“So far as we feel sympathy,” Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, her examination of the moral complexities engaged by images of human suffering, “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” When it comes to our most blighted stars, the generation of this sympathy is both an indulgence and a relief. In Jackson’s case, anything short of drooling catatonia would do. He was transformed from an industry joke and fifty-cent freak show back into an exalted deity, and all it took was a glimmer of the old magic and a few well-executed dance steps.
In the same book, Sontag refers to a gruesome photo that Georges Bataille kept on his desk. Of the 1910 picture of a Chinese prisoner being subjected to death by a thousand cuts, Bataille wrote, “This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.” Sontag explores this response, comparing the subject to Saint Sebastian: “[Bataille] is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime.”
If Sontag’s assertion is true in a personal sense—and I am not convinced it is—when applied to the pain of others, it is refuted by almost every facet of modern celebrity culture. Still uncertain is whether our attraction to publicly staged suffering is as deeply rooted in religious thinking as it has long seemed. In the case of widely acknowledged talents like Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, pain was linked to sacrifice, and sacrifice eventually to exaltation. That is how that story goes. And yet more and more that telling is the exception to the rule. For the Greek tragedians suffering was a key to knowledge—less for the sufferer than for those looking on. That the exploitation of washed-up models, sex-tape curios, former child stars, and anonymous tormented civilians is currently paying for half of the advertising on television suggests that the hunger we are sloppily trying to satisfy is less for holy transfiguration than tragic catharsis. But finding meaning in popular mythology is less and less possible when we consume these cut-rate knockoffs of a master narrative while eating cucumber sushi alone at our desks. What that produces is the opposite of ecstasy.
“People don’t become inured to what they are shown—if that’s the right way to describe what happens,” Sontag wrote, “because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.”
9
Catholics are taught not to use the word worship with regard to anyone but God Himself. And although the extreme adulation of any one of us would seem inherently dangerous, the need to single each other out seems as equally an intrinsic part of our nature. The fight against that nature, some say, has led to everything worth anything in Western civilization. It has also led to a degree of self-consciousness that precludes the outlet of tragedy or even traditional cults of personality; whatever role each played in facilitating a kind of cultural health has been ceded. Yet our appetite for myth persists, like an embarrassing growl from within.
The great twentieth-century tragedies bordered on Grecian in their balance of the enlightenment of individualism and the darkness of its dissolution. We followed these stories in real time, sometimes over decades, and found meaning in their full expression. But the terms of realism began to interfere with the stories themselves, and their mythology became a marketable commodity—something to be broken down and sold off for parts. The institution now requires little more than willing bodies to run smoothly, mass-producing a form of popular tragedy that doesn’t leave room for more than a quick revel in the misfortune of others. Apollo has left the building, and it behooves us to wonder what becomes of a culture left to its own undirected desires and devices. Without gods, in other words, is everything permitted?
It’s hard for me to feel anything other than lucky that I caught the wave just before it crashed. That I got a taste not only for death but dying. The stories were too powerful to resist, and because I wore the T-shirts and bought the books and slid a little too passively along the vector of celebrity intrigue, I am implicated in the current state of affairs. I am part of the reason that the National Enquirer is now eligible for a Pulitzer Prize. I am responsible for the irreversible mutation in the narrative of tragic greatness: I’ve been here this whole time, clicking confusedly away, reshaping the stories that matter and the way they get told.
And yet I can’t regret it. I don’t. Because I saw Michael Jackson move and in a single, seismic heartbeat I wanted to know everything, about everything. Funny that it seemed less possible to be like him than to be him. I longed to become that sublimity, to meld with it somehow. I still do.
One Senior, Please
GOD: A man down on Earth needs our help.
CLARENCE: Splendid. Is he sick?
GOD: No, worse. He’s discouraged.
—It’s a Wonderful Life
What a dramatic animal a plane is—always racing against some evil spirit!
—E. B. White, 1935
Only recently, in one of those dubiously fine moments where a dried mess of twigs accidentally ignites a perturbed little flame of observation, I noticed that the American relationship to mortality and the American relationship to flying share certain pathologies. Though routine in practice, both death and flight remain pretty outrageous in theory, which means a liberal application of denial is required to keep things running smoothly. How else could it be that despite a morbid aversion to reminders of our mortality we have normalized a form of travel that was at first quite logically regarded as the Death Wish Express and remains by any standard but the statistical one the most dangerous thing you can do while reading a Patricia Cornwell paperback. It seems significant that much of the flying experience—the personal entertainment centers, the pilfered Xanax and bihourly running of the snack cart, the contrived casualness of phrases like cruising altitude—is designed to obscure what’s actually going on.
And yet by placing it in our hands the miracle of flight has only made us more impatient with the physical world. Specifically with the persistence of our bodies, and the ordeal of carting them across oceans or continents or just to Pittsburgh when our minds are already there and our senses tell us it’s a matter of stepping up one gangplank, closing our eyes and breathing burnt, carbon monoxidic air for some amorphous duration, and stepping down another. Adding to the fastest-available mode of human transport’s endemic frustrations is the recent, subtle reconception of the passenger as an anomalous piece of luggage—subject to scanning and probing, too heavy to be checked and too unwieldy for the overhead cabin. In more ways than one, modern air travel promotes a state of self-suspension. You were in Marrakech yesterday morning; you got in to Melbourne last night. But who knows what to call the thing that writhed in coach for the time gained or lost in between, except a body that cannot yet be shipped separately. Even the fearless resort to a form of Zen denial—the old zone-out—to get through. Decades—whole lives—can be bound by similar terms of distraction: a feeling of disassociation from what’s really going on, how we’re getting where we’re going and what we have to forget to get there; the sensation of finding ourselves in strange places and not entirely understanding how it happened; our stupid bodies’ finally insisting on their own limits and the limits of time. Both shaky fliers and thanatophobes are best advised to try not to think about it, which probably says it all.
* * *
I was flying to Halifax and contemplating my own death when I was given reason to actually confront it. Poor weather the previous evening meant Newark Liberty was jammed with hollow-eyed, white-lipped travelers at seven thirty on an April Sunday mornin
g. A faulty check-in kiosk had buggered my first of the roughly two dozen transactions it takes to transition from person to plane passenger in 2011. I was waving to an obviously doomed agent beyond the scrum of shuffling, ticketless zombies closing in on her when the magical one-hour mark passed, then striding toward a second agent at the moment my seat was given away. Approximately two minutes later I was advised to stake out my original flight on standby; they would only print me a ticket for the next one, four hours out.
At the gate I watch the standby vultures—two women with their teenaged daughters—hover by the check-in desk, knowing they feel as entitled to my spot as I do. A middle-aged man in puffy sneakers and expertly brindled jeans is desperately trying to lose his temper with the agent on the other end of his cell phone. “This is your guys’ fault,” he insists. “It’s your fault I’m in this position now.” His voice is high and catches on the long vowels. “You guaranteed I would get on this flight, and now it’s not going to happen.” He’s in a customer service free fall and he knows it. It’s like begging someone who’s stopped loving you to look you in the eye, and as painful a scene to watch. The flight is boarding now, but that doesn’t stop him. “Something needs to happen,” the man pleads, convincing no one.
Then the vultures, last in line, are flagged at the gate. There are only three seats left and four of them. The man finally dismounts from his BlackBerry, lobbing a parting curse in midclick. You could see what it cost him, but by that point he had an audience in need of closure. For the next twenty minutes the two of us watch the women pinball between stages of acute aviation grief—denial and rage—before agreeing to a different itinerary. Then up goes puffy sneakers, like the last faithful kid in church. Ten minutes later up I go as well, making pointed, exculpatory eye contact with my fellow passengers as I find my place.
I’ve always enjoyed the pomp and semaphore of the seat-filling pageant—the mental blowing on the dice as the wheel spins, the scanning of faces for a signal, the hopes and dreams crushed by the last-minute arrival, the barely squelched mutual disappointment when the inevitable comes to pass, the enigmatic pointings and phrasings of the moment of reckoning: Is that you? Yes, it is. Are you here? I am.
So it was that I devastated an overgrown young man by claiming what by that point in the game any rational flier would have assimilated as an empty seat, recalibrating his mood and sense of an ultimately just world accordingly. But what followed shunted the controversial boarding of two apparent stragglers into distant memory. We waited another hour as the aggrieved foursome’s luggage was rooted from the hold; a second hour piddled by after that. Halifax headwinds required extra fuel, and random bags were eventually hauled out to make room for it. It’s not safe for five-ounce shampoo bottles and crumpled underpants to fly, is what I heard, but the human cargo stays. In a tone that grew more defiantly nonchalant with every update, the pilot advised us that some of our bags would arrive on a future flight. Even with routine debacles such as this it’s rare to be promised future bullshit while the current bullshit is still very much in progress. Sorry ’bout that, folks.
The quiet of animal endurance settles over 120 tightly packed humans resigned to their fate. Not even the acquainted speak. Loathing seeps into what breathable air is circulating, and one by one people begin to drop off just to escape it. I can feel the consciousness leeching from my seatmate, whose broad shoulders and bulbous knees have a straining quality despite reasonably well-fitting street clothes. As his weight deadens, his big, bran-colored head lolls into my sight line and rears up violently, dipping back into view a beat later. I consider fixing him to my lap just to kill the suspense. I can’t sleep in anything but circadian darkness and full horizontality, and after the usual bout of grotesquely Darwinian sexual fantasizing, I begin herding omens for lack of anything better or less obvious to do. The mechanical groans and sudden lurches, the inscrutable red print on the wing engine, the irresistible misfortune of narrowly avoiding my own death—and is that a ripple of worry passing over the flight attendant’s face? I’ve never been a bad flier—funny how that admonishing term took hold—but I spend the remaining tarmac time waving every signal of advancing doom into the hold with little neon batons.
During our half-hour descent into Halifax, a thunderstorm grips the plane like a one-year-old conducting a wooden-spoon symphony on the kitchen floor. After about four minutes of that you start to reckon with a new reality. The density of the fog beyond the oval cutout has an absolute, anywhere quality, and though we are suddenly, miserably aware of hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, there is no measurable progress. Only a forever kind of throttling and the disembodied, just barely unclutched arm beside mine. I am working to accept either imminent death or sustained, nauseous stasis as my future when the blacktop leaps up and a fine, exhaustlike spray shoots out from below. I tip my forehead against the window, trying to settle the gorge in my throat, and watch the wheels spinning madly, smoking like the feet of a cartoon bird with the force of our arrival.
* * *
I am heading straight to Melville Heights, a Halifax retirement home, to spend some time with my only living grandparent. The visit was prompted by a recent call from her caretakers; my mother, traveling from Toronto with her husband, Frank, is scheduled to arrive later in the evening. The cab ride from Stanfield International is long and only slightly less emetic than landing a 727 in the middle of a Maritime typhoon. The seat-belt light flashes in tiny, red protest throughout, and not for me: Esmail is the driver’s name, and a little water never hurt him. We maintain the velocity at which rain droplets squiggle across the glass in great, spermatozoic patterns, converging to spawn fatter droplets in the far corners of the windshield. Esmail gestures casually to a six-car pileup in the opposite lane. “I hear about this,” he says, noting detour plans to himself for the way back.
A demolished hatchback sits at the nucleus, surrounded by five vehicles at frozen angles. Beyond them a ring of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars form a cellular wall. Certainly life had divided within it. Esmail asks me what I’m doing in Halifax, and I tell him I am visiting my grandmother. “Ahh,” he says with the approving warmth such plans generally yield. “How old?” I tell him, and he nods, smiling into the mirror. “My father was ninety-five.” We contemplate the silent second half of that sentence by the light of the flashing seat-belt man—ever stalwart, ever strapped in.
I had claimed Purcell’s Cove as my destination, but upon arrival Esmail, already fond of correcting me, says that we are near Purcell’s Cove, not in it, and cuts my fare accordingly. He hands me his card and asks after my return plans. If you need me, he says, I’ll make myself available. We are talking about a taxi ride, but those words wash up on some farther shore and begin to build a hutch, where my regard for Esmail might live.
As I sign myself into the building, the smiling older woman behind Melville’s front desk asks me, by way of greeting, if I am Rita’s daughter.
I stop writing and look at her. “Granddaughter.”
“Oh, I see,” she replies brightly. “How nice.”
I pen in the time and pause. “She’s ninety-five you know.”
“Is she!”
Yes, she is. Her age had been a source of familial pride for the past two decades: Rita Boyle, eighty-two and off to India; Rita Boyle, eighty-five and taking furloughs with her garrulous Greek boyfriend; Rita Boyle, eighty-eight and dominating at the Highland Golf Club. My grandma the movie lover, ninety years old and still driving her little red Sunfire to “the show” twice a week, often collecting less mobile—and younger, she always noted—old ladies on the way. This is the story we liked to tell.
At her eighty-fifth birthday party, an event she agreed to despite her innate reluctance to cede any ground to time, my mother toasted my grandmother’s “will to win,” a phrase I did not soon forget. I stood up and said a few words as well, “hero” being one that I remember. This is how we all want to wind up, we said. This was someo
ne who seemed to be cheating expectation, nature, biology, and defining for herself what a long life could be. What I did not grasp then was the extent to which my grandmother’s late-life iconoclasm was not an extension of her adult life but a complete inversion of it, as if she had earned an autonomous self, paid in decades at the mercy of expectation, nature, perhaps even biology.
* * *
Clinical depression is one of the growing tally of mental illnesses made up solely of self-reported symptoms. Medically defined it is a set of emotional, psychological, somatic, and behavioral symptoms occurring over time. Lack of appetite and sleeplessness, for instance, combined with feelings of worthlessness, despondence, and suicidal ideation, if experienced for more than two consecutive weeks, would meet the diagnostic criteria for a major depressive disorder. These were the symptoms that had brought my grandmother to Halifax—where my mother’s younger sister Jeannette, a psychologist, is based—in 2007, about a year after she woke up in her London, Ontario, apartment feeling “bummed.”
In retrospect, it was a poignantly casual choice of adjective. She used it for several weeks, as if to curb her condition by force of descriptive will. Bummed is not part of the DSM checklist; bummed is the common cold of mental illness. Oh, you’re bummed? Too bad; feel better!
Then, just as summer and her beloved golf season were about to begin, Rita ended a call with my mother with an expression of love—pretty much a first for them. It was as if, my mother told me years later, Rita knew she was about to go “down the rabbit hole.” As if to say goodbye.
This Is Running for Your Life Page 8