designer deaths

Death is such a bummer, but you know, that’s just a design problem:

Bennett’s fixation on death began with the death of his father. He was close to his dad; in a recent talk, he likened his childhood to the plot of Billy Elliot, a story “about a little nelly gay boy who twirled in the northeast of England” and the exceedingly masculine father who dared to love him. Bennett, in fact, traces his identity as a designer to the day in 1974 when his father, Jim, a former military pilot, brought home The Golden Hands Encyclopedia of Crafts. Jim Bennett then spent the next two years sitting with his son, making macramé and knitting God’s eyes, so that sensitive little kid could explore his talent and find his confidence. In 2001, Bennett’s father wound up in a hospital bed, stricken with bone cancer. Bennett was 5,000 miles away at home in San Francisco. He told his father he’d be on the next flight, but Jim ordered him not to come. Eventually, Bennett understood why. His father had painstakingly maintained his dignity his entire life. Now “he was trying to somehow control that experience,” Bennett says. “He was designing the last granule of what he had left: his death.”

In 2013, Bennett started sharing his ideas with the other partners at Ideo, selling them on death as an overlooked area of the culture where the firm could make an impact. He had a very unspecific, simple goal: “I don’t want death to be such a downer,” he told me. And he was undaunted by all the dourness humanity has built up around the experience over the last 200,000 years. “It’s just another design challenge,” he said. His ambition bordered on hubris, but generally felt too child-like, too obliviously joyful, to be unlikable. One time I heard him complain that death wasn’t “alive and sunny.”

T. S. Eliot, 1944:

I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.

Ah, don't be such a downer, Possum! Everybody, come on, sing along!

Death and Twitter

Yesterday Gabriel Garcia Marquez died, and suddenly my Twitter feed was full of tributes to him. Person after person recalled how deeply they had been moved by his novels and stories. And yet, I don't believe that in the seven years I’ve been on Twitter I had ever before seen a single tweet about GGM.

This has happened often on Twitter: I think of Whitney Houston, Paul Walker, Philip Seymour Hoffman. People poured our their expressions of affection, gratitude, and grief — all for those whom they had never mentioned on Twitter until then. Why?

Well, death always does this to us, doesn’t it? When you hear that an old friend has died, even if you haven’t seen her in years and years, your memory draws up all the good times you had together: they appear before you enriched and intensified by the knowledge that they can no longer be added to. The story of your relationship takes vivid shape in light of its ending, as often happens also with stories we read.

But I think on Twitter that natural and probably universal experience gets amplified in the great cavern of social media. You tweet about Whitney Houston’s death in part because other people are tweeting about Whitney Houston’s death and you don’t want to seem cold or indifferent, and as the avalanche builds, it comes to seem that Whitney Houston was of great importance to a great many people — even though most of them hadn’t thought about her in fifteen years and wouldn’t have noticed if they never heard a song of hers again. Such are the effects of what Paul Ford and Matt Buchanan have called “peer-to-peer grieving”.

I’m reminded here of a brilliant piece by the playwright Bertolt Brecht called “Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting,” in which he comments:

One easily forgets that human education proceeds along highly theatrical lines. In a quite theatrical manner the child is taught how to behave; logical arguments only come later. When such-and-such occurs, it is told (or sees), one must laugh. It joins in when there is laughter, without knowing why; if asked why it is laughing it is wholly confused. In the same way it joins in shedding tears, not only weeping because the grown-ups do so but also feeling genuine sorrow. This can be seen at funerals, whose meaning escapes children entirely. These are theatrical events which form the character. The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.

To this we might add, “And tweeting arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from tweeting.”

And there's one more element worth noting: When someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman dies, at the height of his powers and of his fame, the grief that people express is distinctly different from that they express for a faded star like Whitney Houston. Since they have no recent encounters with her music, they cast their minds back to their own youth — which is of course lost. As Gerard Manley Hopkins said to the young girl weeping over a forest losing its leaves in autumn, “It is Margaret you mourn for”.

All this said, I wonder if it might not be useful for all of us to spend some time thinking about those artists and musicians and writers and actors and thinkers whose death would — we know now, while they’re still here, without any crowdsourced lamentation — would really and truly be a loss to our lives. And then maybe tweet a line or two of gratitude for them before death forces our hand.