The Canadian poet Irving Layton once told his girlfriend that he couldn’t marry her but would buy her a wedding ring so that she could change her name to Mrs Layton. Upon arriving in the shop, he then proceeded to buy a silver bracelet for his wife and mother of his child. His best man, Leonard Cohen, instead bought the ring and gave it to Irving’s girlfriend so she could change her name. Later, speaking about it, Leonard Cohen said that Irving was a nice man who didn’t want to hurt anyone. He also placed the blame on Irving’s wife and girlfriend for trying to force him to choose. The now Mrs Layton later complained that Irving would sleep with every girl he could and tell her about it. To summarise, a man goes to buy his girlfriend, with whom he is having an affair, a wedding ring, decides to buy a gift for his wife instead and his best friend says this is good behaviour, blames the victims whilst another victim complains that others do what she did.
Here we have a wonderful illustration of what Emerson said that, ‘People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character’, and so we can see that Leonard Cohen had no qualms about women being mistreated by one whom he identified with and Mrs Layton disliked the same bad behaviour that she did if it impacted her negatively, and Irving Layton was an insecure child who placed no value on himself.
One does not have to be a God or famous to be considered an idol. In our everyday lives we have people we admire and who admire us. The key word here is people. When I was young, I devoured copious biographies of those whom I admired to find out the source of their art/thought. Vile behaviour I paid no attention to, too busy trying to uncover their inspirations. Years later, I was struck by how blind I had been. As my knowledge and awareness of the world fed into a deeper understanding, through reflection, I realised that many of these great figures were incredibly flawed people, often leaving others to pay the price. Leonard Cohen lived on the Greek island of Hydra with Marianne Ihlen (so long). They lived in a bohemian fantasy culture of infidelity, drugs, no rules etc. Even the of those involved children were given drugs. Of the group of people, most of the children developed psychological problems, addiction, suicide etc., all paying the price for the freedom of their parents. ‘Marianne and Leonard’ is one of the great celebrity love stories. Her son, from a prior relationship whom Cohen helped to raise, lives in a psychiatric hospital. It also must be noted that reflecting on the time, Marianne said that every time Leonard Cohen cheated on her, or gave the impression that he had, she wanted to ‘die’.
The failure to show remorse and accept blame is prevalent in society. The actor Johnny Depp used an award acceptance speech to claim how, simply because a judge said he beat women, Hollywood was turning its back on him. He said similar things in defence of Roman Polanski for only giving drugs and alcohol to an underage girl and raping her. Please note, the ‘victim’ Johnny Depp was receiving an award for acting when he spoke of how his career had been destroyed.
The reason why people can get away with such behaviours are twofold:
1) They are idolised and seen as being beyond good and evil
2) People are insecure so think by living their phantasies through famous people, or just people they admire, they make themselves greater.
An Idol sits on a shelf covered in gold but if we look closely, we can see that this gold is just vermeil and if we peel off just a thin layer we can see below that they are merely human and then, once the gilding is removed, we can judge them by the same standard as anyone else, by their humanity.
’till next time
thegreaterfool2016 