Amy Winehouse and Performing grief

I must first state for the record two things: the death of Amy Winehouse is tragic. She burnt herself out, as the brightest flames often do, and although I bought none of her records, yet I well remember how she provided the soundtrack to life, everywhere I went in bars, clubs and living rooms, for many years.

The second thing I need to say is that 'performative' emotion is not really my field, so my views may seem underdeveloped, obvious and lacking maturity. Thus, I need to explain myself. The reason I am writing is because I found something today which really irritated me, on the BBC website:

'Close friend Kelly Osbourne paid tribute to Winehouse via micro-blogging site Twitter. "Cant even breath right my now im crying so hard I just lost 1 of my best friends. I love you forever Amy & will never forget the real you," she said.'

I don't wish to question that Miss Osborne feels grief, but I want to know how this 'tweet' is a 'tribute' to '1 of [her] best friends'? As far as I can tell, this 'tweet' is an advert for Miss Osborne: how close she was to this fallen star, so close that only she will 'never forget the real' Amy; how violently the news has affected her, to the point where she 'can't even breath' through her tears; and how, even having lost Amy in the undiscovered country, their bond endures into the next life, addressing her directly 'I love you forever Amy'.

No tribute to her talents, no thoughts for her parents and family, no mention of Amy's character, flaws and perfections - no, this is all Kelly Osborne, laying it on thick.

I take her as the example of the moment, but in this regard she is hardly extraordinary. I doubt, even, that it is a phenomenon unique to our age, the tendency to hijack other's tragedies for self publication. It is undeniably much easier to do and to spot now, for the social media has brought private thoughts and feelings into the public domain; this blog is a case in point. The difference now is not so much the medium as the audience: views are now news.

The first time I noticed this was with the recent attacks in Norway: I spotted the BBC had trawled the Internet for reaction tweets. Every news item can be 'shared' across the social networks. Every news item has a comments box; I can understand the comments facility on the editors' blogs, where opinion may meet with opinion, but why an item of news requires it is less apparent. Either way, news is now not news until it has been visibly discussed.

In this regard, it is hardly surprising that 'tweets', the immediate reactions on the ground, now form part of the story. To make a Day Today formula: events + reaction = news (which means fact into doubt now goes very well indeed). The discussion of news is nothing new, of course, and has always been the essential means of a story's dissemination and survival.

The effect, however, of so directly involving reactions, of consciously embedding into the very fabric of the delivered news the commentary of the people, is that there ensues a kind of anarchy: too many voices competing for your ears. How many hundreds of thousands of tweets are yet to tweet upon poor Amy? How few will be noticed? Here's the rub: people don't comment or tweet to be ignored, they wish to be heard. In order to be heard in such a noisy place, you have to scream.

The effect is, I believe, a certain presumption: of course people want to hear what I have to say! To return a moment to Miss Osborne, before the days of Twitter, she would have had to wait for the television crew to arrive at her house, or have had audaciously to make her way to the studio, in order to display to the world just how unique was her bond with poor Amy. It would have been worth the wait, too, for the cameras and sound equipment would have done the work for her, recording her struggling for breath through her tears. The problem is that that relies on others' consent: for example, the editor might not want Kelly's histrionics, he might want instead to feature Victoria Beckham paying tribute to a fellow artist. The tweet, however, is Miss Osborne giving us her grief sans invitation. It assumes that the audience is there, that the audience is waiting for her , that it will listen when she speaks and respond thereto. At no point was she asked, and at no point does that matter.

The problem that arises from this is, I think, really quite serious. Rather than waiting for someone to ask, 'what do you think?' Kelly started with 'here is what I think'. When that becomes the common starting point, the result is that conversation ceases, and the noise of the tweets, that white noise of cyberscreams, is really people talking past each other rather than to each other, not hearing yet expecting to be heard. Miss Osborne's misnominated 'tribute' is her screaming, and its republication on the BBC is her being heard, but only in the capacity of news - there is one speaker, and one listener, there is no interaction between two people, two ideas or two camps. As her strong hints of closed intimacy suggest, the voices of others will hardly matter to her. She isn't listening.

Well, we needn't follow her example, for we can help to break this spell by listening, even when we dislike what she says.

Chandos Portrait

Upon a recent stay in my home city of London, I felt the time had come to begin correcting a common wrong, that being, that the local inhabitants of a place are frequently ignorant of its treasures. True, I understand the current, the ebb and flow and the map of life in London better than the tourist with his guide book and check list of famous places to see, yet I see no excuse for never having been to the National Portrait Gallery before.

I grew up in East Dulwich, which is served by the 176 bus. It goes past Charing Cross, Trafalgar Square and the galleries themselves. How many thousands of times have I sailed past without even so much as offering them a glance? 

Upon a loose end this time, I went. It was a sudden decision, and a good one. The moment that I shan't forget, was of seeing Shakespeare.* I made a sketch of the scene as I found it, very roughly and possibly not accurately, but there it is above. One comes to the top of the stairs, and turns left, immediately to be confronted with this prospect. It quite took my breath away, for the signs had not prepared me that I was about to meet with my hero.

I stood awhile before, and took a moment to guage its relative size: not large, but respectable for a private portrait, I think. Beside him was Jonson, a little smaller as befits his place next to Shakespeare. I gently strode up, and looked closely into the Poet's eyes. He seemed almost wearied in his countenace, as though he would shrug his shoulders and say to me 'of course I'm the best, what of it?'. The dark aura that surrounds him seems the perfect shroud to this shrouded, mysterious man whom we chase, yet who eludes us.

I am content not to chase him. One can only access a poet's heart through the poet's words: rather than chasing facts to know him, we would do better to reflect on how he makes us feel. There we will have the answer; and if each man come up with a different answer, I say to them that that's how it ought to be, for if they strove to find a living man who is one thing to all men in all variety of circumstances, they would inevitably fail, for men are more interesting than that.

Jonson beside him had a pensivity in his countenance. Such pensivity beside cool self-assurance inevitably made me think he was shrinking from the other man. Of course, that was never the case - in his own day he was revered, and looked down his nose upon Shakespeare - but that's certainly how it felt when I saw them. It's amazing how the judgements if posterity can influence how one looks at a picture, even as one tries to resist.

I have replaced Jonson's image with mine, on the left. This is as close as I can ever come to the Poet. Please forgive my self indulgent folly.

*I know the identity of the sitter of the Chandos Portrait, portrait No.1, will never be proven, but sometimes in life, sheer belief is enough to overcome all doubt.

Byland Abbey, Yorkshire, Summer 2011

As we descended into the valley, the distant ruins on the far side nestled into the enfolding arms of Yorkshire’s land. It was not a grand or awe inspiring sight, but it possessed a different kind of power. We knew it when we saw it, by the crumbling Norman arches of the north wall, that this is what we had come for. As I stepped off the coach, I too felt as though the land embraced me, in this once holy place.

            In many ways, the ruins seemed peculiar as we stood beneath the west wall. The lower lip of the rose window ascended on the north side, to meet with a surviving small tower. It created the shape of a crescent moon, oddly like to a minaret, or to a design which otherwise belongs to a different tradition. The narrow, stumpy windows in the chunky stonework made the west wall into a dark impediment, stealing the brilliant sun’s light, hurling a shadow which permitted only minor intrusions of light to touch the ground. Even after so many centuries of decay, the abbey still imposed, seeming to dictate to the natural world around it, and to the people who huddled in its shadow.

            Nicola, our guide (host, tutor, what you will), told us that the abbey was the first of its kind in the Early English gothic style. Adam and I were slightly puzzled at this, for our own eyes had first registered the Romanesque of the heavy, lightless window designs, as frequently rounded as pointed. But for one stunning yet only half present space for a rose window, my imagination failed to conjure a will let, airy gothic place, but somewhere dark and brooding. Adam and I thought the abbey represented a first substantial effort of the Early English style, rather than a first achievement or realisation.

            But well. Nicola quite anticipated how we all felt about the place. A still and silent ruin beneath the undulating waves of the sunny English countryside was spiritual tonic to my soul’s gin, if I may allow my feelings to attest for all. We soon learned from Nicola that a large stone complex on carefully manipulated land would not have been a refuge from the modern world but rather, when medieval was modern, was the very modern world itself. It traded, it communicated, it had livestock, it had light industry, it produced, it consumed, men lived and men worked, men came and left, their numbers expanded and diminished. They went from greatness to ruin. Upon these tales, I reconceived the abbey. It was no longer a peaceful place for a perturbed, unquiet modern soul, but a graveyard, a chapter in history, a monument to something guessed at which was once vital, now dead.

            We went on a treasureless treasure hunt. Our mission: to seek out and record things outstanding, perplexing and unexpected. One particular aspect Nicola foretold us was the surviving floor mosaics. They were an indication not only of wealth but, crucially, wealth which the abstemious monks ostentatiously spent. Indeed, what we found was very precious, as I shall describe in one example which we found at the foot of a saint’s shrine. It is arranged into four circles, designed in stages as a narrower outer encircling a respective broad inner. The innermost is in the pattern of a flower, perhaps signifying the sun’s light emanating from a centre, reaching out to the second narrow circle of small diamonds, further encircled by a circle of circles, each according to a six-petal design, as like to wheels wheeling about a bigger wheel. The outermost circle is packed with sharp diamond figures, giving a prickly edge and limit to the circles’ aura.

            As the sun still hovered high due east, the north wall gleamed. There survived in a row, nine Romanesque windows, not very wide and only moderately tall. Between each, there flared out the exposed crumbled stonework which once would have vaulted upward to a canopy, parallel to the nave. I contemplated how high they might have gone, and my mind’s eye replaced the absent Romanesque rounded arches which might have made the galleries, running atop, looking down upon this solemn place. I wondered at the chants and the prayers which, long ago, would have resounded down these vaulted walls.

            When we moved out of the south transept, we came to a less holy place. On such a site, it would be appropriate, and easy to joke, that the open sewers were profane. My compatriots leapt straight in, and only Adam seemed to stand tall in the mire I conjectured for them. Mild amusement aside, we began to fancy ourselves as architectural detectives, pondering as we went: how do the vaults in the eating place ascend? Above which rooms would there have been another floor? Are there stairs nearby? Would this vast space over here have had one purpose, or several? If the second, were the monks keeping an eye on each other? Is this a private chapel? – quite unmeek. Is this the closet, or the water closet?

            Thereupon, the good shepherd Sherman recalled his flock to the bus. As I left, I thought of all the absent people I would love, one day, to bring to this place.

© Ian O’Neal, 2011. Thanks to Miranda Fay Thomas and Adam Bramhall for the images. This post was written for the University of York HRC website blog, following an outing to historic sites around the village of Coxwold. http://www.hrctreehouse.co.uk/