Meursault's Walk & Mine (Dad's ashes)

JOURNAL ENTRY

 25^th July, Thursday

“First light of iron and steel.
A mist of rain
On the back of
A wind from the south.

A raven calls from the
Topmost branch of the tallest
Of the convocational oaks.

We both look west
And share this morning light
Of rain and southerly wind.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

There's hardly a breath of wind tonight. The moon, in her last quarter, is hiding just below the skyline to the east. The sky is clear with the blues of late twilight. The surface of the water is mirror calm and the charcoal-coloured reeds hold their breath lest they wake the dozing moorhens. Quietness pools around us like a filling rock pool. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into darkness of a late July night to you wherever you are.

Greetings! It is lovely to see you. I am really glad you could make it on such a glorious summer's night. Come inside where it is cool, settle down and let us enjoy the night together. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

It’s a busy time along the canal bank with lots of coming and going. Fruit is beginning to ripen along the hedgerows and some of the cow parsley and lacy cousins are beginning to die back. Cuckoopint in their fruiting form are now beginning to emerge; scarlet , and green and red, traffic light, popsicles. Bindweed braids of trumpeting flowers, black Briony's waxy heart shaped leaves. Swallows chitter on the wing like a troop of small chattering monkeys.

I still haven’t seen many dragonflies this year. It’s worrying as we are now at the height of their season and usually they are in profusion.

I suppose the local news has been predominated by the swans. In the last episode I said that I had heard reports that two of the six cygnets appear to be missing, but wasn’t sure about the details. Well, it does appear that the whole family strayed out of their territory and went below the lock – then getting stuck on the wrong side. I don’t know how far down they went, but do know from when we were down that way last, that there was a couple of nesting swans there and so this was probably part of their territory. Territorial disputes can be violent and sometimes lethal – particularly to the young offspring. This might have been the reason, or an attack of some description. Four of the original cygnets eventually made it back to their home ground, but one was spotted with very bad injuries and cuts. It looked as if he had been caught in barbed wire – possibly trying to escape a predator. Fortunately, some of the heroic local boaters managed to catch him and take him across county to a swan sanctuary. Reports are that he is fine and expected to fully recover. However, because he will have been away from the rest of his family for so long, he cannot be reintroduced as they will reject him. Therefore, he will be looked after at the sanctuary and then released back into the wild when he is older and strong enough to look after himself.

However, the three remaining cygnets are continuing to grow. They are much larger than the ducks now and are really quite capable of looking after themselves, but still hang around Mum. Dad is now a little more distant. I assume that he thinks most of his work is done. Actually, the adult swans look as if they are entering their eclipse. There are piles of feathers everywhere. The cygnets, are still scruffy with stalky grey fluff and young feathers, dampened by rain and water splash. Unkempt hooligans who are gaining their own individual personalities.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

MEURSAULT’S WALK & MINE (DAD’S ASHES)

A few days back I had the rather strange, unsettling even, experience of walking in the footsteps of the main character from one of my favourite books. Well, I say favourite, that is probably going a little too far, but a book that has had a huge impact on me, my life, writing, and sense of perspective. Its author is someone whose skill as a writer I think is massively underestimated. Probably because he is better known as a philosopher and has become rather a pin-up boy for his particular school of philosophy, Existentialism. And that is Albert Camus. The book is L'Étranger (The Stranger), published in English translation as The Outsider. It was the first of his books that I read and I was immediately arrested by the clarity of writing and the sheer powerful evocation of the images and pictures he creates. Of course, credit must also be given to the translator, for my edition .Sandra Smith. But I immediately wanted to write like him and no other. Bearing in mind that up until then, I was still very much in the thrall of Dylan Thomas and his mesmerising kaleidoscopic use of adjectives and semi-kenning – an influence that more than one listener to this podcast has noted still remains! As much as I would want to, I can never write like Camus. Adjectives just leak out of the soles of my feet everywhere I walk. However, this was almost the polar opposite. I had come across it in some of Steinbeck’s writings. Sharp, sparse. Sentences paired of colour and yet how brilliantly did they shine?! The Gallic atmosphere – although set in French colonial Algiers – and this sparklingly lucid quality of the prose dazzled me. I think it is why enjoy the reading Georges Simenon so much. It’s not the plots so much, mostly they go over my head or I’m simply not really interested in them. It’s the places he takes me too, the settings, rain swept, bitter, wrapped in fog or parched by a blistering sun. Scanning the list of Maigret (and other) titles of his that I have read, I would be hard pressed to describe the plot of even a handful, but I would be able to tell you the places he took us, how it felt, and how it made me feel. Camus does that too.

In all honesty, I am ambivalent about The Outsider. The main character, Meursault – who is also the narrator - is a person I find difficult to relate or have sympathy to any real depth with. Actually, you are meant to feel that. He is after all, an outsider, a stranger in more than one sense. He lies outside the rigid cultivated social conventions and mores of 1940’s France. In that sense, he is someone perhaps more identifiable to the modern reader who feels alienated and alone, somehow apart from a culture that, even though increasingly polarised and fragmented, is also ever more locked into prescribed codes of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.

Secularism was on the rise in Europe and Camus pours into the world of Meursault the major existentialist themes of meaning and morality in a meaningless and godless universe. The Outsider is one of Camus’ first attempts to grapple with some of these questions, particularly how does one live authentically or truthfully in a world that ultimately has no meaning or morality – only those culturally imposed? Meursault is a man situated on the margins of his society. Key to this is his emotional detachment as much as his social detachment. Today, we would probably identify Meursault as socio-pathic or exhibiting some kind of psychopathy – although even today, these terms carry a certain stigma and weight of value. Later, discussing this book, Camus stated that he was exploring the idea that “In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.' I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game…”

The opening paragraph of the book reads…

[READING]

Meursault does not feel grief or sadness, does not cry, just numbness and disconnection. It affronts the conventions; the little rituals of grief. Meursault refuses to play along. He refuses to pretend he feels something that he doesn’t.

The first part follows Meursault attending his mother’s funeral and noting his emotional detachment. This detachment forms a barrier or wall between him and those around. Later, this is taken to the rhetorical extension. After being embroiled in a fight on Algier’s beachfront, Meursault kills one of them, an unnamed Arab, by shooting him. Here again, he feels only an emotional detachment. The second part of the book is his experience in prison waiting to be executed. Here Camus brings in the major existentialist themes of living in a universe without meaning or any revealed universal ethic. It is a universe that is as indifferent to him as he is to everyone else around. How do you make sense or find meaning in a meaningless existence? Camus encapsulates this quandary, in his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ published in 1942 around the time that he was writing The Outsider, with magnificent, but devastating clarity, what stops us from committing suicide in a universe that is absurd?      

A listener once wrote to me and said the thing he liked about Nighttime on Still Waters was that you could never predict or tell what was coming next! Well, that is certainly true today!! I’m getting way off the point here, but it is sort of important to understand the context of my experience and why I found it a little unsettling.

Personally – and it is probably very controversial, as much as I love The Outsider, for the beauty of its writing, I much prefer Camus’ later novel The Plague (La Peste) that charts the events of a small town, thrown into quarantine, by the arrival of a deadly virus. Returning to it after many years and reading it again during that warm silent Spring of the pandemic was an unforgettable experience. 

In both books the geography plays a major role, but it is Camus’ use of weather that strikes me the most. In both books, the heat almost takes on the role of protagonist. The lethal virus and the sweltering summer heat meld into one in The Plague. The unnamed Arab in The Outsider is depicted very much as incidental, collateral damage in the face of the blazing Algerian sun. I think that the callous disregard of a human life as callously disregarding as the sun that beats down upon the beach is entirely intentional.

But it was the earlier description in which Meursault follows the funeral cortege, in which Camus so expertly uses the sun and heat to build the tension, that I found myself swimmingly free-falling into.

[READING]

Just over a week ago, I went to collect Dad’s ashes from the funeral director. It was a sweltering hot day of sticky heat, reaching well up to almost 30°. The walk across town, from Dad’s house was only a short one taking probably only about five or six minutes. I knew the back streets and alleyways (there are a lot of them there – reminiscent of smuggler’s alleys, all sharp zig-zags and skulking) enough to be able to weave my way along the shortest and coolest route.

We’d not slept at all well the previous night, and had to get up for a 5 o’clock start to be in Norfolk in time for the man who was coming to collect the remaining boxes of Mum and Dad’s books. A sleepless night and the heat began to make my head throb. Donna had suggested picking up the ashes in the car when we first got there, but I was resistant to that. I don’t know why; it just didn’t feel right. It still doesn’t. I’d go a pick them up, once we had opened up the house and unpacked our stuff. However, as always happens, multitudes of jobs surface and I didn’t get going until well after 11.00, when the sun was nearing its height and so the shadowed alleyways the snaked between houses offered little relief from the sun.

I was hot, tired, and my head was beginning to ache, but the walk is pleasant and the grassy green at the top of the town, bordered by regency period houses is nearly always a welcome respite of calm. I cut across the green following a route that took in most of the glorious shadowed-cool offered by the majestic mature limes that line the rectangle of the common, and then dropped down a further alleyway towards the funeral directors. It’s a strange, befuddling experience picking up your father’s ashes. Sitting at the desk waiting while the person who was manning the reception went to collect the neat little box that contained what is rather grotesquely referred to as ‘cremains’, I became aware of not so much what I was feeling as what I was not feeling. That sense of disassociation. Not numbness particularly, that would suggest something too definite, too emotional. Just a sort of nothing. The sort of nothing you might feel waiting for the bank teller to print off a document, or a pharmacist to pick up a packet of medication waiting to be collected. All I was aware of was the coolness of the room, compared to the dirty grit of heat outside and the cars that passed by. The brochures on the side table. Flowers in a vase by the window that the sun streamed through. Samples of receptacles for ashes in different sizes depending on whether the remains are human or pet. A pen on the clean, polished wooden desk in front of me, which took everything in me not to pick up a fiddle with. It was at this point, my mind flicked back to Meursault’s long night vigil beside his mother’s body. An awkward, slightly uncomfortable wait. Aware of those around who seemed to fall so naturally into the socially expected rhythms of ritual and convention, that for him jarred and felt alien.

The person at the reception was lovely, very supportive and professional in her empathy. Was I sure that I was okay? ‘Ashes,” she said (I noticed that she too avoided the term, cremains), ‘are surprisingly heavy.’ The cardboard box, now sitting on the clean wooden desk in front of me, was very neat, about the size of an over-large shoe box. Good quality cardboard, nicely presented. I assured here, that I was okay and that it would be no problem. More cars went by on the road outside.

But the whole thing had an unreal feel to it in its sheer mundanity. The handing over of this cardboard box in which there was a plastic bag that contained all that was left of my Dad. The signing of the register to document receipt of remains, the shaking hands, saying the right things in response to the social convention. It felt as if there needed to be something more. More theatre, more ritual, more to mark something awful (in the proper sense) something truly cataclysmic. Some form of words or actions. Something that would stop the cars passing by, and the busy streets and stop the airliners in the sky, just for one half second – to acknowledge, yes, this has happened – we understand. In a lot of ways, this action of picking up a large shoe box and holding in my hands my father exerted far greater emotional weight and gravity, than the funeral did and seeing the coffin slip between the curtains.

But, again, our present culture does not do death well. We have no form of words or ritual acts to help us locate our hiding (or hidden) emotions. I suddenly realised that I felt as lost and as detached as Meursault did. No, detached is not quite accurate, dis-located, might have been a better description. I too would have asked for white coffee when the expected option was black. I simply, unfolded the shopping bag that I had brought along with me, placed the box of ashes in it, picked it up, said ‘thank you for all your help’ and opened the door to the oven-heat and traffic.

The walk back was a strange haphazard meander of an almost dream-like trance. This man carrying a shopping bag through the streets of a seaside town with his Dad’s ashes inside it. The lady in the undertakers was right. They are surprisingly heavy – although Donna and Wendy had already warned me that they were. The weight of the ashes of the average male is roughly the same as that of a baby. Of all the worries and problems that could have concerned me at that moment, the one all-consuming one was which route should I take back to the house? Looking back, it is difficult to see why that held such significance, or why it posed such a problem. I think it was partly because of that feeling that this moment, this action, needed to be marked in some way. Simply prosaically trudging back through the heat following the shortest route, didn’t seem appropriate.

But it was also the weight of this box in this bag. The weight of a baby. The weight of the ashes of a man who once lived. The weight of the ashes of my Dad.

There is a photograph of Dad holding me. In my memory, it was at my Christening, but looking again at it, I think it must have been later. I am older. He is looking at me, relaxed, smiling. We’re both young. Our lives together just starting and I am being held by Dad. And now at the end of that life, I am holding Dad. Weight for weight. Heaviness for heaviness. That picture is all I could think about as I hesitated whether to nip up a steep alleyway. The advantage was that it offered at least some shade and would take me back up the green. I also know that Dad liked this alleyway. However, it would take me away from the churchyard, and the little foot-lane that passes the alpacas and on through the old cemetery. I know Dad liked this route too. Stopping in the churchyard under a canopy of spreading tree branches, sitting on the bench to listen to the dove and pigeon coo and the more distant wheel of gulls, breathing in the resining smell of warm trees, also seemed important. Which way Dad? I can’t do both and it is sweltering.    

The enormity of taking Dad home for the last time in HIS world threw me. Carrying him as he carried me in the first years of my life. It’s confusing. Bewildering. How am I supposed to feel? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t matter. But at that moment, it felt as if it does matter. That the continued turning of the world depended upon it. Perhaps this is what true goodbye feels like. It’s not sadness, just odd. Strange.

Personally, I am still agnostic about life after death. At times, I struggle with the concept. It wasn’t as if I felt Dad was really with me and that I was taking him around for one last look and to say a last goodbye to all his favourite places, but it also sort felt that that was exactly what I was doing. The putting to rest.

The sun pounded down on hot tarmac. A stark blue bowl of sky, flashed with guano-white gull and tern. Sweat trickled and itched in my eyebrows. The smell of parched earth, bins, chips. Tufts of grass grow in odd corners or among the brickwork; bleached to hessian, brittle and scratchy. The heat seems to rise up from the pavements to greet the heat pouring from the sky. I am caught in the middle making the throbbing in my temples louder and louder as I zigzagged across town. Walking, almost automatically, making snap decisions at each turn. Seeing Dad in each place, even as I carried him under my arm, cradling him there, as I was cradled once.

There was that weird surreal disjunction that many who have also been in my position of following families on their holiday with fishing nets and beach towels on their way to the beach, laughing and joking together, as they carried picnics and sunscreen in their bags, and me carrying my dad in mine. Dad would have appreciated the joke. Cut back upon myself, walking mindlessly and yet never more fully minded. I didn’t know what I was doing, but also seemed to instinctively know. Walking close to an east facing wall that offered a few strides worth of shade. Threading past, trodden dog mess, a fast-food wrapper, caught like a prayer flag in the chain-link fence. The heat rose up from the paving stones.

We did get to the churchyard in the end. The sun was beating heavy and my head swam, pain behind the eyes and a pounding in my temple. It was too hot to sit down, but the shade was heavenly and the pigeons cooed softly from the steeple heights.

I hadn’t planned on saying anything more on this podcast about Dad’s death. I had felt that I had said all I wanted or needed in ‘Walking Home in Fading Light.’ But I was wrong. Standing beneath the tower of St Nicholas’ flint-faced steeple, there was a little more to say. There were threads left untidied, business not quite complete. Things never quite go as planned. To use the analogy of the walk home, that I used in that episode, every walk – real walk – has its miss-steps, wrong turnings. And so did this one. Dad’s death was a good one, a gentle going to sleep with his daughter and son there. But it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t end how I would have wanted. Things still left unsaid. A hurt that was left unhealed. Things I would have changed. Decisions, judgement calls that I would alter. Perhaps Dad feels (or felt) the same. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is also a torment. I wish I had known, on that last night that it was going to be last. To have spoken one more time. To have reassured him in his sleep that I was just going to pop upstairs for a bath. Would he have heard? Maybe not – though the hearing, it is said, is the last thing to go – but I would have known.

We don’t always get it right. Life is not perfect and neither are we. That’s what makes us human. That’s what makes our desire to be better so beautiful and powerful. This last walk taught me that once again. Standing in the church yard surrounded by all the sounds and smells that Dad loved. Where this spring the early daffodils bloomed and then the cowslips – clouds of them – and going back to the house to say “Dad, Spring has come at last.” Him smiling and asking if the scaffolding was still around the tower. Now, back here, with him heavy in my arms, a precious time. A time of coming to terms with his and my shortcomings – of learning to live with the tattered ragged edges of our lives.             

Meanwhile, Dad, there’s one more alleyway back towards the top of the town that I want us to walk down…

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG