A Child of Spirit Has Died
As the entire globe mourns the passing of Michael Jackson, I am comforted by the knowledge that he died as he lived: a child trying to negotiate a world beyond his comprehension but not his genius. As some have suggested, Michael was most at peace when he was on stage doing what only he knew how to do. Away from that sacred space, Michael was shielded from the savage vagaries of everyday life only by the thin veil of his wealth and innocence. And when they weren’t enough, the injuries to his soul were as debilitating as his talent was extraordinary. Like his idol, Peter Pan, Michael could neither understand nor tolerate the anger and hate that pervades our lives. So, he retreated into his own world of make believe.
I think Al Sharpton said it best when he whispered aloud to Michael’s children that their father wasn’t strange, but that he had to deal with strange things. That was as true when he was alive as it is now that he has physically left us. Peter King’s and Donny Deutsche’s venal incoherencies standing pitifully against a global tide of love and adoration were reflective of the strangeness that has always seeped through the American illusion of a compassionate and moral people. They represent a surviving core of American disorientation toward difference as negative and unworthy of the most basic respect. Yet, Michael would have just smiled at them, thrown the peace sign their way, and then wondered why people feel the need to hate. Even in his death, his magic is too much for their mendacity.
Like so many tens of millions of people around the world, I rejoiced in Michael’s musical genius, but what I connected to most was his humanity. Michael never grew up, thank you. He lived as a child in a “Neverland” of real life; a free spirit bound by few adult-diminishing rules of thought and behavior. He was a free being; free to be a child in an adult’s body, and in a world that demands compliance and complicity rather than individuality and freedom. He was the living essence of his idol, Peter Pan, and that was too different for most of us to tolerate. Peter Pan wouldn’t have thought twice about having a sleepover with hordes of young children, and neither did Michael. And, in Pan’s world, no young boy would have been coerced by his father to bring charges of molestation against him, because no public audience would have countenanced such a contemptible incursion into their world of joyful love. They made Peter Pan in their childlike fantasies just as we made Michael in our adult-like altered realities.
And Michael played his part, if not brilliantly, then with convincing regularity. Even in a world gone mad with its obsessive preoccupation with implants and enlargements, Michael’s choice to re-color his body reminds us of how different he really was. One could argue, as I do, that Michael chose not to be a contributor to our national degeneration around race. As with most children, Michael either didn’t or did not want to see race as a political divide. As a child, race held no meaning for him beyond its cultural “call and response” rhythms, while racism was anathema to his soul. Perhaps his father’s race-tinged messages about his nose and hair, echoed by others in his early years, impelled him to become race-less in his features, if not in his heart. If so, then he just may have done what most children do in similar circumstances—choose to hide behind a mask, an imaginary otherness too extraordinary to be truly seen and understood.
In a different context, comparisons between Michael and Mozart are misplaced, to my way of thinking. Mozart’s genius was that he could do unimaginable adult things with music at a very young age. Michael’s genius was that he could do what Mozart did, but without losing his child’s grace. Children aren’t mysterious or magical. Their real genius is that they have either resisted or not yet been exposed to adult socialization that strips away one’s human fealty to kindness and love, and that binds them to a spiritless me-ism/we-ism that inevitably strips the soul of its potential and a nation of its promise. I’m sure Michael loved Sesame Street. I doubt that Mozart would have.
One need not like Michael’s music nor appreciate his phenomenal talent. One need not feel compelled to participate in his post-living resurgence as a global ambassador and loving icon. One must, however, if one is truly human, respect the outpouring of genuine love that those countless millions of people from every corner of the world give freely to him. One must acknowledge that Michael was special and that most of the world knows it. It is to his specialness of difference that I join with so many others in saying thank you, Michael, for coming into our lives.
