But She Said ‘No, No, No’

Amy Winehouse is dead today. The news comes from London, where she died, at 27, of causes not-yet-determined but certainly surmised by many.

Here in sweltering Iowa we cower beneath the “heat dome” of July 2011. I’ve just consumed, courtesy of beloved wife Jessica, a major league Julep in Amy’s honor.  It is now being followed by a beer chaser, a Sierra Nevada Hefeweizen called Kellerweis. Just because I too say ‘No, no, no.’ There is a time and a place – perhaps many times and many places – for intoxicants. It’s been known fact since ancient times. Heady brews and concoctions, herbs and ales and fermented plants and so forth, call up strong spirits and visions – creative forces both Mercurial and Vesuvian by definition. Such forces are capable of bringing forth all manner of greatness as surely as they can reduce a mere mortal to so much human rubble.

I am always unutterably saddened to see a creative force battered by excess, dying by their own hand, or some combination of the two, crazy heroes stumbling along their doomed path with as much bravery as they can muster by the sheer force of gifts the Master of the Universe bestowed upon them at birth, yet ultimately unable to rise from the ashes of their own repeated, reckless and Dionysian bonfires until finally they lie extinguished in a smoldering heap. All that creativity gone from this world. All that energy dissipated, bouncing through the cosmos and reinfusing the very fabric of space and time in some way we cannot yet understand but which I am quite certain is real and  significant.

On this Saturday of swelter where the air itself is devoid of air, is liquid and somehow smothering, I see my personal litany of greats gone from this Earth unreel on celluloid strips before me:  Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Alexander McQueen, and now Amy Winehouse. All shot so much life into this world – this crappy, rude, unappreciative world, where they labored and suffered and created what they could when they could manage to rise up and do it – and all died awful deaths, deaths many of us call needless or meaningless and lament as “a shame.” I suppose they each were a shame, and yet each was also an endpoint for a specific person, a person endowed with much, who gave much to everyone they touched and who struggled to honor their talents against long odds. What is the meaning of all that accomplishment, then, on this day?

I can’t say as I know. It’s hard to piece together a wall of logic to reassure anyone against life’s random and massive ironies when, as one small example, Ms. Winehouse’s Tarot card is…wait for it…Temperance. Yes, hers is the lovely and somber card of Temperance. I am amazed and somehow humbled to know this. Jessica has created an altar here in our house, where she commemorates Ms. Winehouse with that card, and a lovely picture of her before she laid herself at the altar of various intoxicants to the point of permanent disability and ultimate demise.

Jessica's Altar for Amy Winehouse

Rehab…I am of mixed feelings there. I love Rickie Lee Jones, and think work made after her own life changes is as lively as her earlier work. She gathered unto herself all her sparks, somehow, while distancing herself from the fire’s deepest heat and saving herself from immolation. I have to respect that. But I respect Amy, too. She died and it was a hard and probably an ugly death, but it was all hers, and she had lived her own life while getting there. I refuse to dishonor that or diminish it by calling it “a shame.” It was something far more vibrant, volcanic and wild than that. It was an implosion, a pyre of perhaps her own design.

I love to see artists of all kinds who can pick up their burdens and wield them, move along, and survive, giving us the gifts only they can muster up out of the mean and rough fabric of life. I love them perhaps best of all. But I will always remember and honor the lives and work of those who do not make it through. They too struggle, they buff and burnish, shine and polish all their rough stones to present to us, and we are better for receiving them. I thank each of them, and wish them all peace, and rest.

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Tags: Amy Winehouse, art, death, music, rehab