Another obituary

The way things are going, Plashing Vole may as well become the Daily Telegraph obituary page (the best bit of that newspaper, by the way). Today, two days after my beloved grandmother died, my Aunt Margaret passed away of pancreatic cancer. She wasn't particularly old and we'd hoped she was beating this particularly vicious variant: only a few months ago she was well enough to fly out to Hong Kong for her son's wedding.

Margaret was my uncle Patrick's wife. Dumped into a large, boisterous, opinionated and mostly male family, she coped with us through a combination of gin and a very dry sense of humour. Egos were deflated and pomposity pricked with deft ease and wit. She brought common sense and a degree of proportion which were sometimes in short supply: she was a great ally to my grandmother.

Just as with my grandmother, my most prominent memory of Margaret is linked to gin. This time though, I was the consumer. I landed an interview at the university in the town in which she lived, so went over early in the morning planning to look round the place, meet her for a coffee, then go for the interview in the afternoon. She had a different plan. Her plan was to have a long and liquid lunch, and it was probably the first time I'd ever spent time alone with her. She plonked down two large gins and tonic, the first I'd ever tried, and they were soon followed by more clinking glasses until she realised that my interview was about to start. I was way beyond that kind of perception by this stage, which was enormously helpful. For once, I wasn't a nervous, shambling wreck (my Cambridge interview was a disaster: I forgot the plots of my favourite novels and walked into the doorpost on the way out) and had a really enjoyable time at the interview. The interviewer seemed to like me and offered me a place on the spot with a tariff of two E grades, and gave me a copy of my headmaster's reference ('Vole does not deserve a place at any university. He is a troublemaker and is entirely without merit'). All thanks to Margaret and her Bottomless Glasses of Gin.

I am, like Bertie Wooster, blessed with Aunts. They are all funny, fearsomely clever, practical and enormously likeable (and forbearing). Margaret was the first of her generation in the family to go and I shall miss her terribly. What I'd like now is a pause of several decades before I lose another.

Self-defence

The surely-not-long-now death of Thatcher is going to be a horrible time for those of us with a conscience: the right is going to behave as though she were a combination of Boudicca, Mother Teresa and Marie Curie. Carpers (i.e. anyone who points out that her legacy is global despression, inequality and war) will be as welcome as republicans at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

So here's a cheery and tuneful (no, really) song by Mogwai called 'George Square Thatcher Death Party'. I've a playlist of Thatcher death songs which I'll work my way through.

These people are dead inside

I popped home to see my family yesterday. I was all ready to sympathise with them on the death of our cat, Sherpa, which has died at 23 years old.

Until I noticed this on the fridge (the Pope John Paul II fridge magnet is an added bonus).

That's right. My family and their friends were running a sweepstake predicting the cat's death. Given that my mother won, is a doctor and was the only person in the house when it happened,  I'm calling shenanigans.

On death…

I've just posted some uncompromisingly hard words on the passing of Steve Jobs. Some balance is, I think, required.

I've been reading Stephen Greenblatt's new book, The Swerve, which posits that the rediscovery of Epicurean philosophy via Poggio's unearthing of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) kickstarted the humanist Renaissance. Two of the central tenets of Epicureanism are that death is definitely the end, and that if there are gods, they don't concern themselves with us. This is the life we have: its limited span gives it meaning amidst an indifferent universe.

I have a friend who cried when I espoused this view: to her, the lack of a divine purpose or design made her feel infinitesimal and lonely. For me, both liberation and responsibility are enhanced by the feeling that we are responsible for our actions. The fear of God or eternal reward/damnation don't provide a basis for morality, they remove it. If you do good, or avoid doing harm in the hope of avoiding punishment or achieving rewards, you aren't moral, you're a coward.

I think Steve Jobs felt something similar, based on what he says here:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful … that's what matters to me." 

He clearly isn't concerned with morality or philanthropy: his mental landscape is dominated by achievement in financial and technical terms, but mortality - and he faced it bravely - actuated his drive towards triumph. I suspect that like Epicurus and Montaigne, 'legacy' isn't important: the dead cease to be. Being dead isn't a problem - it's dying that we all fear, as Lucretius said on the subject of dying unfulfilled, 'after you expire/Not one of all these things will fill you with desire'. Montaigne, who returned to the subject of death often, had this to say:

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death and still more of my unfinished garden'. 

Hopefully Jobs, having lived ceaselessly driven by ambition, had this moment of realisation to ease his passing.

Why DO I hate C. S. Lewis so much?

Partly it's the hammer blows of unsubtle allegory, but it's basically theological. In the final instalment of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, the children are killed in a train crash when they go back to our world. Sorry if I've just ruined the plot for you. It's all done in a dreamy and calm fashion, and then he goes and summarises their violent deaths thus:

 'The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.'

Susan, of course, isn't with them - as an adolescent female, she's become interested in lipsticks and tights and is therefore persona non grata in heaven. But we'll leave aside Lewis's misogyny and skip straight to the anti-humanism. By characterising life on earth as 'school' - the boring version - and as a training period before the important and fun bit, Lewis completely rejects the idea that life on earth has any meaning at all. It's just the waiting room. 


That makes me very angry. I'm with the radical atheists on this one. Life is exciting and meaningful and important precisely because we are little more than a brief blip of consciousness between eternal nothingness. We shouldn't live as though what we do will get us into heaven - it leads to a life of caution, oppression and calculation. Whereas if you're keenly aware that we've got until tomorrow, or next year, or at best a few decades, then everything we do is invested with huge significance. 


Of course, this is rather idealistic. If I really lived like this, there'd be less blogging, less TV, less idly staring out of the window and more grand romances, bungee jumps, political assassinations and coups d'état in my live. As it is, I largely wasted my twenties and my thirties (half-over now) are sliding by in a welter of Green Lantern t-shirts and arguments about Stoke City's back four: interesting yes, but not things I'll look back on as major achievement when faced with the blackness on my deathbed. 


Lewis's disgusting formulation is a classically Christian approach: heaven as a disciplinary measure designed to make you behave. It's deeply conservative too: slaves were always told that they'd get their rewards in heaven if they behaved while on earth - socialists say get your rewards now, because there ain't no heaven. John Stuart Mill called the afterlife 'a more cunning sort of police' (in 'The Utility of Religion') and suggested we all pursue progressive activities while alive, achieving immortality 'in the life of those who are to follow them'. 


To Kafka, the paradox of the human condition was that we thought we'd been expelled from one Paradise and looked forward to entering another (if we were lucky), when in fact 'we are currently there, whether we know it or not' (one of the Zürau Aphorisms). 


Let's give the last words to Pliny:

All men are in the same state from their last day forward as they were before their first day, and neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth. But wishful thinking prolongs itself into the future and falsely invents for itself a life that continues beyond death, sometimes by giving the soul immortality or a change of shape, sometimes by according feeling to those below, worshipping spirits and deifying one who has already ceased to even a man.These imaginings are characteristic of childish gibberish and of mortal men greedy of everlasting life.  (Pliny, Natural History, p. 103) 

How many deaths at your hands?

Quite a lot, I suspect - most of us have played computer games at some point, and we as a culture seem to find mass killing entertaining. The last game I played a lot was Civilization II. I tried to avoid war, but quite often found my population annihilated in nuclear holocausts (the game is rigged against peaceful, socialist economics). Perhaps the attraction is the safety-valve principle or it's a throwback to fighting off rival tribes and sabre-toothed tigers (we sure showed them).

On this day…

Shakespeare was allegedly born today, and died on this date. So did several other of my favourite authors: Michael Moore the rabblerouser, Paul McAuley, the speculative fiction writer (it's what we academics call science fiction to defend ourselves against accusations of geekiness), talented paedophile Vladimir Nabokov. 


Joining Shakespeare in their graves on this date were Cervantes, Jules Verne and Wordsworth. 


Here's Sonnet 71 by Shakespeare.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it; for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.

But let your love even with my life decay,

Lest the wise world should look into your moan

And mock you with me after I am gone.

Anniversary

My paternal grandfather died 8 years ago today, after a long and varied life. He never lived with my immediate family, unlike my maternal grandparents, so we didn't see him more than a few times a year, but he was a big presence.

He was, in my memory, a great big, loud character with a booming, thick Irish accent and a limited repertoire of sayings which got funnier with volume and repetition. I associate him with fat cigars, Catholicism, the Columba club, good suits, golf clubs, crystal tumblers of Irish whiskey or gin and tonic, appalling driving and a certainty that he was the centre of his family's world, despite having a 'traditional' (i.e. distant) parental role in their lives - or so it seemed to me, though such perceptions are utterly subjective. I've heard a couple of fairly shocking quotations which, even said in jest, strike me as hurtful - but I guess the nature of love is the capability to hold contradictory views of the same person.

I got to know him a little better in my late teens - I tried my first cigar with him, and would accompany him to the Columba (a very depressing drinking establishment for Catholic men convinced that the world was now rubbish) where I'd sip Guinness as he downed a foul mix of lager and bitter ('two-stroke': despite being a doctor he claimed it was low calorie, that smoking was harmless, that he was in tiptop health and hat rather than him going deaf, the world was conspiring to whisper in his presence) and bemoaned the state of the country, interspersed with familiar jokes and routines which I enjoyed hugely. I always hoped I'd downed enough Guinness to counteract the justifiable terror of being a passenger in his car, until I realised that the human stomach couldn't hold that amount of Dutch courage without bursting.

His death was a surprise, despite my awareness that he was getting on and not in the best of health. I didn't see him often and I'd been away for a while, so hadn't witnessed illness, participated in hospital visits or observed the inevitable decline I'd experienced with my mother's father, who was ill on and off for my whole life, and with whom I spent far more time. Instead, what I saw was a redoubtable, practical family effort: a large, dignified funeral (which included the beautiful Irish hymn Ag Criost an Siol* which I'll have at my funeral to console the Catholic family after they've had to endure The Red Flag and the Internationale) with mourners from across the diaspora, some determined drinking and the quiet sadness which passes for emotion in Irish families mixed with, of course, a lot of laughter. No doubt tears flowed, but not in public. As the oldest of the grandchildren in my early twenties, I shuttled between the conversations of the next generation up and the younger cousins, most of whom I didn't know very well - Mary in particular, who would have been about 7, devoted herself to making sure the Cousin Vole was never without a gin and tonic. We've been friends ever since.

Did I miss him? I did, though not in obvious ways. Birthday cards didn't stop, because he'd always left that kind of thing to my grandmother, but the familiar patterns of family visits altered and there was, for a while, an emptiness about the place and, despite his overwhelming personality giving my grandmother little breathing space, she naturally took a while to adjust to a life without him. Gradually, she expanded to fill the spiritual space he'd occupied and we became even closer.

*Amusingly, this video of Father Ted and Co The Priests singing the hymn is accompanied by adverts for meeting single women - even YouTube understands what went wrong in the Irish church.

Celebrity Death list

Slim pickings this holiday: there are usually a few notable exits during Christmas. For the first time, I'm hoping Thatcher doesn't die, as the Thatcher Party CD isn't quite ready yet. I was hoping Bruce Forsyth would be summoned Higher. Or preferably Lower (sorry, non-UK people, it's a light entertainment joke).

One death did sadden me - David Taylor, one of those unobtrusive, principled, hardworking MPs of whom you've never heard because he didn't fiddle his expenses or reach ministerial office (in his case, because he was a socialist in the Labour Party).

Ask not for whom the bell tolls

It's also been an emotional week or so in many ways, outside the daily grind of institutional problems. My boss's father died, as did the mother of a close friend, and in such situations, empathy naturally leads to consideration of mortality and its effect on those left behind. With death in mind, it's odd noticing how often it appears in daily existence - in texts discussed in class, on TV or in games.

As a student, I had little experience of losing loved ones (my grandfathers are both dead, but that's it), and literary texts on the subject were little more than admirable exercises in style. I've not experienced much more myself, but as friends have suffered losses (Cynical Ben's father died not long ago, too young, and another friend's husband committed suicide recently), my responses to the attempts of creative writers to express emotion becomes more visceral and emotional, as my Poetry students may have noticed when we read Silkin's poem on the death of his young son.

There are no words for emotions, a poet once said - but we keep trying. The more we experience, the harder it is to find them: words are often completely inadequate to the situation.

More happily, I got round to writing to my only surviving school teacher (well, the only one I'd  swerve to avoid), via his last known workplace. This morning, I received a witty, erudite and friendly letter from him, full of a decade's upheaval which has ended in happiness and comfort - few things are better for the spirits than a relationship refounded, as I've found out a few times in the recent past.

Rejoice, rejoice

I believe that anyone who doesn't hold a grudge is simply lazy. So welcome to IsThatcherDeadYet.com - I've got music, beer and food ready for the street parties which will spontaneously break out all over the country.

A Good Christian Gentleman

Play this, and wonder why secularism is a growing force! First noted on crooksandliars.com

Bow your heads

Morning. Natural Blues's grandfather has died: pop over there and sympathise in the way only caring atheists can. Shockingly, the news came via her sister's Facebook update - isn't that horrifying?

Just a little longer

I'm not a vindictive man. Well, I'm not usually a vindictive man. OK, sometimes I can be non-vindictive. Now is not one of those times. I just noticed that Margaret Thatcher has broken an arm. That's what happens when a woman in her eighties greets the BNP's victory with the traditional stiff-armed salute.

Before you all start whinging about how cruel it is to take pleasure in the pain of an old woman, I should point out that she is the most damaging, actually evil individual every to take control of this country. I have mixed views on Oliver Cromwell even though he massacred thousands of Irishmen in cold blood. I don't have the slightest tinge of sympathy for Thatcher. Brought up to despise anyone poor, foreign, or who saw the world differently, she allowed her personal prejudices to develop into an ideology which simultaneously yearned for the past while encouraging her friends to make money by making the world worse - culturally, educationally, enviromentally, politically. She supported Apartheid South Africa, despised the working classes, took tea with Pinochet and never met a fascist or hereditary despot she didn't like. She literally denied the existence of community ('there are individual men and women, and there are families') and did her best to destroy the organic communities which grew out of stable employment.

Her lessons that greed, selfishness, wealth, consumption and individualism are the only standards by which success should be judged is at the root of our atrophied education system, our stunted NHS, our poor public services, our low-tax, low-pay economy, our awful railways and clogged roads: Blair and Brown are her spawn, the reason why there's no space in the current political system to discuss collective effort for collective gain.

I haven't the space and time to cover her crimes against humanity - but I do think that any minor bit of pain and suffering is nothing compared with what she's done to us. When she dies, I'm holding a massive party. Every year, I'll visit her grave to make sure she's still dead, and water the wreaths with poison.

Somebody stop me

I just wanted to check a title online and ended up ordering 2 biographies of Jane Austen and a children's novel about the Green Man, reading and death (Season of Secrets) because it sounded interesting (and only two things are certain in my life - reading and death).