It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think of In Search of Lost Time as a fever dream of Proust’s entire life. Penned almost entirely from his Paris flat over the course of more than a decade, the work is a gargantuan, almost plotless catalog of rich impressions - aristocrats, heathens, flowers, gardens, rooms, aunts, a suffocating (to us, at least) mother, not to mention the mysterious Swann - rendered paragraph by interminable paragraph as the text equivalent of full technicolor. We might call it a coda, birthed as it was during the last lonely act of his life. This would be accurate if there’d been other writing before it, but, as it stands, very little precedes his magnum opus. By this point Proust had given up on society (he had little human contact outside of his maid’s ministrations), so, really, it was society, not other writing, that’d “come before”. Proust in his later days, a time spent almost exclusively at his desk, was writing about a completely different life. The book, then, really is a dream, if by dream one means to say a vivid recollection of an “alternate reality”, in other words, a severance from present circumstances.





I find this disconnect thrilling. A man, having lived a society life, a conga-line of fin de siecle fetes, rife with philo-aristocraticism, “wakes up”, ironically, into a kind of sleep - the stillness of his Paris apartment - then, with some fury, pens his hallucination of fascinating characters chin-chinning into perpetuity. I see toothy smiles and velveteen draperies. I think of Munch’s The Dance of Life. It’s a daymare, but the author was “there” for all of it. In other words, the fiction is supported by reality. Proust writes about his life as though the life he’d had were just a dream. In fact, he can only do so by virtue of having “awoken” from the dream of his own past. Though his apartment was much quieter, the silence was more alive than all the characters of the play who, now in some purgatory of recollection, appear more as ghosts.





One could surmise that this disconnect was a natural outcome of factors originating from Proust’s homosexuality and “Jewishness”, not forgetting, of course, the particularities of 19th century taboos prevailing on any educated homosexual or Jew. Those same factors in 2018 are unlikely to produce any Proustian disconnect, but they must have played a large part back then in turning the author into the Cartesian brain of In Search of, ingenious, sensitive, and omniscient to be sure, but also lonely and defeated, and destined for the early sickness and death that seemed to come as a matter of course.





This gives Proust’s apologia pro vita sua, the honorable recounting of life’s details that is his In Search of, anthropological heft. Yet, for my own case, for my own apologia, I’d have to adapt these factors to fit my life. I’m writing from a more distant place, under altogether less impressive societal and political pressures. My anthropology is different and so would be my disconnect. If I had to find similarities, I’d have to limit myself to the relation I sense with Proust’s basic desire to encapsulate his life experience in book form, a life experience which he undoubtedly regards from afar. I could also draw a connection to the universal drive to write down a past from the standpoint of a more prosaic present, a place one no longer feels with the same vitality as the past. Finally, I relate to the need for a Herculean endeavor - seven volumes worth - which promises, by virtue of its scope, to fill a yawning gap between the hope of worldly fulfillment and the actual conditions of life, between a happy life and a real one, the novel/memoir as curative of weltschmerz. That same gap, for reasons perhaps owing more specifically to my own time and place, compels me, as I’m sure it did Marcel, to approach the chaotically figured wall of experience with something of the force of destiny, and with the singleminded purpose of etching onto it a sign of life - even my initials - not out of mindful purpose, some new-age-y altruism, for instance, but out of sheer desperation and loneliness, and out of a haunting terror, rational or not, that I could go any minute now and leave nothing behind. These pressures can be construed as general ones which permit just about any of us, for that matter, to draw inspiration from Proust’s case.





A large part of my own apologia, the memoir I’ve set out to write, comes out of my experience with Fame, the most powerful dream our media-saturated era has ever assembled. My brush with fame was perhaps the most consequential event in my life, since “making it” is considered to be a grand achievement and “having influence” a momentous prerogative, and therefore it transformed the existential conditions of all that would follow. What’s more is that not only did I acquire experience with that dream, but later, motivated by complex environmental factors, I would make the decision to stop being famous. There are some who might say that isn’t humanly possible. But give me the benefit of the doubt for the moment and let’s assume that it is possible. It’s plain to see, then, that Fame from the standpoint of the “no longer famous” is a most curious phenomenon and quite deserving of exposition.





Perhaps I made that “choice” because I knew I wasn’t just famous, but also infamous, and I knew that infamy’s expiration date is tragically close at hand. I think Proust too knew that kind of infamy in his day. I don’t doubt in the slightest that the account of his youth and beyond is itself a kind of famous person’s memoir, or, more specifically, a bildungsroman written by a celubutante (though, importantly, the account is written from a deserted island). This account, containing the episodes of a previous existence in society, episodes whose promise of earthly paradise would eventually come to nought, recounts the details of an infamous life. I can only imagine that, in the same way the outlaw runs on borrowed time and knows it, Proust had to write his book in exactly the way he did, with fury and expansiveness, knowing that a bottomless inkwell is useless in the face of a ticking clock.





Before I go one step further let me rebuke possible accusations arising from my self-comparison to Proust, accusations, say, of a luxurious pretense which, so the criticism goes, I can not honestly justify. I think it’s fair to say that in the spirit of egalitarianism any one is fair game to compare oneself to, so long as it’s useful. My problem for critics, as I see it, is not that I might have failed to prove that I “deserve” to bring up Proust in an essay written to describe my own life, but rather that this comparison is useful to begin with. You can let me know whether you think it’s of any service in elucidating my goals after reading the rest of the essay.





A stronger critique of this seeming pretense, however, one I want to make sure I’m clear about, would be to say that there’s a desire on my part, blinded to my privilege, to liken my own disconnect from the past to the specific factors that fueled Proust’s disconnect; in other words, that I wish to say that the issues of being homosexual and Jewish in early 20th century Paris are illustrative of general issues leading to disenchantment and dissociation from the past, general issues which I, writing a century later from the alien mantle of heterosexual, white, male privilege, am free to make specific to me. In this case, so the critics would have, I’d be guilty of conflating two dynamics which really ought to be kept separate, namely, on the one hand, whatever travails in my own history that issue from developmental problems - say, family trauma - and on the other, the much more complex phenomena of societal and political dynamics, such as scapegoating and tribalism, that give Proust’s case its more relevant status to matters around justice and privilege, and from which, being a card-carrying member of a dominant social structure by virtue of skin color, creed and sexual orientation, I am actually unable, whether I wish to admit it or not, to take inspiration.





This criticism is absolutely well-founded and I don’t wish to equivocate in my laying bare just what it is in Proust I find so relevant to my own life. I’ll never be able to understand what it means to be homosexual and Jewish in a society which turns those characteristics into crimes. I will never be able to relate to the levels of persecution, the intrepid machinations of mobs and ruling structures, the paranoia that must accompany every single handshake (“Do they know?”), the crippling shame which must accompany every instance of “giving in” (“I’ve done it again!”), the degradation into more and more exotic experiences as a means of self-confirming one’s denigration (ie - Proust’s infamous rat in a cage), all these torturous realities endured only for the sake of avoiding destruction at the hands of a state-sponsored bloodlust for tribal compensation. I can write about these things, but I will never know them as eyewitness. For I am immune. I am immune because I am a white, heterosexual man. I am grateful that at long last, whether by today’s moment (#MeToo, #BLM, et al) or simply just aging - or both - I’m able to see that my immunity blinds me to these realities on a daily basis, that is, I am grateful that I am no longer blind to being blind.





I’m not immune, though, to what I did see, hear and feel as a child, to the othering I experienced when I was fourteen at the hands of my delusional and alcoholic father, during a time of incredible desperation - owing to a humiliating and lonely encounter with puberty and the opposite sex - so that all I truly wanted, needed, really, was some older man, generations older, to lift his wing and keep me dry, instead of what he did do, namely, assailing me for little more than growing pubic hair. I’m equally not immune to the concomitant deceptions of my mother who, in her blinding compulsion to avoid encountering her own imperfection - an encounter that is the greatest of fears for narcissists - “assuaged” my exile from the family with pseudo-romantic advances and quasi-therapeutic sessions, the typical designs of power-play for immortality that obsess the narcissistically inclined. I listened intently to the sentimental and tear-choked travails of a woman under duress, nodding here like a consoling friend, squinting and rubbing my chin there in crude pantomime of a thinking therapist. I’m not immune to these things because I have been traumatized by them.





Far be it from me to equate these traumas with the injustices of society. They are the injustices of upbringing, and, though they have left their indelible mark, as such are of a completely different nature than the aforementioned realities of those of us who dare not be white, male and straight in a society that rewards those traits and punishes their absence. Yet, in my opinion, they are similar enough for this essay, since they seem to have produced the same disconnect, though, in the end, are as different as two genera of mammal.





My disconnect, the apologia that will be my memoir, the severance between a bon vivant lifestyle, the rockstar I indeed once was, and the more prosaic one of today, begins with this trauma. I spoke earlier about a brush with infamy. Mind you, this is not altogether the same as the Fame I did indeed attain. Infamy, with its mixture of notoriety and gossip, is an objectifying force, insofar as one is infamous not from one’s deeds but from one’s character. The object of fame is often the works of the human, whereas the object of infamy is the human themself. So the human themself, as a result of infamy, becomes the pariah or the parvenu, depending on the case, but in both cases is reduced to an object. (This explains why we simultaneously worship and revile our rockstars, politicians, and Hollywood stars, who are all, consciously or not, gurus of the Cult of Fame). In this respect, infamy, containing both hate and love, resembles family trauma closely, insofar as family trauma works on this fluid scale, toggles between disguised polarities, is capable of transforming the saint into the sinner overnight. It’s no surprise, then, that family trauma often produces “infamous results”, not just versions of the “rat in a cage”, to name just the most depraved possibility, but also, for instance, the benign trafficking in “branding” that accompanies just about every celebrity’s social media profile. Infamous results run the gamut from the precipice of good taste and good nature (Stalin) to its geographical opposite, say, in the squeaky clean private lives of some (not all) spiritual leaders (Dalai Lama). Infamy is not about values, it’s about objectification, which is value neutral. In this way, a connection to origins, be they of a traumatic nature or not, may be drawn. I won’t ignore this important dynamic in my memoir.





There are many options of memoiring.





Were I simply to have been “famous”, I could write not an apologia but a more straightforward celebrity memoir, a simple chronology of a career. As it stands, these kinds of works are integral components of biographical portraiture, indispensable to historians and fans of particular culture and media. But they tend to run afoul of a rigorous apologia (though some of the best have both). As someone who has been fortunate enough to choose life largely outside of career imperatives, it actually might make more sense to write from a kind of “veteran” standpoint, the perspective of “one who has seen much”, like a soldier in Vietnam, and thus has a tale to tell.





Yet, infamy and duty are different things. Service of country imparts authority to the veteran, an authority that, rightly, immunizes them from criticisms of partiality. Simply reliving the facts, the intense events of war, the murder, the death, the desperation, the bad deeds, or other similar types of human trial, is sufficient to lend the narrator a forgiving audience. While I have made bad decisions, I can’t claim a mandate to some societal imperative, such as “Thou shalt fight for country”, that give my “war stories” an earned pathos. I’m just an artist and a civilian, and therefore much more ordinary than a soldier. I have little recourse to the “exigencies of war” in order to buttress my story.





At the same time, on the other side of the pendulum swing, I am no celebrity that can blithely roll out the “tell-all” details of a bon vivant lifestyle. Yes, I have yet to prove that it even makes sense to say that one can make oneself “unfamous”. But for our present purposes let’s just say I haven’t done things on the basis of “career”. It follows then that whatever I did during my time in the limelight is difficult to recount without the understanding of the considerable time spent outside of it. Therefore, to write this type of “celebrity memoir” would be the most unabashed act of mercenary remuneration, a kind of commissioning on my life, whose crudeness would be outstretched only by its inaccuracy.





It’s really in the infamy that I experienced that the key to the truth lies, because it’s only that infamy that ties me to my family trauma, and with that, universalizes the story (hopefully). The trauma led to the infamy, which then led to all the right and wrong decisions, all the glory and the pain.





Therefore, it’s imperative that I honor my Proustian disconnect, for it is the precondition for truth-telling, the windowpane between the past that is now a dream, and the present that is now the reality. I will return to look at my trauma through this windowpane, the way a backcountry traveler approaches a waterfall miles from civilization and places his hand under the gushing cadence. The white noise of the cascade drowns out all remaining audio, the spray triggers his thoughts, the swirls and eddies on its base cool his bare feet and relax his central nervous system. He pulls his head back, and, with an upturned strabismus of the eyes, connects to the atman of mother nature. In this very manner will my trauma point the way to deeper truths.





I suspect that Proust, in addition to experiencing persistent social and political costs for his homosexuality and “Jewishness”, suffered from family trauma as well. You don’t need to be Freud to read into his mother-worship the unpacked residues of childhood smothering on the part of ma mere. I believe that all these factors together contributed to the great work of In Search of Lost Time, a work which, incidentally, I know all too little at the time of this writing (full disclosure: I’ve only read half of Swann’s Way), but whose genius I look forward to plumbing over the course of my life. I believe that Proust’s isolation from society was operatic, a kind of rich, Cage-like silence, more complex than simply the absence of notes and events. It was not just paramount for the writing of his book, but, in the book’s omniscience, a necessary and implied authorial repose.





Am I still Famous? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m no longer infamous (gladly), I know that. Thanks to therapy and recovery, I no longer produce “infamous results”. Yet it may come about that one day I will “become famous” again, for this or that thing that I do. One has to leave room for change, even if it means diverging from one’s written beliefs now and then. What I truly hope will not change, however, is the prosaic state I’m in, the boredom I experience as a matter of course, this static soil, as damp and mineralized as it is still. I have found that, like the well-tended garden, truth grows from it as readily as ferns in a greenhouse. I can’t pledge that I will stay “unfamous”, but I can pledge to stay prosaic and dull, as Austin Kleon recommends, so that my art might become the rockstar instead of me. Proust, too, was a “rockstar”. And yet, had he never retreated, had he never bowed out of “the game”, never forfeited his membership in elite society, he would have gone down in history as simply another salon attendee, another Robert de Montesquieu (if a more sedate one). We would never have known just how much of a “rockstar” he truly was.





There I go comparing myself to Proust again. No, reader, please let the record show: I’m not sure what will be written, what will become of my memoir, how “consequential” it will be. I’m not at all certain that whatever I write from this point forward could be taken on an equal playing field to my output, say, as a musician. I have as much control over that as I do of the temperature. I know that comparisons to genius writers are dangerous. One needs to look no further than that Proust was infamous prior to In Search of Lost Time, yet became famous for its writing. Whereas I, as the international rockstar I once was, have already bitten from the fruit of that tree, and the rest might go down as simply the obscure contents of my website. Certainly, I ignore that difference at my own peril.





But I’m too interested in a diverse range of media than to continue trucking at only one, even if it means that I am to become the proverbial jack of all trades (I always like to say that one thing he is the master of in actuality is being the very jack of all those trades!). So, in the meantime, I follow my heart, even when it leads me to a lonely apartment to write about glory days and painful nights, and to a silence, interrupted only by a sleeping dog’s breathing, of a man who’s left the party for good.