THE LAZARUS VARIATIONS
TALK ABOUT DEATH AND CANCELLATION
Apropos death, last week I wrote a sentence about Jean Rhys. It contained the phrase, ‘death was her muse.’ More than most nitrogen-boosted sentences in these missives, this phrase must have a tuning fork buried in it somewhere, because, as they say in the Big Meaning Game, it ‘continues to resonate’.
For one thing, Rhys lived with disappointment and despair, penniless and cold, yet somehow managed to keep writing. Good writing, too; I continue to read it, and it continues to pull me through this Slough of Despond. But the consolations to be found in desolation are a very private thing here in my withdrawn life in Western Cornwall.
There’s a darker side to desolation. Let me return to the Memorial Service for Jenne Casarotto that I attended in London mid-May and wrote about two posts ago. Many of these people used to visit my office at various studios to sell me things, some of which I bought. We dined together. And told jokes, and shared intimacies on yachts. The kind of thing you do when you’re middle class and fancy that there’ll always be another free buffet.
No one saw me. It was as if I wasn’t there.
The death of Jenne got me thinking in a way that the arrest of Nicki Minaj did not. I miss Jenne. My consolation? Read about J.G. Ballard and how things used to go off road and cut circles in the ‘desert of the real’.
Things are much clearer now: everything really is off the boil. I suppose this is that moment when dark matter triumphs. I’m no physicist but I think that means that nothingness gums you in its maw turning you into some formless hash tucked in a marsupial pouch formed by bunched plasma gathered just shy of the opening of what would be its esophagus if dark matter phages.
I don’t feel dead. But then I’m at the age where time submits to a force multiplier very similar in kind and effect to the gravity described in the paragraph above. I know, that’s not clear. Let me try a simile: I’m at that age where life is like an airport lounge. You’re past security. You can sit in the lounge appropriate to your class, and pass time before they call your flight. Like an airport, you don’t know when the flight will leave or from which gate. But it will leave. It’s a certainty that your number will be called.
So you fill the time. You look at the local paper, the FT or the Times Sports Section. That done, you saunter to the buffet and because you’re bored, you take some food you don’t need that doesn’t taste like anything. Time passes. You want your flight to depart, but then again you’re mixed on the destination. But it’s in our nature to want the next thing to happen and be done with us.
But suffice it to say, the Royal Festival Hall’s lobby where the Drinks piece of Jenne’s Memorial ticked through its migratory palaver, I went almost totally unnoticed. I would prefer to be shunned; that would be dramatic, perhaps preferable to being de-existed by marginally important people. But put yourself in their shoes.
They’re desperate for validation that they exist. They need to talk to people about anything so that they don’t have to endure that silence that abhors their vacuum. I’m getting judgy I know. But in these circumstances where I have to see people that I once knew and dined with and chatted about ‘the business’ with, whilst feigning interest, and disguising a yawn as an adjustment to jet lag, my techniques for appearing interested have with disuse atrophied to the point where I note the nearest exit, and because its free, have one more drink whilst talking to Katherine about how I really do think I’ve been cancelled.
I probably have been, but I don’t know for sure. I’m told I’m paranoid for thinking I’m cancelled. I mean, why cancel someone if you can’t enjoy the pleasure of seeing them sentenced aloud while standing in the dock. But then I think some more, walking as the First People say, “a mile in the other person’s moccasins”, and it hits me - it’s better punishment if the Cancelled One doesn’t know what they did to get cancelled!
A cruel, envenomed stroke: then people can stare and whisper, as does Ollie Madden, a Survivor of the reality program called “Film Four”. Purgatory would be a Bank Holiday compared to this. But I don’t believe in Purgatory, though I can understand why the Medieval Theologians went to the trouble to cook one up.
And from reading ‘think pieces’ I can see why it’s advantageous to do away with that pesky ‘Due Process’. With Due Process, you have to face your accuser with evidence, and they get to answer back. Character Assassination (the Stasi called it ‘zersetzung’) doesn’t work as cleanly with Due Process. Oh, it would still work, because you’re in power so you can cook the system, as you do, but it takes time, and you have to be at this thing right after this Jenne thing, and then there’s dinner and a show, or the other way around.
If you’re not in the top spot or in the know, there’s also the Spread Sheet. You can descry an evil, give it a name that disguises your real intention - to do someone in - with the name of a virtue you imagine the people whose favour you need to get the better job or invitation to one of these things would really like to hear. You draw up a list.
(I studied Dramatic Writing at New York University. It was started by survivors of the Black List - not the Franklin Leonard one, but the real one that ended careers and lives: Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner, Jr., Ian M. Hunter, Abe Polonsky, in the lineage of Dalton Trumbo and the Communist Party of the USA; they were all ‘blacklisted’, among many more. They lost their livelihoods, their work, their houses, their families.
They didn’t like lists. But times change.)
Funny thing about lists, after the first few names, after the anecdotal evidence runs out, you start making up names. There’s a story about that from the post WW2 Stalin purges. They killed and jailed so many that they ran out of people whom they could reasonably fit for the thought crime de jour. So one of the Apparatchiks had this really good idea, from an HR point of view, simply describe the type of person you abhor or whose job you want, and make that the standard by which you fit someone of that description for the crime and then the punishment.
So, it goes like this: this guy’s a class enemy because he’s employed; he has an office; he’s having fun. Or say you’re the Khmer Rouge or the dynamic front line of the Cultural Revolution, then you take aside people who wear glasses. They must read - why else wear glasses - so they must be intellectuals. Put them in that line, jail them, or if you’re running out of space, shoot them. Otherwise, this whole Revolution thing runs out of gas, and then what would you do? You’d be out of a job.
But none of that was happening in Royal Festival Hall. I saw old friends. But they didn’t recognise me. Could be the hair. Now it’s white. It wasn’t always. They heard my voice. The fellow said it was my glasses. But then people do in fact see ghosts. What do you do? Talk to them? Walk on by? The other person didn’t say a word and had a sort of alarmed expression. That’s consistent with death and cancellation.
Fortunately, I was with Katherine and friends. The guy is in Roxy Music, but only one person at the Event recognised him. As his band mate, Brian Ferry, once sang in a cover version, “I’m in with the In-Crowd; I go where the In-Crowd goes.”
And it was ever thus. A few glasses of wine at the French then an early night at our hotel in Clerkenwell, then home to Cornwall on the greatest unscheduled train in the South West of England, the Great Western Railway.
And now it’s a memory, a thing of the past, and if there’s pain, then it’s that “ghost limb” phenomenon that afflicts people who traumatically lose a limb. The pain goes away. With time.
Here in Cornwall I read, quite a bit. I favour the classics. I count Kafka’s work as classic. As one of my subscribers has pointed out, I mention Kafka a lot in this substack. (Feel free to subscribe by the way, there’s a lot more biliousness where this comes from.) That’s how I picked up Kafka’s “The Trial” and read this opening line:
Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 1). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Some wags have said that this line and this novel in some way prefigure life under fascist regimes, but come on, it could happen anywhere, and why limit it to fascism. Kafka lived in Prague. That’s Czech, not Nazi Germany. The Nazis didn’t come to power until a few years later. By then Franz Kafka was dead, tuberculosis. But then I did have occasion to visit Auschwitz on a location scout in Poland. In this one building, they have a room for all the glasses’ frames, another for hair, and one for luggage.
It’s an enormous pile of luggage that was taken from the new arrivals at the camp and discarded since they wouldn’t be needing it anymore. Atop the stack, one piece of luggage faced the viewer. On it were two chalked words, “Kafka” and “Prag”, the German spelling of ‘Prague’. The grip must have belonged to Franz’s sister Ottilie; she died in Auschwitz. Sister Elli, it’s surmised, died in Kulmhof. Valli died in Chelmno.
So much absence. If Hamlet’s “undiscovered country” exists, and the Ghost of his father gives his son evidence, if he can trust his senses, that it most certainly does, I expect that with its vast extent, its many conurbations and suburbs, the afterworld is larger than all our largest cities combined. Yet in Heaven - suppose the Christians are right - we’re sure to see people we know.
But Hell? Who knows? It’s larger than heaven, and since Dante visited, and saw lots of familiar face, there have been many additions. For example, management types like the ones who ran the camps where the Kafka sisters died, and their Underlings who took the luggage and showed the way to the showers.
“Bursting at the seams” we say in my native United States to describe an oversubscribed event. Yet I hold out hope that Heaven, with its restrictive door policy and fearsome ‘face police’ working the door, has few enough people that you could reasonably expect that one day, if you have all the time in the world - and you would - you must eventually run into people you know.
Like at Jenne’s Memorial: people from the past, like Ollie Madden, if he made the cut, and why wouldn’t he. And famous people, too, from the past. For example, I can imagine a situation where I wander the margins of a drinks do for tyrants who were also statesmen, like Ollie Madden, but famous, like Henry Kissinger, and that crazy Mongol but superb stateseman Genghis Khan. I confess my own fandom. I have a thing for Napoleon Bonaparte, and I didn’t get my full portion of him in Ridley’s movie where Joaquin Phoenix plays the diminutive Corsican.
So I can imagine, if I ever get to Heaven, and get invited to such an exclusive event, that I would find, sitting at the margins, unloved, shunned by those gathering around starrier dictators, my Napoleon Bonaparte warming his hands around a cup of tea. I would go up to him. I would break the ice by doing a little pantomime with my hand, putting it in my shirt, mimicking the posture the caricaturists use to picture him. I wonder if he would be gracious enough to chuckle and invite me to sit with him. Or would he ignore me, pretend I’m not there, pretend I’m a ghost, which wouldn’t require much imagination because technically, if the Christians got this right, that’s what we would be.
But I would be pretty sure that I had not been cancelled. If you’re cancelled, you go to the other place, right? Otherwise cancellation would be a rather toothless punishment for someone guilty enough to merit joblessness, ostracism, in some cases early death or suicide. I mean, you got to live your convictions.
Judging from my experience, these self-appointed Moral Police do have the courage of their convictions. Though, if you’ll excuse a pun, some of their convictions are for defrauding their organisations of funds.
It’s hard once you get on the subject of suicide and death not to tell just one more story, or two. So if you’ve read this far - I promise this column will end - I’ll tell you about Carl Barnett, music teacher at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma when I went there in the early 1970’s. He taught my uncle Ted music in the early 1950’s. Teddy played trombone, and he went on to play in Broadway shows, Philharmonia, studio sessions with the likes of Count Basie. A real pro, and a tough customer. He used to say the music industry was strangled by a guitar string. That’s why he went into the U S Army Field Band, Fort George Meade, Maryland. They traveled the country and played Sousa marches and their avant garde arrangements of things like Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” which is a great showpiece for the trombone and other brass instruments.
In this way, Teddy had a secure income, and served his country for 23 years. He lives in Arizona, near my mom, his younger sister, Mary, who also went to Will Rogers High. I mention this to say, this tough customer who did not mince words, loved Carl Barnett.
So we were shocked and saddened when Carl Barnett died in 1974. The circumstances of his death merit a modicum of description.
Carl Barnett liked classical music, and if you played for him, you played Bach. So it was, one night during 1974, the Will Rogers High School Stage Band, under the direction of Carl Barnett, played “Komm, süsser Tod” or “Come, sweet Death”.
During the song, Carl Barnett collapsed. He had suffered a massive coronary and died onstage.
Come, sweet Death: people imagined the song as Bach imagined it, as a plea to see the face of Our Saviour. These people imagined further that on that night Mr. Barnett’s plea was answered.
A story that does not square with that has it that the ghost of Mr. Barnett to this day wanders the backstage of Will Rogers High School, a vintage Depression era WPA architectural relic that was and may still be in excellent nick, wearing formal attire, a perfectly white tuxedo. Perhaps then we do become ghosts and wander, hopefully that well turned-out.
One more story: Lazarus. He fascinates me, first because he features in an arresting painting by Michelangelo Caravaggio, “The Raising of Lazarus”. If you don’t remember the story, it’s this, Lazarus is sick; Jesus takes his time visiting his sickbed; when he gets there, Lazaus is dead, and his sisters are bereft, and one is even a little pissed off, which surprises Jesus because he, being a Perfect Being, was perhaps unaware that the death of a loved one could cut a person up so badly with grief. It’s here that we get the shortest sentence in the Bible, “Jesus wept”.
Jesus bids that the stone to the tomb be rolled away, hence Leon Russell’s (Leon, another graduate of Will Rogers High and beloved of Elton John) song “Roll Away the Stone”. Jesus steps into the Tomb.
"ROLL AWAY THE STONE", LEON RUSSELL
You see it in the picture, Lazarus is four days dead. He’s green, and Scripture tells us that he smells a little overripe. (It’s said Caravaggio, a stickler for realism, got his hands on an actual corpse to use as a model.) No matter to Jesus: He raises Lazarus from the dead, and brings him back to life.
(THE RAISING OF LAZARUS, MICHELANGELO CARAVAGGIO, MUSEO REGIONALE MESSINA)
In the new version of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” writer-director Steve Zaillian works Caravaggio into the story. Zaillian thereby adds a deft stroke foreshadowing Ripley’s murder and life on the run, because Caravaggio, as Dickie Greenleaf points out, killed someone and went on the run, too. Unlike Caravaggio (spoiler alert), Ripley gets away.
The author of the Book of John pulls off a nice piece of foreshadowing, too. Jesus raising Lazarus, with His Father’s help, anticipates His own fate some days later, when He is murdered by crucifixion and three days later rises from His Tomb. It makes redemption look easy, but we know it’s hard; otherwise every body would be doing it.
David Bowie in his last recording, made into a show, chooses for his last transformation in a career of transformations, as his final persona, “Lazarus”. With a bit of cheek, Bowie adds a lyric that pictures himself dropping his phone after death.
After Death and Raising, Lazarus converts to Christianity (wouldn’t you?) and becomes, under the auspices of Saint Paul, the Bishop of Cyprus. Lazarus is a bit more revered by the Eastern Church where there’s more lore about his life after death.
One story has it that during his time dead in the tomb, the soul of Lazarus had to enter the Land of the Dead. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, he wanders there, and then pulls off, as we’ve seen with the help of Jesus, the hardest trick there is, coming back alive.
The one thing that people said changed about Lazarus after his death and return to the living: he never smiled again. It would have been no consolation to Lazarus to know exactly what things look like on the Other Side. It’s enough to wipe the smile off your face.
So where does that leave us?
In the Travellers Lounge, I suppose, waiting for our flight to an unknown destination, unsmiling, flicking channels.
There’s one consolation: this flight will not be canceled.