A High-Altitude Afternoon with Jeff Buckley

Whether it was yesterday or the day before, somewhere on a flight crossing back home from the US, I pulled up Amy Berg’s documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. Predictably enough, it was another high-altitude afternoon spent being quietly wrecked.

Some souls are simply born without skin. They stand naked in the wilderness, letting the cold wind, the harsh sun, and every passing grain of sand scrape directly against their nerve endings. As a writer who similarly earns a living through words and raw perception, I found in this documentary a mirror that was cruel yet beautiful.

Jeff Buckley was a man who turned his sensory dials all the way up to max. In the documentary’s rare, intimate footage, you realise he was practically defenceless against the joys and griefs of the external world. As a writer, I know this kind of “overload” all too well. You can look at a withered tree by the roadside and witness the death of an entire universe, or catch a fleeting micro-expression and read the entire story of fate.

People always advise us to grow a thick skin, to learn how to diffuse our pain. But for a creator, numbness is nothing short of slow suicide. We have to use our entire flesh and blood to carry that surplus weight, and then, like Jeff, pour those toxic, bleeding sensations straight into our work without reservation.

What wrenched my heart the most in the film was Jeff’s approach to love.

People always say artists are fickle, but for Jeff Buckley, love was never a game; it was an act of near-martyrdom. He craved absolute, unadulterated intimacy. He loved without holding anything back, like a defenceless, reckless cub. Yet precisely because of this radical honesty, the mundane, petty affection of everyday reality could never sustain his massive, obsessive soul.

In the emotional fragments captured on film, whether entangled in deep romance or wrestling with the inescapable, tangled knots of his relationship with his father, he was forever pulled between blistering heat and abyssal void. He longed for a stable harbour, but the moment things settled down, the beast of creation would roar inside him, forcing him to tear it all apart with his own hands and stumble back into the wild. Ordinary life is far too flat; only art remains the deep ocean where we are permitted to drown.

Watching the film, a realisation suddenly hit me: all these creators who punch right through my defences seemed to check out early. It turns out this pattern was hardwired into my tastes a long time ago.

I still remember when I was little, my favourite songs were Danny Chan’s Just Little Bit and What Do I Seek in Life, and the concert I watched on DVD on repeat was Beyond’s 1992 live concert. Back then, I didn’t yet know that both of my favourite singers had already passed away, and listening to their songs ever since has always carried an extra layer of lingering sorrow. Perhaps it was around then that I first started obsessing over the concept of mortality.

As I grew older and drifted into Western circles, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain became the two giants who broke my heart the most. One lost his stardom at twenty-three to an overdose; the other joined the 27 Club, truly living by the creed: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

I used to hold this stubborn, romanticised notion that dying young was the ultimate destination for an artist. Death wasn’t an end, but a sacred rebirth, and that a life sacrificed for art was the most noble choice of all. Just as Don McLean sang in Vincent: “This world was never meant for One as beautiful as you...”

It wasn’t until much later that I realised I was wrong.

I remember lying in a London rental during a rainy night, battered by a severe bout of illness, staring at the spreading water stains on the ceiling. For the first time, I felt the suffocating, crushing reality of physical decay and mortality pressing down on me. And in that moment, there was no sacred rebirth, no blinding light, only endless void and absolute despair. I didn’t even have the strength to crawl out of bed for a glass of warm water.

When the fever broke the next morning, the sky outside was just turning pale. I dragged my frail body out to the balcony, watching the early morning mailman at the street corner and a neighbour pushing a stroller slowly through the mist. It was the most ordinary scene imaginable, bordering on the trivial.

Yet in that exact second, a sudden, violent tremor rippled through me: isn’t raw, flawed, living existence infinitely more powerful than any absolute martyrdom? The “martyrdom” I had romanticised for so long was nothing more than a grandiose excuse to escape the mediocrity of reality and the gruelling marathon of creation.

Yet this clarity didn’t make things any lighter; it only intensified my tug-of-war with time. If dying young isn’t a badge of validation, then I’m out of excuses, leaving only one question: What on earth am I supposed to do with the limited time I have left?

That question has never stopped echoing in my head, and there are always two voices fighting to answer it:

Voice A (Warm and reassuring): Sweetie, don’t rush. You’re still young. You still need to wander the streets, to love and to hate, to experience heartbreak and loss before you can write anything with true weight. Lived experience can’t be rushed. If you haven’t succeeded yet, it’s simply because you aren’t ready. Look at Gauguin, who didn’t leave Paris for Tahiti until he was forty, or Hemingway, who had to roll through the storms of life before writing The Old Man and the Sea. Real depth takes time to brew.

Voice B (Cold and merciless): Tick... tick... Do you hear that? That’s the countdown of death. Are you scared? Are you terrified that before your magnum opus is even born, you’ll be swallowed whole by this mediocre, grinding world? Van Gogh, Keats, and Mozart burned out early, but at least their lives were complete because they left immortal works behind. What do you have to show for yourself?

In the crossfire of these two voices, I haven’t yet reached that supreme state of focusing every ounce of my energy solely on my calling. I feel too much, think way too much, until my head and heart ache, squandering my scant creative energy in pointless self-doubt.

My state of mind is just like the tide: when the flood comes in, everything is brilliant; I can sit right down, and the words flow effortlessly, feeling smugly convinced that I am the greatest writer on earth, ready to move the earth if given a lever. But when the ebb tide hits, I want to burn it all down. I feel utterly worthless, despise everything in sight, and stand completely paralysed before my own inertia.

Whenever I hit rock bottom, I frantically hunt for resonance, trying to prove my pain isn’t just self-indulgent whining, trying to prove that all of this is worth something. But damn it, the more I read writers’ biographies or watch documentaries like Jeff’s… the deeper I sink into them, and the more anxious I become.

I kept looking for a life jacket, only to find myself dragged under by the suffering of my peers. Eventually, I realised I was trapped in a terribly ironic vicious cycle: if I look at mindless, fluffy content, I can’t connect with it at all, picking it apart with my professional writer’s bias while groaning about how any trashy thing can make money these days. But the moment I pivot to the blood-and-tears histories of my fellow creators, I’m right back in a chokehold of anxiety, suffocation, and vicarious burnout.

This contradictory life of ours... perhaps it is simply the rent that we, the stubborn fools who refuse to turn away, must pay to this world under the name of creation.