All Shall Be Well

My lovely wife, Jen, turns 40 this month, which means I turn 40 in November, which further means Generation X is in the process of collectively hitting this milestone throughout the decade. If we stipulate that modern medicine (or its holistic alternatives) will see most of us an extra ten years past our allotted three score and ten, then we are about half-way home. In addition to being a great time to run to the bathroom and then score some nachos, halftime also affords a brief respite to pause and take stock of things, to graph our current data, as it were. I would like to suggest that the trajectory of our generational line graph, our trendline, depends in many ways on what, in retrospect, we make of the signature Generation X death, the suicide of our rock and roll antihero, Kurt Cobain. Cobain is inarguably the most important (white male) Gen X figure because the art he made out of his angst was universally accessible; it spoke to people with real problems like abusive parents, depression and/or serious drug habits, and to people like me, who blared songs from In Utero on our college dorm stereos after getting unexpected C’s on sociology midterms. If reading Gen X’s David Foster Wallace was, per David Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody you knew,” then listening to Cobain was to hear their heart voice.

Google “Kurt Cobain on mainstream music” and you will quickly come across this:

“Kurt Cobain was an outspoken critic of the mainstream music industry, both prior to and after his success with Nirvana. He believed that major record labels promoted anything they believed would sell, and gave little regard to the quality of the music. This belief, combined with immense mainstream success of Nirvana, is believed by many to be the primary factor in Cobain’s suicide. In his suicide letter, Cobain stated that he no longer enjoyed writing or performing music, and hadn’t for a long time.” (emphasis added) (http://www.wisegeek.com/who-is-kurt-cobain.htm)

The perspective referenced here, that Cobain killed himself because he couldn’t reconcile his mainstream success with his religious belief that all things mainstream sucked, was pretty much what I was suspecting when I started my Google search. But if you read the full text of the suicide letter referenced at the end of the quote, you find the following: “Since the age of seven I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general.” (http://kurtcobainssuicidenote.com/kurt_cobains_suicide_note.html) What happened at age seven is a matter of public record; his parents divorced and “his mother noted that his personality changed dramatically; Cobain became defiant and withdrawn.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Cobain) In trying to grasp Cobain’s suicide, then, this leaves us with two seemingly competing narratives: 1) He never got over his parents’ divorce, or 2) He never got over his own fame. But if we dig a little deeper we find that 1 and 2 are simply the staging of the same basic tragedy, like West Side Story following on the heels of Romeo and Juliet. Because 1 and 2 are not only both striking cases of the collapse of meaning, they were both experienced by Cobain as self-inflicted wounds, making them sad augurs of his suicide.

Understanding divorce as the collapse in meaning of a child’s world should meet the criteria for commonsense. But to connect the dots, here is UVa sociology professor Brad Wilcox:

“Marriage conveys a sense of meaning, purpose, direction, and stability that tends to benefit adults and especially children. People who get married have an expectation of sexual fidelity, and that fidelity tends to engender a sense of trust and security.” (emphasis added) (http://uvamagazine.org/articles/the_marriage_crisis)

Wallerstein et. al. give an even better sense of just what this collapse in meaning feels like in lived experience:

“The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks.” (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wallerstein-unexpected.html)

Even more importantly:

“There is now way for a sensitive child to see her mother cry or her father fall into depression without worrying she’s the cause of it- and so she takes full responsibility for her mother’s tears and her father’s moods.” (ibid)

It is almost certain that Cobain the artist was exactly that sensitive child. So not only was his world torn asunder at age seven, he was left to believe, consciously or not, that he had done the tearing. “I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general,” indeed; who wouldn’t hate the progenitors of a civilization that (from the perspective of a sensitive child) enables its seven-year olds to essentially hit the family’s self destruct button. Parental neglect is suddenly writ large, becoming, via the developing child psyche, universal human neglect.

As we know, Cobain sought, and ultimately found, refuge in Seattle’s underground music scene. (After, we should note, turning to his temporary non-parental caregivers’ brand of evangelical Christianity and then rejecting it; one can only wonder how history might have changed had Cobain stayed the course and formed a Christian rock band instead of Nirvana. If nothing else, I might be able to name two Christian rock bands as opposed to the current list that begins and ends with Jars of Clay, whose “Lift Me Up” is as good as anything ever released by e.g. Live.) Like all undergrounds, Seattle’s punk rock scene defined itself in contrast with the mainstream; undergrounds are forever playing antithesis to the mainstream’s thesis. To find belonging in his second, punk rock family, Cobain would necessarily have exhibited the fervor of the religious convert in expressing the family creed, especially since that creed, “everything mainstream sucks,” aligned with his personal encounter with that foundational mainstream institution, marriage.

Had Cobain been gifted with anything less than artistic genius, he likely would have lived out his days as a contented punk, i.e. as someone content with his discontent. Given that every action results in and equal and opposite reaction, the reactive antithesis has exactly the same quantity of available meaning as the thesis it rejects and mirrors; no is as deep as yes. But Cobain’s talent proved too large for the space afforded by “no.” Cobain’s band, Nirvana, was the first glimpse of synthesis, the transcendence of the mainstream’s thesis and punk’s antithesis into something entirely new. That something new is the way we are all going to be living on the planet by the end of this 21st century, which, in early 2014, is just beginning to come into focus. If, as Colin Andrews describes in On the Edge of Reality, “society’s conflict is between secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” then it is also between mainstream and punk. Andrews goes on to say that “The reconciling of these forces will require dropping long held ideologies that are blocking our ability to move forward. The tensions demand a shift in paradigms.” The tragedy of Kurt Cobain, then, lies in his inability to understand himself as a prophet rather than a punk. Nirvana jumpstarted the initiation of new meaning, and all Cobain could see was the collapse of the old.

Cobain’s blindness to his own prophesy is illuminated by a particular reading of the title of a documentary film about Nirvana and Sonic Youth’s 1991 European tour: 1991: The Year Punk Broke. When, in the early 1990’s, Nirvana, like The Beatles before them, became “more popular than Jesus,” all Cobain could see was that his band had broken punk, just as he (believed he) had once broken his parents’ marriage. In achieving mainstream success, Nirvana dragged punk with them into the spotlight, singlehandedly creating the “Alternative” music genre that would dominate the music industry for the next decade. By making punk mainstream, Cobain had unmade punk. He had silenced the antithetical “no,” and all he could hear emanating from his own music was a “yes” to everything he had ever rejected. Amidst all of this he had dissolved his second family in his short life, making his suicide the ultimate “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” moment.

In her brilliant memoir, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas finds new meaning in Cobain’s death by providing an antithesis to the dark thesis Cobain settled on in place of the synthesis his music truly hinted at:

“All alone is all we are, whimpered our sweet, lost, sad, fallen hero. Our fear is that ‘alone’ is the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that if we cannot provide them with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too. But what if that isn’t true? What if there is more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone- that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?”

The alternate reading of 1991: The Year Punk Broke has nothing to do with broken homes and broken movements. 1991 was the year punk, via Nirvana, broke a hole through all the tired conflicts (“secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” mainstream and punk) that would keep us spinning our wheels in perpetuity. Like Obi-Wan dissolving around Darth Vader’s light saber, Punk’s disappearance into the mainstream was pure illusion; by delivering us the seeds of synthesis, punk became more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

“None of us is alone.” Cobain sang the opposite even as his music made way for this new meaning to break through, making Cobain more of a John the Baptist figure than the messiah figure he is frequently touted to be. It is up to the rest of us, collectively, to save things this time around. We can, and we will, if we heed Susan Gregory Thomas: “None of us is alone…in spite of everything”. This is the impossible, necessary truth on which everything depends. If we listen, then “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This may strip Julian of Norwich’s prayer of the comfort of certainty, but these are uncertain times. Thanks to our modern-day punk prophets, our Cobains and Thomases, at least we know the path forward, a path defined by the fact that it is wide enough for all of us.