Michael Jackson: Insomniac Sought Amnesiac Bliss

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It is an irony of Michael Jackson's peculiar life that a recording star would die in pursuit of a drug that confers a form of erasure: the erasure of duration from one's awareness.

Propofol, the anaesthetic apparently responsible for the sudden cardiac arrest that ended Mr. Jackson's promising re-entry into arena performance, has often been termed 'milk of amnesia.' Police interviewers reported that, in the course of issuing his demands for the drug, Jackson himself had referred to it as his 'milk.' An aqueous emulsion, propofol has the white appearance of milk, but it is plausible that the surgery-savvy Jackson was also familiar with the colloquial moniker satirizing the drug's mental effects.

Typically, abusers of this drug first seek it out in an attempt to treat an otherwise intractable insomnia. The Guardian reported an expert in addiction treatment commenting, "What's shocking is that most Propofol [addicted] patients are not looking for euphoria or for a high, they just want to go into a coma. They are wanting to disappear." Many of them are choosing to do so to avoid the intrusive thoughts that accompany traumas like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or a history of childhood sexual abuse.

While there is public knowledge of Mr. Jackson's poor treatment at the hands of his father during his childhood, any suggestion of sexual abuse would have to be inferred from allegations of inappropriate relationships with young boys that dogged Jackson over a period of many years, resulting in a criminal trial and, separately, a reputed payoff of a substantial sum of money to buy the silence of a family whose son was alleged to have engaged in some type of sexual activity with Mr. Jackson.

But as a self which presumably faced itself in the mirror at least on occasion, though perhaps only then by accident, this logical referent of 'Man in the Mirror' seemed to evolve over the years into a Möbius strip of negative identity feedback, a fact to which the endless plastic surgeries and ever more garish facial sculpting attest. It could well have been a case of plastic surgeons treating body dysmorphic disorder.

If we think of the propofol experience as a lacuna of the self, an absence or obliteration that lifts only when the drug ceases to be dripped into the veins, it possesses phenomenological resemblance to an amnesia.

Amnesia as an 'organic' psychological defense mechanism exists too, of course, and, as if to remind us, a month after MJ's demise, a man wandered out of Seattle's Discovery Park, knowing nothing of his past. What drew him to Discovery Park? Perhaps he was hoping to 'discover' his identity, though this is unlikely given that the subtype of amnesia he most probably suffers from is 'psychogenic' amnesia, resulting from psychological trauma, rather than, say, a degenerative brain disease. Contrary to the propofol example, if personal choice is operative here, it is at a deeply obscured and perhaps inaccessible level.

Separately we are confronted with the possibility of dissembling as a  manifestation of 'fraudulent amnesia,' when considering the odd discrepancies in the timeline of events given by Mr. Jackson's personal physician, the eminent cardiologist, Dr. Conrad Murray, who has acknowledged administering several sedatives and subsequently, propofol, at 10:40am, an odd hour to go for the heavy guns.

His is the type of deposition that often morphs into a base form of legal posturing, as defendants testify in court with answers like 'I don't recall' or 'I have no recollection of that happening.' Where has their memory gone, we are left to wonder. One would have imagined such a hair-raising series of events to be accompanied by a concomitant sharpening of the senses.

For this sub-species of man the beautiful lie is the one that can be contorted from the facts, like an alphabet from paper clips, rather than the one that needs to be manufactured from whole cloth.