the facts answer

freeing the voice of our
desire in the “real” world
The “bunker” described by the Pope, and the death of a pop star, remind us of the drama of life, but an untruthful culture would convince us to look the other way.

by JOHN WATERS

When, each new morning, we walk again into the world, how much do we bring of ourselves as we truly are? Not as much as we usually imagine, for the world always supplies us with descriptions, versions of ourselves, that function, after a fashion, in the “real” world but really do not fully harmonize with the deep narrative that drives our natures and desires.
In his recent address to the Bundestag, Pope Benedict spoke about the concrete “bunker” man constructs to convince himself of his control over reality. Mixing the metaphor a little, I would propose that perhaps the bunker is built of words, ideas, assumptions, and dreams of the future, all calculated to seduce man into a version of his existence that excludes the idea of a Creator or the possibility of an ultimate destiny. Instead of eternity, the bunker mentality proposes a utopia–tomorrow, next week, the year after next, always thrusting forward as though to escape the limitations of the present.
But the limitations of the present will be there in the future as well, being inherent in man’s nature, in what the Pope in that speech called “the ecology of man,” which our culture at all times seeks to persuade us against.
There are examples every day, but I will cite just one. In July, the world was shocked to learn of the death of the English pop singer Amy Winehouse. At first, the circumstances remained unclear, but in October an inquest revealed that she died, essentially, of alcohol poisoning, having consumed three bottles of vodka in a short time.
Such events are reported and received in our culture as sensational and yet also, in a strange way, predictable.
Because Winehouse was a pop star, it is implied that excess was an everyday element of her lifestyle, and thus her fate is tragic and cautionary, but also perhaps inevitable. We know, after all, that pop stars are a little crazy, on account of having fame and money thrust upon them!
But there is a deeper truth: Winehouse was a conduit for something profound in human nature, the voice of a desire that is infinite and specific in its longing. Perhaps she understood this a little, perhaps not, but when she sang she still bore witness to it. Her life, offstage, spoke of something different: of humanity a little lost in its self-constructed reality. In her singing, she summoned up something that most of us merely feel as an unrequited longing, but, in silence and repose, she too was struck down by the absence of that to which her singing testified.
Perhaps, endowed with such a gift but without the means immediately to understand it, she was even more baffled than the rest of us to find that, when the music stopped, she felt alone and lost in a cold world.
In a truthful culture, the newspaper headlines would have said something like: “Singer dies of her misunderstood desire.” In the “real” world, they explained: “Winehouse drank herself to death in a final binge.”