FROM THE BOUNDARY

Today was wet so I YouTubed the equivalent of my ‘Hundred Best Tunes’. You will have yours and you’ll notice that, as with me, they come from different periods of your lives. In my case, the song and music of Chaliapin, John McCormack, Marlene Dietrich, Simon and Garfunkel, the Incredible String Band, Whitney Houston, Randy Crawford, Donovan, the musical ‘Ipi Tombi’ which I saw in London in 1978. The overture to Giselle and still more all have their place in my life’s libretto from youth to pensioner – as well as those heartfelt Welsh hymns, ‘Calon Lan’ and ‘Cwm Rhondda’ courtesy of William Williams Pantycelyn. My love of John McCormack arose from a motoring trip to Ireland in my Mark 1 Sprite in 1968 with a College friend. I kissed the Blarney Stone, heard Micheal Mac Liammoir at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in his one man ‘The Importance of Being Oscar’, rowed to the Lake Isle of Innisfree where “peace comes dropping slow”, gave homage at Yeats’ grave in Sligo (“Cast a cold Eye on Life, on Death. Horseman pass by”), and then got food poisoning on the Aran Islands. There were my childhood loves, too, Paul Robeson and Kathleen Ferrier. I don’t remember the name of the radio programme in which they were regularly featured on Sunday evenings at home when we all listened. I know I always wanted to sing like Robeson. The nearest I got was crooning ‘My Curly Headed Baby’ and ‘My Little Black Doll’ to my kids as babies in my arms. They actually seemed to like it. Kathleen Ferrier – ‘our Kath’ – had the most marvellous clarinet contralto voice. She died from breast cancer at 41 in 1953. I always associate her with the aria ‘What is life?’ from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’: “What is life to be without thee; what is left if thou art dead?” Well, there’s the great “question that cannot be answered”, the “lover that cannot be lost”, as the Incredible String Band express it in ‘The Layers of the Onion’. It’s the one thing that keeps religion going, death not life, the one constant for all of us.

I suppose now in older age I think about it more. Playing my stuff on YouTube it occurred to me to burn a disk with my favourites on so that I could listen contented to their whisperings of my life in its different times and places as it ebbs away into nothing; and though my Wife, when I suggested this, told me I needed my head examined, I still think it’s a nice idea – and you might even consider it yourself, the idea of your life gently passing before you through music.

As for what follows, well – I’ll leave that to whatever will be, without expectation. Religion tells us it’s not the end and that, if we’ve behaved ourselves sufficiently, we’ll be reunited with our loved ones who’ve gone before. Well, it may be true. I really don’t know – and neither does anyone else. But I’m not counting on it. Mind, concern about death isn’t just an age thing, when more and more of your contemporaries pack their bags. It hits hard when you’re young too, as the Ferrier aria insinuates. When someone we love dearly dies, some part of ourselves dies too. We’re forced to learn the language of irrevocable separation, what ‘life is without you’. For me, that language learning began when I was 15 and then, more significantly still, when my Mother died four years later. They say that the grieving period for a death, like a painful divorce, lasts two years and I’m sure there’s much truth in that. A year on from Mom’s death, I still cried for her. But then I read the most wonderful biography by George Painter of the French novelist, Marcel Proust. In it was a letter from Proust to a friend who was suffering from bereavement. The letter said it was right to grieve but that there comes a point when the dead return to you, when you’re able to assimilate them as part of yourself, and that when this happens they will always be with you, never to leave you again. After two years, my tears for Mom dried, she returned, and has never left me. She has become part of myself.

Of course, the experts say that we should let go the dead lest we succumb to a pathological condition which prevents us from moving on. That’s all very well if you’re not grieving. However, it’s very hard if there are so many memories around you. Besides, the dead do seem to have a habit of whispering to you – in dreams and little happenings, unexplained things. This certainly happened to me after my Dad died. And some, of course, do have the gift of clairvoyance. You never quite know whether it’s all projection, experiencing what we want to experience. But all the little whisperings associated with the dead do make me wonder whether there isn’t a life beyond life. If there is, I don’t see how it can possibly be contingent upon a yes – no vote from upstairs. Should a Christian priest even wonder? Shouldn’t he know? Isn’t he an expert on something which in life “cannot be answered”?

Go safely, then – until the next time.

‘You what?’ from the boundary: “As long as there is no readiness to become nothing, one remains nothing.” (Osho)