Tuesday, August 12, 2014

To No One, For You Two

Today is a melancholy day, but I refuse to link to the action. Tragedies make me want to hide in notebooks. I remember sitting in a food-filled room after the funeral in my youth, how awful the light was in there. Sometimes you just want to cry in a corner...of the internet.

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.