The other day I learned that a girl I
used to jokingly refer to as my “nemesis” in college had
committed suicide. I had not seen this woman for many years, and we
had never been close. A few days before this day, a friend remarked
that there was something perhaps-dangerously disingenuous about our
social media culture's casual relationship to tragedy. How the
Facebook feeds, the Twitter statuses, all those RIPs shouted into the
void, how they had a suspect genesis – for what's our goal, when we
express vague condolences on the internet? When our profiles are so
closely linked to our own cosmic cries for attention, a dark soul has
to wonder if all the public well-wishing isn't utterly empty, more
concerned with the author than any alleged recipient. An optimistic
girl on my Facebook feed is out to quell the cynics: she tells her
followers, “posting about Robin Williams['] passing doesn't mean
any of us are looking for 'likes' or 'attention,' so shut your
bitter, wannabe nonconformist mouths.” Well said, Brittany. (Her
name is Brittany, too.) Sometimes we say things just because we feel
them; sometimes we feel things just to feel.
Yet here I am, on a curious pulpit for
rumination, here on this blog that no one checks anymore. I am also
here because today I was supposed to write a dozen things – most
of them ostensibly for money or at least attention, because nowadays
I am a freelance writer and so everything I write is suddenly of
merit. Every idea I have nowadays seems necessarily linked to a
finished project, for one thing – which means every idea I have is
linked to the notion of scrutiny. This is primarily a problem because
I am not so good at finishing projects. But here are some things I
really love: being complimented, being paid, being right, being
thought wise. Now that my writing (and the swells of commenters on
said writing) can sate some of these desires, I'm addicted to the end
goal. It's been harder to rationalize winding rafts of un-researched
pop-philosophy because people don't read those, and nobody pays me to
write them.*
So I was feeling listless about this
art life, as per usual. Then a good one died, and this made me think
some more about myself because my relationship to the world is
insufficiently developed. Let me also catch this before it drifts too
far away: listening to Gene Clark's No Other, a bit of lyric: “Words
can be empty or filled with sound.” I will cut the crap and attempt
to fill the words with sound. And so what if no one is here to hear!
The point is to remember that an audience is not always the point.
*
This already feels forced. All I'm
able to remember about my classmate is how she was beautiful, and
very talented, and such things already indicate a tragic heroine. But
it's true: a lot of people liked her. A lot of people thought her
very special. I did, if I am being honest. This woman had a light so
affecting that I was insanely jealous of everything she did during
our first few years of concurrent education, even though we didn't
take a class together or ever hang out during this time. Jealousy is
such an ugly feeling, it feels odd to admit out loud. Ha – 'out
loud.' Here we go again.
Like Robin Williams, little bright
star suffered from mental illness, as I understand it – but I will
walk away from comparing what I don't understand, in this moment. If
the warring factions of Facebookers with divergent opinions on
how-to-handle-public-deaths agree on anything, it's the injustice and
universality of mental illness. Today is a good day to scribble down
hotline information, or reach out for a friend. In this instance,
death masquerades as some helpful unifier. That is, if anyone really
reaches, or really calls.
This girl didn't have a Facebook for
many years, which these days feels like something that is worth note.
Her pictures, the shape of her face, her smile – these images were
erased for me a long time ago. I hadn't seen her since I'd last
actually seen her, in the flesh. If she had changed much in the past
four years, I would not know. I will never know. As a result, the
void she has left remains quiet, unheralded in this garish world wide
web.
*
Naturally, when you occupy a larger
spot of the public's imagination, more people have more opinions
about what to do with you when you're gone. What I'm most mystified
by in the whole celebrity-death concept on a large scale and Robin
Williams' recent death on a smaller scale, is the section of the
population who seem determined to assert just how much they didn't
care about the deceased. Sure, there's something level-headed and
briefly refreshing about people who are honest – I'm talking about
statuses like, “Remember I didn't know him personally, and neither
did you.” But as opposed to the other Brittany, who tells us she is
basking in her lonely feelings just to bask, I wonder about the
naysayers' goal. What do they hope to accomplish in pointing
out the obvious? For it is pointing out the obvious: few of us
“really knew” Robin Williams. Then again, few of us “really
knew” my college classmate. There are of course varying depths of
grief, but I really want to know: why
point any of that out, at a time like this? What's the harm in
letting people be in their own pain, or even in their showcase of
affected or exaggerated pain? Why is privately experienced emotion
seen as the more noble, the more genuine? It's as if in opening our
feelings to public scrutiny, they become part of a 'trend.' They are
no longer merely ours, in some way.
I wrote a few paragraphs above,
'certain kinds of internet condolences seem more concerned with the
author than the recipient.' But isn't this always the case, with any
condolence? The recipient will never receive the condolence, is the
thing. Maybe that's what makes the whole enterprise so hollow.
*
Yet were it not for the internet,
there are so many deaths we wouldn't know about. Here is an
argument for the realists: what about all the celebrity deaths or
friends of distant friends' deaths that occur on the daily, which we
would otherwise know nothing about until some later college reunion
or the Oscars 'In Memoriam' montage or never? I wonder if the instant
way we receive our information now has a relationship to the grief it
produces; if timely access to a tragedy enables us to experience
sorrow at some increased rate. There is the shock-factor, when you
learn something immediately: you find out, and if it is Facebook,
soon everyone has found out. You are presumably all in your own rooms
at the exact same moment, finding out, then being surprised, then
flocking to video montages of the deceased as one huge virtual unit.
I remember attempting to buy a vinyl pressing of Thriller the
day Michael Jackson died; I remember the object's price increasing
exponentially every time I refreshed the page. A community can whip
itself into a frenzy far more efficiently than an individual.
And
here is an argument for the people who like to feel things-then tell
other people what they've felt: there is so much to feel!
You will always have your Tweets
cut out for you. Your heart should bleed, always, if you refresh your
page with regularity.
*
Things we can widely agree on: It is
good not to be a jerk. It is good to have feelings. It is sometimes
good to interrogate these feelings, and where they come from.
Would it be different, the patch in my
heart where my classmate used to be, if I were able to be saturated
in memories of her at this moment? If she had Facebook, perhaps a
flood of remembered days and nights, the shape of her face, would
rush to the surface and coax more from me. But then, what is 'more?'
All I have now is that time we rehearsed a scene in a dorm basement,
when there must have been some laughter. Those two different times
when we went out for the same part and she totally got it. Various
hallway brush-ins, seemingly heartfelt compliments exchanged. If I
had been a better person, it's not impossible that we could have been
friends. (The macabre, recalibrating thoughts of a left-behind.)
And would it be different, the patch
in my heart where Robin Williams used to be, if I wasn't presently
inundated with Netflix suggestions of his best work, with lengthy
eulogies from friends and columnists, with montages and images
galore? I have to imagine that it would be. While I do not think my
vague sadness would go quietly into that good night, I'd be thinking
only of my memories: of Mrs. Doubtfire. Of a certain seemingly
coke-addled Today Show interview.
As is, I am thinking of a filmography. A canon. Art objects and
experiences that do not feel personal to me, but make up the blurry
picture of many peoples' memories. I suppose this kind of public
grieving is like any funeral, where everyone in a waiting queue can
speak their piece. Without her own public funeral, perhaps my
classmate will fade into the small burning star of everyone's private
moments with her. We will paint no unifying mural, we will
mythologize not one vaguely outlined idea of a sketch of a lady but
dozens and dozens of fractal limbs. The eulogies of distant
acquaintances will go unheard, and none will be the wiser.
Except
maybe the distant acquaintances.
*
It
doesn't really matter, of course. What I think. I want the people who
got closest to “knowing” the deceased parties to feel minimal
pain. I want them surrounded by other loved ones and all small
solaces. That's another thing: funerals and condolences are for the
survivors, don't forget.
One
thing people have been writing on the public walls, to Robin
Williams, is “thank you.” “Thank you, you made me want to be an
actor/comedian/pirate captain.” Thank you seems appropriate in a
way that RIP doesn't, quite. Thank you connotes attention paid to
time lived, deeds done, thoughts affected. It seems more personal,
somehow; and personal is the nature of grief. I say thank you to the
girl I used to know, not for something so overt as “making me want
to be a better actor, and for putting good work into the world”
because this doesn't ring entirely true, but fuck it as it's just
between us? For fanning a flame. For light, your own. I did not know
you well, but I am sorry you're not in the world anymore.
*
Finally – and this is important,
directed to the hotline posters – there is the weight of depression
on both these individuals. Depression is a thing endured so
privately, to see its effects made public has always been taboo. The
solidarity in the all-of-us-posting-together approach seems
especially attractive here. Everyone who suffers emotional pain that
renders them unable to see light should be granted light, as much as
possible, so at the very least they have a place they feel they can
speak, if they want to. But this line of thinking is also broad
rhetoric, the kind of thing individuals in pain can't easily
metabolize. Perhaps it resolves like so: though we necessarily suffer
alone, there must be something in knowing that we all suffer. Though
we cannot ever get close enough to another human being, there is
something in trying. And frankly? Loud as we shout, there seems to be
little catharsis in any of it – for whether to Facebook or nowhere,
we are still shouting for the benefit of hearing ourselves out loud.
And whether rendered as shout or whisper, that goal is always,
always the same: it is attempting to fill a silence.
*Then again – why are these “rafts”
(WC) of pop-philosophy so very un-researched, so very winding? One
wonders if the author should rethink everything she's ever done.