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imomus
My latest song is called I Refuse To Die, and it's a cheery little ukelele number equidistant between George Formby and Louis Armstrong. Infuriatingly catchy (it's going to be great to do live, tap-dancing and all), the song fulfills an ambition I've had for a while: to write a grotesquely absurdist existential protest song, something that challenges the basic conditions of life as if they were simply political problems rather than immutable givens. This song certainly does that, and with a catchy showbiz sunnyside-uppery about it which, finally, is rather upsetting.
Death comes for all, but I plan to be out when he calls, it begins. It's Bergman's 'Seventh Seal' replayed as farce rather than tragedy. We're rooting for the narrator, of course, in his mad yet universal quest to cheat death. And yet the idea that there might be some easy alternative to mortality is disturbing. It knocks over the screens we erect around death, it makes us re-examine our acceptance of the basic fact of our mortality. It's at once completely natural -- every adventure story is posited on the proposition that the hero will surely escape death, whatever dangers he gets himself into -- and as spooky as a conversation with a cryogenic survivalist.
It reminds me of the way I used to reassure my little brother, when we were kids. He'd come and ask me 'Do people really die?' and I'd say, 'Yes, normally. But there's a way round it. Just eat a little piece of cheese when you're 99 and you'll live forever.' My brother seemed doubtful, but the answer reassured him momentarily. Later, when he discovered how he'd been misled, he developed a fear of death much more nagging than my own, and a mistrust of narrative so thoroughgoing that he became a deconstructionist literary critic. I, meanwhile, became the George Formby of post-modern nihilism, tap-dancing across the ruins of abandoned certainties with an infuriatingly cheeky grin.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 05:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 06:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 08:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 08:45 am (UTC)'I, meanwhile, became the George Formby of post-modern nihilism...' Yes, I suppose you did, didn't you? Quite a piece of work. Luckily for humanity at large, there are still men and women dancing like Fred and Ginger to the tune of certainties that the brainwashed (such as you, old fellow) are unfortunately deaf to.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 09:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 10:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-14 02:11 pm (UTC)Swedish is quite a beautiful language. it'd be interesting to write part of it in said language. new stuff sounds great, i eagerly await the new album.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-15 01:09 am (UTC)italian writer dino buzzati wrote a story on a strike against the death. people in front of the hospitals and old people's houses... and indeed people did not die...
i can't remember the way the story ended..
yanez
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-15 04:31 am (UTC)The abandoned certainties of which you speak are restricted to a particular group within "Western" society, of whom you are one. Many have done no such thing. How one can be expected to abandon "certainties"-in the sense of felt experience, intuition and faith-on the say-so of modish theorists who really do no more than manipulate symbols, is staggering.
We know nothing about death, nothing beyond the fact that we shall "die"-but what is that, to "die"? We do not know. We must therefore assume that death constitutes the final limit of all that we are able to imagine. The desire to to extend our imagination into the beyond of dying, to anticipate psychically what death alone can reveal to us existentially, seems to me to be a lack of faith disguised as faith. Genuine faith says: I know nothing about death, but I do know that God is eternity; and I also know that It is my God. Whether what we call time will abide with us beyond our death becomes rather insignificant for us compared to the knowledge that we are God's-who is not "immortal" but eternal. Instead of imagining ourselves to be alive yet dead, we will prepare ourselves for a true death, which is perhaps the terminal boundary of time, but, if so, certainly the threshold of eternity.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-15 06:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-15 06:27 am (UTC)What are you talking about?
Date: 2004-06-15 06:16 am (UTC)That's the "absolute limit of our imagination": being eaten by worms
and unable to do anything about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-15 09:12 am (UTC)"Death will be unlike the night-times we lie awake thinking of death..."
AiX WhYe cZed
(who has looked death in the eyes... and run!)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-16 11:53 am (UTC)The preceding sentence is false.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 05:40 am (UTC)Teach Yourself Japanese
Date: 2004-06-28 02:27 am (UTC)