Sometimes something, some little event or brief encounter, comes along and stares you in the eyes long enough until you realize that you've been looking at everything in the wrong way. It comes a like a horridly lucid dream, a mirror held up to your face, showing you how you looked, thought, and felt. And how it is all very, very wrong.
Pictures of her bloody remains have reached my desktop via e-mail. The subject line read: FW: Never shown in the limelight: Nida Blanca. Nida Blanca is dead. Her image is splashed all over my screen, a shattered star.
Aghast, I realized that the first emotion I felt was fascination. It was a celebrity in blood! A disfigured star! I would thank heavens if I were given the release of at least lurching once I realized how damningly perverse that emotion was. A fellow human being suffered a horrible end at the hands of another of our own kind. And there I was, gawking at her image, fascinated at how it all looked!
Dorothy Jones was a stranger to me. I never met her in my entire life. But I seemed to know everything, just like everybody else did. A failed breed of an intellectual, I thought that my objectifying gaze was actually proper. But I am no different. Just a self-rationalizing idiot in a world of spectators, voyeurs.
That doesn't excuse me though. Just because many others also "naturally" felt that our object is now a dead object doesn't excuse one bit.
I write this here because I want to know how I can atone for this. I cannot just tell everybody that it is all wrong, the way we stare. I cannot just criticize the institutions that have taught us how to stare. So what if I pontificated to the rumor-mongering communities, my tsismosa family, my e-mailing friends, people who dared joked "suicide," the personality politicians, and their personality constituencies? So what if I damned, with self-righteous fist in the air, the ravenous cycle that reproduces (ad infinitum?) a mass of voyeurs and an elite of exhibitionists?
It will not cleanse me. Or give me the guts-out-self-hating-puking that I asked for. This will stain me more! Keen readers will decide that I am just another spectator who has decided that I must bare my soul to display my own exhibitionism. And steal my fifteen minutes (or inches) of fame from the genuinely conscientious readers.
Let that be my punishment then, the stigma I must wear for a seemingly absurd crime. I must be marked because I have stared at a stranger's death in the way that no person should ever gaze upon a fellowman's tragic end.
Despite the continuous spin that her death, her memory, and her very person is being subjected to, may she ultimately rest in the peace that is denied her here.
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Dionysio works for a non-profit foundation focused on the problem of blindness. |
