Marianne Faithfull, my totem

In the ‘inspirations’ section of the website, you may have noticed a reference to Marianne Faithfull. It is time for me to tell you about her and reveal the madness that lives within me, or at least part of it.

Marianne Faithfull adopted me when I was twelve or thirteen, becoming my mother. Of course, no one was informed of this event, not even Marianne Faithfull, and I didn't see any problem with that since I was the only one interested in this adoption. Unable to find anything that could truly connect me to my own parents, and by extension, to my own family, my mind had to find an answer to the question: ‘Where do I come from?’

So I nurtured and fed my theory that I had been adopted from a very early age, because how else could I explain that my parents and I had absolutely nothing in common? I'm not that crazy, of course, I ‘knew’ that my parents were my parents, but I needed to create an imaginary environment that made sense to me.

That's how Marianne Faithfull entered my troubled psyche and became a totem figure I could summon whenever reality confronted me and brought back all the feelings of injustice, sadness, despair and rebellion that plagued my daily life. I would play her music, and Marianne would speak to me. I didn't understand a word of English, or very little, but I knew that what she was saying was for me. It didn't matter that I didn't understand the lyrics because she wasn't just singing. No, she took me in her arms. She held me close, comforted me, calmed me down. And when she was on TV or on another screen, she looked at me, and I could see her trying to make me understand that I didn't have to worry.

The question that arises, which you may be asking yourself at this point, is: Why Marianne Faithfull?

Because she blew my mind! Because she blew my eardrums!

She was so beautiful, so elegant and yet so broken, so dignified, so great. Great in a way that few people are. Classy. Fire and water. Heaven and Earth. The most immense joy and the deepest sorrow. Being adopted by her was a way of trying to become what she embodied. I wanted to be great too, to stand tall, not to deny the infinite sadness that lived within me but not to be defined by it. On the contrary. I wanted to be like this totem figure, I wanted to transform the darkness that inhabited me into something dazzling once it was externalised, just as she did.

This is what many people do, and not just artists – I will have the opportunity to return to this myth of the cursed artist in other posts – and this is why my inner relationship with Marianne Faithfull has long been a form of madness due to its exclusive and intense nature.

What about today?

Marianne Faithfull has passed away. I have lost a dear friend. I have lost a piece of my madness, a piece of my strange history. I listen to Marianne Faithfull when I need to recapture those feelings from my childhood and adolescence, not the memories of those times, no, but rather who I was at that time: a being who refused to let the world close in on him.

I think I sensed at the time that the dreamlike quality that filled my mind would disappear, crushed by the demands of a world in which you have to be completely serious, completely responsible, completely in control of yourself, completely this and completely that.

So being adopted by Marianne Faithfull was one of the best things that ever happened to me. That episode fuelled my imagination – in fact, my second novel was born out of my relationship with Marianne Faithfull, which I'll tell you about another time – and it nourished a thousand hopes, a thousand dreams, a thousand inspirations. I was able to escape the turmoil of the graveyards, as Lorca put it.

I close my eyes sometimes when I listen to her and ask her to lend me her grace, her beauty, her beautiful and gentle creativity. I close my eyes and hope that she has found peace, along with all the children who took her as their mother. After all, she may not have been an ideal mother in real life, but that's not the point, because this madness has value only because it is madness, a remedy to fight against everything that can destroy us.

We cling to memories, or dreams, or crazy ideas, and we do everything we can not to let them go for fear of falling into an abyss - which may not exist - but which we believe can devour us. That is the beauty of dreams. That is the magnificent complexity of human beings.

Perhaps it is simply the power of music and singers.

Sometimes I find myself laughing when I think that what I long believed to be the expression of a completely twisted mind, my own, is in fact nothing less than the experience of millions of people around the world, with other Marianne Faithfuls.