I’ve been working on a playlist made up of bangers from the 80s and it has been a disorienting experience. There’s joy in rediscovering some of this stuff, including material I didn’t especially like at the time, but some of the songs – from 1980 to 82 – have triggered full on flashbacks to sitting in Student Union bars with them on the jukebox, flashbacks so real I can taste the cheap beer and smell the tobacco smoke and hear the clack of the snooker balls.
But there are one or two songs that have provoked sudden moments of melancholia, the awareness of the passage of time from when I was young and Kirstin and I were engaged and getting married and setting up home together.
As I write, Cher is wishing that she could turn back time, and so do I. In some cosmologies and philosophies, all times are happening simultaneously. I’d like that to be true and that those days remain as real as they were when they flew past and I’ll get to live them again.
Also, I don’t think I ever got the answer – is Vic there?
Sometimes these blog posts take a turn, and this is one of those. A number of my interests collide and I’m hoping that some sense emerges from the scattered debris. The fulcrum on which this pivots is writing vampire stories and thinking about both the stories and the subtexts – the things that I’ll revisit and work on during the revision process.
I’ve said before that the way I wrote the stories in Coyote in the Corner was conditioned by not wanting to write vampire stories. Why not? Because they are ubiquitous and have already been done very well by many authors and filmmakers, so why would I want to go there? Now, writing the stories to complete the sequence, I’ve leaned more into the classic features of vampire tales, and this means that I’m always thinking of what the emergent subtext is, so that I can develop it when revising.
With that in mind, I fell down a research rabbit hole looking for what I thought would be surface details for a couple of stories and sought out material on near-death experiences (NDEs). I’ve been interested in NDEs for quite some time, though I don’t think I’ve ever written about why or even talked about it. My interest began when Dad told me, after he had a heart attack in an ICU, that he’d had what I now know to be a classic NDE. He told me that he’d been conscious of ascending towards a bright light as if rising up from the bottom of a well. At the top, a voice said, ‘Not yet Stuart, it isn’t your time.’
I really wish young me had talked about it more with him, but I didn’t.
But looking into NDEs took me somewhere I didn’t expect, and that was a TED talk by Dr Christopher Kerr, a hospice doctor in Buffalo NY. TED talks can be hit or miss, but this one is a goodie. The link is here and it’s well worth a quarter of an hour of your time (handkerchief suggested).
Since watching that, I’ve also watched several longer pieces with Dr Kerr in which he is more detailed about his work and the controls placed around it to exclude common explanations around hallucinations, effects of medication and hypoxia. He’s clear that the End of Life Experiences (ELEs) that he recounts are quite distinct from NDEs. He is also very careful – correctly I think – to avoid putting any explanatory framework around the stories and simply present them as people’s subjective experiences.
Without wanting to sound mercenary about it, there is plenty here for adding glosses to fiction as well as digging deeper into some of the deeper themes and imagery and tacit metaphors, some of which are already there in the current drafts of the stories in progress. But there is also a lot there to consider about one’s own mortality and how one approaches it, because to think about death is inevitably to think about life and how to live it.
One of the themes of a lot of this is that death and mortality are things we rarely talk about unless circumstances force them on us, and a consequence is that we don’t engage overtly in conversation with the great existential themes of being and consciousness and personality and eternity, although these are very much things that we engage with in the arts. This parallels changes in the sciences where increasingly technocratic approaches to subject areas divorces us from experiential knowledge and often leads to personal experience being shut out as ‘unscientific.’ In other presentations, Dr Kerr contrasts the reception of his research amongst sceptical and dismissive medical students as opposed to nurses and medical teams in hospices (and also indigenous societies) who already knew everything he found and documented.
I was twenty-four when Dad died and I’m sixty-four now, so thoughts of mortality are maybe more pressing these days, although I have no intention of going swimming in eternity yet. I’m not going to speculate or bloviate on issues of mind/body or soul/body or any of that stuff: I have no idea. What I am clear about, though, is that my preference is that my eventual death is not medicalised to the extent that I am a patient with a clinical condition rather than a person whose body is transitioning from animated to abandoned.
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