 So, a sprint into foolishness... Having just finished George Saunders' wonderful new book (A Swim In a Pond In The Rain) on reading and writing, in which he repeatedly extols the importance of spending time with, and on, the re-write; and, being a long time admirer of Donald Hall's poignant late essays (Essays After Eighty & Carnival Of Losses) where he reveals that he sometimes changes a word between sixty and three hundred times, I am ignoring their advice: Letting something sail into the world because of the wind behind it, rather than a scrupulous and methodical check on whether it is a sea worthy vessel. Late last night, as an unexpected snowfall entered its final melting, I sat reading Luke Mogelson's troubling and telling essay The Storm (Among the Insurrectionists) in this week's New Yorker. This followed: In Him We Trust God must be sleeping or have died a while back, 'otherwise, ' she said 'he would have smite those motherfuckers' whose twisted mouths conspire to set fire to truth with their firsting dragon breath, their tattooed hands hurling history onto the pyre of stories that cause indigestion or inconvenience a roadblock on the pursuit to happiness "Stop the steal, beat the seal, to death we don’t like the colour of his pelt and how the hell did he sign the ballot paper anyway Af- af- af- af- af- af- after this we are the flippers. Stop the clocks, the count this is the end of the world as we know it" Lady Justice has her blindfold ripped from her face, her lips painted blue so that she can sing a proud boy’s anthem extinguished dreams have fallen from the mountain and there he is, god, sliding gleefully down its side having abandoned his angels to march with them Groyper, they call, slapping his stooped back and his big old white feet goose along with them to whose house? "Our House!" The fountain has poured its black liquid for so long that words are forming in its raging foam, parasite, parasitism gurgles and spills over its stoney lip, staining their green and pleasant land "Look what it’s done to our lawn, ma" Somewhere on the floor of a deserted building a shape with coyote fur, buffalo horns and the body of a man his wounded animal wrath seethes through megaphone “I will be he’rd. We will be he’rd.” He turns his woolly head in thanks to their heavenly father, slumped against a lectern slack jawed, breath wheezing from gaping mouth and a yellow plastic shard embedded in his cheek “We need more firepower” he barks © Simon Parker
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 The Elephant in the Room (Simon Parker)  What we talk about when we talk about death... Death usually ushers us out of the world but with me he started early, accompanying me into it. He will, of course, be beckoning me at the end, pulling me slowly and painfully, or hurling me into darkness, but he is so familiar that I won’t be scrabbling to get away. I was born dead, unable to breathe, and put on a ventilator. Eight and half minutes later, medical intervention had given my lungs enough of a rehearsal that I was able to start taking on the job myself. I have always, sometimes jokingly, sometimes as explanation, offered this episode as the beginning that led me to become death’s familiar. I have always thought about death, read about it, pictured my own dying, and I continue to read and write about how we die, and what it might mean for living. The daily death toll that has dominated the media landscape has thrown this shadowy figure centre stage, a blazing spotlight revealing what was always there but carefully hidden away. The gruesome fascination with counting how many have died in tragedies around the world often seals away, like a trees protective healing after a leaf has dropped, any intimate letting in of death. Covid 19 with its rapacious scything and its blazoning across the news has broken the seal. The leaves of trees have suffered heat stress. As we moved through the twentieth century and set out into the 21st, death has been shepherded away from the public eye. As Atul Gawande notes, in his beautifully humane book, Being Mortal, in the 1940s over eighty percent of people died at home, by the 1980s just seventeen percent did. Coronavirus may not have returned dying to the domestic setting, but it has brought death’s shadow to all of our doors. In a Position Paper published in The Lancet , Psychiatry, one of the authors, Prof Rory O’Connor, writes, ”Increased social isolation, loneliness, health anxiety, stress and an economic downturn are a perfect storm to harm people's mental health and wellbeing,”. This distressing and damaging consequence has wreaked havoc on people’s lives and torn at the already frayed seams of the mental health infrastructure. What hasn’t been included in the assessment though, is the clarion call of mortality. How the brazen, public appearance of death, has drawn our gaze. We live in sanitised times. We deny death’s dominion. But as political philosopher John Gray argues in Straw Dogs, his corruscating critique of American styled liberalism, despite the veneer and polish of civilisation we are still “animals” over which death will always have dominion. What we have become masters of, especially with the elevating of the individual as product, is tidying death away. With the current pandemic the mess keeps spilling back out. Scrabbling towards the end (Simon Parker) Back in 2015, as my father lay on his death bed at my sister’s home, I tried to talk to him about dying. I hoped that by talking he may feel less alone, that by sharing some of the fears and anxieties, the thoughts and feelings circling in his head, he would go gently into “the dying of the light”. He, as he had always done in my lifetime, wouldn’t communicate and the subject was only approached through humour. Humour had protected him in life, and it would serve him in death. What I felt, more about his life than his death, was that that humour, an understandable reflex against the pain of the past, stopped him living. Mark Twain argued that The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. The last thing my father said was a joke. He pretended that the nurse who was putting a needle into his arm for morphine had hurt him. Something along the lines of, It’s not enough that I’m dying, you want to beat me up as well. When the undertakers arrived to take his body away, they slid the pillow from beneath his head which stayed exactly where it was. I marvelled at this empty space, this vacuum between his neck and head and the mattress. He was gone. Death, its rigour, held this gravity defying place. There was nothing that we had said to each other to fill it. Reading and writing are a way of life, not, as some would argue, a retreat from it. I wrote about my father’s dying, and I spent the months after reading books about death and how we approach our end. This wasn’t running away from the grief but a way of wandering through it. I read, I cried, I thought, I questioned. I wrote a play, Aching Parts, about how we die. Most days I think about death, about dying, not in a morose and fearful way but instinctively. Now, death is everywhere and everyone is thinking about it. Or are they? There is a scramble to return to things as they were. For schools to reopen, for people to return to work, to the gym, for people to escape the isolation and strangeness that the pandemic has brought, for death to be tidied away once again. This feels like a missed opportunity. Economic worry, which carries education in its wake, is fuelling ideas about the future. With death having come so close to all of us, with our mortality so baldly exposed, is this what we want for the one short life we live. Death awaits so why don’t we start living as we really want to. Aren’t these the conversations, the desires, that should be driving us beyond an unchanged return. Pushing us to the life worth living, its energy increased by an acceptance of the inescapable end. Death should be kept from its hiding place. The tireless and brilliant Maria Popova has shown how other countries sensitively place death centre stage in children’s books, starting the conversation early, with death a protagonist in many wonderful tales. These stories characterise, and normalise, death for young children, and, I believe, make their lives much richer for it. Two of the books that Popova introduced me to, I use when teaching both adults and children, and often, in the many conversations I have about death. In Wolf Erlbruck’s Duck, Death and Tulip and Glenn Ringtved’s and illustrator Charlotte Pardi’s, Cry Heart But Never Break, there is an uplifting tenderness and truth about how it all ends. Erlbruck’s Duck, who has failed to noticed that Death has been following her all of her life, suddenly realises he is there. They spend time together, becoming friends. Duck suggests they go to the pond but the water proves too cold for Death, and Duck has to keep him warm throughout the night, her neck and wing laying across his sleeping body. Death is moved as nobody had ever offered such intimacies. This heartbreaking moment of communion and togetherness cannot prevent Death from doing his job. Ringtved and Pardi, delicately tread the same path. Death has come to a house to collect an elderly woman who is sick. So that he doesn’t frighten her grandchildren he leaves his scythe outside, resting it gently next to the front door. The children, to prevent Death going upstairs to their grandmother, keep pouring him tea and telling him stories. When Death can take no more tea, he tells these anxious children a story of his own, a story that strikes the same bell in Keats’ “temple of Delight” where “Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine”. After listening, the children relent, accepting that you cannot have life without death. They let their grandmother go. Inevitably, we must follow out grandmothers and grandfathers, our fathers and mothers, but don’t we want to follow them knowing we have lived a life without fear. Until death is part of the conversation that may never happen.  Erlbruck’s Duck and Death
 The Pep Guardiola of Improvisation Writing a play in seven days God, the bastard, had a day off. No such luck for a scribbler As it has for many, the lockdown day has been punctuated with a daily walk: sometimes along the Thames, sometimes through Chiswick House Grounds, sometimes towards the vacant city; sometimes alone, and sometimes with one or more members of our family. Somedays, my body has walked carrying a head weighted with worry, things were seen but not looked at. Other days, what was witnessed made the walk, or, in a few instances, made the day, unforgettable. Walking may be a form of exercise, but, it is also a mode of discovery. The eyes take in things, stringing them together to make a narrative, or searching through them to explore memories that lay dormant. Also, the pace and the rhythm can throw up unexpected, new, or bizarre thoughts. My natural pace for walking, described by a friend of mine - a keen walker and cyclist - as only just moving, is slow, reflective. On one particular walk, Abraham and I chose Chiswick House. Once there, we decided to search out the old bowling green, a spot - despite being freighted with memories - neither of us had visited for many years. When Abraham was a small boy, we held his birthday parties here. Him being a summer born child, we were usually accompanied by good weather for the games, picnic, and treasure hunts that were staged. This particular morning, the sun was shining and the day, still carrying the last traces of a cool night’s edge ,was beginning to warm. The light was beautiful, as it is so often in these grounds: dappled, mottled light beams, shadow, and rich openings of morning sunshine. Stepping from a thicket into this familiar place, we were both struck by the way that memory held it in different proportions. It seemed to have shrunk. We wandered around the sheltered space, each studying the shape of it, the scraggy grass, the huge trees; not talking but listening for echoes from the past. Time passed, and turning to each other, we both spoke the same thought: What a great natural spot for a piece of post-Covid theatre. Reflection was jettisoned by our animated excitement and we began to chuck around ideas: what story, what characters, how spectators would interact with the piece etc. By the time we returned home, we had two characters, a broad outline of their histories, and what was the starting point of the play. We then made a decision that made the writing of the play so much easier than it normally is, and, that resulted in a first draft being finished within a week.  There's something out there... We decided to return to this space for few hours each day, to try on our characters and improvise. Neither of us had made a play in this way before. There was the thrill of novelty, but also the fear of exposure, disaster and sterility. We decided we would start at 9am the next morning, a time that the grounds would be relatively quiet, mostly dog walkers, runners and insomniacs. We cycled there, lay a phone on a stump, pressed record and began. Abraham had expressed his worry about being a ‘good’ improviser but fifty minutes passed before, stumbling so drastically, we searched out the time. Keith Johnston, writer of the seminal books Improv and Improv for Storytellers , the Pep Guardiola of improvisation, implored that an improviser should be average, normal, and steer well clear of trying your best. I’m not sure that Pep, leaning close to Raheem, whispers in his ear, Be normal, (not for £300,000 a week) but there is some truth in it . Consciously trying your best is doomed to failure, and we live in a culture that doesn’t cultivate failure. Failure is where we learn most, and trying too hard tenses you up. Abraham and I had reassured each other that what we did, the words spoken, were tentative, free from censure, and not worth worrying about. Of course, reassurance only goes so far. We were both nervous, worrying about whether what we were doing was any ‘good’ and, most self-consciously, whether we were just recycling the last play we made together. There were also the unexpected interruptions of working in a public place: dogs bounding through, people bellowing on mobile phones, the joyful singing and laughter of a nursery group, the panting joggers, and people who stopped and watched as we handed each other imaginary things. Most notably, there was the grey Weimeraner that padded through the space, sniffed at the phone recording us, cocked his leg, and narrowly missed arching his piss all over it. We returned at the same time each day, four in total, and by the end of it we had almost four hours of dialogue. The story we had decided upon was a coming together of a father and his estranged son. The son, despairing at the damage done by his father’s dependence on alcohol, had moved away, physically, successfully, and emotionally, well that was the work in progress. Each session had begun differently: the first day, the father arrived first, waiting, expectant; the second, the son arrived first, apprehensive and defended; the third day we had them arrive together from opposite directions, no time to display and conquer their anxieties; the final day, we started in medias res, resentments fuelled, misunderstandings woven and hope dying. Our next task was to wade through the thousands of words that had poured out of us and see what was worth keeping. What ideas, backstories had been introduced, that were worth further exploration? Were there any sequences of dialogue that, with a bit of snipping and shaping, we could transcribe into a script? We sat at either ends of our dining table, a shared document open, and listened. We discussed and made notes on what we cherished, laughed at what was odd and insignificant, and began typing: You’re late Mostly, in writing the script, we would be sat opposite each other, working from the beginning, writing our character’s next line, reading the response and typing. Occasionally, one of us would get up to make coffee, grab something to eat, or tend to a paid-work related chore; the other would plough on, taking on the lines of both characters. At times, we passed the baton. Demands from beyond the page, would mean that I or Abraham had to go out for a few hours, or an afternoon. In the other’s absence we would continue writing until the other returned. The script would be read, and either, the joint writing would be resumed, or the returnee would write the next couple of pages alone. We weren’t as quick as the imaginary bloke upstairs. We didn’t rest on the seventh day. Rome wasn’t built in one etc. We rose early and finished late, but we finished a script seven days after we had first stepped onto the bowling green. It won’t be seen by as many people that traipse through the Pantheon in a couple of hours, it may not be seen by anyone at all, but we had a lot of fun and it was a real collaboration. The second draft is waiting… |