Michael Jackson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Michael Jackson

So, when I find myself affected by a celebrity death, my thoughts often turn to a particular Gerard Manley Hopkins poem because I am deep in a way that is not at all pretentious or annoying and is also entirely original:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.*
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Did you read that or just skip ahead? I bet you just skipped ahead. Don't even. I know how you are. Allow me to summarize: Hopkins is laying down the hard and heavy truth that most of the time that we mourn, it's our own short stint on this planet we're mourning, it's our imminent death we have on the brain:

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret (i.e., your own sorry hide) you mourn for.

Years and years ago, I started making the joke that in my Michael Jackson world it was always 1985. There was no Michael Jackson for me after that. It was just too goddamn sad. So, if this is my Michael Jackson reality, why was I thrown for such a loop that he died today? 1985 Michael Jackson is as he ever was.

You following me here? I'm not really mourning the death of Michael Jackson at all.

(Ah, but he used to be so good, didn't he?)

Anyway, I recently read this article about the two Our Towns that were showing in Chicago. It had never hit me that Our Town was two plays: one about the brevity of life, the certainty of its end. The other is about how awesome it is that we get to be alive at all.

(Thornton Wilder and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Michael Jackson. And I can STILL make it all about me. August company I keep, huh?)

I'll leave this blogpost sad about Michael Jackson (sadder, I think, for the sadness of his life than for the soon-ness of his death). But also glad that I got to be here when it was all new, that we get to have that music for like always and finally that I get to be alive at all (I may have let this video go on a little longer than I should have... pardons for the self-indulgence):



*Look just a quick poetry lesson - read these fivelines aloud. The way they scan kills me. This is such a great poem:

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.*