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On Verdi Cries by 10,000 Maniacs, as Threatened
The man in one-nineteen takes his tea all alone
Mornings we all rise to wireless
Verdi cries
I’m hearing opera through the door
The souls of men and women impassioned all
Their voices climb and fall
Battle trumpets call
I fill the bath and climb inside
Singing
He will not touch their pastry
But every day they bring him more
Gold from the breakfast tray
I steal them all away
And then go eat them on the shore
I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand
Sing of a lover’s fate
Sealed by jealous hate
Then wash my hands in the sea
With just three days more
I’d have just about learned the entire score
To Aida
Holidays must end as you know
All these memories
Taken home with me
The opera, the stolen tea
The sand drawing, the verging sea
All years ago
(Natalie Merchant, 1987)
This floors me utterly. Always has done, and I first heard it twenty years ago and haven’t exactly gone easy on it since. Seriously, it was all I could do not to burst into tears while typing out those words. (And I’m not even gay. At least, that’s what my analyst tells me, for £60 an hour. My girlfriend says she’ll get back to me on it.) It is without doubt my favourite pop song that’s ostensibly set in a hospice. I think what’s so heartbreaking about it is that these deaths – or soon to be deaths – are pretty much the most dignified and comfortable deaths available to any human being who ever existed, but they are still curtailments of those impassioned souls, they’re still stuff that curious minds and curious bodies would have liked to have got around to but were denied the time. The world’s foremost expert on the philosopher Epicurus will kill me for this, but Epicurus, helpfully translated into the modern vernacular, says that, for you personally (and sod the weepy relatives and friends you never liked anyway) death is no biggie cos, fuck it, you’re dead, innit. But he’s wrong, cos he’s forgotten about all the stuff you could have been doing if it wasn’t for the whole being dead palaver. QED. Fuck you, Epicurus.
posted on Monday 2nd March, 2009
