{"id":6878,"date":"2016-04-23T21:37:22","date_gmt":"2016-04-24T03:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=6878"},"modified":"2016-04-23T21:37:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T03:37:22","slug":"why-mourn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=6878","title":{"rendered":"Why Mourn?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The year has been a terrible one for celebrity deaths: Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, now Prince.  The last one hit particularly hard with me.  Prince was the music of my difficult and lonely teenage years.  I admired him.  I loved his music.  I thought and think he was a musical genius on par with the historic greats.  And it&#8217;s been cathartic and touching to see the tributes springing up all over the world and know that I wasn&#8217;t alone in thinking that; that millions of people did get how great he was.<\/p>\n<p>Every time the world mourns a celebrity, however, people ask why we do so.  After all, it&#8217;s not like we knew them personally.  Why shed tears &#8212; even metaphorical ones &#8212; over a stranger?<\/p>\n<p>This tweet explains it better in 140 characters than I will in many more words.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Thinking about how we mourn artists we&#39;ve never met. We don&#39;t cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Juliette (@ElusiveJ) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ElusiveJ\/status\/686568077991882753\">January 11, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>In one of Stephen King&#8217;s non-fiction books, he describes writing as an act of telepathy.  When you write a piece of fiction, you are using words to put what&#8217;s in your head into the reader&#8217;s head.  If I write, &#8220;There was a room with table&#8221; you get an image in your head.  And, if I&#8217;m a good writer, you get something close to the image I had in my head when I wrote those words.<\/p>\n<p>This act of telepathy applies to more than just writers.  Artists, musicians, actors &#8230; all of them perform acts of telepathy.  It&#8217;s a bit more subtle since they work in a visual or auditory medium.  But it&#8217;s the same principle: trying to evoke images or feelings or ideas through an act of telepathy.<\/p>\n<p>We let artists into our head.  We have, indirectly, a very intimate relationship with them.  People will talk of books or songs or movies that spoke to them.  And that&#8217;s true in a very literal sense.  And if an artist is particularly brilliant, they will sometimes reveal things about us we didn&#8217;t know or put us in touch with feelings or ideas we were unfamiliar with.  And we <i>share<\/i> this intimacy with everyone else who has felt spoken to.<\/p>\n<p>So no I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything wrong with mourning an artist or an actor who has died.  Because sometimes we really are very close to them in a way that truly matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The year has been a terrible one for celebrity deaths: Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, now Prince. The last one hit particularly hard with me. Prince was the music of my difficult and lonely teenage years. I admired him. I loved his music. I thought and think he was a musical genius on par &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=6878\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why Mourn?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[377,398,399],"class_list":["post-6878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-celebrities","tag-fame","tag-prince"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BzKF-1MW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6878"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6883,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6878\/revisions\/6883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}