This story just caught my eye. Young actress, Stephanie Parker, was found hanged "on open ground near Pontypridd on Saturday morning". The article seems to imply that this was a suicide brought about by the series Belonging coming to an end. I don't watch much television, never saw Belonging and know nothing about Stephanie Parker, but I do find this kind of story sad, perhaps because, if the implied motives of the article are true, then I feel I can understand.
I'm reminded a little of this.
A symbol of dreams turns out to be
A sign of disillusion
I asked someone recently for an opinion or interpretation of the song My Well Known Views on the Subject (can be listened to here), because I thought Sasa had really nailed the lyric with this one. I was given what I thought a very accurate one-word analysis, that it seemed to be about "disillusionment". I mention this as a matter of free association.
Incidentally, under the story about Stephanie Parker, I found an article announcing the death of J.G. Ballard earlier today.
Very sad about the young actress. This happens more often than I’d like to say. When a series ends and a young star can no longer find work, so many become drug addicts or alcoholics, commit suicide, or disappear into the woodwork.
I think that the gap between the life that is held up as ideal, and life as it is experienced by most of us, is the cause of an incalculable amount of suffering. I am by no means immune to it myself. I suppose that it’s partly a biological urge, in some way, like the salmon trying to leap upstream to the spawning ground. When your leap into life fails, then there seems to be no point just hanging around in a backwater. I am reminded of this:http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Kafka/beforethelaw.htmAs they say, many are called, but only a few are chosen. Of the hundreds of turtles, for instance, that hatch on the sandy shores of the beach, how many even make it as far as the sea, a few yards away, without being picked off by seagulls and other predators?I suppose such thoughts lead one to social Darwinism – a philosophy of which I’m not fond. I wonder if a salmon, unable to make the leap up the falls, is ever able to make a different kind of leap, and find in its confinement to a backwater for its remaining days a purpose to equal that it would have known at the spawning ground.