Do you realise…?

There is a line in a song by The Flaming Lips that goes: ‘Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?’

Perhaps it was the venue and context in which I first heard those words – sung by a choir at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford last Saturday, during the World Humanist Congress – but whatever it was, I found myself incapable of thinking about virtually anything else ever since.

Do I realise this fact? Oh, my rational mind certainly does. It would be a symptom of extreme delusion to argue otherwise… and I am clearly deluded enough to assume that I suffer from no such delusion myself. But in practical terms, in terms of the way we live each minute of each day… do we actually ever realise this?

Speaking only for myself, the answer is: no, I don’t think I really do. Which is why it inevitably comes as a shock to hear about the unexpected death of people you somehow, irrationally, had assumed would always ‘be there’.

So it was with Robin Williams… who died within a couple of days of the above contemplation triggered by the above line in the above song. And so it almost certainly will be when I hear of the deaths of others, including people whom (unlike Williams) I actually know.

It seems to be a sentiment shared by others, too. Guze Stagno expressed much the same feeling in his debut novel Nbid Ta’ Kuljum. This is a loose translation: “There are some people you just never stop to think will one day die. Your mother and father, Princess Diana, Diego Armando Maradona. They are so much part of your everyday life that you just can’t imagine the world without them…”

But applied to Williams’ death on Monday, the same question suddenly seemed to acquire new meaning. Did I realise, at any point in the thousands of times I’d watched Williams on TV (Mork and Mindy being among the first TV shows I ever followed) or at the cinema (Dead Poets’ Society, Good Morning Vietnam, and The Fisher King being among my all-time favourites) that lurking behind that veneer of infectious comic mania was a mind so utterly, desperately unhappy that it would eventually conclude that being dead was preferable to being alive?

Again, the answer is the same. No, I didn’t. My rational mind did, yes… but it’s not exactly the same thing as ‘me, myself and I’. And this realisation disconcerts me profoundly.

We all know – because there is an overwhelming body of literature to prove it, mostly in the form of autobiographies by comic geniuses – that there is a dark and sinister link between ‘being funny’ and ‘being tragically unhappy’. At the same time, in my case, I responded to news of Williams’ suicide in much the same way as most of the responses I read online. I was shocked and saddened, even if – looking back using only that rational part of my mind I so often ignore – at no point was there any real cause for surprise.

If to be funny is to be sad – and Williams was undeniably a very funny man – well, the evidence for his unhappiness was there all along, staring at us through the mask of every comic role he ever undertook. I’ve just finished re-watching ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, for instance; and for the first time I perceived that what I was watching was, in fact, the comic equivalent of an SOS.

Yet I never made that connection until now, when the consequences of all that unhappiness became clear for all to see.

So much for my sensation of surprise at Robin Williams’s death. What remains to be explored is the sensation of sadness, of a loss that almost feels personal. Here the answer is less straightforward. In fact I have to frankly admit that I cannot quite explain it at all.

I can however say this. Like Guze Stagno, there are people out there in the world who have somehow made an impression on me, and subliminally I find myself attaching an emotional, almost personal value to their existence. Robin Williams was one of those people, even if I only realise this now. David Attenborough is another. Diego Armando Maradona is not… yet I can fully understand how he could be to others.

Again, there is an illusion at work here. The Robin Williams whose death saddened me is not, after all, exactly the same Robin Williams who took his own life yesterday. If I admired his output as an actor, all I really admired of him was the externalised persona he consciously chose to project… and whose implications I unconsciously chose to disregard. I didn’t ‘know’ the real Robin Williams any more than I ‘know’ the real David Bowie, the real Charles Chaplin or the real Nelson Mandela. But even if I don’t ‘know’ these people, I still have emotional responses to all of them, and more beside.

Clearly it is a response to what these people represent in my own mind; and what Robin Williams in particular represented was indeed personal. His persona accompanied me for nearly all my life: not just because it punctuated all my seminal life-changing moments… I watched Dead Poets’ Society at a particularly pivotal point when I was struggling with depression issues of my own… but because it always spoke to me in a language I felt I could understand. That finger trick accompanying ‘Nanoo, Nanoo’ was almost a language unto itself on the playground in my school days. And what was that ‘tramp/knight in shining armour’ character from the Fisher King, if not how I often liked to project myself in my own alternate (and hopelessly self-conscious) parallel universe?

Is this an illusion? Undeniably. But it is an illusion that also makes life that much easier to bear.

I think it’s worth remembering this when rationalising our plainly irrational reactions to these ‘death-of-a-celebrity’ events. As I write these words, there is already the first indication of a backlash. The word ‘hypocrisy’ is being bandied about in connection with public expressions of sadness at this sudden belated recognition of the symptoms of depression… but only when they are manifested in celebrity tragedies. We don’t respond the same way to the overwhelming evidence of quiet desperation that surrounds us at all moments of every day. Why, then, do we suddenly feel it when the rich and the famous end their lives in tragic circumstances?

I admit I see the point. Perhaps it is hypocritical. Perhaps hypocrisy is an unavoidable part of the human condition. But then again, perhaps our very fascination with celebrity culture is itself an expression of a deeper emotional response to all human tragedy. Perhaps it is simply easier to invest our emotions in illusory projections of unreal personae – who become the parents, uncles, spouses, children, friends and acquaintances with whom we people our imaginary worlds – than in the real people who live next door, or whom you only see once in a while at the grocer.

And maybe this is not, in itself, such a bad thing... provided that it doesn’t completely supplant compassion and empathy for all those other people, too. There is still, after all, the business of going about our everyday lives to attend to. And this business also involves coping with our own unhappiness and the depression of those around us. If our collective response to all this desperation is to collapse into a state of morbid despair… there wouldn’t be much left of life that would actually be worth preserving.

Besides: if the last role Robin Williams undertook was to enact these tragedies in a language we can all instantly understand… the ‘nanoo-nanoo’ of all human misery… well, this cannot in itself be described as a good thing. But perhaps some good can come out of it. Perhaps, at the very least, it may help make the next distress call to reach our senses that much harder to ignore.

In my case, it reminds me of the answer to the question posed by that Flaming Lips song, which remains far better than any answer I can think up myself:

“Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes

Let them know you realise that life goes fast

It's hard to make the good things last

You realise the sun doesn't go down

It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.”