Into the Mystic

Old pop stars, not the ones still plugging on more or less in the public eye, no, I mean the ones who have become reabsorbed by the ordinary, have lived out their middle age in Bath or Taunton and have been found dead or in need of a new liver/heart and there they are staring back from the news story, a nasty little picture capturing their fall from a life which must have been one of the lives that at least started out perfectly.

Who would have suspected he would have been found dead in his kitchen from a heart attack, no foul play suspected. Of course the foul play came from the inside. The foul play was how that life played out so foully. How can it start with youth and plenty and end with middle age nothingness?

We love these stories, we love seeing our own trajectory more painfully magnified. The starker version of our own. Can life be anything else than tragedy? If it were to be classified by genre wouldn’t it come under tragedy? Again I wonder at the possibility of money shielding us from entropy but that pop star from the seventies band was just as likely to have been comfortably off as living pot-less. The tudor style mansion didn’t save his destitute life, where all he had was in an unforgiving past tense. 

There must be happy people but who are they? How do they operate? How do they navigate the slow falling apart, the shuffle towards the end.

There is this one enduring sharp focused memory of jumping two - three stairs at a time. I am nine or eight and I am wearing a dress, sandals and pants. The dress is the easiest dress, it is a tunic and short enough not to ever get in the way of a stride, a jump whatever I needed to do. My pants felt invisible. I remember feeling the ease, almost nude, it was a day where the weather felt the same temperature as your skin, there was no clue you were in or out, no wind, no cold, no heat just the same. I jumped down my stairs of my flats to meet with my friends to play. 

Play because play formed a part of my life then, it could be a fantastic game of he with enough of us to make it really good. I ran down these stairs and I felt my body was capable of anything, I was whole, I didn’t need need to go to the loo, I wasn’t hungry, I was entirely right with a power under my skin that would allow me to do whatever was required, ride my bike, dismounting in one sweep, it no doubt feeling more streamlined than it was but bike riders do become aligned with their bikes, they don’t have the tricky dismount, they don't seem to be atop this many wired, metal contraption, they have become enmeshed, the wheels grown from them, I was like that with my bike, curbs, hills, corners, swinging it around, crashing it down, my bike, like my body, able, fast. Climb over a wall, a tree, scuff your knees, hurt your hands-no biggie, the body could take it in it’s stride, hang upside down, laugh really laugh, according to research over fifteen times a day. 

Children laugh on average fifteen times a day. Of course they do, emotional gravity must hardly be felt at that age, what do you know of ‘preparing’ to climb into a back seat of a car, of planning a little how to navigate your mass into the back seat, the gratitude of reaching the seat and sitting. The prep is almost subliminal at fifty but I can see how this moves into the conscious with the same slow shuffle that each day makes less possible.

We started as these creatures of great abundance of power and perfection, our skins unimaginably perfect, our muscles ready and springy. We started brand new. Is that why we like new things, new cars, new fridges, no I don’t suppose so, we like new things because they work better, they look better, they are better and we have the choice, we can throw the old one away. Unless we are poor then we have to put up living with old stuff, the shitty car that gets humiliated at the garage, limps through the M.O.T at vast cost yet we find the cash and somehow carry on. We don’t have much confidence, we live with the expectation it wil let us down, we are invisible to other drivers we get no recognition out there. The shiny metal coats we wear out there, a version of youth, at least in my new Audi I am part of the future, the equivalent of perfection. Unscratched unbeaten by time, acceleration with an easy pressure, sheer rush of ease.

I have no first hand experience of a new kitchen or a new house with perfect things in it but maybe that wards off the poverty of middle age, does luxury offer ease but what of the contrast, you may be swathed in Egyptian cotton but perfection must then single you out, you're spoiling the view.

Wives get tossed for less. Mirror back at me the downey little tummy, the pretty toes, don’t keep reminding me of my sagging backside that is now defined by a crease where my thigh starts, dear God I look like those old men on the beach. I cannot look at her and be constantly reminded of how we used to be, hammered in constantly if not by her then your beautiful unmarked children, get a new model or go with it, go with the flow like the rest of us, we settle for less, we chill out we grow fat we sit around more, we become more inert. Each day we become stiller, a point of refuge from the exertion, a word not able to be given to describe the movement of youth. They bounce towards their goals, we haul ourselves. Haul ourselves out of the bath, out of the pool or use the steps. I wonder when the last time actually was that I could put my knee up as leverage and pull myself up out of the water, the last time I subconsciously knew that I would not try that again. 

It is odd that at eight or nine I had that moment inspired by happiness at how good it felt to be in my body, like my mind put down a marker, remember this, remember this moment,  I knew how good it was, how great to have my body that day. 

I imagine great recognition, a pop star, David Essex still alive still doing his stuff, we have all recovered from the shock of his grey hair, I imagine he just gets on with it. Maybe he is still grateful that he can fill the Apollo, Victoria, maybe he even tells himself little lies like he’s better than ever, maybe he is. Maybe my perspective is jaundiced what about Leonard Cohen he has managed to make the youth gauche; you would rather be old listening to him, there is a camaraderie, you are part of his clan, the old sardonic unstriven gang, we who have seen, like Clint Eastwood, they do age in a way that looks like a maturing piece of well polished walnut, smooth with age, holding a sense of history, wisdom, knowledge.

Possibly the mocked are those that achieved a brief flicker of recognition young and then fade back to the nothing. Maybe they more painfully mirror the majority. Our youth being our time, our moment in the sun, and then we return to our rickety cattle carts lumbering along quietly to towards the end. 

Possibly the people who do achieve sustained excellence are not identifiable with but sustain the hope, the hope that we will do something magnificent that our dream whatever it is will be achieved in the last quarter, as unlikely as that is it is probably better to have that, and so former members of the Bay City Rollers are, by their lives trajectory banned from that. It was too good back then and therefore it has to be worse now, the arc is in place, too pronounced to be argued with.