Celebrity and fame is not the same thing at all.
In a doctors or dentists waiting room you may pick up a copy of People, Hello or some other such magazine and open pages with full colour spreads and wild headlines about people you may never have heard of or even seen before.
They are referred to as celebrities. Celebrity meaning in this case, what exactly? Not sure. They may be models, sport stars, actors, reality TV personalities etc. They are also famous. They may even be rich.
Yet you can be well-known and even famous and not be a celebrity. That is pretty clear.
You can be a famous celebrity with lots of money and you can be the same but without. Is money a compensation? E.g. for the hassle of being in the centre of attention? Or is it simply an added bonus?
You can be a hard-working citizen and quite invisible but very influential. Indeed.
You have Warhol fame, and you have fame and then you have celebrity.
Jade Goody and Jack Tweed are house-hold names in Britain and not because they are Dickens characters as their names might suggest but because they fulfilled a need that we have. A need to empathise and feel human like in Greek tragedies and comedies where the audiences could go through a catharsis. A release and outlet for a great many emotions some of them complex and over-whelming.
Our film stars are like our Greek gods, they serve up endless stories for our narrative-hungry beings and the drama is only so real." Two chewy beefsteaks of gossip please", but then we can go home to our cuppa and our sofa. Not 24/7 like our own lives.
For myself I would not like to be recognised where I go by complete strangers who think they "know" me! On the other hand I would like to know I was not a waste of space and could make a difference somehow in some way while around.
Life.
So simple - birth until death.
Yet it is that time in between. That time. That life we share .
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BIRTHS
We will never remember dying.
We were so patient
about being,
noting down
the numbers, the days,
the years and the months,
the hair, the mouths we kissed,
but that moment of dying:
we surrender it without a note,
we give it to others as remembrance
or we give it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we keep
the memory of our birth,
though being born was important and fresh:
and now you don’t even remember one detail,
you haven’t kept even a branch
of the first light.
It’s well known that we are born.
It’s well known that in the room
or in the woods
or in the hut in the fishermen’s district
or in the crackling canefields
there is a very unusual silence,
a moment solemn as wood,
and a woman gets ready to give birth.
It’s well known that we were born.
But of the profound jolt
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and crying and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition or shudder
of the electric essence that takes on
one more body like a living cup,
and of that disinhabited woman,
the mother who is left there with her blood
and her torn fullness
and her end and beginning, and the disorder
that troubles the pulse, the floor, the blankets,
until everything gathers and adds
one more knot to the thread of life:
nothing, there is nothing left in your memory
of the fierce sea that lifted a wave
and knocked down a dark apple from the tree.
The only thing you remember is your life.
Pablo Neruda
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