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I was dreaming last night of soaring through cyberspace, just like in a book by Gibson or Stephenson, it was a way of traveling and not as silly as it may sound.
All of us that did this could be seen as human silhouettes and if you let your eye linger long enough, an alias name could be glimpsed in the corner of the eye. But it was hard to focus on the name, since most of us wanted to be anonymous.
And then we were real people, we were visiting![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thamiris through her obituary (which I can provide a link to, but don't want to do in this post). We could by then walk around at the reception after her funeral, all of us knowing her mostly or only from her writing and therefore feeling as impostors, but with real grief gnawing inside.
So we saw her family and relatives and walked around looking at photos of her, from childhood and later. Through all this I wanted to tell her family "She was such a wonderful writer...thousands of pages of glorious text of hers affected people all over the world, without her having been printed".
But of course I couldn't.
I knew Thamiris in a very odd way and I remember her, years ago writing a lj post about fandom & writing slash as well as "proper" essays and stories on line, and how that was her double life, separated by a fragile but important veil from her front-life, in academia, with colleagues and family. This life was however important enough for her to devote thousands of captivating pages on, to cultivate tons of cyber friendships and to spend hours and hours not only on personal writing, but on helping other writers in their striving. She even spoke as a main authority on this form of writing in a big article in a Canadian newspaper some 4 years ago (maybe it even was the Gazette of Montreal, which now holds her virtual obituary). Of course her quotations in the Gazette didn't reveal her real name, it might have revealed the cyber name Thamiris, but I don't remember.
When I looked through her on-line obituary last night a strange and remarkable thing hit me with a hard slap in the jaw. All the many condolences made by her writing friends/fans from the Internet were indeed humble and respectful to her family (they often started with something like "I never knew her for real" or "I only knew her from the Internet" or "through her writing")...and then there comes a "but". After that the short & humble sentences that follow each mourner sound as if they were close friends through war and famine, or living together, or lovers that sometimes took a brief vacation once every year in Paris and exposed their innermost feelings to each other.
Words like "she was a beautiful soul", "she was so clever and vivacious", "she helped me through such hard times", "she made me into the writer I am today" ...and more of that, much more.
Of all the people giving their condolences, her LJ/writer/reader friend's words shine the most, even though they desperately try to be humble and express the inferiority of their mourning - or perhaps that is part of their glow.
We didn't know Suzanne well, but oh we knewthamiris - that part of her hidden from most real life people. And it is a BIG and awesome part of her. I went back to both her LJ and her webpage and looked through tons of good writing..and thought "what if her family knew about all this..". But she didn't want them to know, and if that wish should be disrespected, it needs to be by someone far closer than I was.
And then of course I thought about all us LJ friends, how we show these parts of ourselves to each other that perhaps we don't show everyone else in real life, how the very voice we write in can be slightly or very different from how we present our front page at work or with relatives.
It's a careless love we throw out to cyber-friends sometimes...but I think if the on-line friends stay a while and exchange thoughts, talk each other through ordeals and life crises, many of them earn a place that is fairly close, a place very personal...and still a place with very little marking in "real life" when someone dies.
The humble words and the respectfulness in an obituary is a good sign, as is respecting someone's wish to keep the two lives separated, but among certain people like ourselves at least, I think it is safe to say that there occasionally was and is a certain form of love, and that we may actually know certain parts of each other more closely than many in our mundane lives who don't read us for years and years.
So, I did love you Thamiris, through your writing. I love you in a different way from how I love a favorite published writer, it's a bit more personal than that. I guess I love you as only a LJ'er can do.
And all you on my friends list, take care, please take bloody good care. If LJ will lose its power over us we may drift apart, but some of us here are saps, and we wonder and we care.
ETA: Here's a piece of writing by thamiris that a friend of mine reminded me of today. It's in many ways a hilarious tribute to both slash and the kind of literture she was an authority on. She could spit out funny smut like this while she tied her shoe-laces in the morning.
In Principio
All of us that did this could be seen as human silhouettes and if you let your eye linger long enough, an alias name could be glimpsed in the corner of the eye. But it was hard to focus on the name, since most of us wanted to be anonymous.
And then we were real people, we were visiting
thamiris through her obituary (which I can provide a link to, but don't want to do in this post). We could by then walk around at the reception after her funeral, all of us knowing her mostly or only from her writing and therefore feeling as impostors, but with real grief gnawing inside.So we saw her family and relatives and walked around looking at photos of her, from childhood and later. Through all this I wanted to tell her family "She was such a wonderful writer...thousands of pages of glorious text of hers affected people all over the world, without her having been printed".
But of course I couldn't.
I knew Thamiris in a very odd way and I remember her, years ago writing a lj post about fandom & writing slash as well as "proper" essays and stories on line, and how that was her double life, separated by a fragile but important veil from her front-life, in academia, with colleagues and family. This life was however important enough for her to devote thousands of captivating pages on, to cultivate tons of cyber friendships and to spend hours and hours not only on personal writing, but on helping other writers in their striving. She even spoke as a main authority on this form of writing in a big article in a Canadian newspaper some 4 years ago (maybe it even was the Gazette of Montreal, which now holds her virtual obituary). Of course her quotations in the Gazette didn't reveal her real name, it might have revealed the cyber name Thamiris, but I don't remember.
When I looked through her on-line obituary last night a strange and remarkable thing hit me with a hard slap in the jaw. All the many condolences made by her writing friends/fans from the Internet were indeed humble and respectful to her family (they often started with something like "I never knew her for real" or "I only knew her from the Internet" or "through her writing")...and then there comes a "but". After that the short & humble sentences that follow each mourner sound as if they were close friends through war and famine, or living together, or lovers that sometimes took a brief vacation once every year in Paris and exposed their innermost feelings to each other.
Words like "she was a beautiful soul", "she was so clever and vivacious", "she helped me through such hard times", "she made me into the writer I am today" ...and more of that, much more.
Of all the people giving their condolences, her LJ/writer/reader friend's words shine the most, even though they desperately try to be humble and express the inferiority of their mourning - or perhaps that is part of their glow.
We didn't know Suzanne well, but oh we knew
thamiris - that part of her hidden from most real life people. And it is a BIG and awesome part of her. I went back to both her LJ and her webpage and looked through tons of good writing..and thought "what if her family knew about all this..". But she didn't want them to know, and if that wish should be disrespected, it needs to be by someone far closer than I was.And then of course I thought about all us LJ friends, how we show these parts of ourselves to each other that perhaps we don't show everyone else in real life, how the very voice we write in can be slightly or very different from how we present our front page at work or with relatives.
It's a careless love we throw out to cyber-friends sometimes...but I think if the on-line friends stay a while and exchange thoughts, talk each other through ordeals and life crises, many of them earn a place that is fairly close, a place very personal...and still a place with very little marking in "real life" when someone dies.
The humble words and the respectfulness in an obituary is a good sign, as is respecting someone's wish to keep the two lives separated, but among certain people like ourselves at least, I think it is safe to say that there occasionally was and is a certain form of love, and that we may actually know certain parts of each other more closely than many in our mundane lives who don't read us for years and years.
So, I did love you Thamiris, through your writing. I love you in a different way from how I love a favorite published writer, it's a bit more personal than that. I guess I love you as only a LJ'er can do.
And all you on my friends list, take care, please take bloody good care. If LJ will lose its power over us we may drift apart, but some of us here are saps, and we wonder and we care.
ETA: Here's a piece of writing by thamiris that a friend of mine reminded me of today. It's in many ways a hilarious tribute to both slash and the kind of literture she was an authority on. She could spit out funny smut like this while she tied her shoe-laces in the morning.
In Principio
