Whistling Clarabella: 100 Awesome Things - Parts 32 and 33

For the first time, 100 Awesome Things takes on two pieces of music at a time... and once more, grief and music are entwined.

~~~2013~~~~

One of the things about grief, in whatever form it takes, is how it eventually just is. Perhaps it takes a very long time, but it's something one absorbs into the fabric of one's soul, one's existence, one's life. It simply is.

There are all sorts of ways to talk about it, to describe it. I very much liked A Grief Observed by CS Lewis but didn't dare read it until I was out of the earliest stages of one of my epic griefs.

I also maintain that not only is grief different for every person, each grief is different from all the others. It is both one of the most universal experiences humans experience and one of the most individual. Yes, there are 'stages' one can track scientifically and there are common threads, motifs, and themes... but it's different each time for each person.

I like to think of each grief as a scar upon my heart and soul, not least because I'm a pretentious, la-di-da sort of personality, but mostly because it's the least-inept way I have of describing what they are, and what they become. Red-raw, oozing blood and pus at first, hard to ignore and, harder to deal with, new and unfamiliar... but eventually it stops bleeding, the infection clears and it closes up and eventually one hardly notices it anymore. It's simply there.

I've got a few physical scars here and there. Not many compared to lots of people and nothing terrible. Some of my scars are a bit baffling - there's one on my left thumb which is from a very minor scrape with a cupboard shelf years ago, and I can't see why it would have scarred so permanently compared to all the idiotic scrapes, cuts, and the rest I've inflicted on myself over a lifetime of clumsiness and inattention.

Still, I'm pretty much unmarked when it comes to physical scars, which is nice. Then again the other kind, the unseen and emotional, are plentiful and if I'm honest, many are self-inflicted. Each scar is its own unique thing, without corporeality but definitely there. Sometimes I wonder if souls are nothing more than a collection of scar tissue... past, present and future.

I'm probably being overdramatic. It could probably be argued that I've chosen some of my scars. I didn't have to give even the slightest, merest damn about any of those musicians, did I? Did I? Jury is still out on that one.

The thing is, the grief for those lost before oneself is very different to grief for those who one has loved in person. Lamented Maria and suddenly-lost Bill. Even as a small child I knew what it was to have lost someone you never had, and that's a very specific sort of pain. I have been yearning for them for as long as I have been alive, their scars the oldest on my soul. The never-had loss of them is so much part of me that to picture a life with them is almost impossible.

Now I get to the point of this. It's 8th December today, which means it's the day of the year when my griefs are concentrated. Yes indeed, tis both the birthday of Jim Morrison and the anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. It's a coincidence I've never been able to reconcile. Is it proof God has a sense of humour, or one of compassion, to keep it concentrated in a single day?

Doesn't matter. The grief of never-had remains, rendered in the broad brushstrokes of not-knowing and distance between myself and these heroes, the grief is stained with a sense of "I shouldn't" because they were not mine to grieve, were they?

I've had some interesting discussions with people over the years about whether fans are really entitled to grieve for their heroes. I naturally fall on the side of 'yes', but it is coloured with an understanding of the distance between them and I. Coloured by it, but it remains there.

I have felt dreadful all today, and no doubt some of this is down to acknowledging the loss and waste. That ridiculous set of pictures of 'what would they look like now' the other week woke up the anger I'd pushed aside - not least in fact because they suggested Kurt Cobain would've turned into the nincompoop from Nickelback - and realising that Jim would be seventy damned years old...

Well, I thought I was over it. I thought the scars were good and healed up, that it simply was that Jim and John have always been dead.

I will never be over it. This I know. The titanic loss of talent, potential, insight, and wonder with the departure of these two is not something one gets over. One learns to live with it. Nothing more. The scars remain even if I don't notice them all the time every day. Sometimes it's more difficult than other times. That's not to deify either person or overlook their genuinely troublesome aspects... I mourn the men and the music, not the legends... Cancel my subscription to that resurrection, as Jim sorta said.

So there are two videos of awesome. The first is John, in a version of 'Whatever Gets You Thru The Night' with only him on vocals...

The chosen Doors video is of "The Soft Parade", selected because I suddenly had the strongest recollection of being consumed by it when I first fell hard and deep in love with their music. The dissonance of styles, his scream, pseudo-religious opening... the cascading images of monks, lions, hunters, the overlapping many-and-arguing voices of Morrison... enchanting, terrifying, absorbing. Just like he always was to me. Also, please note that this "fat, bearded Jim" of the disdainful "he lost it/threw it away" legends is not that fat and still has immense power because he's still him. The power of Morrison was never in his hard, tanned, bare chest.