Where Does It End?

Finality in life and art.

A week before she died, perhaps two, my mum had a spiritual… well what’s the word? I struggle to write “conversion” because that implies a change but I’ll never know how changed she really was. The moment she told me felt more like that beat when someone you love comes home after a haircut and they fix you with a look that begs “don’t laugh”. I did not know how true this was for her, I don’t think she knew either, but we both knew that for this moment she needed it.

Neither can I call this an “event” as that implies something happening. Nor was it an “awakening” as that suggests a rising and stirring whilst this marked her best attempt to acquiesce to what was happening. It was a calming. Peaceful. And for that we were both grateful. Perhaps, a spiritual acceptance.

“What helps an audience, I think, is to always know what has to happen for the movie to be over.” says Bob Gale, co-writer of “Back To The Future”, a story so alert to the need to describe the arc of its own completion that it’s baked into the title.

Stories need to end. Stories are ends or at least are not understandable as stories until they end. However the demands of narrative and the demands of the medium through which we receive that narrative are not necessarily aligned. When audiences had to leave home to be told a story by actors in a theatre, delivering a satisfying resolution made the whole thing worthwhile. The show ends and you return home, longing to go back to place where the magic happens. However when that magic is delivered directly to your sofa the logic is strangely reversed. There you sit, prone in pyjamas, should anything end you’ll guiltily have to switch off and get on with your life. Endings are toxic in TV. This is great entertainment but terrible storytelling. One is a story, the other a distraction.

Gale’s insight is that to really satisfy, even as you start to tell a story you need to be sowing the seeds of its conclusion. That ending is the thing you’re actually giving your audience when you tell them a story.

My mum had a theory that when death took you it claimed you by your strongest characteristic. It’s a good story, that the death which creeps up on us, the kind of dying we spend our lives running from, is the ultimate expression of our personal weakness. It makes sense that it would declare itself through our most vivid expression of life. Of course, making sense is not the same as telling the truth. My mum had two types of theory, those she was proud of and those she believed anyway, this was one of the latter. Had you pushed her on it she’d have accepted it as ungrounded, like her belief in astrology, her response to numbers of magpies or her sense that whichever team she supported would lose (though this was so often true that she struggled not to think it was a kind of science).

Bob Gale’s insight is easy to abuse. It’s easy to tell a story badly by not including the end in the beginning but easier to make an idea feel profound just by tracing it back to the start. In real life our ends, once we know them, can are always be found in our starts lives, but that often serves to obscure the truth that was lived. It is impossible now to think of Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain or Princess Di or, for me, my mum, as someone who lived messily, incoherently, forward. They are completed and we cannot help but make them make sense, even if they didn’t.

If only this knowledge was accessible to us all perhaps we too would feel less tangled. If we could see that black birthday, the anniversary of our own death which we pass through each year yet leave unmarked with candles, perhaps then we too could live as cleanly as fiction.

We think of artists as living through their work. Certainly a version of them seems to speak intimately to us, to live within us. All of us at some stage are inspired by creative work that pre-exists us. Work made by artists either long dead or simply so totally removed from your personal connection that the artist is dead to you even if they are still alive to the world. Being inspired by this work feels like engaging in a conversation, their thought gives you a thought which you in turn give out to the world. But all conversations with the dead are one sided. There are times I feel I owe such debts to dead artists whose work reshapes my understanding of life, it is painful to acknowledge that they don’t know this impact, that their life must have felt as pointless, as meandered, as frittered as mine often does.

My mum was a remarkable woman in many ways, yet it’s not automatic to think what her strongest characteristic was. Though cynicism is not far off it. Not that this was when she was happiest, but then aren’t we often happiest when we are least ourselves? Doesn’t joy often spring from the sensations of simply being alive, unburdened from all the work of being ourselves? When I think of when my mum was most herself it was her cynicism, her stinging clarity, her denial of all bullshit, pretence or pomp. She adored the story of Diogenes, asleep in the sun, when Alexander the Great stands over him “Great philosopher, in acknowledgement of your achievements, as ruler of all I see, I will grant you anything you ask”, Dio opens one eye and nods thoughtfully “Get out of my light.”

Her theory of dying left her often scared that she would lose her mind, her coherence, her memory as these were perhaps the places she looked to find her own strongest suit and the seeds of her unravelling. She never did go mad. Instead her ending was marked by her spiritual acceptance. The calming of the lifelong defiance which finally found it was defending nothing she could keep. She died in sunshine.