#81 Decorum
‘One of our aircraft has failed to return’ – the language demands a suitably decorous response. From a nation of wonky-teeth men, and women with black lines drawn up the back of their legs: wartime pastiche of seamed stockings in desperately short supply.
No way of telling if it was the way they told it: keeping calm, carrying on, ‘your mother running about putting sandbags on incendiaries’, and years later her pointed remark to a teenage son on the brink of overreaching himself: ‘the pilots who never came back were only the same age as you, y’know?’
Quietly but vehemently; quite possibly prompted by closely guarded memory of lost first love.
Bearing in mind this far-off culture of understatement, I have to ask if recent reports of Flight MS804 seem grossly exaggerated. I mean all that footage of gurning – the twisted features of close relatives beside themselves in shock and awe (too early even to call it grief), when the EgyptAir plane failed to return to Cairo and news was first broadcast across airport offices and lounges.
Of course last week’s stricken faces were as old as the hills, and the hills were still there throughout All Our Yesterdays. But who decided to tell it this way? That is, through pictures of people sent briefly back to nature.
No, I shan’t say you might as well take pictures of them on the lavatory. But if we accept this wreckage as our common humanity – the collapsing faces of those needing time, the fullness of time, to re-assemble themselves as human beings, aren’t we assuming much the same as the people who blew up the plane*?
Better to re-write Wilfred Owen’s re-take of Horace, and message it to those journalists responsible for today’s mourn-porn: de morte decorum esse necesse est.
* Itself an assumption yet to be verified.