Goloshes

Here I am believing words again
Here I am trying to find your love again
Here I am down on my knees again
Praying for a love that we used to know
When so few understand what it means to fall in love
And so few know how hard it is to live without it
Ah, to hold something real, and not believe it
To live in her life, and never trust it
To give all you know and never feel it
To hold back each day until it dies away
Lord, I must have been blind.
---This Mortal Coil

I scour the text, searching for the words, the word, that will unlock the mystery..but is this a hopeless endeavour? Will words take us there, help us see?
Maybe we should look for the 'desert places' elsewhere...

What starts as a funferal ends up as a meditation on a funeral. Death is the point of all points. Who is truly dead and who alive ? [Martyrs, for example, are not really dead]. All around us we see people who in the midst of life are really dead (and only all around us?) They are dead to their past, to themselves and to other people.

Gabriel tries to forget the past-he is sick of it- but is he talking about Ireland or, more obliquely, of his wife's past that he is dimly aware of? Is it, then, that he, like an exile, cannot put his memories to one side, or that he cannot remember what he has forgotten?

This is a dense and compressed work and one searches for her clues in vain. A mystery can only be deepened, never 'known'. Which events, Gabriel wonders, led up to the present situation, which innocuous objects, throwaway words, could throw light on this tale, could unravel this mortal coil?

Goloshes: they keep the country out. The snow, the outside world is liberating. But for Gabriel it is the 'East' , civilized Europe with its education and light (and order, perhaps) that he holds in high esteem. The 'west', on the other hand , is a dark land, primitive and unredeemed. He wears the goloshes because that is all the rage on the continent but also, perhaps, so that he can keep the past at bay: "...and the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-filled frieze, a cold, fragrant, air from out of doors escaped from crevices and folds."

This is the story of a quite ordinary evening , with ordinary people. But ordinariness, pushed to its limits, reverts to the mysterious. Gabriel-even the name makes me inclined to think of goodness, rounded contentment-is quite at home with the ordinary, mundane conventions and norms of respectable society (of hospitality, say). [compare this with the rage implied by the name 'Furies'] . And so he is ill at ease when Lily answers his question in an abrupt and unexpected way. The plain saying of the literal truth, instead of the worn- out cliches, surprises him. And this is only a foretaste of what is to come...

The more one allows the images of the film to settle the more one finds oneself paying attention to things that are not said, to the stolen glances, and the inexplicable events -like the reading of the wyrd poem-that punctuate the linear narrative. Mind the gap! And keep an eye out for what stands apart from the grey intervening spaces of a life.

We must remember that Gabriel isn't very comfortable with words. Again and again he must remind himself of a quote and the appropriate things to say (the speech). And he is bored, later on , listening to Freddie's mother's ramblings. But still, he is committed to words, to the printed word of 'the East' and its civilized thinking though a part of him recognizes that we live in a thought-tormented age. But to go west is to venture to one's death or the impulsive country..perhaps, even, to the muffled silence of the snow...

And so, for Gabriel there is no relation between the living and the dead. In his speech he passes over this, glosses over it. although we may rightly be nostalgic for the past, the old ways, though we may fondly remember absent friends whose voices can no longer be heard, we must move on: Let the dead bury the dead. Cherish in our hearts the memory of the dead. Really? These words will come back to haunt him. again, we must ask: are these just words? The question then becomes not what we are remembering, but who....[earlier , one of the aunts remembers the voice of singer whose name escapes the others and we wonder if it is the voice or the eyes that she is remembering...]

Are dead singers, like dead lovers, preferred to present ones?

From inside the house it is the cold that is liberating. But here let us remember that Gretta, Gabriel's wife, is made to wear the goloshes and that she'd walk home in the snow if she were left. An innocent remark?

Gabriel fondly remembers the warm moments with his wife. No, everything is alright in the world and God is in his place. Even if one has to accept the mediocrity of one's life there are always the starry moments, the fire that is the stars, the sparks that illuminate the darkness and without which there would only be a black void. [But earlier on he had asked about a fire : Is the fire hot? Experience is never revealed to him in an intensely personal way]. Perhaps all we can hope for in life is sympathy, a second-hand emotion, second-best? In a thought-tormented age is that all we can desire, all that we can elicit from others?

Doubt thou the stars are fire? No. But sometimes when the light from a distant star reaches us it is already extinguished, already dead. It lives on-at least in the eyes of those who behold it. As Kingfishers catch fire so we too get a glimpse of that reflected light...We need to think of the stars and feel them....

Eventually , he learns that there is a melancholy unity between the dead and the living, that snow is general all over Ireland (and not just over the west). But he has to learn this painfully (is there any other type of learning?) and the truth , when spoken, is startling, dazzling in its simplicity.

At first the snow was something that was 'feared' but now it is desired-even though it may be unattainable. Only now, with the final revelation, does it dawn on him that what he always needed was a sense of what one aunt calls the excitement of swift and secure flight. It is as if now, and only now, does he truly remember what he has always forgotten-and it is totally unscripted. Only now does he see that "the intense and the moderate can meet ; intensity burns out and declines , and the moderated can admire and pity it, and share the fate that moves both types of mankind towards age and death..that all me feel and can lose feeling..."

Can there ever be an acceptance of the past and the dead since to do so would be to accept one's own mortality, one's own fragility? It would be to see ourselves as something that is destined to recede and fade away, like snowflakes into the darkness. [In the film, in a timeless moment, Gabriel draws together moments from the past and the future to his present situation. The death of others is imagined-both of those before us, and those who will come after us. The living and the dead are one.

Goethe: "Death: what was an impossibility all of a sudden becomes a possibility"

He asks Gretta: WHAT was he? Again, his words show how alienated he is. He died for me, she says and this shatters his illusion of self-possession. And this, too, is a kind of death. Betrayal and abandonment are no less a death. Does he , then, sacrifice his old self, "die before he dies"? Is it possible that the death of another person can lead to one's own salvation-as mention of the monks and the coffins would indicate ? [That there is a religious dimension to this story no-one can deny, unless he tell a lie: snow lying, thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones,...on the barren thorns.

As Joyce says:
Death is the highest form of presence.

-----(citations and ideas borrowed from a dead man)