Ben, American Splendor, Enduring Love

This post is about a song, a film and a book.

The song is Michael Jackson's "Ben", which my media player threw up the other day while on shuffle. Like so much of the music in my player, I've had it for a while but had never consciously sought it out, so it struck me quite out of the blue. I was feeling rather doleful that day, and in a rush the song swept over me like a tidal wave of abstract sorrow: young Jackson - with that glorious, golden voice, the promise he had, his fourteen years of age, his first No. 1 hit, the most talented singer of his generation - before he basically went cuckoo and his face started peeling off. His successes to come were certainly phenomenal, but so was the bizarre future which awaited him. Where did one start and the other begin?

The film is Shari Springer Berman's and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor. This is a film about Harvey Pekar, a guy so ordinary he somehow became extraordinary, eventually inspiring a successful comic strip about his life in all the glory of its banality - his job as a hospital filing clerk, his failed relationships, his distinctly unromantic courtship of his wife, his dreary bus rides, his pudgy body, his greasy diners. But somehow Pekar turned out to be the real-life Rumpelstiltskin, and under his fingers he spun chaff into gold. What's the boundary between tedium and inspiration?

The book is Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love." The story (WARNING: spoiler ahead!) is about a character called Jed Parry, who is afflicted with de Clérambault's syndrome, a psychological illness which causes him to fall literally madly in love with the protagonist, Joe Rose, even though they are virtually strangers. This insane love takes the form of psychosis: stalking, gibberish babble, leaving endless messages, letters, declarations of love and, most spookily of all, convictions, no matter how implausible, that the other party returns his feelings and that every gesture is a declaration of love; even rejection, in being the denial of their mutual passion, is a form of affirmation.

Joe Rose, on the other hand, is genuinely - as in, non-psychotically - in love with his long-term partner, Clarissa, with whom he lives and shares a life, and Clarissa loves him in return. Yet, this "genuine" love (as opposed to Jed's psychotic love), in the story goes through all the familiar motions when the relationship is tested: angry, eruptive rows; suspicion; distrust; invasions of privacy; alienation; distancing; moving out; break-up. In comparison, the psychotic love of Jed Parry, right to the end, never wavers, never falters, never stops believing. The faithless is love; the devoted is insanity. They say there is a thin line between genius and madness; so, too, perhaps, between normality and abnormality.

In infinite ways, we walk such knife-edges every day of our lives. And on each and every one of those edges, we will invariably fall one way or the other, the result of which vaults us into yet another determination in the infinite tree of choices which is to map our destiny, upon which we teeter once more, to be repeated until the day we die. I guess we would like to think we have a choice as to which side we fall, but more often than not I don't think we do, really.

All but for the grace of God.