This week I watched a documentary on the Eagles, that great rock-and-roll machine that cranked out the hits and the hopes of the 1970’s.
The Eagles made it to the big time, became one of the best selling bands of all time and then came apart at the relational seams. I find this kind of thing fascinating. Apparently public success for some of us is as hard to handle as public failure.
When publicly successful, some of us tend to suffer a kind of craziness over the public exposure that comes with it. At first our social success creates an astonishing soul energy — we are loved! — but then later, away from the lights, a deep soul deficit may surface. To recover from what is perhaps removed from us by adulation and disapproval we may tend to seek out addictive, harmful solaces.
We brood, and we suffer the angst of the known hero. We suffer foolishness. We may suffer harmful competitions, insane jealousies, massive insecurities, twisted self evaluations. We may complicate concerning our ability to make and sustain our place in the world.
As a result of the pressures public success brings, many people avoid it. They know they can’t handle it. Maybe they can’t. That is perhaps too bad for some, especially those who could survive it and do some amazing things.
To explore this I wrote a modern fable chronicling the rise and fall of the Eagles. In doing this, I invented some new words. This is my attempt at success. I’m not afraid of success. Now I think I’ll go eat!
A Modern Fable
First, there was that pondiferous moment in Los Angeles when it all matriculated and then superwonkified at the Troubadour.
Then there was the exhaustification in London when it didn’t.
And then there is how if you skip to the end it is actually very hard to say what the freakin’ rockstar happened – – the mind-wrestling complications that came with the fore-waiting, the madly intensifying pressure of the creative wars, the wasting psychic metastacision of the alpha male ego and the final terrifying stages of group PTSD.
If you work under the huge, bright lights, if your own face becomes a series of a thousands dazed smiles, if naked women dance on your stage, if you find yourself running in the halls and vaulting into the waiting cars — the berzerkified, ernifricating cocaine craziness afterwards — just maybe then, you might begin to come unhinged too.
It goes back. From the time he was a little boy, from the time he got his first set of drums, from the moment they first heard him play the electric guitar like he was emptying his soul, from the time they heard him sing, from the instant they saw each other’s id in the Hotel California, the oddishly combinicated way in which they met others who wishified to performicate in public at a world-tour level and the weird chancification whereby they womped into a guy who also had the same mad, mad, insanified vision, how they dug the businessman who thought it all might work if they found their signature soul — it was star-crazy, supercool, madman upsetting!
They literally hissed, hogged and hated each other off the stage.
It can be narrificated and then expliconicated as the inevitable brain-damaging trauma of sudden success, or it can be psycho-differentiated as a mental heart attack, but in reality, at its core, it is about the desoulification that comes from not knowing who you are when they parade you before the adoring masses as who you aren’t.
Later the lead singer said, “We made it, and it ate us.”
If you’d like to read more of my fables, please visit my fables website at http://www.antifables.com
Thrive! 