Entropy and pathos in life and in writing

 

A few days ago, my Great Uncle Perce passed away in hospital. His death did not come as a surprise. In August of this year, he had turned 105. He had received his customary birthday card from the Queen – his sixth – which he had given to my Father.

His final days were quiet. His lungs were unable to draw in enough oxygen to sustain him. In the wake of his final shallow breath, an immense archive of knowledge and experience was irrevocably stricken from the living memory of our species, and lost in time forever.

Friedrich Nietzsche advised that one should aim to die at the appropriate time. In most cases, whether one has succeed or failed in this endeavour is left to the retrospective judgement of others. My great uncle would probably have been the first to agree that he had lingered on this earth for too long. He was the unwilling inheritor of a double-edged set of genetics that maintained a tenacious grip on life, regardless of its quality. His body simply didn't know how to die. In his later years, he accumulated an impressive collection of co-morbidities without succumbing to any of them. He spent much of his final decade, bed-bound in the council flat that he refused to leave, subsisting largely on a diet of chocolate mini-rolls; sometimes as many as 60 a week.

While he was loved by his family, in particular my younger brother, from whom I am estranged, his great age had inevitably sidelined him as an anachronism; a fragment of living history, who had outlived their era. His outdated opinions and language would have likely earned him the enmity and contempt of those who espouse the virtue of tolerance in their speech, but who are utterly vicious and mob-like in their actions. During the Second World War, he fought for the freedoms that people like this take for granted and increasingly abuse.

He harboured a disdain for organised religion but described himself as “a God-fearing man.” He said that, during the war, there were times when every man prayed, regardless of whether he attended church or not.

Yesterday, my father and I visited Perce's council flat. Ostensibly we went there to remove any valuable items, since there are multiple keys-holders to the property; also there has recently been an issue with drug users gaining access to the building. We thought it prudent to take out anything that might be of interest to burglars. While we were there, we took readings from the gas and electricity meters so that we could notify the utility companies.

The flat was landlocked in the early 1970s. The grimy, garishly-patterned carpets appeared to have shrunk as they slowly uprooted themselves from the floor. The spongy, heavily-textured wallpaper had become a magnet for dirt. Hanging from the ceiling, in the approximate centre of the living room, there was a small chandelier, consisting of tiered circles of dangling glass pendants, that resembled icicles dipped in liquid nicotine. The origin of this brown staining will remain a mystery. Neither Perce, nor his long dead wife, Nance, ever smoked. The bathroom was a disaster. We both instinctively avoided it. By the time we left the flat my blue latex gloves were coated in a silty veneer of grey filth.

As we moved through the rooms we encountered the surface evidence of a life that had been permanently interrupted. The pendulum of the clock, on the wall of the lounge, swung dutifully back and forth, marking time for no-one. In the bedroom, there was a small, square plastic bowl that contained six unwrapped mini-rolls and a trio of protein drinks. The drum of the washing machine contained a dry, semi-cleanish tangle of clothing and bed linen, that must have been set into motion by the carers during their final visit. The doors to the kitchen cupboards had been repurposed as an improvised noticeboard and were covered in scraps of paper bearing heavily underlined hand-written instructions for visitors.

It was only when we began to open wardrobes and drawers, and Nance's old clothes, costume jewellery, birthday cards and assorted nicknack's tumbled out, that I began to gain an impression of a life that had gradually been laid to one side, as the effort required to maintain even a basic standard of living became increasingly difficult.

There was certainly more than my father and I could have hoped to deal with. We gathered a few photographs, cleared out the refrigerator and returned home.

It was a strange coda to a life, though maybe not an uncommon one. I regard pathos as a defining human trait. It is something that I frequently resort to in my writing, especially when it comes to ending stories. It seems that much of what occurs during our lives is sorrowful and anti-climatic. As for our deaths, very few of us get to leave this world in a manner that would be regarded as heroic or dramatic. Nor are we likely to ride off into the sunset, keeling over unceremoniously only after we have bridged the horizon and passed beyond view. The best that we can hope for is a figurative trudge towards an overcast sky. However, most of us, even those whose lives have been as long and as storied as my Great Uncle's, will go quietly, leaving behind rooms that display recent signs of a life in slow remission; ephemeral traces of a human being that will be cleared away by their loved ones.

For a long time – too long now – I have been preparing an Amazon paperback edition of my novella – The Missionary Dune. This self-appointed task has devolved into a treacly downward spiral of stalling and procrastination, driven partly by my apprehensions regarding the physical quality of the end product, over which I will have minimal control. The current hold-up is my fault and can be put down to the addition of an epilogue that I am in the process of editing. When this supplementary text has been thoroughly weeded and sufficiently polished, it will also be grafted onto the current edition of the eBook.

Although I am happy with the ending of The Missionary Dune, I concluded that the book should close on a note of pathos and reflection; one that was 'off to the side' and only tenuously related to the over-arcing plot. The coda that I have written dwells upon Edric Munnoch (a minor character in the novel) as he strikes out across the Saltmoor in the company of his visiting brother, Sigric. In this desolate setting, the two men discuss the past and future of their sprawling family estate on the Norfolk coast.

Unlike the novel, which is written in the first person, this short addendum (I expect that it will end up being between 2000-3000 words) switches to a third-person perspective. This has been done to give readers the impression that they are watching the two characters from a distance.

The broader purpose of the epilogue is to set up a minor event that occurs partway through my second novel, which, at the time of writing this blog, exists as 126 pages of chapter and character notes. It also establishes the predominant theme for the new book, which is nationalism; not the common derogatory portrayal of such movements, but rather what happens when a nation loses belief in itself, to the extent that it surrenders the ability to unify the disparate communities who dwell within its borders. I have already written the final paragraph as I like to have something to aim at. This time around I am setting my sights on an ending that is a little less ambiguous and a little more optimistic, but we will see.