These are obviously very sad pages. It’s not as if Robert’s death is a surprise. Not only are the historical facts well-established, but his impending death hangs heavily over the book from the very beginning. Nevertheless, it’s heart-wrenching to read, despite Patti’s beautiful, lovingly poetic tributes that surround all the details.
One of those details was Robert’s curious question: “Patti, did art get us?” It’s a complicated question, and Patti rightly shrugs it off, with no regrets. But the devotion of both Patti and Robert to art, and how it played out over their lives, reminded me of some of Robert and Patti’s interactions from earlier in the book. I was especially reminded of Patti’s early description of herself as the bad girl trying to be good and Robert as the good boy trying to be bad. This dynamic lasted to the very end, with Robert trying “everything but prayer” to heal himself, and Patti praying ceaselessly to make his suffering sufferable, convinced that Robert is still holding hands with God on his way toward death.
In an earlier section of the book, Patti talked about Robert describing himself as pure evil. “You don’t have to be evil to be different,” she’d told him then. “You are different. Artists are their own breed.” She goes on to tell us her readers that she “believed he would once again embrace the knowledge that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity.” When I read that the first time, I wondered what it meant exactly. “Only purity.” Pure what, really?
The sacred and the profane loom large across the artistic bodies of work of both Patti and Robert. Given the horrendously immoral response to the AIDS crisis that came from the conservative, often Christian, establishment in the early 1980’s, it’s no surprise that Robert would embrace the profane in an attempt to undermine the sacred attacks on him and his fellow travelers (the horrible bullying of the beautiful human being of Marlon Riggs comes to mind). It’s a path that other artists have followed in his wake, embracing a posture of pure evil to challenge and expose the real evils of disease and intolerance and narrow-minded hatred and injustice. Diamanda Galas, for one, has made quite a notable career doing such things.
Yet it’s a posture nonetheless. During Patti’s (excellent, charming) afternoon performance for the students last week, she jokingly mocked her own cool artistic poses from the 1970’s. “There are no pictures of me smiling in the 70’s,” she laughed. “I was too cool,” she said, launching into a set of mock caricatures of her iconic photographs, most of which were taken by Robert. “Nowadays all my pictures are of me grinning like a big dork,” she went on to say, and ended her talk with an inspirational set of comments about not being afraid to be embarrassed in public, capped off with a brave a cappella performance of “Because the Night.” On the face of it, this admission of her former posturing seems to be at odds with “Only purity.” Is art a pose, or is it pure?
So I got to thinking about art that’s seen as pure evil, and art that’s seen as pure good, sticking with the traditional understandings of sacred and profane as defined by traditional Christian symbols. I’m no art historian, but I do know pop music, so that’s where my mind went.
On the pure evil side of the spectrum, I recalled the end of the (excellent) documentary Until the Light Takes Us, an examination of the Norwegian black metal scene known for its explicitly anti-Christian symbols, corpse-painted band members, real-life arson of historic churches, and ghastly murders and suicides. But even here, Darkthrone multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and black metal legend Fenriz looks sadly at the camera and says “A big part of me wishes that this whole thing didn’t turn into a trend. That’s what f&!#ing sucked, and sucks still. Then again, you know, people like to dress up.” The pose seems quite present here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EhasabiQGs
On the pure good side of the spectrum, I recalled conversations with friends of mine who play worship music in praise bands at Evangelical churches. One such drummer told me he had to quit the band because he felt guilty when congregants told him they’d felt the Holy Spirit move during a moment in one of his songs, knowing full well that it was his manipulative cymbal flourish that had produced such a feeling. The possibilities for posturing in such music is quite well known and frequently discussed among such musicians, as this video demonstrates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJp98hoqy5I
So it appears Patti was right. There is no pure evil and no pure good. But where’s the “only purity”?
Again, my discipline of Sociology is happy to explode notions of purity and authenticity in art, personality, and elsewhere. Everything is fabricated, socially constructed, imagined, idealized, and performed. But this explosion is not meant to diminish what remains. The performances we try out in front of each other are the only reality that we’ll ever have. They may be posed, but they’re not fake.
Ruth Finnegan studied music making subcultures in the English town of Milton Keynes. As a good social scientist, she tried to map the obvious social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality onto these musical taste communities. But nothing fit. She then realized she needed to reverse the causality. The social circumstances were not producing the musical tastes and practices. Rather, the activities and performances and musical expressions within these enclaves were in fact producing profoundly important social communities, identities, and moral pathways through life.
Simon Frith argues that engagement with music and art allows us not to discover who we “really are” (since such a thing doesn’t exist), but rather allows us to try on different identities and personalities to become who we wish to be. I think this is what Patti had in mind with her notion of purity. And I think this is what Robert and Patti succeeded at so admirably.
Kurt Vonnegut said that Mother Night was the only novel of his that he knew what the moral was: “We are who we pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be.”
“I did alright, didn’t I?” Robert asked Patti as he was dying. “Yes, you did well,” she replied.