Spring Break
Jewish Worship of the Dead
613% of a True Story
Mordechai Shinefield
Issue date: 9/20/05 Section: Arts & Culture
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Chuck Klosterman
256 Pages, Scribner, 2005
Stairway to Heaven : The Final Resting Places of Rock's Legends
J.D. Reed and Maddy Miller
160 Pages, Wenner Books, 2005
Rachel is totally the Sylvia Plath of the Bible. Plath, the poetess most famous for her depression, wrote a number of heartbreaking poems. She penned a novel, the Bell Jar, so devastatingly distressing that as a teenager I had trouble reading it. Her husband, according to the popular legend, drove her to death. She ended her life with her head in an oven.
Rachel lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. Like Plath, she came from a troubling household with an abusive father. She died due to her husband as well - because of his curse on her head for stealing an idol. In many ways she is the romantic figure of the Bible. She is doomed to die on the road and must pray for her children exiled to a foreign land. Like Plath, the death sealed the popularity.
This comparison is by no means an attempt to degrade the matriarch Rachel, but merely to point out the pervasiveness, and perversity, of our culture's appreciation for tragic characters. They are the reason why Kurt Cobain hangs on thousands of college dormitory walls and Hunter S. Thompson's ashes shot into the sky draw fans to watch the fireworks. Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson, and the aforementioned Cobain all died at age 27, giving the number a mythological significance.
It is also the reason why Chuck Klosterman, editor at Spin Magazine, wrote his rock travelogue, "Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story." The basic premise starts with him traveling to the United States to visit the fatal sites of famous rock stars. He goes to the site of Lynryd Skynyrd's plane crash, Sid Vicious's murder of Nancy Spungen, and Kurt Cobain's home. Simultaneously a study of, and an exploitation of, American's threshold for pathos, the book asks the important question: "Why do we love it when our heroes meet tragic ends?"
Though we claim in Judaism that we are impervious to the urges of glorification, promoting elderly scholars over young hotshots, we still cling to charismatic leaders whose lives seem blessed by fate. Aryeh Kaplan, who died at 48, wrote for only 12 incredibly prolific years. A number of leaders from the previous generation were plucked from Nazi-ruled Germany, a feat that lends them a mythological dimension of providence. Almost sanctified reverence is held for the suffering of previous generations. Some might even point to our obsessions with understanding the Holocaust as an indication of how we romanticize those that lived through it.
In contrast to Klosterman's book, Maddy Miller's Stairway to Heaven is like a textual graveyard. While not attempting to contextualize the death of its stars, the book tells the story of the death and afterlife of 100 musicians. Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Johnny Ramone and 97 other people are profiled, as if the deaths of these people are worthy of a book itself. Beside the morbid idea of putting the rock equivalent of the Tibetan Book of Death on your coffee table (next to your copy of Kurt Cobain's Diaries, no doubt), its release at the same time of Klosterman's book reveals a tempting new genre: Rock Deathpics.
Miller's conclusion is absent - the book is only a testament to the deaths of its stars, much like a gravestone to a corpse. Klosterman's conclusion is anticlimactic. He decides that death means nothing and that the obsession of death tells us more about those who obsess than those who died. Cobain killed himself once, but fans still gather around a sunflower in his home that supposedly marks the place he pulled the trigger on the shotgun. The fans hope that his death wasn't in vain, that it didn't occur in an empty vacuum. They claim he killed himself because of the fame. Or the stomach pain. Just like commentaries that say Rachel was always fated to die on the way to Israel, so that she could cry over her children.
Klosterman spends a lot of time getting to that point, though. In the meanwhile he riffs on pop-culture, his failed relationships, his undeservedness, and basically what makes him sad. In a way, he wants us to see him as another tragic figure similar to the people he writes about. Just that instead of in the ground, he is on the other side of the page. It's a farce. It's like the prophetic moment when Kurt Cobain said, much like Babe Ruth pointing to the fences, that he only had a few more years to live. His 27th birthday was coming up.
Though he won't kill himself, Klosterman explains the obsession young people have with possessing tragic flaws. Any reasonable guess can be used to justify the shocking amount of self-proclaimed lunatics, drug addicts, alcoholics, and non-functioning social defects. Being tragic is the new competence. I would rather my readers believe this article was written hopped up on beer and sleep deprivation than that it was a thought out and researched piece. It would add to a mythology that an ego presumes already exists in coda form.
One of the explanations for Jewish resistance to unionization during the Lower East Side immigration was a dream that one day the individual could be the boss. He didn't want to jeopardize that by joining an organization serving worker's rights. In a way, the mythologizing of dead heroes follows a same thread. If I worship the dead, when my time comes, perhaps some one else will worship me. It is self destructive, inane and utterly romantic. It is also, as Klosterman points out, completely meaningless. Jews aren't allowed to communicate with the dead. So why do we allow ourselves to worship them?
