Can I Get a Witness

I've been thinking lately about truth... how I once believed there was a singular version of things-- as they occurred-- and it was sacred. Simple. Not biblical, because there are versions-- interpretations, translations... but sacred.  Today I can't even get two identical thermometer readings-- there's the air temperature, the ground, the heat index. There's exaggeration, and there's the margin of error of human memory.  With all the technology and recording of moments, there is photo-shop and there are erasures, corrections... these change history.  The Rashomon-reminiscent January 6th hearings... will they lead to justice, conviction, or just a massive national shrug?

In the small-print news items, there has been a spate of suicides. Jumpers. This always shakes me to my core.  Looking further into a couple of the incidents that happened just blocks from me, there are local postings-- discussions, comments.  Yappers and criticizers observing the selfish nature of this kind of drama-- the clean-up, the damage, the risk to innocent human life passing on sidewalks below. Someone's car windshield was smashed.  Jumpers are not always considerate; they do not warn.  Or do they? And how do we know at the last instant-- they could have been pushed... tripped on the brink of some decision? I remember watching that documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge-- how the few survivors of a leap spoke about regret when it was too late.  

Some days I feel as though I'm in the middle of some Murakami novel. I'm not quite sure what is real. I observe, I even record, sometimes-- write things down... but I am too often missing a witness. Occasionally I lie awake worrying about being misunderstood.  The indignity of having your final gesture misinterpreted-- the poor suicide being not just victimized enough to end his life, but to be posthumously chastised--- well, it was a little overkill.  Who really knows his last thoughts-- his intention? Even Ivana last week-- what happened? I'd rather, in the end, not rely on a Coroner's report.  

Over the years I've done a bit of support work-- for medical patients, cancer sufferers.  Mostly this requires listening.  In the end, these people need not just care and pain-relief-- but they need a witness. Even Sunday confessions-- it's not absolution as much as the release of information-- sharing, letting go... to be heard, if not seen.  Their own truth, or their guilt as they process it.  Once it's witnessed, well.. it becomes perhaps bearable.  Psychologically, a large percentage of therapy is just talk-- having a 'paid friend', one of my acquaintances used to describe his shrink sessions-- but for me, it's the designated witness that somehow shifts the burden of guilt.

My friend reminded me this morning about the importance of sunscreen.  I suddenly had this memory of a distant summer in the city where I sat out on my rooftop in a white bikini day after day, at peak afternoon heat, maybe trying to turn myself into a different race.  Coincidentally I was married at the time to a West Indian who was often on the road.  In my neighborhood there were tons of musicians; many of them knew I'd be lying around on the rooftop, and they joined me there.  It became, more than anything, a kind of therapy... people would tell me their problems... I was a captive sunbathing audience, absorbing not just rays but extraordinary tales of infidelities, band-infighting, bad relationships. Unpaid witness that I was, exposing myself to not just future skin cancer risk but the toxic unraveling of people some of whom became celebrity fair-game. Today the memory gave me a laugh.  Nowadays of course I'd have to go to their instagram or whatever and see their secrets and minutia exposed for the world.  A little cheap.  Would I sell my experiences?  I would not.

The whole Facebook/instagram culture attests more than anything to some human craving to be 'seen', for those of us with no lifetime heroics to display ourselves in all our petty daily activities as though we were being paparazzi'd to death.  Then there are the endless autobiographies and blogs (guilty as charged) for everything that a photograph cannot convey.  

I recently read a disturbing but important history of Eastern Europe under the Hitler and Stalin regimes. The author reiterated the fact that the horrors of concentration camps and cruelties as described by survivors cannot even compare with the atrocities that passed without description, with no witnesses besides the silent perpetrators who were unlikely to retrospectively record their wickedness.   While we sift through the endless mountains of media product, the competitive surfeit of daily information, there are still the unsung, the unobserved-- the lost and perhaps longest-suffering unseen and unheard.  For all the history books, there are perhaps just as many unknown narratives.  

Last week I ventured out to sit on a park bench at sunset, with a book.  There seemed to be an endless stream of older neighborhood people looking to talk, to share... asking me if I'd listen, or speak... they'd been so solitary during the long months of pandemic quarantine... they'd lost loved ones and friends, jobs... homes.  It was a bit reminiscent of my bikini roof-top days.  I got no reading done but felt a certain communal sadness realizing with all the outlets and connections, we have very few valid witnesses of our own deeper realities and truths.  On every level, it's a little tragic.