A great many things were dead

This morning it was -34°C with the windchill. Harsh, blowing snow. Tomorrow will be no better.

It's winter.

I'll be spending the weekend indoors reading, I think. What could be more appropriate than Winter, by Ali Smith.

It starts like this:

God was dead: to begin with.

And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.

Love was dead.

Death was dead.

A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren't, or weren't dead yet.

Life wasn't yet dead. Revolution wasn't dead. Racial equality wasn't dead. Hatred wasn't dead.

But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.

Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower.

Ghosts themselves weren't dead, not exactly. Instead the following questions came up:
      are ghosts dead
      are ghosts dead or alive
      are ghosts deadly
but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn't a ghost story, though it's the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas (Christmas, too, dead) and it's about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead).

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this opening.

Of all the things listed as dead, I'd argue that twitter, instagram, and mobiles (at least in their smart incarnations) are not, though they are losing relevance quickly. And racism, not dead. (The rest I won't take issue with.) I assumed a current-day setting, but perhaps this list intends to nudge the timeframe slightly ahead.

Or dead is meant allegorically. Dead inside.

Dead of winter.

No one transcends

Her parents were too middle-aged and dull to suffer accidents or die before their time, like mountaineers or poets.

For some reason I was under the impression that this book was a comedy. It is not a comedy. It is excruciatingly beautiful and filled with great sadness.

I read Jim Crace's Being Dead in one sitting. It starts with two middle-aged zoologists, husband and wife, Joseph and Celice, on a beach, undressed and very dead.

When their daughter, Syl, arrives at their house days later, she learns that Celice has been reading Calvino's Antonyms. (I can't find any trace of such a book. Anyone?) One strand of the novella details the process of death and the decay of the bodies, over the 6 days till they were found, and this strikes me as a very Calvino-esque element, in a t-zero kind of way, so minutely microcosmically physical as to become cosmically metaphysical, the flesh of a life lived falling away.

So this decomposition is interwoven with the story of their meeting; it's quite musical really, the backwards telling and the forward, their coming together and the falling apart, and then you start to hear the hum, the drone of their current life. The murder itself is percussive, and so is the daughter's anger and resentment.

It's sad how much the daughter is like the mother, but doesn't know it, and will never know it.

How should the dying spend their time when life's short portion shrinks with every waking day? She'd walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world's small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death — or birth — except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

It's sad that Joseph and Celice spent their lives together, but not really together, and that they don't love each other the way they should. It's kind of sad that they ended up together, they were good for each other for a while, for that summer, but a forever should not have grown out of it. It's so sad they should die like this.

They say that hearing is the last of our proficiencies to die, that corpses hear the rustling of bed sheets being pulled across their faces, the early weeping and the window being closed, the footsteps on the wooden stairs, the ruffian departing, the doctor's scratchy pen. This is why our generation talks so quietly in the dying room. And that is why the quiverings of old were not a waste. The body hears the widow and the child, the rattle of the chimney-pot, the quiver sticks, the life unravelled backwards through the night.

Interview: The Paris Review
Review: New York Times

(For the record, I loved Crace's The Pesthouse. On the basis of that book, I have a couple other of his works lined up on my shelf. On the basis of Being Dead, I'll be getting to them sooner rather than later.)