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The cult of celebrity seems to have run mad over the past few years. Anyone can have their fifteen minutes of fame and if they can be sufficiently outrageous, outraged or enraging, may find themselves with a career in the limelight. At least for a little while. Some, however, have a real and enduring talent… and amongst those who touch the hearts and minds through music and the arts, some will find a lasting stardom.
Some notable stars died this week; the inimitable David Bowie, Alan Rickman, better known to a generation as Severus Snape and Dan Haggerty of Grizzly Adams fame. The world paid homage in recognition of the gifts they had brought to stage and screen and many have mourned their passing.
It is a strange relationship we have with those whose talents bring them fame. Sometimes, we almost think we know them, even though their personae change with every role… and none knew how to reinvent themselves better than Bowie. We do not know them, we see only those facets of the public and private faces they choose to show and the occasional and often misconstrued intrusions of the paparazzi. Like Severus Snape, they assume a public persona and live the visible part of their life to its rules, whilst beneath the mask they are as human as the rest of us, just as complex and contradictory, with the same human hopes and needs.
Yet for those of us who grew up watching their rise to stardom, the passing of such stars is often said to mark the end of an era… perhaps because it also marks the ticking clock of our own lives and realising our own mortality in theirs… the era we see ending includes our own youth…
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Hawk at Noon
Selected SE Writings 2015 – 2018
Sue Vincent
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Sue Vincent was a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, from its inception in 2012 until her untimely death in 2021.
This book is a collection of her writings during her second three years in that role.
In these monographs, originally published as blog-posts, her unique and unmistakable voice relates the trials, tribulations, challenges and joys attendant upon the setting up and successful stewardship of a Modern Mystery school – it’s birth on the inner planes, and its pioneering work which ultimately led it from the safety of the traditional indoor temple and out into the wild and rugged landscapes of the Blessed Isles of Albion.
Amusing, inspiring, and enlightening, in turns, these stories relate above all else what it is to be truly human in an increasingly dystopian technocratic age.
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 