from:
Stephen G. Adubato
In a open letter written after the death of her friend Amy Winehouse in 2011, comedian Russell Brand recalled with regret their “common affliction: the disease of addiction.” He closed his letter with an appeal to “adapt the way we view this condition not as a crime or a romantic pose, but as a disease that will kill”.
It’s hard to deny that Winehouse’s mental and emotional struggles, which included substance addictions, destructive relationship patterns, and bulimia, needed professional treatment (however much she may have protested in her most popular single “Rehab“). But should we reduce Winehouse’s drama to something that medical and psychological treatment alone could cure?
Winehouse’s pain seemed to come from her emotional instability and addictions, but I would like to state that her pain was rooted in an acute awareness of her heart’s desire for love and meaning. This is something Brand would likely recognize. He himself is a practitioner of the 12-step program (which is rooted in surrender to the divine – surrendering one’s will and life to God) and a convert to Hinduism. Yet this more nuanced understanding of the factors that drive addiction, the desire for love and meaning, are rarely recognized in mainstream culture.
I recently did research on Winehouse’s life and music for an exhibition I curated for the “New York Encounter”- an annual cultural festival, which this year will be held from 18 to 20 February, hosted by the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. I was surprised to find out how much I identified with the experience of this singer who is no longer with us.
Winehouse, like me, was a millennial, both trapped in a culture that struggles to understand the blurred distinction between two powerful life forces: on the one hand, an existential pain of transcendence; and, on the other, mental instability rooted in traumatic experiences or chemical imbalances in the brain. Many of us have not been given the tools or language to make sense of these distinct sources of pain and have grown up receiving only reductive “solutions”. My reflections on his life have shown me how important it is to understand both the desire for the divine and the struggles of mental instability, and how both require their respective “treatments.”
A voice bigger than life
I first came across Winehouse, like most Americans, after the release of “Rehab” in 2006. Her unusual sense of style and her larger-than-life voice caught my attention, reminding me of Motown records my dad raised me with. I didn’t give it much weight, until I read a homily by Don Julian Carron, then president of Communion and Liberation: “Despite all our confusion, something resists …” he said – speaking of the infinite desire for happiness that marks all human beings. “This is how, after a long and tormented journey, the evidences that characterize our ego reappear. Do what you can to avoid thinking, the pain will explode in your chest. “
In other words, we can’t stifle that desire for long.
He went on to quote Winehouse’s song “Wake Up Alone“, In which she sings of trying to keep busy to avoid having to face the memory of her ex-lover: who“ takes my guts ”and“ floods me with terror ”.
Even though Winehouse was not religious (she considered herself a secular Jew), Don Carron pointed to her as an example of someone who allowed herself to experience this God-given desire for happiness, even if it hurt her. She was not satisfied with a “bourgeois” sense of complacency and self-sufficiency. “As for my heart” – she sings – “I prefer to be restless” (evoking the famous saying of St. Augustine that “our hearts are restless until they find rest in You”).
This year’s “New York Encounter” is titled “This Urge for the Truth”, which is taken from a line of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”. He refers to how after the pandemic and social unrest of the past two years, many of us “feel trapped in our certainties and afraid of the unexpected. We remain dissatisfied, with the annoying feeling that we are losing ourselves. Yet, there remains a subtle, inexorable desire for what is true ”.
Can we ever know what is true and who is trustworthy? Why is the truth important? And how can we achieve it? These are the questions we were asked to explore at Encounter, and we did so through the lens of Winehouse’s life and music.
While preparing the exhibition, we drew on Winehouse’s albums, several biographies (including those written by her parents), as well as a short but powerful Winehouse elegy written by Irish music critic John Waters: “An artist like Winehouse she can be reduced, perhaps even in her own mind, to a performer or, worse, to an entertainer. But in reality, she was a shaman, a medium, who channeled through her fragile existence the pain and potential of human experience to the fullest, and testified to the mysteries that make this condition bearable … She was hurt, not because she had abused herself. itself, but because it was called to be the voice of the walking wounded, that is, of those who are totally human. In the name of this humanity, she begged for answers and reassurance in the song.
Waters said that Winehouse, along with many other talented but tormented artists who died at the age of 27 – Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, among others – had a prophetic sensibility that is “overshadowed” by the ” way in which the world sees and portrays the status of the hero of rock ‘n’ roll ”. We often forget, Waters said, that contemporary pop music comes from the Gospel and the Blues. “Outwardly reduced to show business and entertainment, the sanctity of the song is forced inward in a closed circuit, a communicating and receiving that becomes exchangeable for something else and deniable in its true nature.”
The entertainment industry has not exactly been hospitable to the integrity and moral and artistic convictions of the “prophetic” members of the so-called “Club of 27”, or to other artists who have understood their craft as a call to transform into art the deepest yearnings of the human heart. “We notice the existence of passion – continues Waters – but it seems that we don’t remember what passion is for. Thus, the artist is caught in a trap: she is from the sky and yet she is not allowed to understand or believe it ”.
Things haven’t changed much since Jesus himself proclaimed that “no prophet is welcome in his hometown.” So is the enigma of artists who are painfully aware of their need for something infinite, but are forced to conform to the expectations of an industry that favors “finite” realities.
This conflict also raises the question of why these artists engage with commercial record labels, knowing full well the compromising situation they are getting into. Instead, they may be content to sign with independent labels and play for a smaller audience.
“When I was eighteen” – said Winehouse – I didn’t knock on the doors of record companies. I wasn’t interested in becoming famous. I’m just a musician ”. Winehouse clashed with her manager on several occasions because she refused to “play the part” while doing press interviews, and once said, “the fact is, I’m not trying to protect ‘Winehouse, the brand.’ , you know what I mean?
Many artists for whom music is a means of expressing longing at the heart of their humanity have found that their art form led them to a “response” in the form of a religious conversion. Let’s take figures like Lauryn Hill, Prince and Bob Dylan, whose faith has allowed them to hold their art steady in the face of pressure from record companies to comply. Winehouse’s public life has been defined in part by her struggles with addiction and unhealthy relationship patterns, as well as the overwhelming power the industry and tabloid news have had over it. Would her life have been different if she had had such a meeting of faith?
Similar experiences
The research I did on Winehouse’s life and music made me reflect on the parallels between his experience and mine. I, like Winehouse, grew up with divorced parents, both of whom were extremely loving and too permissive. My parents sent me to a child psychologist as soon as they divorced, when I was three. I found that my work with the psychologist did not help me articulate the neuro-divergent tendencies and spiritual despair I was beginning to develop.
I also felt an intense desire to be loved, a desire that no person, be it a family, a friend, or a romantic affair, seemed to be able to satisfy. I found that beauty in art and nature left me hurt, wanting more and more. I found that the suffering and injustices that existed in the world hurt me even more deeply, and I wondered how evil could exist in the first place.
This spiritual wound, combined with obsessive thought patterns, a tendency to paranoia and social anxieties, left me confused and isolated for much of my adolescence. Psychologist after psychologist I was told that my “self-diagnosed” mental instability was an exaggeration. My need for some sort of spiritual breakthrough would be taken care of by asking fewer questions about life and “accepting myself as I am”.
It was only when I reached the lowest point that I met a psychiatrist who recognized my experience in its entirety without trivializing it. He taught me to distinguish between the mental and existential aspects of my life. He told me that my existential questions about life and God were an essential part of who I was. Psychiatric treatment would not “erase” my questions, he said, but rather it would give me the clarity with which to seek answers more freely.
In my college courses, I was given the grace to meet professors and classmates who understood the questions and desires that plagued my heart. It was in their loving gaze towards me that I encountered the presence of something that fully corresponded to that desire.
While I cannot say that this desire has been “resolved”, or that it has never again had moments of weakness, I can say that I now have a place to turn. I know that I will be accompanied on my journey to unity with the definitive Answer.
I wonder if Winehouse’s fate would have been different if she had met people who understood both her cry for truth – for a kind of lover who would fully satisfy the restlessness of her heart – as well as her emotional and psychiatric pain. I am filled with an immense sense of gratitude and unworthiness for having found such people in my life.
As much as listening to Winehouse’s music fills me with sadness at the loss of such a young and beautiful person, I can’t help but feel that she has become my friend. As much as she struggled and suffered, she refused to silence her heart’s desire for her. She was determined to make something beautiful out of it. I pray for Winehouse, that she may finally experience the same hug that I did: the hug of a lover whose affection for her is unconditional. I pray that those who are in conflict both mentally and existentially continue to seek and find in her music as a beacon in the night.
Published in the US Jesuit magazine America (our translation from English).
