An ending of sorts

  

 

What to wear to a funeral is now a question of some import.  There used to be a time when the answer was obvious: black, black, and more black; with a white shirt for the men.  But now . . .

     The last funeral I attended was in Catalonia and was an event that followed hard upon the death itself.  In Catalonia you would expect the funeral to be celebrated on the next day after the death and the cremation on the day following.  Done and dusted in a few days.  The time between the death and funeral in Britain is mystifying to my Catalan family.  Some things really are different.

     But the funeral I am preparing myself for is in Britain, and it has been a couple of weeks since the death.  This period has allowed time for all the paperwork to be done.  In a positive sense, it does allow a sort of finality to inform the proceedings: the ceremony being the final step in the bureaucracy of death.

     My Catalan partner also does not understand the concept of the post-funeral refreshments, or ‘coming back to the house’ as the last social gathering associated with the death.

     But getting back to what to wear.  I am assuming that the old necessity for black as the dominant colour is a thing of the past – but I am not comfortable with a complete reversal of expectations in an explosion of colour.  I have opted for dark blue trousers and a paler blue short-sleeved shirt, and I have a suitable tie to go with the ensemble.  My assumption, however, is not fact, and I am waiting for more specific guidelines to inform my final appearance.

     In my opinion, I couldn’t care less what people wear as long as they are comfortable and ‘tidy’.  Presence is the important factor not sartorial elegance!

 

My cousin, Katy, has been reading through the book The Absent Artist which combines my poems with drawings from two old sketchbooks by Ceri Auckland Davies.  The book was a collaboration, which turned into a memorial when Ceri died in his sleep.  It is his funeral that I will be attending.

     My cousin asked if I had any paintings by Ceri and when I responded she asked if I could send her photographs of them when I had time.  I will do so, but I told her that signed prints of Ceris work are still available, for example here: 

 

https://www.albanygallery.com/artists/ceri---prints-auckland-davies

and I urged her to look through them.  I did so myself and I remembered seeing preparatory drawings for some of them; seeing one or two in a half-finished state; hearing about new departures in subject matter and admiring some of them before they were sent to the gallery for exhibition. 

 

     In other words, in looking through the range of Ceri’s work, I was drawn into remembering the painstaking preparation, the drawings, the charcoal studies, the photographs, the sketches, the sheer hard work that went into each and every one of his artworks.  And there they all were: beautifully produced signed prints, waiting to be bought and displayed.

 

https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies

 

     It is easy to say that Ceri’s art mocks death.  My house has a collection of his work; I see his art every day.  But I’m also conscious that what I see is as much as I am going to get.  Yes, Ceri has a substantial body of work, but now he is gone, that body of work is finite. 

     So, there is a strange sort of pleasure-pain in looking at Ceri’s work.  Ceri was a painter of the here-and-now, he aptured the momentary beauty of wild nature at particular moments in the day and night.  With painstaking layers of tempera, he was able to give depth and body to the curve of a wave, moisture on rippled sand, a tree in full bloom, the movement of dappled sun on a mountainside.  And the hand that painted all those things paints no more.  But the evidence of his work is hanging in houses and galleries and is living on.  And he will continue to be my daily companion on my walls and in my mind.

 

One thing leads to another

 

 

Why, I asked myself, was I half singing the words of a half-remembered kids’ song that I last sung on a seaside beach, possibly in Cornwall almost seventy years ago?  And the words of an evangelical song at that.  It was not, I hasten to add, that I had been struck by the theological import of the words that passed me by all those years ago:

 

Deep and wide,

Deep and wide,

There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide,

Plunge right in

Lose your sin

There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.

 

No, it was not a surrendering to the enticing idea of redemption, especially through water – one of my favourite elements – with the addition of a fountain, for which I have a fascination almost as potent as my being irresistibly drawn to fireworks, making the image even more forceful.  No.  The reason the words (and the tune that I also remembered) was because I had said something with the dum-di-dum rhythm which triggered the memory of Deep and Wide.  A Proustian moment, conjured by sound rather than the taste of a madeleine.

     And with that, I am back on the sands of St Ives or somewhere similar as a very small child – well, not that small, I was ever tall for my age even when I was very young.  Going back, daily, to the little group of evangelical mission workers who encourage their young audience to sing along with them and learn a bible verse, to be recited the next day and if that learning and recitation was continued until the end of the week, then . . . something was promised.  The eventual gift (I even demanded a bible to refresh my memory on one day) I no longer recall – but the words and the tune have stayed with me, waiting to emerge as the ear-worm that will now stay with me all day.

     I suppose I should say something about the potency of memory, but as Marcel has taken over a million words on the subject anything I can add would seem merely meretricious at best or entirely redundant at worst.  Or possibly the other way round.

     I would merely say that the words and tune do not come alone in my memory, but it opens up a whole range of family holidays when the three of us would pack ourselves into the Ford Prefect and set off with sometimes only the haziest of ideas of where we would go and where we would end up, but always with the eventual objective of being by water.  Sea, lake or river, but water.

     At a time when close friends have died, and other friends and acquaintances are showing the signs of age, it is amazingly comforting to think back to the times when the concept of death was just that: a word, and idea, something in stories, but not an element in my life.  Not carefree, no child’s life is carefree.  Our childish cares may be just that, childish, but they are as real as anything in the adult world.

 

 

 

     In the late Tom Stopppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead one character asks

Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it.

And it’s true.  I cannot remember the moment when I fully realized that we “don’t go on for ever” even though I ‘knew’ what death was.

     It took the death of my grandmother, my father’s mother, for Death quite literally to bring me to my knees.  And not in prayer.

 

I saw the corpses of each of my parents when they were prepared for the funeral service for cremation, and I was unmoved by the sight.  Not because I was numb with grief, or unfeeling, but more because what I was looking at were palpably not my parents.  Even when my parents were seriously and terminally ill, and comatose, they had more life in their features than those corpses.  The corpses were other.  Not my parents.

     But they live on in my memory.  And they live well.  And I welcome each and every unsolicited nudge that lets them walk though my mind again.

 

A Pill for Everything!

  

I have always found shame to be a great stimulus to writing.

     It was salutary to see that the last time that I wrote in my blog (that has been in existence since 2006) was in February of this year, and that 2022 was the last year in which entries for the whole year managed to stagger into double digits.

     It is not as if I have been leading a completely incident free life for the last few years: operations and publication have vied for my personal attention and, not one to waste an opportunity, I have allowed one to inform the other.

     As I have said before, if you are an English teacher and you want your class to talk, all you have to do is ask for them to relate their injury experiences.

     Hitherto taciturn students will suddenly blossom forth in expressive language in much the same way that blood did from their injuries.  Indeed, in some classes after listening to the vicissitudes that my students have suffered, I am amazed that they are still alive to recount the gory details.

     My eyes and knees have been sliced open and various (though different) artifacts have been inserted to improve my sight and my perambulation.  Both are better than they were, but by no means perfect – even though my eye surgeon keeps telling me that I have 20-20 vision.  I can read the small print on the eye chart, but the small print of the ingredients list on produce is not so easy to decipher.

     In the Old Days when I was short sighted, I could not see distance other than as a blur, but I could bring things close to my eyes and I could see incredibly small details.  That is no longer the case.  And, if I am truthful, that had not been the case for some time as my eyes managed to be short sighted and long sighted at the same time – but there was no real ‘sweet spot’ of perfect unglassed vision.

     The difference after the insertion of new lenses in my eyes (rather than in front of them) has been remarkable and generally I do not need glasses at all.  When I am reading there are times when my eyes are tired and I do feel the strain, but I usually can’t be bothered to find my so-called part-time reading glasses and so I adjust to a new normal.

     And that is what you do.  Each new improvement comes with a cost and limitation, and the trick to good health is working with those limitations and remembering What It Was Like Before.

     For me a key memory is walking to a restaurant in Sitges with my cousin.  I had parked in an underground car park ‘within walking distance’ of our destination, eschewing the usual distant parking space on the borders of the central district that we usually used.  

    It took me the best part of a week to recover from the exertion of simply getting there.  That is the memory to which I return if I think that the weather is making my knees a little factious and I am inclined to grumble.  That was then, now I can get by with a great deal more fluency, and I mean that word literally as I frequently bewail my miserable state as I remember that I used to play squash and badminton and jump down groups of stairs!

     All things being equal, the present-day discomfort has been caused by medication.  I have now reached the stage when I take medication to counter the effects of other medication – the Domino Pill Effect.

     Ever since I graduated from injections of Rat Poison (that’s what it is, look it up) to thin my blood to counteract the incipient thrombosis in my legs, to somewhat more sophisticated medication I have had tummy trouble.  The first pills I had lulled me into a false state of security as I suffered no after effects from them for a month or so, and then suddenly, the cumulated after effects came down on me like the proverbial Assyrian on the fold, and reduced me to a gibbering wreck, clutching fruitlessly at my middle.  I then turned to the ignored pills for the pills and gobbled a few in the hopes of immediate relief.  Which was not forthcoming.  But eventually (that comforting word!) calm was restored and I now take my pillsforpills religiously and reverently.

     And even those pills have been changed into a tiny bright red pills that are blister packed and look dangerous!

     It was with some degree of trepidation that I took the first of these Devil Pills last night and I have been waiting for the tremors to start.  So far, so good.

 

It is surely a sign of increasing age that I can type an A4 page of 12 point about the mechanics of a body and regard that as time well spent.  I used to say that it takes fewer than 5 milliseconds for the meeting of two teachers before they start talking about school.   

     Now that I am retired, it takes the same amount of time for my contemporaries and I to start talking medication and clinic visits!  And I, like Coriolanus, flaunt my scars, by wearing shorts above the knee, the better to display the incisions where two full knee replacements have happened.

     But, as the old philosopher said, “Such talk is better than the alternative!”  And since when has silence, either in speech or writing suited me!