Gig - Simon Armitage - describing Morrissey

I have never been a Morrissey fan, but I respect people who are. I like the songs that everyone likes - This Charming Man - for example. I have never sought out more songs until last year when after listing to an edition of Desert Island Discs and listening to someone - I forget who - try to describe how wonderful he found Morrissey, I decided to give it a go. And I gave it a couple of listens and I liked it a bit, i.e. not much.

Now I am reading "Gig" by Simon Armitage, the poet. I loved Simon Armitage's book about the North. I loved the sly humour. The funny thing is, when we lived in Yorkshire I went to a Simon Armitage reading and I thought it the dullest evening I had ever had. I couldn't connect to any of his poems. I felt rather sorry for my children because his poems were on their English exam syllabus. The person who wrote the prose seemed entirely different -

Like Stuart Maconie, who has some sort of weird emotional connection with Morrissey, Simon Armitage is absolutely fascinated by him.  He does him the great service of trying to describe the emotion of what he can see - the meaning of M's stomach for example ("real, proud, serious") M. does have a fantastic voice and (I'm told) a great stage presence. It seems, from what Simon (sorry mate I am going to call you Simon) writes, that Morrissey projects a seriousness that they crave. Apart from Morrissey's sad rhetoric, people find this release into emotion only at football matches, I suppose, or in fights. In the past, men were more emotionally outspoken than women. Think of Beethoven, all those crashes and bangs, like a man losing his temper and slamming a good few doors, and the melodic passages like a man basking in the sunshine of God's approval. Women, at some point, claimed the ability to voice emotion but I sometimes wonder. When they create art it isn't emotion, it's often about sex, as though their ability to desire and be desired, or their ability to climax and produce a climax in another person, were all there was to them. And of course, that can't be true. I don't know about women who are creating art with thoughts life and death - but there must be some. This is my pre-occupation at the moment - it turned out to be the summary of the talk on films by David Thompson (previous post) and it is the theme of the book of the week, by Robert McCrum, who isn't much older than me. And I find myself glued to the series "Ambulance" which sometimes shows people near death - and even in their last moments. It shows you how marvellous things can be - like the woman giving telephone instructions that save a baby's life, and how a man can face death with equanimity knowing that he has provided for the people he loved.

My friend's husband died suddenly this summer, an acquaintance died of cancer, my parents died last winter. The entire cast of our lives will die even though we don't seem to be perceptibly aging. (See post: We are old, but we boogie)

This is what Morrissey is singing about - a doomed celebration of the fleeting emotions - a longing for salvation in Love always mixed up with the feeling of falling into a lonely grave. "Life has killed me" - that's serious. And all this in songs shorter than 4 minutes. I am trying to understand the music as I write, but I find it very busy music, difficult to like.

Dad was himself

Dad was himself. Even old, he was naturally inclined to hope for good things. Now confused, he cried when he found he couldn't go home. He could never go home again; he couldn't climb the stairs, two flights; how could he have climbed them a few weeks ago, after his last hospital stay? But he had, on his bandaged feet, on his legs that were losing their skin, he had done it through dogged determination. But a week later, was carried back again to hospital.

He and Sue lived two floors us in a flat where everything fitted together like a nest of oddments, collapsed together in a general impression of browns, smelling of cigarette smoke, the papers on the desk never moving, the books on the shelves never moving, just a small area of kitchen still a workspace, just a small current flowing through the still, dark pool of age.

So Mrs T thinks of her father, about to die, and about packing up her mother's flat - all the bedroom first, then on to the bathroom - chuck - chuck - chuck - she would put the toiletries in the sack - but the clothes go to Help the Aged, where they give her a Gift Aid number.

One morning she has a John Lennon song in her head - "I'm only Sleeping" so seductively beautiful -

"But he was depressed" Mrs T thinks. "He didn't want to get up, or think, or make a plan. He could hardly even finish the song - it just repeated itself and lasted only three minutes."

Sleeping too much was a sign of depression, as surely as sleeping too little. And sleep was a foretaste of death, too much sleep a flirtation with death.

Mrs T has wanted to say these things to her father, agonised on the brink:

"Death is but a sleep and a forgetting". "Our little lives are ended with a sleep."

She had not had the opportunity to say these things. And he would have mocked her anyway because he wasn't ready to "sleep". Mrs T had wanted to help, but everybody has to die by themselves and there is nothing to say, in many cases, nothing at all that will help.

Mrs T carried "I'm Only Sleeping" around in her head and its unhappiness hurt her. She found it on YouTube and then went on to other recordings of John Lennon, and there was the cure; it turned out to be - Early Lennon. "It won't be long Yeah! " "This Boy" "I call Your Name". It was a roughness about his voice that did it - a fierceness to his nature - he sounded like a friend to Mrs T.

My mother died

She had Alzheimer's and I suppose she decided it was time. She could no longer read, watch TV or even remember where she was.

She still remembered me and I hope I was a comfort when I stopped trying to make her eat. I wish she had been a properly religious person so we could sing hymns at a funeral - but she wasn't. I wish she had had more friends. All her enjoyments were quite solitary.