FOREWORD BY MY HEAVY METAL GRANDMOTHER !
6 août 2013 par vincent
Vincent just lost his dad, Robert. A quick and unexpected death, especially for Vincent. Despite the “little” affection his father felt for Vincent, he is very unhappy about his passing away. They say you should never speak evil of the deceased, but I want the truth. It is terrible, unbearable that a child (the age does not count) should realize and say: ‘daddy didn’t love me’. Robert never loved his son; he didn’t forgive him for being different. Criticism, the destruction of his life, seemed to be a form of vengeance for not being the way he wanted his son to be.
For 7 years, Vincent has been a Marilyn Manson fan and has read countless books about him and has written many texts about him. His only ambition: to meet him, to offer him the books he has written about him, for him, and the lyrics he has composed for his repertoire hoping to give them to his idol one day so he can sing them. He has also written and prepared a detailed interview, but…disappointment (the word is too weak). NOTHING! The barrier is impassible. The star is out of reach, inaccessible.
Some hope was recently born when this artist came to perform in the region. My daughter, his mother, contacted the network of journalists to set up a possible meeting, even a very furtive one. A friend of hers and his friend, who is also the festival director in which Marilyn was to perform accepted to help them. Big promises, a good enough organization, but… Vincent got to the concert with his carefully wrapped texts and his last two published books. The director and the journalist told him that his best chance is to meet him before the concert. But in fact, it had to be after the concert as he needed to concentrate before performing. They should have known! Of course, Marilyn and his manager refuse to meet him then. Vincent is demolished; the concert becomes an ordeal although he adores this artist! Seeing him, listening to him so close, as he is up front, and yet so far! On the way back to Montpellier, Vincent is annihilated, desperate. All the work he has done, all his personal involvement and research, for nothing. Even more so as the artist is no longer in France.
Vincent does not believe in the possibility of meeting his idol any more. He, who represents so much for him, like a father figure to compensate for the absence, The abysmal emptiness left by his progenitor. He says he does not want to write. ‘I’m a failure, I want to die’. In a nutshell, total ‘joy’… I believe that both the journalist and the director should have known that the best time would have been after the concert, and absolutely not before, if you take into account the total concentration artists need before this kind of show. Suggesting a meeting before was a foreseeable failure, if you ask me. Recently, Vincent, not wanting to kill his hero, has rewritten two of his texts. One of them is another true-false portrait, The Enigma of Faith, the other one is a continuation of the meeting between the artist and his friends from Nice, The Stovefest Tour. The latter evokes the friendship between the rock star and Sister Rachel. His best friend, the Dominican Brother Jean Marie Zanga, has written an email about this text: the style is always alert; the different stages of the Stovefest Tour follow smoothly one after the other, with a relaxed and very warm Marilyn, who seems to have wrapped even Sister Olga around his little finger. I wonder about the scarf offered to Sister Rachel, did she have any ulterior motive? As for the description of the arrival at Lourdes, it’s worth its weight in gold! Vincent told me that he has overcome the violent shock he suffered in Carcassonne because of his hero, Marilyn, and describes him with a profound humanity, just like he would have wished to experience from this Gothic rock star. Sister Rachel is an apocalyptic chaos, because she has coldly broken all contact with Vincent. In short, the ‘Stovefest Tour’ describes an affective homage to Marilyn from Vincent and his suffering due to Sister Rachel’s ice-cold silence. However, he talks superficially about Marilyn’s creative background with his new album, Born Villain.
My grandchild is known as ‘The Archimandrite’ among the Dominican priests in Nice, a religious title that gives Vincent great joy and pride. He has christened himself ‘The Tenebrous Archimandrite’! Indeed, his dreams were coldly crushed. Besides Marilyn’s important role in his life, Vincent hoped for the esteem of certain artists who ‘are worthwhile’ such as the singers Ozzy Osbourne, Amy Lee, Jonathan Davis; the drummer Joey Jordison, the writer Anne Rice and, of course, the burlesque performer Dita Von Teese. Thus, Vincent reconstructs his ‘replacement family’ to heal his wounds. Marilyn is his creative identity reference; Ozzy touches him because he seems to be really involved with his children. Vincent has very warm feelings toward Dita Von Teese, who symbolizes Passion. He really hoped to reach her heart affectively. When I say her heart, I mean her heart as a woman and no tricks. Vincent wants to impress Heather Sweet (alias Dita Von Teese) with his writings. He suffers from the absence of a feminine partner and feels a certain ‘security’ with this woman; he feels grounded. It is the same feeling he has for Marilyn, in other ways.
Vincent knows in advance that he is doomed by our cruel modern world. Thus he loses his joie de vivre and energy to refine his work, because of the recurrent judgments he hears incessantly about his writings, his artists, his objectives, etc. which kill him progressively. I know that my grandson hates himself with a passion. “It’s in my nature and it’s what I’ve been taught at school and the psychiatric hospital: a mental patient remains a mental patient no matter what he does,” he has confessed to me upon seeing my distraught face. What can I do? The hatred Vincent feels for himself is greater than the one his father felt for him because of his difference. Robert also felt great contempt for his writings. Vincent also talks about a self-destructive feeling of deliquescence in relation to all the in-vogue authors. When he runs out of arguments, he says: “Anne Rice is really much more amazing than my stupid and disappointing writings.” True, this author marked his adolescence with the film Interview with a Vampire. Vincent immediately immersed himself in a universe which would inspire his work with the Catholic Faith.
This film also exorcized his phobia of vampires and influenced his entire life, to this day. Vincent suffers at times from insomnia, so he leads this vampire-like lifestyle: alone, hidden in the darkness and observing this estranged/alienated society, but also crying with nostalgia over his great sufferings. Since early childhood, he was influenced by Christian myths. When he was very young, he hoped to die in order to bury his pain. Each day I hear my grandchild pacing up and down, his radio playing loud non-stop. When I point it out after seeing him walk in circles, lost in his thoughts, he says: “It’s an old reflex I’ve kept from the time when I was locked up in the psychiatric hospital. Life is an ocean of acid tears in which I drown.” Vincent is also the object of dispute in our family, despite my attempts at sharing his interests with him by listening to his music. I like some of Marilyn’s songs like Mobscene, They say that Hell’s not Hot and Redeemer. How will Vincent manage to find his place in a life he hates in a city he loathes? I worry to death about him, because I know he roams the streets looking for death. He is quite open about it. He has been suicidal since his childhood and yet, according to his own words, he perseveres with his writing for a ‘subtle and dull survival’.
How can I describe Vincent? One sentence is enough: he is unhappy, even desperate. The world is, for him, rejection. “I am not part of this world. Only death will release me. I will finally find peace and will no longer suffer,” he says to me. Sometimes he tells me he is afraid of God because he thinks of himself as too despicable for God to turn his way. “I need an absolving look to understand that He loves me”. He is very superstitious, he does not dare to do, say, read, act during the day because if he does, God, turned into The Whipping Father, is going to punish him. “I’m too small, deep down I’m nothing, He can’t love me. Despite my fear I love Him but I’m scared of going to hell, it petrifies me ». He seems confused about the saving stability of Christianity. He both defends the banner of the Catholic Faith and feels great anger against religion which he deems hierarchic.
His suicidal nature pushes him to provoke Christ and God violently in his ‘blasphemies’. He believes and declares himself damned and thus already excluded from the kingdom of Heaven. He explains to me: “I find peace and rest at the cemetery. These places are full of archaic and mystic architectural beauty. Whether at the St. Lazare Cemetery in Montpellier or the Père Lachaise in Paris, these places make me feel close to God, full of spirituality, where faith transcends silence. I can really connect with Religion and Christianity. When I’m out on the streets I can breathe wild death, because I contemplate the excesses of this youth. They intoxicate with decadence and consume their potential, getting too close to the sun. Indecency is all around us. At the heart of the archaic cemeteries, I immediately feel a surrounding peace. We are in touch with the immortality of the souls. It is a place of truth, because there you can’t lie to God. Alive, we are sinners, often ignorant of the precepts of Christianity, which often appears to us as an attack on our liberty. Our nature pushes us to sin. At the cemetery, I meditate about my insignificant, aborted and chaotic life. I think about those with whom I would have loved to be close, but, with time, I discover that everything is desolation. For me, peace is unknown; all is failure. I am an extremist; everything is black or white, no room for grays. Within my cemeteries I observe the tombs which symbolize a pure act of faith, and the magnificent crucifixes.” He has created a form of religion he calls ‘Christian darkness’, a mixture of the Goth perception of darkness and romanticism and metal music all mixed with the purity of Christian mysticism. It seems like a funny mixture but Vincent really believes. Only the Dominican Brothers understand him and try to reassure him.
My message for him, in a nutshell, is: “God is great; men are small and often intolerant.” But all around him, friends (!), acquaintances and even his own family, including his father (May God forgive him) have told him repeatedly that he is possessed! That results in a child, an adult now, who is marked for life. We, his mother (my daughter) and I, find ourselves crippled, unable to redress the balance. His father and my ex-husband, i.e. his grandfather on his mother’s side, have always told him he was a ‘parasite’. As a consequence, Vincent believes that if he dies, his mother is going to be ‘freed’ in their eyes!!! A criminal heresy! He spends part of the nights outside meeting all kinds of characters: drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless, and other diverse lost souls, who recurrently tell him: “You are nothing”. And despite it all, he prefers to go out. He sleeps little and badly. Being alone with himself makes him suffer inevitably and just underlines his affective absence. I can no longer wait for him up till late as I used to do in the past because I go to bed earlier. His presence at home reassures me as I need him near me now that I am quite old. He watches over me.
Once, his mother brought him home with blood on his face after a fight. She went to pick him up after having been called by the people alarmed at seeing him in such a state. The next morning, after my daughter drove him to the police station to file a complaint, Vincent was on his way home and stopped on the way to talk to a ‘friend’. For comfort she overwhelmed him with reproaches, telling him that all was his fault because he wore a crucifix around his neck!!!!! Incredible! What happens to freedom? What world do we live in? Since then, I always worry when he goes out at night, especially about meeting the wrong person. He says he is not afraid of death; he is looking forward to it. So I worry about him provoking a situation which can have dramatic consequences.
After many visits to Nice, we no longer go there. Jean Marie, his Dominican friend, is very busy with his work and tired. Mireille, prison visitor with Jean Marie is also absorbed by too many things. As a result, they can no longer spend as much time with him as before. Sister Rachel has been transferred to Besançon, because her order needed her skills. So, she no longer lives in Nice and does not have too many opportunities to go there. Vincent feels very lonely, his friends dispersed by life, Paul at the seminary, the friends from Ichthus (the religious band he played drums for) all over the world each leading his own life, his friends from Nice too busy with diverse occupations. He feels abandoned. All he has left is his mother and me. His cousins never call him, and yet he has eight cousins all close by here in Montpellier and Lunel. All this makes my grandson live in a difficult and painful atmosphere and adds to his suffering. He has written a sort of journal over two years in which he tells his life, his vision, which cause me great pain because I feel his abyssal suffering that neither his mother nor I can appease.
The depth of his writings, the power of his words, undoubtedly represents a saving outlet for Vincent. At least it is a means of sometimes finding some kind of appeasement. He does not believe in himself but others do for him! His mother, who has always encouraged him to persevere in his writing – a way to evacuate the overflow of pain – and his editor, who continues publishing his books, and a few other people, I among them, all believe in him.
I strongly hope and wish he will manage, one day, to feel the joy the recognition and accomplishment of his work can give him. He certainly deserves it, absolutely.
Hélène Blénet