On reality and its representation

She wakes up, she makes up, she takes her time and doesn’t feel she has to hurry…

On the evening of Sunday the first of July 2007 she went to bed as usual. That was the last time. In the morning, she reluctantly left the cosy warmth of her sheets, she took a shower and she left home after she’d kissed her cat and her mother wished her a nice day. This Monday morning she had less than 10 hours left to live. At midday she had lunch with a friend of hers and was on her way to the metro station. 

I was coming home at 4:30 pm when I saw her body stretched in the middle of the street. Her head had been smashed off by a truck and there was a stream of blood spilling in the gutter. A sickening pool of thick, greasy blood gushing from her torn throat was relentlessly spreading on the street. 

I heard a passer-by say “she’s dying” while a woman from the emergency unit was practicing a heart massage, trying to resuscitate her. To no avail, she was bleeding to death. This image I will now keep with me forever. The day after, someone had tied a wreath to the pole nearest to the place where her head had been blown out. And her mother is now wrenched in insufferable pains for the rest of her life with thousands of images from her daughter playing when she was a baby, when she was 6 year old, when she passed her baccalaureate…

Everyday we hear about car crashes and people being killed, grown ups and children alike. It only happens to others, you know. There are about 40.000 “others” a year in the U.S. alone. But we only represent to ourselves these sorts of scenes, and we don’t really bother. Until reality strikes and we realize the difference.

Now, there’s a country where hundreds of people die on a daily basis, where inferno is a daily reality of life, where more than 3,600 American soldiers have perished in even more horrible circumstances with their flesh and blood being burnt in the soil. And their friends come home saying they bear with them unbearable images that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

They’ve all met reality when most of them thought war was some sort of video game. When all they knew about war was the shallow representation they’d been watching at through the innumerable flicks Hollywood has been providing for decades. You know, these movies where good Americans never die or when some do, well, they don’t, it’s just a movie you know.

One head of state, for all his shortcomings, knew from his own personal experience in Algeria what war is all about. He knew the reality of death and suffering and unspeakable horror. Another one, the commander in chief, only knew war through his Hollywood education because he hid away when it was his turn to face reality. He probably had a good representation of war.

In the meantime, thousands and thousands of American families are now yelling their hearts out of suffocating grief and sorrow. They’ve met reality when they only knew representation. And the commander in chief is still doing fine, thank you…

(May that post be in memoriam of the 25 odd year old girl I saw dying on July the 2nd 2007)

Note: The picture is “The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” [1632] by Rembrandt