J died this year. Or was it last year?
J told me he was not concerned about people liking him.
I envied him this.
For how many times in my life have I thought about someone:
I hate him! I hate him!
…Why doesn’t he like me?
I put on an old mix CD J made for me, full of grating atonal experimental stuff that would bug most people but that he - we - loved.
J was obsessed with physical media. He said that it was forever. That they couldn’t take away anything from him that he could actually physically touch - unlike streaming which would one day, poof, disappear, just you wait and see. Plus, you’ve got to hear the fidelity of vinyl, man…
I wonder if being forced to move his method of mixtaping for me killed him as I know he preferred the flawed analogue of cassette tapes to the soulless 1s and 0s of CDs. But I no longer owned a tape player so he was forced into making me CDs if he wanted me to listen.
I guess this compromise was his way of making a human connection.
I sometimes think of reality - whatever it is our existence is made of - as being a flat pristine-white bedsheet. We are all just temporary bunchings up of this bedsheet, and when we die these bedsheet bunching-ups are flattened down again. Yes, for a while, we are little sticking-up clumps of energy and then, all of a sudden, we die and whatever we were goes back to being an undifferentiated part of bedsheet. Just like we were never there.
J is gone. His part of the universal bedsheet is now flat, never to be bunched up in precisely the same way again.
I know (that is, I am aware of the fact) that there is no life without death. One defines the other. The yin and yang of existence.
What is life without an end? What is the sound of one hand clapping?
J had a world view. It was inconsistent and blinkered, but a world view, nonetheless.
He once told me that the Navajo believe a baby only becomes a fully-fledged human being when it laughs for the first time. That they have a whole ceremony for it and everything.
I don’t know whether this is true - the Navajo believing this, not that we become human when we first laugh (although I’m not sure about that either) – but J said it with enough conviction that I knew it was important to him that I believe it. Or at least that I believe that he believed it.
So I did.
Anyway, J told me he did not believe we became human when we first laughed.
In fact, it was quite the opposite.
My second biggest fear is dying.
It preoccupies my every moment that is not filled with life’s other little frustrations.
I think to myself:
Life is awful, I hate it, I hate it.
…My God, what if it were to end?
J told me he was desperately trying to become unhuman.
He said he was done with the human race.
My number one biggest fear, the only thing that terrifies me more than dying, is the thought of living forever.
Can you even imagine it?
I don’t want to.
Perhaps dying is a gift after all.
In J’s personal cosmology, we were born into the world not once but three times.
The first is when we are conceived.
The second is when we first encounter the world outside of our mothers.
The third is when we first feel shame.
J had dictated precisely what the running order of his funeral was to be. He was particularly meticulous in his choice of music, which was the product of many years of deliberation. It was to be full of obscure, avant-garde pieces he felt to be the highest achievement of a species he wanted no part of.
The ceremony was to begin in complete silence (a nod to John Cage) followed by all 13 minutes and ten seconds of Steve Reich’s Come Out before segueing into Frownland by Captain Beefheart and so on.
These pieces meant everything to him.
And they would mean nothing to the small smattering of family and acquaintances that were gathered at his funeral.
J’s first birth is pretty straight forward.
There is nothing at all human about the wiggling sperm and the placid egg. They are mere cells with blueprints hidden inside them. But put them together and then the magic happens! God comes in, leans over, touches them with electricity and - POW – biology’s own version of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
Adam is created.
J didn’t realise - wasn’t capable of realising - that funerals weren’t meant for the dearly departed, not really.
Funerals are for the survivors.
The purpose of his funeral was to give an opportunity for his mourners to mourn him not for him to be mourned.
What I’m trying to say is: this wasn’t his opportunity to make the ultimate mixtape.
Or to put it another way: no one gave a shit about his taste in avant-garde music.
J believed that during our second birth - that is our actual, regular, physical birth - we are cruelly ripped from the safety and comfort of our mothers’ wombs. Before this birth all our needs are met and we do not need to bother our pretty little baby heads about anything.
Thus, our natural reaction to being thrust from our embryonic Eden into the cold, harsh world is to cry out in pain. We are now expected to breathe and feed ourselves, it’s all on us. So we wail our newly-functional little lungs off at the sheer unfairness of it all!
He did not blame the newly “born” babies for this self-pity.
In fact, he applauded them.
J’s funeral was in a soulless little room containing rows of uncomfortable chairs and vaguely glum mourners. I sat in the preplanned silence waiting for his programme to begin and thought of the many, many hours we spent listening to music in his small, unspeakably dingy flat. And slowly, a sense of unease grew in me.
J would not be here to listen these pieces. He had not understood that on the day of his funeral he would not actually be there to force a room to ‘enjoy’ the genius of both cuts of Ascension by John Coltrane (and, of course, his genius for choosing them). His body might have been there in the room, hidden from our easily offendable eyes by a plain coffin, but he was gone.
The music he had prepared would have no resonance for the mourners. It would not help them mourn him. They just needed to be reminded J was into weird music for 30 seconds and then move on to some platitudes to help them grieve.
He wasn’t converting anyone to the Church of Experimental Music today.
J said our third birth was the most important to humanity as a species and was the saddest birth of them all. It was, in fact, a tragedy.
He said that when we first feel shame, we are all of a sudden no longer sad and mad at the world (which had been our default setting up until then) we are now sad and mad at ourselves. Disappointed in our very own existence.
That is to say, instead of screaming out at the world for failing us so badly, we now scream into ourselves for failing the world. We are at last fully human when we feel it is us who should be better rather than, well, everything else.
In that airless, literally funereal room, I considered what J had planned from beyond the grave and… I just couldn’t do it. I knew what would come next: Simpsons quotes, clips from David Lynch movies, readings from arcane science fiction novels from the 1930s.
Looking round at the blank faces of those gathered in the funeral parlour, I was dying inside.
J constantly told me that he was trying to get back to his second birth. He fully rejected the third. Like a record caught in a groove, he would repeat,
“It’s not me who’s failed the world! The world has failed me! And I’m furious that it’s tried to trick me into believing anything else!”
When Come Out began, instead of feeling the usual hypnotic lull of its broken language, the tension inside me grew. The seconds ticked by excruciatingly slowly. Each stuttered come became more grating than the one before.
All I could think of was the discomfort, confusion and irritation this “music” was causing to those gathered there. J was embarrassing himself from beyond the grave.
J had let more than enough of that bruise blood out. He had shown them plenty.
It was time to put an end to it.
I moved to the back of the room and found the laptop that was discretely hidden from the mourners’ view. Obviously, it had been too much for the funeral parlour to organise a CD - let alone record - player as per his wishes. This fact alone would have been insult enough. And here I was, about to add one final indignity to his afterlife.
I did what I had to do.
I typed 3 Little Birds into Spotify.
I tried not to make the transition between tracks too abrupt, lowering and raising the volume to fade slowly from one to the next.
I looked from person to person.
Their faces were still confused, but this, this they understood more.
Togetherness. Oneness. Humanity.
Let’s get together and feel alright.
God, I hated that song.
I don’t know what I had planned to do after that.
In a perfect world, I would have had a quiet word into the officiator’s ear and we would have skipped over the more esoteric stuff in J’s programme. I probably would have told her to keep in a singular Simpsons quote and perhaps we could sing Abide With Me at the end?
Maybe I did do that. I don’t know.
My only memory after my betrayal is standing outside the funeral parlour and wondering why my face was so wet.
When I die, I hope that people say,
“He tried.
That was a good clump of energy right there.
We don’t hate him.
Not even a little bit.”
I don’t think J ever managed to get back to his second birth. He had too much physical media in this world to be truly apart from it. He was a fully-fledged member of the human race whether he liked it or not (he did not).
But now he is dead and that’s as unborn as you can get. So perhaps on his journey from being to nothingness he did pass through to his second birth again.
Who knows?
I once read that once we left the sea, we took the sea with us, in our blood. That, in a sense, we have never really left the primordial ocean.
So now, here we are, human shaped bottles full of sea water sloshing around inside us, worrying about everything.
Worrying about when the worrying stops.
Come Out comes on the mix tape and I let it play.
J was a good clump of energy.
Good enough for me.
Fin.