Elliot Smith: A Eulogy
By Michael Owen
Contributing Writer

Elliott Smith was 34 years old. He was a singer and songwriter. Last week, he stabbed himself a single time in the chest, and his girlfriend came home to find him dead in their apartment in Los Angeles. Within hours of the announcement of his death, a photograph of Elliott Smith appeared on the homepage of The New York Times, with a link to an impassive summary of the events in Smith’s life: his birth, the rise and fall of his band Heatmeiser, his nomination for an Academy Award in 1998, his problems with alcoholism and drug addiction. The obituary appeared for one day, during which the world read it, left to right, top to bottom, and then moved forward. Another prolific author of extraordinary and beautiful things had passed, tragically and senselessly.

For me, the notion of making what is normally meant to be a humorous section of this newspaper into a space for eulogy and tribute is a bit disingenuous. What prompts a shift from whimsy to mourning? What about this event justifies a reversal of tone? The world is not wanting for artist-suicides, let alone death and suffering on any scale or in any place. People say that Elliott Smith wrote a great deal about pain, misery, and desolation. People say also that the world is full of those things, that, to paraphrase Woody Allen, we ought to be grateful that our lives are for the most part more miserable than horrible. In this column, I ordinarily write about things that are rejuvenating in their senselessness; but I can’t help finding a blander, blunter senselessness when reading Elliott Smith as a particular brand of tragic hero, a notably nice famous man who killed himself because it was all too much and thank God, at least he is in a better place. If it is disingenuous to write a memorial in a column that is meant to be about the hilarity of foreign living, it is also, under the circumstances, obligatory.

I began listening to Elliott Smith when, like many of his later fans, I first heard his songs in Good Will Hunting. Taking immediately to his half-whispered longing (I was 15), I bought the film’s soundtrack and then all of Smith’s solo albums, including Figure 8—his last, underappreciated full-length release. Figure 8 is lyrically and musically expansive, wistful and soaring, mute and furious desperation launched into a vast sunlit emptiness. “I have become a silent movie,” Smith sang with his usual, intangible reticence. “There’s a ghost in every town/ Can’t make a sound.” That this was his departure, the final song on the last album released in his lifetime, seems far too fitting.

Smith stabbed himself—so painful, so determined, so difficult—and to myself I thought: how poetic, what a way for him to die. An artist’s death, walked through in exacting detail on some prior level of consciousness, before the act of death and the end of consciousness itself. “In Which the Artist Contemplates the Legendary Means of His Own Erasure” would be the title of the work, and the disciples would flock to its unveiling with constrained urgency. How absurd of us to think it was poetic, the death of someone who gave us, briefly, a different sense of sight. Of someone who might have been our friend. The unpoetic death of someone.

I realized, after people who had been crying through the day sent me instant messages, and in Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Prague we wept and reminisced and, at one point in my case, maintained a many hours’ blank stare: that death for all its presence in life is not poetic, is never lyrical. The poetry of Elliott Smith’s life was in living, was in his music when he sang about misery or cocaine or breaking up. There was the poetry, dishonest sometimes and conflicted and aching with the pain of never being sure. There it was, in those stratospheric moments on Figure 8 when the strings swept us off our feet and briefly the song was not about loss, it was about having once had, not about death but about holding on, not about pain but about paradise.

Because he bore an unjust share of difficulty in his life—because his life too often really did lapse from the miserable into the horrible—the people Elliott Smith left behind imagine him in a better place. The eulogies on Internet fan sites speak of reunions in heaven and peace for a tortured soul. But what is really awful about Elliott Smith’s dying is that it is possible for us to imagine a better place for him, for anyone, than among his friends and the people he loved. What is really awful is that he could stare into the face of death—whatever joy or silence it might bring—and not turn back, not run toward other faces, toward life. “Nothing’s gonna drag me down,” he once wrote, “to a death that’s not worth cheating.” Was it a disavowal or a prophesy?

Suicide is sometimes called selfish. Suicide, the one act that unwaveringly presupposes the total tragic loss of self, the departure from that singular, mad fixation on living that keeps anyone alive. Smith sang so often of that madness. The tension of it, the tug of war between being and not. Life burst through in fantastic moments for Elliott Smith—moments he sang about, with great clarity—until, apparently, there were no more. Not for him. The source of so much beauty was imprisoned by emptiness.

Like the life of its author, Figure 8 finished with a question. It is a question that, by some predisposition of the universe, we are forced to ask of some of the most brilliant and generous human beings, a question whose answer is a mystery because we are invariably too late asking it. “Why should you want any other,” sang Elliott Smith, “when you’re a world within a world?”