I was reading a magazine in the dentist office and saw a cartoon of a holy man sitting on top of a mountain peak and a hiker had made it to the top to ask him for the meaning of life to which he responded, “to be on TV.” I heard an interview with someone who said fame is something some people crave so much they’ll do anything to achieve it but once they have some they’ll do even more to keep it. In the classic Kink’s song, Celluloid Heroes, Ray Davies claims “celluloid heroes never really die.” Is fame more than simply attention to those who seek to attain it? Or is it immortality?
There is a tribe in Africa that believes that death exists in various dimensions. According to Wikipedia, James Loewen in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: "The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living ... when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the Zamani are not forgotten but revered." In that case are celluloid heroes, or movie stars as we call them, not dead but in the Sasha even though we may not personally have known them? Is the knowledge we have of someone, say Humphrey Bogart, accurate and detailed enough to allow Bogey to live in our dreams? Didn’t Woody Allen make a movie about this? If so, then famous people, at least those whose work in films and television that remain popular after their deaths, don’t really die and Ray Davies was right.
There is a tribe in Africa that believes that death exists in various dimensions. According to Wikipedia, James Loewen in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: "The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living ... when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the Zamani are not forgotten but revered." In that case are celluloid heroes, or movie stars as we call them, not dead but in the Sasha even though we may not personally have known them? Is the knowledge we have of someone, say Humphrey Bogart, accurate and detailed enough to allow Bogey to live in our dreams? Didn’t Woody Allen make a movie about this? If so, then famous people, at least those whose work in films and television that remain popular after their deaths, don’t really die and Ray Davies was right.
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