There's nothing inherently beautiful about being broken

By Caitlin Ward

Horrorshow
by The Libertines

I’ve been following — I’ve been following your mind’s instructions
On how to slowly sharply screw myself to death
Yes there is a screw
It’s pointed at my head
Then, look, a dream peddler
And a stick of light through my bones
“Don’t get on the wrong one”
“Oi, you!” and “You, what’s your game?”

CHORUS

Laying me down to waste
Laying me down
Now you can pin me up or put me down
Now let it all go:
It’s a horrorshow
You should come on round
Horrorshow, the horse is brown
I left something in Moscow

She said: “I’ll show you a picture
a picture of tomorrow
there’s nothing changing it’s all sorrow”
Oh no please don’t show me
I’m a swine you don’t wanna know me . . .

Still I’ve been following, following your minds instructions
on how to slowly sharply screw myself to death
Yes there is a screw
It’s pointed at my head

CHORUS

(author’s note: and it goes on)

I am not a Romantic. I tell you this because it is a fairly new development. It’s been creeping up on me for a while, but I realized just how unromantic I’ve become last Sunday night when I was loudly descrying the awfulness of smoking outside Lydia’s Pub. Usually I find it tiresome when people talk about the evils of cigarettes, but at the time it seemed necessary. A good friend of mine (a non-smoker) works with at-risk youth. She commented that sometimes she thought her relationship with the young men she works with might be improved if she could go for cigarettes with them.

I can see the logic. There is a camaraderie among smokers: an instant intimacy found in alleyways and 10 feet from the doors of pubs and clubs that is predicated on how no one has a lighter, it’s too cold out, and the price of cigarettes has gone up again. I’ve never been good at small talk, but with a cigarette in my hand I can talk to anyone about anything. But that doesn’t change the reality that smoking is quite awful, and if there’s anything I hate about myself, it’s the fact that I haven’t quit yet.

You’re probably wondering at this point what my Romanticism (or lack thereof) has to do with my smoking. To understand that, you have to understand a particular brand of Romanticism of which I was guilty in my younger years. You see, Romanticism with a capital R has very little to do with romantic love. It finds its modern meaning in the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, when a group of poets and artists sought to validate strong emotions as an authentic source of aesthetic experience.
Basically, what that means is that poets such as Byron, Shelley and Coleridge found beauty in being angry, or terrified, or depressed. At the time they were writing, it was an important idea; Europe was coming off its Enlightenment hangover and industrialization was laying waste both to the countryside and the health of England’s people. Emotion, spirituality and nature had been done away with in favour of progress, and that was destroying something that neither deserved to be ruined nor should be.

Romanticism was an emotional and poetic reaction against what was wrong in the culture.

Of course, it was a short-lived movement because the thing about valuing aesthetics over reality is that it tends to make you have less than brilliant ideas, like thinking opium addiction is harmless fun, or that you can single-handedly liberate Greece. They all died young, except for Wordsworth, who turned into a crotchety old man.

The hangover of Romanticism in popular culture among a certain set of people is the belief that there’s something inherently beautiful in being broken. Now, this in itself is not a bad thing. One of the most enduring symbols of our faith is the image of a broken man and a broken God: Christ on the cross. What makes it beautiful, though, is not that Christ was broken, but why he allowed that to happen: God so loved the world he gave his only son. I don’t think there’s been a Good Friday mass in about 10 years when I haven’t, at some point, broken down sobbing. Especially when the choir sings When I Behold The Wondrous Cross — you know, that line, “did e’er such love and sorrow meet / or thorns compose so rich a crown?” Yeah. Every time.

Among us mere mortals, however, being broken is not always, or even often, about supreme acts of self-sacrifice. Instead, it goes back to the less than brilliant ideas of certain Romantics: breaking yourself because there’s something inherently lovely about it. English band the Libertines built a whole persona out of it. Yes, they had ideas about some mythic England called Albion (I refer you to songs The Good Old Days and Death on the Stairs, off their first album Up the Bracket), but equally necessary to the band’s mythos was an obsession with the underbelly that, as a group of middle class boys, wasn’t by rights theirs. It might have started out quite lovely, living rough and on drugs, but the reality is written all over the face of their lead singer, Pete Doherty, who destroyed his health, his relationships and his career through his very Romantic addictions to heroin and crack cocaine. It might have been pretty when he wrote Horrorshow at the age of 20 when he was doe-eyed and soft, but now past 30 and back in a bedsit in North London (if tabloid accounts are to be believed), he’s nothing but sad.

And on a less dire level, I, a former Romantic, can’t help but think that it was my Romantic tendencies that led me to start smoking. There seemed to be something beautiful about the casual disregard for my health, something glamorous and seedy and anti-heroic about nicotine. But it was clearly crap, and that Sunday night on Broadway found me swapping war stories (or horror stories) with a former smoker about the absolute lack of dignity in being an addict: smoking strangers’ cigarette butts at a New Year’s party, fashioning homemade cigarettes out of newsprint and the tobacco left at the bottom of the ashtray, going into minor hysterics because you lost a full pack and you can’t afford another until payday. My non-smoking friend was nonplussed. She’d never thought about it that way. And before you get to that point, you don’t. But it is a horrorshow. Don’t come round.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon. You can find her short bursts of insight and frustration at http://www.twitter.com/newsetofstrings