Writing Right with Dmitri: For Whom the Bell Tolls

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Writing Right with Dmitri: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Editor at work.

No, I'm not going to talk about Hemingway. (I never do.) As I write this, the internet is mourning the death of David Bowie. He was a fine musician and artist, and will be sorely missed. But something interesting strikes me about public reaction to the news.

See, my naïve reaction was, 'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. What a shame he died so young. My sympathies to his wife and children. I'm glad he lived to see his music sung in space – and I'm sorry he won't be around to write more.' After all, I didn't know the gentleman personally, and although the bell always tolls for thee, thee doesn't have to make a huge fuss. Or intrude into private grief.

Now, what struck me, though, was what I saw on internet chat. People mentioned their favourite songs. People talked about how he was, or wasn't, an influence on them in their youth. People talked about his 'legacy', what he left for 'us'.

There is nothing wrong with that at all, but what does it mean? It sort of indicates that people see the deaths of famous figures in relation to their own lives. They reflect on their passing as a sign of social or cultural change. It offers them an opportunity for nostalgia – and sometimes, self-assessment. What did this person mean to me?

So, to try and understand that, I looked up a few obits. And then I looked at some bios of Bowie, about whom I knew little other than that he was married to Iman, a person I admire for a number of reasons. And I noticed that he'd given a concert for New York City after 9/11. And that he'd sung a minimalist version of Paul Simon's 'America'. So I looked that up, too, and gave it a listen. Now, 'America' is one of my favourite Simon and Garfunkel songs. It brings back certain personal memories because of lines about Pittsburgh, Greyhound buses, and the moon rising over an open field as seen from one.

Aha. Now I was doing it: personalising cultural history. And now I understood what it was about. Those 'big picture' events, to the private person, serve as backdrop to a personal narrative. And we measure them by our own experience.

What does that tell us as people? That there are as many (valid) points of view as there are observers. What does it tell us as writers? That we should root our observations of human nature and the passage of time in the understanding that for each person, the story is particular. David Bowie means, not what he means to himself, or his wife, or a cultural historian, but what he means to the person who's reminiscing about the concert he went to back in…whenever. I doubt Mr Bowie would have minded. After all, he was a professional, and knew the difference between his public and private life.

We need to keep this in mind because when we write, we aren't ourselves only. We're also the people we're writing about. And they stubbornly insist on seeing things from their own angle.

Another thing all this memorialising tells us: the bell indeed tolls for thee – but the sound it makes depends entirely on who's listening.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

25.01.16 Front Page

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