June 28th – Isn’t there a line somewhere on the new
Black Sabbath album that goes;
“…I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to die…”?
Trust someone like Ozzy to come up with that one. He’s
paraphrasing a theme played out in countless stories but one that probably only
came to popular notice in the story-throughline of Highlander. Whatever we think of the movie and the accent of Christopher
Lambert in the title role of the film (which rates 7.2 in some reviews but is classed
as ‘clumsily put together and makes
bugger-all sense…’ in others and is dismissed as, ‘…Just Christopher Lambert running around with a very sharp sword’
elsewhere) yet the themes and questions asked and expanded upon throughout Gregory
Widen’s story are, in a populist manner, quite profound.
His ideas about immortality and the sense of mortal loss and
yearning that must inevitably come with it were preceded by JRR Tolkien when he
partnered the immortal Arwen with the mortal Aragorn. That must be the epitome
of purgatory mustn’t it? That we live to relive the passing of loved ones we
meet in each successive generation as they die and we continue with our life,
only to be granted an encore of the demise of yet another true love…an endless,
repetitive encore of heartbreak; Queen sort of touched on this in the soundtrack
to Highlander with their song Who Wants to Live Forever? My guess is
Freddie Mercury would’ve, or at least have been granted a bit longer anyhow…but
that was just a pop song interpretation that revolved around the self and, yes,
although it made a statement yet that statement was all about the me generation
and the supposed immortality of fame, it didn’t step into more challenging
territory; writing to the strait-jacket of a movie or a three-minute pop song can
cripple one, artistically.
Whatever, in the turmoil of grief for a loss, we can often be
caught wondering how the world can possibly carry on when the personage of
so-and-so is no longer living in it. That’s the one thing that comes to mind
with the loss of a really close person; that you walk out of the room where the
news is imparted and life is continuing on, as if nothing had happened, nothing
has changed; which, in the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t.
As one of my characters in my second novel, The Quarry says;
“The graveyards are full of indispensable people.”
Is that a comfort? That those we hold up as icons, beacons to
a life well lived and major contributors to our sum knowledge and understanding
of life, the universe and everything have gone before us and yet still we, the
seemingly less worthy, live on, but that we will be granted the same opportunity
of death as they have had; that this, at least, puts us on an equal footing
with our heroes; ‘for kings and beggars He comes’.
I’m not a Beatles fan, you all know that by now, but one has
to reflect that, on this day in 1997, George Harrison had an operation to
remove a cancerous growth from his neck and he said, a year later;
“I’m not going to die on you yet, folks.”
He was right in one way because it took him a further three
years to succumb to the disease but succumb he did…and who could imagine a
world without The Beatles in it? (I asked myself the same question when Jimi Hendrix
died). As far as The Beatles were concerned, we’d had Mr. Lennon taken out of
it by Mr. Chapman (that’s one) and then the imminent demise of a second (Mr. Harrison,
that’s two) and then suddenly the possibility was (and is) there; the four
members of the Beatles would be, eventually, dead. Would we want them to live
forever? Is that not giving them consecutive life sentences? Or is it enough to
know that we lived at the same time and in the same world as our present-day
heroes, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, et al as their partners and friends even if
it was from the distance of a song?
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