The beginning of everything presupposes an ending. That’s life. All things must pass.
I’ve heard it said that once you hit a certain age, say forty, which still for many remains the mid-point of life, the thought of your own death becomes magentically compelling; sometimes, for some, to the exclusion of all else. Previously (in callow, immortal youth) the thought of death, your own death, probably never entered your head; if it ever made it that far it was either ignored or the focus of derision and black humour as a distant, abstract concept, something that happens to other people (like cancer and motorway pile-ups). Post-40 it becomes tangible, specific, muscling into the mainstream of day dreams and casual obsessions, barging through the ineffectual white noise of distraction and dominating like a power-purchasing Premiership club, building an empire at the expense of all others until, in a league of its own, having eliminated all competition, it sits there unmoving, a static entity with nowhere else to go. More and more, you begin to see where it has always been; everywhere.
Ignite, sparkle, extinguish. Written in the DNA of every organism, we suddenly see it in every natural process, every cultural entity, every entertainment. In theatre, from the opening of the prologue, we know the star-crossed lovers will be lying side by side in death; from the moment Macbeth hears his name on the lips of the witches we see his head held aloft on a spear. In concert halls, on the car radio: the tragedy of Puccini’s bohemians, his innocent Butterfly, his tragic vocalist is already present in the launch of those first syllables. From 12 bar Blues to 12 tone symphonies, every opening note, key or no key, must inevitably resolve itself and fade into silence. In the darkened cinema (or worse, on the innocent screen in your own front room): the mundane violence in De Niro’s monologue (‘cleaning the scum off the streets’), as he wipes the cum off the back seat of his cab, already contains the bloody denouement in the body strewn flophouse before the credits. Lynch’s lipstick lesbian porn dissolves into mere fantasy on Mulholland Drive once it becomes clear the entire movie is its own stalled ending.
What then is suggested by the subtle open endings of movies which extend into series? The desperation to cling on to life, inviting the daisy chain of sequels and prequels, each less innocent, less creative, less successful than the last, culminating in parody and ridicule and the soiled franchise, like an old man in an ill fitting toupee (or the dye tricking from the scalp of a deckchaired von Aschenbach fading into oblivion beneath the indifferent Venice sun).
Birth, tension, climax, ending. The more you look, the more you experience, the more the sequence becomes increasingly predictable, so predictable it may seem pointless to venture beyond the beginning, to accept with an innocence the fabricated false promise of an opening when you can see how it will all end. Is it worth beginning books, movies, careers, relationships, lives. What is the driver for these mechanisms in the first place: Hope? Instinct? Human Nature? The struggle of evolution? And, when (at 40) we can see through the illusion of how clearly entropy is the only reality, how everything ever built will age and dissolve, what is left to drive us forward? Immortality of achievement? A hope we might linger in the memory of others like the tall, elegant woman with the lop-sided smile who lives in yours; the woman you loved and lost in your 20s and who will never age, will always retain the beauty of her 27th year, smiling at you in the sadness of your glazed daydreams, until Alzheimer’s takes her away.
Exposition, confrontation, resolution. OK, so where is my climax, you think. Where is the blistering explosion to make sense of all the random, spastic highs and lows, the joy and suffering, sunshine and rain? Where is my resolution? You’ve seen it on screen and stage but in your life you can now see it’s already somewhere way behind, back in the past, if at all (life, unfortunately, rarely follows art or even a Hollywood 3 Act structure) and you are a;ready heading into the deep space of the ending, into what you know all too well has always been there outside the psychedelic dayglow colours of your now popped bubble: oblivion.
Is this fear and emptiness, this ‘mid-life crisis’, merely an expression of our guilt at finding ourselves still here after the best days, the most creative work of our lives has already passed. Perhaps knowing when you’re living through the climax is the key note, and checking out there and then is the key to immortality. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, the holy trinity of 60s recreational drug abuse lived and died in a decade which was itself a kind of climax for the 20th Century. All 27, all at their peak, all (to varying degrees) remembered with a reverence beyond love. Perhaps the world of art and entertainment, its practitioners in touch with their creative persona, has the solution. The 27 Club is seductive and far from exclusive: the statistical spike for musicians who died at 27 is stunning (well beyond 50 and counting); Jones, Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, Cobain, Winehouse are just the more familiar names whose demise was more usually a self-inflicted product of D ‘n A, the lethal (drugs and alcohol) cocktail, although Robert Johnson probably kicked off the trend with his alleged pact with the devil.
Elvis, by contrast, unwittingly mocked by a million impersonators as the Las Vegas caricature, is remembered as a bloated fool dying on the toilet (after 40). Michael Jackson somehow made it to 50, to see his trajectory pass full arc from precocious bright-eyed boy wonder to decaying addicted, bankrupt pedophile (allegedly). These two obviously missed their moment and fate doesn’t offer a second chance.
Homicide or suicide will be just as effective. The Elephant man, for example, did something for his personal reputation by rounding off the journey from sideshow freak to society darling, while also hoisting David Lynch into mainstream cinema and initiating David Bowie on an acting career (of sorts). Although Bowie might be seen as a poster boy for MSC (Musicians Surviving with Cred), has he, or even Dylan, for that matter, produced anything beyond his 30th year to compete with his earlier work? Can you even name any of the albums either produced beyond this watershed? Coming down a level, the surviving members of the Who, after strutting into the public consciousness with the line ‘hope I die before I get old’ have been doomed like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to repeat it through their middle years into pensionable age, while their redeeming album ‘Who Should Know Better’ remains unwritten.
What about literature, which lends itself more easily to longevity? You’d think. Rimbaud, Keats (already at 24 ‘half in love with easeful death’), Shelley, Byron (although surviving to 36) remain immortalised in their frozen youth like the tantalisingly separated lovers on the Grecian urn. Tormented by their unfulfilled potential or checking out at the right time? Required reading in academia 200 years and counting after their death suggests the latter. Would a Keats, returning from Rome having survived consumption, ever have written anything again so moving as Ode to Autumn? Of all these, however, a healthy, still sane Rimbaud must have known exactly what he was up to, managing his own destiny; having changed the face of French symbolism by the end of his teenage years, he simply stopped writing. Could it be there is some future in his ‘derangement of the senses’, enough for him to glimpse his own climax from the bow of his drunken boat and accept his moment?
If only this was the destiny of us all, satisfied with the completion of our achievements, and accepting death for what it is, a natural resolution. What’s the alternative: clinging on to an existence which day by day turns us into Belsen skeletons, stripped of independence, confidence, dignity, huddled over our lingering memories and regrets like Krapp over his last tapes, just waiting for ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’? The raw material for an unwritten Samuel Becket play. Is this any kind of life? Perhaps, instead of living in fear of what we call death, we should embrace it. For PR reasons alone, a well judged death seems to do no harm. After all, how else can life end?
DG 2015
