Art, the Artist and Billy the Kid

I took down my Facebook page last weekend. I could see it coming from the day I started it. Just last night my daughter noted, “You're still kind of a loner, you have friends, but you like to be alone.” True enough. I do like to make and have friends, I love a coffee or glass of wine, or a lovely meal with friends. Good conversation, or kayaking, or taking walks, concerts, but I like my alone time, too. Facebook wasn’t like any of those things for me. Facebook was like eavesdropping, like only being partly present and it always felt strange to me, made me feel more alone, not more connected.

As I’ve been practicing mindfulness, one of the things I’ve been paying more attention to is my sense of smell. Tree smells, flower smells, and well, even people smells. In our culture the fact that people smell isn’t a great topic, I know. But it’s one of the things I like about people. I also like the warmth that most people’s energy gives off. I like to see the glow of light on skin. These are just a few of the things you don’t get on Facebook.

What I was starting to get though, were strands of people’s lives while I was there. Stories of where they went, what they ate, sometimes more information than I cared to know in the context of a page on a computer. Then there was the whole thing about how was I presenting myself? If I added a pitch for organic food, or for or against something political, what would people surmise about me without context? What good I might ask, does it do to put what amounts to a bumper sticker on my page?

I've heard, that at one time, in some cultures, photos were thought by some, maybe some still believe, to take a piece of your soul. What if all this internet marketing, when it starts to beg of you to advertise, quietly starts to steal a piece of your soul? Anyway, that’s how it started feeling to me. I’ve heard all the stories about how wonderful Facebook is, and I did reconnect with a grade school friend, so that was cool, but all in all, not for me. It was even a conundrum when I quit my page. What would people think? Would they be offended? Take it personally? I just had to let it all go, they'd make other Facebook friends.

So, where’s the Billy the Kid part? Well, I heard another story, about a blogger who pretended to be someone he wasn’t. It turned out his blog was fiction, not fact. It was about the art, not the artist. It seemed that this was very disconcerting for people who wanted his story to be true. People who felt duped because they’d had feelings for this blogger whom they thought they knew through his blog. When talking about this story with a co-worker, he was surprised that I felt more concerned about the people who felt duped, than for the blogger. I wondered how people could get so invested in a person’s story who they didn’t know, to a point where the imagined relationship with the blogger became more important than the story, the art?

So which is it? The art, the artist, or all the stories we tell about the artist or in Billy the Kid’s case, the person. Billy the Kid was an outlaw, but many other things, too. In life and now in death. Billy the Kid has stories, songs and poems written about him, a ballet by Aaron Copland which is anything but illegal and numerous other art forms inspired by his short life. The lines between the art and the artist, and more art he inspired and inspires becomes blurred. He now ‘lives’ in my blog.

We weave in and out of our lives and stories. We get to be the author, our lives become the stories we tell and then we lose some control. On Facebook, it always seemed too out of control, for me.