byrdsongs, xxxv

It might be that Gene Clark was abandoned in some way or other. Maybe it occurred when he was a young boy. That would explain things. But I’m just speculating here:  Someone important to him left or wasn’t there in his hour of need. When this happens, and your way of looking at the world around you is still in its formative phase, the experience becomes the filter through which you process everything that happens to you.  You can’t really imagine any alternative course or pattern of events in the future. Being abandoned simply becomes who you are. You expect it of yourself without even thinking about it, in the same way that you expect to breathe or blink. Sometimes your expectations are correct, in which case your assumptions about life and other people become even more cemented in your psyche. But sometimes those expectations are self-fulfilling.  You can’t conceive of things happening differently, and there’s a part of you that doesn’t want them to happen differently, because the pattern has become predictable, knowable, even comfortable. Anything different would be jarring enough to cause a personal crisis. So you actively seek out circumstances and people that conform to what you know. You need this conformity in order to feel like you have control over your life. Control is everything. It makes you unhappy, but you’ve become happy in your unhappiness. You also don’t feel you deserve better. You’ve done much to engineer all your accumulating disappointments – which is to say that you are the source of much of your own torment – but this doesn’t take anything away from the way those disappointments have wreaked havoc on your self-esteem, and so you gravitate towards the circumstances that measure up to the concept you have of yourself…

But it’s not all grim. The years of pain will have done much to damage you as a person, but they might also compel you to look for a way to express your intense feelings, perhaps through painting, or writing, or acting, or singing… Often times one's creativity is the silver lining to deep unhappiness. And as unhappy souls cultivate their gifts, they might even begin to get recognized. In spite of all their inner turmoil, there's a part of them that will inevitably find that they like being recognized in a way that’s positive, in a way that provides some validation.  They'll want more of that validation and they'll develop a kind of split personality. One side of the personality will want to be affirmed, and may very well become addicted to affirmation. But then the other part of the personality is the one that holds something akin to a death wish, a need to be destroyed. The two poles will be constantly at war with one another, and this tension between them will lend new and powerful impetus to the creative process, elevating it to ever higher levels of excellence…

Oh, if only this is where the story ended!  Unfortunately there’s danger at every turn.  The darkness and the light rarely remain in perfect balance with one another.  One of them will eventually win the war.  If the self-loathing wins out, the unhappy soul will find ways to sabotage himself.  But if the self-validating side wins, then the creative power of his self-hatred will get whittled down, and he may very well lose his only source of inspiration. Some are able to find a solution to this conundrum.  I suspect most can’t, or won't...

I have no idea whether this at all resembles the Gene Clark story, other than that the man was at once incredibly talented and tragically tormented. His personal demons ultimately got the best of him, as personal demons so often do, but not before he sublimated those demons, at least for a little while, into beautiful music that’s helped a few of us navigate our way out of some dark passages...