‘I was aware that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan’s front room floor with a Mork action figure struggled with mental illness and addiction.’
I'd been thinking about Robin Williams a bit recently. His manager Larry Bresner told me that when Robin was asked by a German journalist on a press junket why the Germans had a reputation for humourlessness that Williams replied, "Because you killed all the funny people."
Robin Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser of comedy. Like he didn't manufacture it laboriously within but had only to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.
I was aware too that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan's front room floor with a Mork action figure (I wish I still had that, he came in a plastic egg) struggled with mental illness and addiction. The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.
He
spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction, how he felt often on a precipice of self-destruction, whether through substance misuse or some act of more certain finality. I thought that this articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against the return of such diseased thinking, which has proven to be hopelessly naive.
When someone gets to 63 I imagined, hoped, I suppose, that maturity would grant an immunity to adolescent notions of suicide but today I read that suicide isn't exclusively a young man's game. Robin Williams at 63 still hadn't come to terms with being Robin Williams.
Comment: ZeroHedge reports that Campos' beliefs included: Also interesting timing given recently Israel apologizes for calling Brazil a 'diplomatic dwarf' over Gaza massacre