In recent years, it seems that more people are dying. I don't mean people per se, though the recent tragedy suggests acts of nature still sometimes have a means to trump the acts of man. As to that, by the way, what can be said? The only thing perhaps I would note was the almost offensive focus in my local paper on a handful Americans who died, and an article or two that focused on some model -- probably a chance to include a sexy picture or two. We can understand why, especially since the deaths of mostly faceless people on the other side of the world is so hard to truly imagine, but still ... To be fair, the coverage mostly dealt with other matters, but it seemed so trivial when they focused on those issues.
Anyway, how does one view eighty thousand people dying at once? It's like the movie Hotel Rwanda, which focuses on the act of one man who did he best to save a small number of his wife's Tutsis, while hundred of thousands died around him. You have to focus on the small scale or single tragedies and saviors -- the whole picture is just too much to behold.* I believe this is where poetry works more so than prose, imagery giving us what prose fails to do.
Among this tragedy, it is almost gratifying to honor a few celebrities that recently died. As I said, it seems that there have been more of them in the last few years, or perhaps it just seems that way to me. Recently, the football player (and ordained minister) Reggie White died in his forties. As I went on my travels yesterday, I also heard about the death of Jerry Orbach, which was sure to upset my sister, who is addicted to Law and Order. Besides, he is from our neck of the woods, and played a character that one can admire -- good at his job, sarcastic, spare, and holding inside certain tragedies that he must carry around with him.
It is no wonder that local cops, as Lenny Briscoe would probably not mind being called, loved him. His long stage career is almost gravy, though until fairly recently, it was his major call to fame (including a voice in the film version of Beauty and the Beast). Thus, the NY Daily News fittingly ended some remarks honoring him by quoting from one of the songs he sung: "Deep in December, it's nice to remember, without a hurt, the heart is hallow." A tune that has enough to say about "September" for it to be used for other purposes as well.
Susan Sontag also died. I know her only from reputation, though now I might be pushed into reading more of her work (maybe when I die, my writing will get a broader readership) as well as criticism from her post-9/11 remarks. For instance, to quote Christopher Hitchens' obit, she spoke of the events as "a consequence of specific [sic] American alliances and actions."
In this, she is not too far off from the author of Imperial Hubris, though I doubt their views match up in all respects. Sontag surely thought differently on the subject than Hitchens, whose remarks blackened Slate for months, providing the fray loads of opportunity for ridicule, especially frayster "doodahman."
Therefore, it is notable that Hitchens only briefly mentions the fact in his obituatry, which is filled with respect and surely some awe:
Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. ...
[on her efforts to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance] She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did.
Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others. She had a long running battle with successive tumors and sarcomas and was always in the front line for any daring new treatment. ...
With that signature black-on-white swoosh in her hair, and her charismatic and hard-traveling style, she achieved something else worthy of note - the status of celebrity without any of the attendant tedium and squalor. ...
If she was sometimes a little permissive, launching a trial balloon only to deflate it later (as with her change of heart on the filmic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl) this promiscuity was founded in curiosity and liveliness.
Reponses to the piece at times sadly focused on his criticism of her 9/11 stance, a criticism that amounted to a few sentences late in the piece, sentences couched more in sadness than in the sneer that he tended to focus on such opinions elsewhere.
Thus, I think he deserves his due here: it was a fine piece, one that suggests why so many respected Sontag so greatly. A woman whose writings and photographs are probably as important these days as any other. In respect to the latter, a local gossip page had an amusing comment about the absence of mention of her long time companion (Annie Leibovitz) in an otherwise long and well written obituary in the NYT. The official word was that paper could not substantiate claims that it went "beyond friendship." It did note that Sontag was photographed by said "friend" for an Absolute Vodka Ad. This, said the gossip writer, "has to be the best euphemism for 'lesbian' I've ever heard."
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* "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Joseph Stalin