And After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

For some years now, I have considered Momus to be one of the most fascinating singer songwriters alive, and I am currently looking forward to acquiring his new album, which should be released on St. Valentine’s Day in the United Kingdom. It’s not that I agree with everything he says, but the fact that he has the ability and the nerve to express some very specific and often very radical ideas in his songs, I find to be admirable. In this way he is one of the very rare individuals to set himself apart from the usual crowd of singers that someone else has recently described (in a song) thus: "Just more lock-jaw pop stars, thicker than pigshit/ Nothing to convey/ They’re too scared to show intelligence/ It might smear a lovely career."

In fact, I think that Momus may well be the most articulate singer songwriter I have ever come across. And this means a great deal to me. From the time I began to take an active interest in music, shortly before my teenage, I developed the feeling that I couldn’t bear to listen to music made by people who were obviously less intelligent than myself. It made me indignant somehow to have to listen to idiots. But I digress.

Is Momus famous? Most people I speak to about him have not heard of him or his music. Perhaps these things are relative, though. Momus himself has modified the famous Warhol dictum that "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes" to "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people." In this case, Momus is certainly famous and more. If it comes to that – and it does – I am also famous (I would not be surprised if it were for exactly fifteen people). Whether this level of fame is satisfying is another question, and a question that is dealt with in one of Momus’ songs, How to Get – And Stay – Famous. I quote from that song:

"Lord, I have friends, I've watched them, one by one, become famous.

While they complimented me on my songs, I smiled in my corner alone, watched their inner birds

Spread their wings and fly.

Though I had an inner bird too, Lord, You know, mine remained a swan in cellophane

Trapped under a glass ceiling, a bird in a transparent cage

Lord, why do this to me? Why let me die having given me a bird and never let it fly?

Lord, why? Why?"

This anguished question – addressed to God – "Why?" is echoed in another song to have caught my attention recently, I Have Forgiven Jesus, by Morrissey. In this, Morrissey sings: "Why did you give me so much love in a loveless world/ When there’s no one I can turn to/ To unlock all this love?"

Why, indeed. This is a question that perplexes me, too. Because, yes, I too have an inner bird, a swan in cellophane.

Recently I received an e-mail from a friend of mine, in which she told me – I blush, but it’s necessary for me to write this for the sake of this little essay – that she had recently read one of my stories, ‘Far-off Things’, and wanted to tell me never to forget that I was a … No, after all, I can’t say it. But, suffice to say, it was complimentary.

I believe I wrote back to say thank you and added that while I seem to have got almost uniformly positive responses from readers and reviewers, for some reason, publishers and editors do not seem to see things in the same way. To which she responded in turn that she didn’t know why I should always revert to such a thing, that the point was that I was able to touch people with what I had written.

There was not much I could really say to this. After all, that really is the point of writing, however miserable publishers and editors may make our lives by being so thick-skulled. If I have touched people with my writing, then it would seem I have succeeded. We must forget about that thing ‘public acclaim’, perhaps simply for our own happiness, but certainly for the sake of art. Those in charge of selling art are usually the enemies of art. By winning on their terms, you usually lose on your own terms. You must simply remember yourself, get back to yourself, and to the swan imprisoned in your heart.

When I want to forget this sordid world and try to ‘get back to myself’, I go for a walk along the river, not far from my house. There I look at the rippling river surface, at the branches and leaves, at the water birds – the geese, the moorhens, the swans. These things will not last. We know now that within ten years global warming will become irreversible. We have ten years to convince the government of the USA to change its policy re the environment. I am not hopeful. So I stare at the birds, wordlessly, knowing that there is only this moment. The birds have become a presence in my life, like my friends. I feel as if we are quietly sharing our last moments on earth. This is life, this and nothing else. It’s a clichéd phrase, but these days, more than ever before, I feel as if I ‘commune with nature’ whenever I go for a walk. I stare at twisted fractals of winter branches. I greedily drink in every change of the rain clouds.

I have begun to read the poem Beowulf. At the end of the poem, which is set in about the sixth century, the hero, king of a Germanic tribe known as the Geats, dies in his encounter with a dragon. He knows he is going to die, but for the sake of lof and dom – honour and renown – he goes willingly to his death. And perhaps that is why his memory survives in this poem, though his tribe died with him. All those tribes, where are they now? The world has changed, and races and cultures are swallowed up, leaving only a poem to show that they existed.

Here’s another poem:

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan."

These lines, from Tennyson’s Tithonus, I have long thought to be some of the most beautiful in the English language. When I watch the birds on the river, it is as if I am watching the bird within my own heart. When that bird dies, no one else in the world shall know. It will be a matter between me and myself.