infinite death

#3

My great-uncle died on Tuesday.

Mum did this thing she does which always annoys me, where she called (I missed it because only psychopaths don’t set their phone to silent permanently) and then texted me saying “Please call me back as soon as you can”. She knows that always makes me think someone’s died. In her defence, someone had died this time, but normally when she does it it’s because one of her cats or chickens has done something silly she wants to relay to me, or she’s had a bad day at work and needs to vent.

Anyway, we weren’t very close, which creates this strange sensation of feeling sad but not that sad, and then feeling bad for not feeling sadder. My great-uncle was my grandma’s youngest brother. He was 80 and never married, and he was an untreated schizophrenic for years, so I always felt a bit of distant kinship, though I have it a bit easier than he did. I remember hearing he was a talented artist when he was younger. We don’t know what happened yet – he wasn’t ill as far as we know. He just died. He wasn’t young, and his life had become very isolated after his mother passed away after a very long and ugly dementia diagnosis. My mum and I both wondered if we should be sadder and considered the guilt that came with that statement. She told me about when my grandma died two years ago, and how she ended up arguing with my great uncle because he said it was wrong to cremate her, in case she wasn’t dead. Mum said she was fairly sure she was dead but he wasn’t convinced. That was the last time they spoke.

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently, and not in a cute Greta Gerwig way. My grandpa has dementia and wants to die. I know this because on Christmas Day he told us. Mum told me he says it a lot, but I don’t think that makes it easier to hear, even as someone who has wanted to die, planned to die, so many times. I felt so overwhelmed when I saw him that I went into the hallway to cry for a little bit. I felt awful for the relief I felt when we left, but it’s difficult to see someone who lives so large in your memory become a different person.

I went to see Ryuichi Sakomoto’s kagami at The Roundhouse on January 2nd, which is a VR concert which combines a CGI rendering of him performing a 50-minute set with some animated effects. It’s quite gimmicky, and the graphics reminded me of both The Sims and those quirky Windows 98 screensavers that everyone used to have, but Sakamoto’s music is sublime and it sounds great in the space. But the reason I mention it, beyond the obvious fact that sitting in a room watching a dead man reanimated is pertinent to everything happening in my life right now, is because the strangest thing happened when I put my clunky, noisy headset on and saw the 3D rendering of Sakamoto sitting at the piano.

Something about the image blindsided me. I blinked tears out of the corner of my eyes. There he was, sitting at the piano. Only twice did he speak – once to remark on the unexpected popularity of his song ‘Energy Flow’ in Japan, and at the end, to explain the final piece, ‘BB’ was written five minutes after he learned of the death of his friend and mentor, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. It’s a beautiful piece. Before kagami, the only people to hear it were the mourners at Bertolucci’s funeral.

The idea of bringing people back from the dead with the use of technology repulses me in some ways, but knowing that Sakamoto was fully involved in the project did alleviate that queasiness – it’s different from, say, the holograms of dead singers that keep being produced to flog tickets to gigs, or using AI to resurrect a long-dead actor for your film which they never agreed to be in. This was something Sakamoto was a part of in the knowledge it was unlikely he would see the results, and there’s something both incredibly moving and awfully sad about that.

Then, on Monday I caught Annie Baker’s Infinite Life at the National before it closed this weekend. I was just too late to see in New York in November so I was very glad I realised it was on just in time. I was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition when I was around 15 (an extraordinarily rough age to be diagnosed with such, not that there’s ever a convenient time) and the play centres on the attendees of a fictitious pain management clinic in North California, so it seemed particularly relevant to my interests. I ended up sitting right in the front row, squinting up under the brightest lights I’ve ever seen in a theatre, while the women reclined on sunloungers, discussing their lives. Their relationships. Their treatment. Their pain. Obviously I cried.

I’m not such a theatre person – I try to be because I love plays, but it’s a very costly hobby for a chronically disorganised person to entertain – but I knew a lot of my American friends spoke highly of Baker, and I understand it after my experience. It’s not just that she’s an incredibly frank and funny writer, but there’s something so piercing and precise about her writing – an ability to articulate in an inarticulate manner. The way people do it, ugly and uncertain and tongue-tied. Dare I say it was that saddest of words for a creative: inspiring?

I’m going to try and be a bit better at writing these dispatches this year, but no promises. It’s nice to have a creative outlet that isn’t criticism, which I’m enjoying less and less with every waking hour. Thank you for reading this, anyway — love to the lonely, wherever you are.