Glenn Gould died in 1982, aged 50. His mystique though is still very much alive. A major part of this fame comes from his sheer virtuosity as a pianist. His 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations being especially well-regarded, considered by many to be his masterwork. It isn't too difficult to understand why.
With the spark of genius, eccentricity and a persistent self-destructive streak came as a package deal. As is so often the case. Kafka wanted all his writings in manuscript to be burnt after his death, Vincent cut-off one of his ears, Virginia Woolf chose to walk into a river like Ophelia after weighing her pockets down with stones; it isn't a short list, this. Anyone who has seen at just how leisurely a pace Kolkata's trams travel would find it difficult to believe that the poet Jibanananda Das' death in the early-thirties after being run-over by a tram was an accident; Sylvia Plath preferred to opt out of the ordeal of living; Jim Morrison drank himself to death in Paris when at the peak of his songwriting powers; the maverick Grandmaster Bobby Fischer, whose enigmatic reclusiveness is as much the stuff of legend as his long-running cerebral duel with his Soviet rival Boris Spassky; Annapurna Devi, acknowledged by Baba Allauddin Khan himself as the best musician among his four stellar protégés, who chose to never once perform in public (apocryphally because of the negativity and insecurity she felt her performing in public would cause her then husband Ravi Shankar to feel); examples of the eclipse despair and wilful self-destruction cast on a damned certain few are all too easy to find.
Much like what happens in our world even today, Gould's doctors put him on a cocktail of anti-depressants and anxiety-treating tranquillizers to numb him out from a life that was just about exclusively introspective. You probably see this coming by now, so yes, Gould was very much a loner. And further, as you must have guessed too : the meds did not offer him any short-cut to sunny-happy-socially cheerful paradise.
More in the Guardian article below – but it was essentially 'The Second Coming' from then on. Twisting, slow, inexorably circling gyres/spirals culminating in horror and Chinua Achebe falling apart. Yeats is canonical and has been dissected bone-dry by now... if you're among those who have had too much of Yeats and 'The Second Coming' (I know, because I've had to read it first in eighth grade, then tenth, then for the +2, again for undergrad, and yet again during my MA)... check out Junji Ito's Uzumaki. You'll then know what I've been talking of about blighted souls like Gould; the ones who had to live through all their life fighting that ruthless serial killer of souls, accursed depression.
On Uzumaki:
Scanlations (i.e. editions scanned from the Japanese originals, then communally translated into other languages by angelic souls brightening the Interwebs) of the complete three-volume graphic novel are widely available online. Here are direct links to the full three-volume work hosted on one of the many such sites:
Uzumaki v1
Uzumaki v2
Uzumaki v3
If these links do not work for you for any supra-rational ninja cosmic voodoo reason whatsoever, despair not, for Google is your friend. And then there's always the published hard-copy edition.
As you may have gathered from the two pages above, this is not (repeat not) manga of the Naruto and Pokemon variety meant for a young-adult audience. This is seinen manga, explicitly meant for a mature target demographic. There is a significant amount of graphic, occasionally bordering-on-the-gratuitous nudity, death, and violence involved. Though I can think of just about no other mangaka whose work is as genuinely frightening as Ito's, a movie like The Ring is perhaps an analogue of sorts far as the horror and despair go.
The ultra-violence usually found in seinen is a different beast (though there isn't much of that here); for that we're on the same page if you're familiar with either the book or Takashi Miike's film version of Ichi the Killer, or something like Old Boy or Battle Royale.
But yes, I cannot recommend Ito's work highly enough. A book like Uzumaki or Gyo is powerful and visceral enough to be classified among literature of that rare breed which perceptibly changes your worldview after you've read it.
Link to the article on Gould in The Guardian:
Glenn Gould: a wilfully idiotic genius?
Tom Service
Thursday, 20 September 2012
The Guardian
theguardian.com
Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2013
Two more portraits of Gould:
