For all that death
appears on screen more commonly than clichés,
the real thing’s undermentioned.
Here we go…
St L
Life is bad
Death is good.
Life is bad. Death is good.
No, I don’t think repetition’s going to crack it.
After the chemo
comes the waiting
and the - rather oddly timed –
splitting of my thumbs.
S
What nonsense is this diagnosis?
I can feel the life-force
pulsing through me -
or is that it draining away?
I'm a little fed up
with being told I look better
than when I was well. What will I gain
from being the halest of corpses?
L
Am I living with death
or dying with life?
What sounds important
may be no distinction…
L
Here’s my chintzy cheeriness
The half-alive is what you see,
the half-dead what the doctors say
is plotting from within.
Bo
If you're going to have a run-in
with death - and you are -
you might as well have it
while you’re still feeling good.
St L
People say I’m stoic
but the pain’s been nothing much.
And as for death,
I’m not expecting anything at all.
Am
We all need death
to come to terms
with horror and injustice:
without it we’d be stuck with them.
L
Spilling water onto my laptop
I feared the worst.
But my data arose in a new body
and I began to wonder…
St L
Writing my computer off
made me think of all the things
that haven't yet gone wrong.
They'd better get a move on if they're serious.
will I be able to say -
supposing I can say it at all –
‘I’m dead and I am perfectly content’?
Be
Why the plaintive note
in ‘you can’t take it with you’?
Nothing you could take would help
to deal with an eternity of nothing.
L
Is death
stronger than life?
Not really: they are co-dependent
and life, after all, comes first.
Be
I have my senses
and my sense of having senses
and now the sense that they’ll be lost
before I’ve even come to them in full.
L
When the big death’s on your mind
the little ones are quite a nice distraction.
What nonsense is that?
They always were.
L
Of life
I know enough to understand my ignorance.
Of death,
I know as much as anyone.
L
My birthday was fun
Presents, grandchildren, cake, meal out…
How about another one,
same time next year?
S
I have just two questions
When am I crossing into the black?
And, supposing that you’ve got the answer,
do I really want to know?
L
I’m dying too late
2010 was optimal - unalarmed by global warming,
unaware that all these years
of Tory bodge-and-Brexit were to follow.
L
I think, on reflection
I’ll take a chance on death –
even though I can’t yet know
how it’s going to be.
L
Most cattle only exist
because they can be killed for beef.
will I – even though less tasty –
be delivering a purpose in death?
L
Why is the expression
‘take it or leave it’
when ‘take it and leave it’
would get closer to the core of life?
L
Procedure postponed
I should be pleased to be judged
less likely to die soon than whoever’s bumped me.
And yet I am not.
L
‘Live in the present’
would be a more meaningful motto
we're there any other
opportunity to do so.
St L
I don't deal
in certainties.
And what would be the point of odds
if you didn't defy them?
Am
‘That’s Life’
ran for 21 years on the BBC.
There seems little danger
of anyone commissioning ‘That’s Death’.
L
How can I complain?
Look what Alexander the Great,
Schubert, Keats and Seurat
achieved in less than half my time.
L
Mine is such a tiny death
up against our species death,
the planet's death, the universe's...
I’m not sure it really counts at all.
L
My plan’s to keep moving
onwards and upwards.
My back-up plan’s to die -
but with no regrets.
Am
Death is here
as it always was,
smuggling in
its opposite of ‘always’.
L
I'm dying, which is interesting
I'd sooner not - or not just yet -
but why not make the most of it?
I'll only get one chance.
L
Following a laparoscopy
my bladder’s full
but I can't pee the way I must
before they'll tell me to piss off.
L
Will death suit me?
I’m pretty sure so,
same as it suits everyone
living in a world beyond fashion.
L
It's my death
and I'll smile if I want to
right up to the point when my expression is fixed
in what, by then, might look more like a grimace.
Am
Somewhat ironically
– when you consider the depth of slumber it guarantees –
death never sleeps:
you can go at any time.
L
Too soon for me
but maybe too soon for most.
In which case it’s simply
part of the condition.
Br
Dementia
seems to have sneaked ahead of cancer
as public health enemy No. 1.
But why should I fear it?
Am
Allergic to life?
That will be sorted.
Allergic to death?
It’s a little more tricky…
L
If death's been issued with a moral code
– 'though shalt kill', presumably –
would it be wrong of me,
supposing I could, to resist it?
L
According to Gil Evans
there’s no such thing as a wrong note,
it’s what you do next which can yield a mistake...
but death is a wrong note with nothing to follow.
‘Since we’re all going to die’
says Camus, ‘it’s obvious
that when and how don’t matter’.
It isn’t so very obvious to me.
St L
Why should I hurry?
I’ll be late soon enough
with no reason to care
about how soon I got there.
How does it feel
to be a rock
or a cloud or a clod?
The afterlife will tell me, I suppose.
L
It’s a pity
there’s no God.
He’d know how I adore life
and extend it, for sure.
Am
I cannot know
what I would be
were I not me
but I guess I am about to find out.
God knows if he exists
His existence being proved
by just that the knowledge
in a way that ours - arguably - is not.
How can I prove that I exist?
I’m content with the awareness
of how different it’s going to be
when I don’t.
Will God mind
That I didn't believe in him?
I don't suppose
I'll ever find that out.
L
If death's intervention
doesn't prove the blank end I assume,
take this as the apology
I may, even so, be unable to make.
S
The point to remember
is that I won’t have a body
so, even if there is a hell,
no suffering can be involved?
St L
Will this sequence
have an afterlife?
All that I'll say is
it has a better chance than me.
L
The éclat of death
is hardly something to applaud –
however nobly you may go
to find there’s no maker to meet.
‘There is no alternative’
said Margaret Thatcher.
Sure enough,
she’s dead.
L
So what’s it like
to know you're doomed?
You tell me:
we're all in this together.
L
Despite
there being fewer pieces
the endgame
is not the easiest part of chess.
Br
Is the date fixed at birth
as determinists would have it?
If so I’m determined in turn
to defy the run of fate.
L
Would it be daft to ask of death
'What's in it for me?'
knowing that the answer
is going to be 'nothing'.
Death: who needs it?
Everyone, eventually.
But did Perec need it in 1982?
I rest my implausible case.
Would a world without death
be truly beautiful
or a terrible disaster
to make me regret that selfish hope?
L
Wakeful at three
I imagine my coffin being borne
past the greatest works of art in turn
before getting back to sheep.
S
He wrote a hundred books…
scored five hundred goals…
made a thousand women happy…
The best lines for a funeral are way beyond me now.
L
I’m determined
that my funeral will be fun for real.
If anybody cries
I'll never speak to them again.
J
No
to negativity:
I will not be
defined by what is not,
even if it turns out
to be me
L
What's the fuss?
Once you've gone
You might as well
be forgotten.
Context
I wouldn't claim my normal year is typical of many people - visit a thousand art shows in London and abroad, plus several art fairs; curate four or five exhibitions; write a hundred articles and catalogue essays; post regularly on three Instagram accounts; produce a few hundred photo-poems; talk to many artists, and interview twenty in depth. Too much, of course, but what I enjoy. Anyway, once I knew my case was probably terminal, in the period after chemo but before a definite diagnosis, I was keen to get back to my usual activity. That interim period lasted two months… Here I combine quatrains with photographs of points of opening, closure, time and transition taken out and about in London (mostly), Southampton, Bournemouth, St Leonards, Jersey, Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin – places I visited during February to April 2023.
References and notes
As in 'The Death Suite' and ‘Death in the House’, there are echoes of others:
John Betjeman (‘Here’s my chintzy chintzy cheeriness’) - Death In Leamington, 1932
Charlotte Gainsbourg (‘How soon’) - The Songs that We Sing, 2007
Robert Wyatt, co-written with Mark Kramer (‘I have my senses’ and ‘I cannot know’) – Free Will and Testament, 1997
The Fall (‘I’m dying too late’) - Living Too Late, 1986. Perhaps The Fall’s frontman, Mark E Smith (1957-2018), lived too long: he died of kidney and lung cancer, having had a better time in the 20th than 21st century.
Around a quarter of the 1bn cattle in the world are dairy cows (‘Most cattle only exist’).
There was a delay in my laparoscopy, i.e. the insertion of a camera through my stomach to check, in my case, the extent of abdominal cancer (‘Procedure postponed’)
Seymour Gottlieb (‘It’s my death’) - It’s my party, originally sung by Lesley Gore in 1963
‘Allergic to life’ arose from mishearing Lee Scratch Perry’s ‘Allergic to Lies’, 1987
‘According to Gil Evans’: the jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader said ‘There is no such thing as a wrong note. It is always the note that follows that will define whether the first note was wrong or not’. Evans was a major influence on Miles Davis, whose pithy rendering of that advice was ‘If you hit a wrong note, hit it again!’
‘Since we’re all going to die’ refers to Albert Camus’ ‘The Stranger’, 1942. The narrating character says this while awaiting execution, adding ‘So, I was going to die. Sooner than other people, obviously, but everybody knows life isn’t worth living.’
‘How does it feel’ derives from William Cullen Bryant’s 1811 poem ‘Thanatopsis’ (i.e. the sight of death), which muses on being ‘a brother to the insensible rock / And to the sluggish clod’.
‘God knows if he exists’ and ‘How can I prove that I exist?’ touch on famous philosophical arguments. One claim is that God is perfect, and as such must exist because to fail to exist would be an imperfection. Descartes ‘Cogito ergo sum’ was his way of proving that he himself did exist.
Beth Gibbons with Rustin Man, i.e. Paul Webb (‘It’s a pity’) – Mysteries, 2002
‘The point to remember’ cites the doctrine of Tibetan Buddhism, as in The Book of the Dead, c. 1340
Emily Dickinson (‘The éclat of death’) – collected poems 1,307: ’That short – potential stir’ c. 1874
‘Death: who needs it?’ - the French writer Georges Perec (1936-82) died of lung cancer aged 45, cutting off the supply of a remarkably imaginative oeuvre.
José Saramango (‘Would a world without death’) - Death at Intervals, 2005
‘I’m determined’ derives from a joke told by Stan Laurel (1890-1965)
Photographs
I have noted the locations as follows: L = London, Am = Amsterdam, Be = Berlin, Bo = Bournemouth, Br = Brussels, J = Jersey, S = Southampton, St L = St Leonards
