Was I disappointed by the festival of dying last weekend at the Royal Festival Hospital in London? Yes. It was hardly a danse macabre. Not a day of the dead. Not a carnival at all by any true meaning of the word: no firecrackers to make you jump out of your skin, no tequila to get those crazy voices going talking into your ears, no long knives slung from thick leather belts ready to glint in the moonlight, no fingers on triggers ready to loose off bullets in any direction.
Nothing under the volcano. No, Malcolm Lowry would not have recognised it. It was pastiche. Pretend. Or simulation. Therapeutic perhaps? Possibly, if you have the twenty pound note to buy in to the events, and what you are searching for is that elusive ticket to a feel good factor round about the time and place of your personal demise.
A good death? No, it was not the sustaining community I had in mind at all. I didn’t feel that I belonged. It is odd that, given I am over sixty now, older, and what you would call a good candidate for what was on offer. Still I observed that most of the people there discussing death were younger than me by 20 years. Is it simply that I am joining (as Frederic Jameson has put it), ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”’?
Too bloody right!
Time for another quote. We are back in the company of Andrzej Stasiuk, ‘On the Road to Babadag’ (Eng tr 2011) this time, from a piece he has called “A Description of a Journey from East Hungary to Ukraine” (P53-54). Andrzej is stopped in the small town of Gȍnc in a land whose language he cannot speak (nobody from elsewhere, but nobody, can speak Hungarian), hitch-hiking and taking buses and trains to the east with an unnamed companion (he always talks of “we”), and looking out on Main Street for something more interesting than the local museum to stir him while he waits for the next connection:
‘… I went into a liquor store, because it was August 18, the hundred–and-sixty-ninth anniversary of the birth of Franz Josef, and I was determined to celebrate it. When I was again seated on the low wall before the store, there appeared before me a bearded man in a herringbone coat and nothing under it. Without a word he produced an enamel mug and lifted it towards me. How could I refuse him, on this day, the birthday of His Highness? Here I was, travelling through his country, and he granted audiences even to simple peasants and made no distinction between Serb and Slovak, between Pole and Romanian. So I took out the flask of pear brandy I had just purchased and shared it with my fellow man. He drank in silence and pointed at my pack of Kossuths. I gave him a cigarette. Some citizens came by and in the international language of gestures gave me to understand that I was dealing with a lunatic. I reflected that in the empire lunatics too had their place, and I refilled the mug. We drank to the health of Franz Josef. I told my new friend that I had always been partial to sovereigns and caesars, that I particularly missed them in these threadbare times, because democracy cannot satisfy the thirst for the mythic, and so feel people feel abandoned. My friend nodded emphatically and held out his mug. I poured and told him that the idea of democracy contains a fundamental contradiction, because true power cannot, by its nature, be immanent; it would in that case resemble the most ordinary anarchy, though without all the entertainments and pleasures of anarchy. Power must come from without; only then can we embrace it and revolt against it. “Igen,” said my new friend, nodding. A small crowd had gathered around us and was listening to the discussion. People also nodded and said, “Igen, igen.” Then my friend proposed that we arm-wrestle. He won twice; I won twice. The crowd kibitzed and cheered. When it was all over, men came up to me, clapped me on the back, and said, “Franz Josef, Franz Josef.”
‘South of Gȍnc, the plain began.’