The death of the brilliant actor Philip Seymour Hoffman of a drug overdose at 46 last Sunday provided commentators with an opportunity to describe — and sometimes misunderstand — what people imbued with an attraction to self-destruction are like. Most alluded to those who abuse drugs as individuals lacking moral principles, who could rid themselves of their dreadful habit by simply opting to change their behaviour, as former US first lady Nancy Reagon had suggested in the 1980s, by just saying no. Oh, please! This is not only too facile a hypothesis to advance in this context, but one that any therapist who has treated addicts will tell you has holes.
The obvious question here is: Why would someone like Hoffman, an Oscar-winning actor recognised by his peers as having exemplified character-acting at its best, a man who, as the saying goes, had so much going for him — fame, power, wealth, prestige — choose such a dangerous life-stye that he knew would invariably lead to death?
The grim reality is that in social life, as in the natural world, we are born saddled with challenges, drawn to them “like a moth to a flame”. The more adept we are at meeting them, the better are our chances at survival. Nature shows no mercy. The fit survives. The unfit are left by the wayside. Have you considered, as a case in point, how moths make their suicidal nose-dives toward candles, camp fires, light bulbs and street lamps? Only those moths nimble enough in gait to circle closer and closer to the light without getting killed exhaust themselves and quit flying, thus surviving a fiery death.
But we are not moths, you say. We are complex beings imbued with impulses more complex than those of a moth. We know right from wrong, to say the least. True, but our addictions, say to drugs, alcohol and gambling are different from a moth’s only in kind, not in degree. And once we become afflicted with an addiction, it takes more than good intentions and strong will, to quit, because an addiction, whether organic, like heroin, or psychological, like gambling, is relentless, incessant, overpowering. It changes our brain in ways that foster compulsive needs in us beyond our ability to control.
Do you remember Edna Sue Pate? Well Edna Sue Pate was a 73-year-old Indiana grandmother, addicted to gambling, who between 2005 and 2007 gambled away $97,000 (Dh356,766), the entire amount set aside in her grandson’s trust fund for his college education. And trust me on this one, Edna Sue Pate knew only too well that what she was doing was wrong, very wrong, as did Hoffman, who knew that his substance-abuse was wrong, very wrong. And so did the others in his milieu — equally endowed with fame, power, wealth and prestige, like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janice Joplin, who overdosed on drugs in the early 1970s.
However, sometimes, we are driven to self-destruction, much “like a moth to a flame”, driven there perhaps by our inability to have mastered a grip on tormenting demons from our past, driven there by a form of guilt or self-doubt, driven there by the terrifying, albeit subconscious, notion that to cleanse our spirit we have to destroy our life. Inexplicable? Not so when you consider the question that the British philosopher Karl Popper raised in his book, The Poverty of Historicism (1936) about what propels men (he had in mind Bolshevik terrorists who fought against the Tzarist regime) to go on suicide missions in order to promote a cause that they knew they were not going to be around to see triumph. And those men, not unlike their counterparts in later decades, went towards death with sombre yet unabashed readiness.
Drug addicts like Hoffman knew that they were committing suicide by taking to drugs. In the back recesses of their minds lurked the notion, perversely, that what they were doing was heroic —— that they were mocking death, the ultimate summoner, showing him up for what he was, a pallid scarecrow. For why is it that writers and poets, actors and musicians, tormented souls one and all, are notorious for their addiction to drugs and alcohol, attracted to them “like a moth to a flame”?
A lot of wanton psychologising, you say? Not so fast, dear reader. Hoffman was determined to kill himself (and no one was ever going to change his mind, as evidenced by his several failed attempts at rehab), as were those other equally talented, nationally known celebrities before him.
His death, I will tell you here, hit me personally. It hit me hard. It hit me very hard. Not because I knew Hoffman. Not because he was in any mockingly remote way connected to me, but because his death brought for me an onrush of memories. You see, my son Malcolm, who was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia, and who had it all — a child who had so much going for him, as they say: Top grades in college, a bright future, loving parents (though long since divorced) who cared for him — overdosed on heroin in September 1993, leaving me to resolve the existential riddle: Why? Maybe drugs are an expression of the cruel spirit of our time. Maybe fate does not choose carefully among its victims, but plucks them at random.
Philip Seymour Hoffman had not got anywhere near the terminus of his career when he died last Sunday. And Malcolm had not even begun it.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
