Dying While Canceled
Your Cancellation Will Outlive You
Last month, Thomas Sayers Ellis died at the age of 61. Ellis was an influential poet, photographer, bandleader, teacher and founder of the poetry reading series, The Dark Room Collective. He was also someone accused of being a creep in a high-profile literary takedown which cost him his position at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2016. As accomplished as he was, his drama in Iowa was the only reason I even heard of him.
The most damning article against Ellis was only recently pushed to the second page of his google results by his many obituaries. The article, with the very 2016 title, “Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?,” is the stuff of Kafka, as it announces his demise while offering a dead link when you click on the word “accusations” (the link to nowhere also included here).
Again, I’m not here to defend or debate on whether anyone is guilty or not, what’s important to me is that when he died, I thought, “oh, that guy who was canceled,” which is no doubt what some will think when I die too, unless of course I outlive everyone who gives a shit, which is my plan.
Being canceled (or whatever you want to call it) is a highly existential experience. How many times do you hear about this or that person’s life being “over” when they are the subject of some ignominious public scandal? There is an obvious connection between being canceled and death, as in the death of a reputation or of the life one was living beforehand. But there is also real death: People often become suicidal/commit suicide after of a public humiliation, like Ed Piskor. Some even kill themselves BEFORE anything is public, instead of enduring the shame of being humiliated, like the tragic wave of teenage victims of sextortion scams.
For me, it’s the fear that perhaps every canceled person has: that your most humiliating moments are immortal, and you are not.
I think about that almost every day, that it wasn’t a “good life” that was taken away from me (because I still have one), but a “good death,” where I’ll never stop thinking of death as some Poe story where my evil doppelganger will be sitting on my tombstone, mindlessly kicking its feet against my engraved name.
I wonder if the people who DO the canceling consider this. In some cases, I think the answer is yes. It’s a way of killing someone you don’t like without all the trouble of murder. But most of the time (I know it might be too optimistic to say most), I don’t think the long-term ramifications to the individual are even thought about. It’s a Justice of Passion. Those involved in the canceling don’t realize that the branding is permanent, and might even find its way into an obituary.
No matter what I have or will accomplish in life, I’m certain that on my deathbed I’ll be thinking of the trauma of being canceled to the delight of a bunch of weird strangers. Like death itself, there is nothing you can do about it.
But in the meantime, there is still life. And even if you are constantly consumed by your past, try to remember that not everybody is.