Tap-dancing across the ruins of abandoned certainties

[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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

just because I think its not good to get no reaction on an interlude like this, I want to say something, “oh” for example. ann

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's nowt as queer as folks, mam!