The traces we leave behind
My fabulous friend Jessica posted this piece about Joyce Vincent from the Guardian on her Facebook wall this morning. The double-fold story about the quest of an artist and film maker to find the life story of the woman that is known throughout the world as the lonely lady that died and nobody noticed (go ahead, follow the link, it’s a summary of the news from 2006, the year her body was discovered), left me completely stunned. Numbed out. For oh so many reasons.
Not only is Carol Morley’s piece in the Guardian so well composed and written, that you get to feel the fraction of shock and confusion that she must have felt over all these years of research, but the story itself is such a heartbreaking testimony to modern life and the loss of community and the realisation that in the end, we all are alone. Forgotten and discarded, the only thing that remains are the people we touched.
Morley has finally made her movie. 8 years after Joyce Vincent’s death and 5 after her discovery by a media public that was just about starting to get the concept of internet content and shared news. At the time they hadn’t gotten blogs or Livejournals yet. The citizen journalists hadn’t really been born by then yet, the internet had not favoured revolutions or changed our way of interacting on such fundamental levels yet.
One reasoning always comes up when you start reading about this woman and her isolation: this would not happen today. Today we have G+, we have Twitter, we have Facebook. Someone would notice. Today, absence would be impossible to miss.
I fundamentally believe that this is a guilty lie that we are telling ourselves to mask our own uncomfortable thoughts. Because there isn’t one person in our Facebook lists that we could immediately think of and say “Hey, it’s been a while since I heard from him.”
Isn’t the truth of the matter somewhere completely else?
What if it wasn’t in the loss of our sense of community today, where we can only dream of neighbours taking care of each others or where community is more often the theatre of conflicting interests rather than exchange and support. If we dare to move beyond the fear of blaming the victim Joyce Vincent here, the truth might be somewhere in between. Maybe she wished to isolate herself the way she did and people/our modern society just made it that much easier.
Moving beyond the nagging feeling that someone should have done something – which goes from blaming the immediate neighbours, to the social services, to the electricity company that didn’t check her bills etc. – you quickly realise that the best system, the best social service, the best support net of friends or family cannot save you if you won’t let them. But again, this is only part of the equation of truth here. The other part is much more painful. Intervening in other’s people’s lives takes strength. It takes time. It is inconvenient and disruptive to your own life and worries. It’s messy, and it’s unbearable at times and you will be rebuked and pushed back more times than taken for a good samaritan.
Why that is?
Because truly, today weakness is not interesting. Showing weakness, showing emotion is a liberty that isn’t rewarded particularly well. Even less in the working place, but the same goes for friendships. Rare are the ones that can really support a crying friend and so, we don’t dare to give oursleves this opening. This weak spot. This blemish on our armour. Because we are much more afraid of what our friends might think of us than we are of dying alone.
Facebook et al. didn’t help with that. Facebook makes that even worse.
It has never been easier to project something completely different from what you are feeling to the outside world than over the internet. Facebook has given us more possibilities to appear happy, fulfilled and well rather than made it easier to span together.
Sure, true friends are more easily reached and average friends can be kept close without having to put in the time to really connect. It’s made it possible to be with people without actually being with them and caring for them. Modern social & friendship media has taken out the ‘messy’ of life. How easy is it today to ignore a digital message by someone? Much easier than a personal visit and a proper face that will tell you that they’re worried about you.
No. Joyce Carol Vincent would have died the same way today. Because in the end, she had isolated herself from the people she knew. That the people around her that didn’t know her, had not realised her passing, is a different story. I doubt that it really is a story of neglect or disinterest. Much rather of hard times, maybe even respect for someone else’s privacy. And someone who for whatever reason was at a point in her life where new decisions had to be made. She needed a clean slate to make them.
Joyce Carol Vincent never got to make those choices. That’s why Morley’s title for the documentary is so fitting: Dreams of a life.
Often we have dreams that we cannot realise, dreams that remain on our mental top shelf and develop a life apart and sometimes life ends without them ever seeing the light of day.
It doesn’t make them anything less, or anything more.
I profoundly believe that Joyce Carol Vincent is not defined by her death, her own neglect or the fact that nobody missed her for three years. I believe that the traces she left in other people’s lives transcend her dying alone in whatever circumstance. People – through Morley’s insistence and meddling in Vincent’s life – remember her for who she was, care for her memories, and isn’t that what really matters after all?
Whatever really waits for us after death, we cannot take anything with us and we cannot change the unchangeable. But we can strive to leave parts of us with other people. Leave our essence with them and hope that it’s enough to become a change in their lives in turn.
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The Mum/Dad Manifesto
I ran across this picture a while ago and made it into my Kindle screensaver. (Sounds odd? Don’t know how to do that? Well, you’re in luck, here’s a guide and here a repository of rather neat screensavers for the kindle.)
It’s been with me for a while now. Almost a year to be honest. And considering the hours I’ve spent carrying Amélie in a sling or wrap and reading on my Kindle, the message has left an impression.
I do think that this is just as valuable to dad’s as a manifesto as it is to mothers, because trust me, they worry just as much as women do, but it has a profound message and I thought I’d share.
Have you ‘stopped, taken stock and breathed’ today?
Just ‘savour each moment, laugh, tickle, kiss and cuddle’. It’s love. And we can all do with love. It’s almost Christmas after all.
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1 year
One year ago.
365 days.
52 weeks.
Full of laughter, full of joy. Full of surprises. The biggest one being: we’re actually not too bad at this.
One year which saw me become a mother, lose loved ones in more ways than one, gain new friends, love more, change life, adapt, re-evaluate, overcome and endure.
Thank you, Amélie Rose, for taking me back to the bare essentials. For showing me my center, my strength and my weaknesses.
Thank you for that gorgeous smile of yours and that already blossoming mind which I cannot wait to see explore this world.
Happy birthday, baby girl.
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Cassandra had a point.
I’ve reflected on this problem and whether I should post this article or not for quite a while. I’ve decided that I should post it. Not only because it might spark a thought or two out there, but because some things shouldn’t go uncontested.
Now, I have been guilty of ranting against Steven Pinker in the past (“A Crisis of Consciousness”-Series). One could even say that I have made this blog the spectacle of Steven Pinker’s descent into unfathomable depths of my contempt when in 2007 his article series in the TIMES ended up being less about consciousness, and more about politics of consciousness, less about finding new sources for human ethos, but more about abolishing Christianity.
Pinker is back in the general eye of the reader with a new book: The Better Angels of Our Nature. While I don’t wish to enter any kind of debate on the book itself – even though I am always wary of argumentation that starts out stating that we’re nearing our Golden Age – I would urge anyone to read the synthesized version and application of considerations taken from the book and applied to the here and now: the author’s article in The Guardian “If it bleeds, it misleads: on violence and misery the Cassandras are wrong” (1st of November 2011).
There are quite a few things wrong with this article. Not so much on what Pinker’s saying, but how he is saying it and a much more fundamental argumentative way. It seems that the brilliant writer that he used to be, the unsung hero of so many well constructed reasonings has swapped his gift for some rather badly thought up interpretations and has lost his way with words.
My main problem with his article is the complete lack of distinction between the feeling of insecurity of a group versus the factual decrease in the number of deaths in wars. The fact that fewer people die in wars is balanced against the general feeling of insecurity of ‘the people’ (which I personally read as ‘the civilised western societies from the northern hemisphere’). If our everyday society of the western world feels more insecure today than they did 10 years ago, then there really isn’t any proper way to dispute that. Feelings are subjective and they can’t be altered with reason or facts. People feel less secure today than 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Through that alone this situation becomes a fact. The statistical number of less deaths in wars, less wars, less conflicts etc. cannot alter that for the simple reason that both facts have not much to do with one another. It’s like watching someone fit a square into a round hole. Painful.
I would even argue that the wars far off, raise the feeling of cohesion of a societial group rather than threaten it. To come to a proper balance or argument, you would have to set the general criminal rates in a country, a suburn, a city, a region etc. against the general feeling of insecurity of that area and see if it matches.
Enter: the big bad, dulling and manipulative mainstream media. For Pinker, they are at the source of the non-sequitur that the changes in our societies (approaching the null-line of ‘free’ and ‘secure’) should make us all feel better about our societies and much more secure, are none other than the mass media. While I am not unreceptive to the idea of a general media manipulation, this argument does nothing to help balance what Pinker’s already unbalanced. The important thing here is not the wars or open conflicts, but how immediate they are to us. The individual. The building unit of a group.
Through the media these conflicts become more and more immediate. The social network habitus is doing its part in this, as we were all able to witness with the Arab Spring.Going back and applying this reflection onto the past, anybody realises that a lot of conflicts, even battles from the big wars weren’t reported back home immediately, but rather weeks after having taken place. This is also part of the reason why WWI has been such a traumatic event. Battles were stalemates and would drag on. It was the first time where people could get the feeling of being at home, while on the Western front children were killing themselves in the muds of the Somme. Or, who from the greater public in 1870 knew anything about knew anything about the battle of Sedan and Napoleon III subsequent capture until days after it had happened? Today we are taken as witnesses of Muhammar al-Gadaffi’s last moments in the public limelight before the mob exhibits his dead body for everyone (and I mean everyone) to see.
As always, judging from what can be remembered, because it was written down, then moving on to use that as a basis to reconstruc what actually has happened, is a method that will never give a proper picture of the past.
But, Steven Pinker has learnt from past mistakes. There is no mention of terrorism as a reality. And that is the main flaw of this article. Wouldn’t that be absolutely fundamental to any kind of argumentation involving aspects of feeling insecure in our modern society? It would be. This feeling of insecurity that ‘the people’ are feeling is in fact a direct result of the terrorism of the last 10 to 20 years and any textbook on the matter would tell you so. Again, Pinker is incapable of moving past his Amero-centric view on the world and the slightest possibility of seeing the part-victory global terrorism has already gained on us and particularly our civil liberties. Even if it was the only way to limit its validity. Even if it was the only way for our modern society to find a way our of the insecurity. (Btw, when will a sociologue declare that what the rating agencies are doing is nothing more than economical terrorism?)
The fundamental misuse of the Cassandra myth in the title is a sad symbol of Pinker’s errors in setting up his reasoning.
Cassandra was right in what she saw. She could forsee the future. That was Apollo’s blessing. Her curse for refusing him was that nobody would ever believe her.
Oh, the irony.
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How gentle was the breeze…
Just posting this, because this came up in my itunes playlist for the first time in such a long time and it made me go back to a lot of happy and a lot of very painful, solitary moments and it truly warmed my heart to look back at the path that I had made for myself.
Here’s to a brilliant week to everyone out there listening.
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