The Earth Wants You, And It Gets What It Wants

Do not go gentle into that goodnight, a poet once said.

Another said Hope I die before I get old.

Another, It's better to burn out/Than to fade away....


And yet another, dying is what the living do,/...dying is what the loving do....

To (too) many people, those poets are, of course, to only varying degrees worthy of the term: Dylan Thomas, Peter Townshend, Neil Young, Alastair Reid.  Some are accepted into the canon, some not (or at least the canon shifts criteria and aim).

I've been watching people and relationships die and dying these last few months--one dead, three others knockin' on heaven's door, as another poet said--and surprisingly, given my basic human obtuseness--that's made an impression on me.  Dylan Thomas's well known admonition to "not go gentle..," for instance, with some perspective, strikes me as the bravado/directive of the young:  "We're in the world, alive, open to all sensory experience; we should fight "the dying of the light."  It's become a rallying cry, a directive, a way to see and fear and avoid death: at least go down fighting.

Dylan Thomas was 39 years old when he died.  Of course he should have resisted, of course he should have fought: no one should die at 39; even The Bible, that great work of fiction, hagiography and, for some, inspiration,  gives us 70 years ("Three score and ten").  Yet Thomas's end, for all of his exhortations and protestations, was self-induced.  He drank himself to death.  Why, then, should we listen to his directive to resist death, except as an understanding of his conflict with self-immolation and self-destruction?  For most "normal" folk, then, his words are rubbish (to use a UK-ism).

Then there are the self-imagined, self-promoted nihilists who urge us to go for it, to "live fast, die young, stay pretty"; those are lyrics, somewhat bastardized, from Blondie, that 80's band fronted by the eternally youthful former Playboy Bunny Debbie Harry (seen her lately?).  That's not far from Pete Townshend's or Neil Young's views expressed above.  The great irony, of course, is that those who wished to die before they got old, who wanted to live fast and leave a pretty corpse, are now in their seventies, and far, far from their pretty youth.  Praps they should have, instead, resisted aging, died young, and been remembered in the bloom of youth.  Hey, it worked for Jim Morrison; remember the Rolling Stone Cover from years ago that featured his photo on the cover with the tag line "He's hot, he's sexy, and he's dead."?

Finally, from my opening, there're Alastair Reid's lines, the best-considered, the ones with the most to offer.  They are from his poem called Curiosity, which uses cats and their attributed curiosity--which of course, we say, kills 'em-- and their mythical nine lives as its governing metaphor.  Reid says that the "cat price" of their curiosity "is to die/ and die again and again,/each time with no less pain."  But for each loss there is a gain, to paraphrase another poet:  "And what he has to tell/on each return from hell/is this: that dying is what the living do,/that dying is what the loving do,/ and...that hell is where, to live, they have to go."

Duh, he said, smacking himself in the forehead at an obvious truth he had never stopped to consider (is it a sign of a problem that I write about myself in third person?).  Like hello and goodbye, about which I wrote some years ago, they are simply two sides of the same coin:  We are dying from the moment we're born, and dying can only be done by the living.  It's as natural as same-sex marriage in Ireland, for goodness sake.  And that may be why, as I have witnessed, the old and the terminally ill not only don't rage against death, they welcome it.  They've seen enough, had enough, have nothing in front of them but empty days and so are ready for the next phase.  It is only the young who are ignorant or foolish enough to either rage against death, or to hope to die before they get old.  Although it may not make it any easier for the ones left behind (as it's always easier to be the leaver than the left), LifeDeath is simply a process, to be taken on its own terms in its own time.  There is much wisdom in acceptance.

Living and dying songs this week, then, which seems appropriate as I write this on Memorial Day.
Among the songs I'll choose from, or from which I'll choose:


Living The Blues                                                                           Dylan
Change My Way Of Living                                                           Allman Bros.
Living In Fame                                                                              The Clash
Living In The Material World                                                        George Harrison
I'm Living Good                                                                             Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham
Living Without You                                                                       Manfred Mann's Earth Band
Long As You're Living                                                                  Karrin Allyson
The Only Living Boy In New York                                               Marc Cohn
Living On The Inside                                                                     Michael Franks
The Living                                                                                      Natalie Merchant
The Only Living Boy In New York                                                Simon & Garfunkel
Living Is Good                                                                                Wendy Waldman
Ain't Life For The Living                                                                Sonia Dada
Viva La Vida                                                                                    Santana
Living It Up                                                                                     Rickie Lee Jones
I Got A Mind To Give Up Living                                                   Butterfield Blues Band
In My Time Of Dying                                                                     The Be Good Tanyas
...(Dying In The Forest)                                                                   Dr. John
I Wouldn't Mind Dying                                                                    The Carter Family
When Love Is Dying                                                                       Elton John & Leon Russell
Art Of Dying                                                                                    George Harrison
The Golden Day Is Dying                                                                 Hem
Dying On The Vine                                                                           The Jayhawks
A Dying Man's Plea                                                                          Mavis Staples
Prayer For The Dying                                                                       Seal
The Earth Wants You                                                                        Mose Allison
In My Hour Of Darkness                                                                  Gram Parsons

I'll be on the air Tuesday from noon till two at WOOL FM 91.5, and wool.fm streaming worldwide.  Hope you can join me.

Two addenda:  Went to a Japanese restaurant in Ossining, NY a month or so ago and was surprised that they were apparently catering to people on the Paleo diet, as one of their menu items was "Filet Magnon...."  Hey, at least it wasn't "Crow Magnon."

Much more seriously:  Last week I blithely wrote about public stoning as means of execution in the Tsarnaev case, never stopping to think that that sort of thing still goes on in parts of the world.  A good friend of mine, who served tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan wrote to say that it was not that uncommon for soldiers to come upon public stonings, women buried up to their necks and being stoned for the crime of disgracing their families by being raped by a relative.  Yes, you read that right.  I need to just keep my fucking First-World mouth shut.