Читать книгу Invention of Dying, The - Brooke Biaz - Страница 12

1a. The Facts About Dying

Almost all so-called “facts” here are made up, human algorithms enhanced by our shared, communal fantasies, buzzards searching for pieces of our beliefs to strip off the bones of real truth. It’s as if we have created these islands to embrace the metaphor of human life but have never viewed the rolling plain of that life itself, spread out as it is in front of us. This is the medical truth:

Death came to The Communion Islands in search of bats, not to interrupt our human lives, not to disrupt our general well-being. She was a woman looking for flying foxes. Fruit bats! A fruit bat lover, an amateur chiroptologist (a bat scientist, that is), an avid explorer (if exploring is seeking out that which you cannot yet understand), Death sailed from Europe in a cloche hat.

Old woman Death sailed from England. Southampton in sunny Hampshire, speaking geographically. Her deadly heritage was French and Scottish, mostly; with a touch of that darker Anglo-Saxon that frequently reaches out from the Celtic nations, and some remnants of what we call here our B.O.I heritage (Born On the Island). Something she had born in her because of her islander mother, long past. Death, let it be known from the outset, sometimes comes from within.

Death came to us to provide something of a rebuke to her European past, and a declaration (though she didn’t realise it) of her erstwhile islander future. Her mother’s own life—of which she knew almost nothing, because her mother, following the Fate of many islanders in her mother’s day, was barely 13 when she was taken as a dark smooth native to a dank day in a cloudy London—almost certainly spurred her on.

Of course, people write these histories all the time!

I could probably write a pretty decent one of Death, make her a man most likely, and younger, swap her cloche, her beaver, her surgical bonnets for a dark green Homburg, give her a name like Ramsbottom or Finlayson-Smyth or maybe Philips-Einstein, if not for the obvious scientific connotation. Point her neat beard to match her tall black pompadour, and present her in an old plaid coat, provide her with a silly monocle and a regular left-footed gimp, as surely she must have.

But you don’t want to read a pretend history of Death. Why should you? You want the real thing, so that’s what I’ll give you. Long live the Queen! Long Live Poetry! Long Live Independent Music!

Let’s call Death what she was: a traveller, a gambler, an occasional flimflam woman and, like all true fanatics, quite possibly the saviour of us all.