Fencing with Philip Seymour Hoffman

A few months before he overdosed, I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman on the street in the Lower East Side. It was late, and I was walking to the subway through one of those uniquely warm yet strangely desolate New York nights, when the city is still buzzing but there's no one out who isn't trying to escape it. I recognized him at least a block away: he was standing outside a bar, alone, smoking a cigarette under a street lamp like an animated mannequin. He noticed me, and understood that I knew who he was: he looked at me with a contempt I shall not forget. But I didn't look away, even as I walked toward him: few can best me in that game. He knew that I knew that he knew: and so it proceeded, for a few tense moments, each of us examining our motives and challenging the other to do the same... I don't remember who looked away first, perhaps I did: his indifference and subdued rage seemed indefatigable, a quivering tidal force. I came away from the story feeling sobered, perhaps respecting him more, perhaps less: as though he were alone in such contempt! As though there were no one in all the world to befriend, as though this human gaze, this understanding, were necessarily inadequate: but he did not want to be understood - that much became clear. That throughout my life, many have felt both chillingly naked and yet sympathetically encompassed under my gaze is not something I can control except through a self-obfuscation - which fortunately grows less painful the more I realize how simple it is to hide in plain sight. Hoffman seemed to perceive all this instantly, but wanted me to know that he wasn't impressed, and that I still had much more to learn about the dance of a self-revelation which unmasks everyone at once. It was as though he were saying: "Yes, but you're hiding behind that gaze of yours." I seemed to ask him in return, with my characteristic double-or-nothing head-first gambit, that if it were possible to be transparent and intelligible to a stranger on the street in one inexplicable moment, what might he lose? Would he succumb to the contempt he needed so badly as consolation, armor, and identity? Perhaps I looked away first: but did he also suspect that I looked away not from fear, but pity? That I pretended for a moment not to understand, for his sake - and did that offend him all the more? Or did he see me squirm towards compassion, and therefore feel vindicated? I'll concede that he won the duel - but I believe I learned far more from it. He had the power to make someone like me feel that my humanity is still shallow, still lacking in empathetic resonance, still somehow ignorant of itself and lacking sincere representation. That perhaps my psychological understanding prevents intuitive depth, that my intelligence makes me stupider, that I'm fooling myself and haven't sacrificed half as much as required to become a real artist: all of it probably true to the degree that I hold myself back... There are passions strong enough that even a glimpse of their flame is sufficient. Do not doubt that this much is possible in a few moments between complex souls: dreams are a dilation, and fencing with a tortured artist on his own turf will demonstrate your limitations like none other.