36 minutes and 40 seconds
2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00140-6
ISSN2215-0374
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoCat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman is a short album. 11 songs. 36 minutes and 40 seconds. In 2003, Rolling Stone included it in its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2007, the album was included in The Definitive 200 Albums of All Time. It has appeared in many other lists compiled by sages of the music industry. And it is the last album my father ever heard. On Oct 8, 2003, Michael John Hasler (I rarely say his name—it's nice to type it here) died by suicide. He'd been listening to the CD, which was now still and quiet in the portable stereo close by. It was one of the things I seized up from his flat as though his remaining artefacts held an energy that might re-member him like a Frankensteinian patchwork doll. I was not allowed certain other items—things too morbid to reclaim, disposed of by the police, but the CD I could keep. It is the closest I will ever get to being there, with him, as he died. And though that seems like the most ghastly thing to want, I want it more than almost anything else. Dad had bipolar affective disorder. He first attempted to end his life in his teens. It was always there. I never knew what it was; it was all kept from me until somewhere near the end, so I suppose my clinging to the physical aspects of what he left behind is a simplistic way of me trying to make sense of something I'd never had to consider before. There's a minefield of possible last lines and goodbye notes in Tea for the Tillerman. There are allusions to faith and hope of an afterlife. References to a God Dad had only been nominally interested in pondering as a lazy sort of agnostic. A disquiet with life, a disappointment in Man, in modernity. Moments of elation and celebration. Of spiritual rebirth. Of moving on, somewhere beyond. This is what I read into it. Others see it as a sceptical album that does little to foreshadow Stevens’ later conversion to Islam. I am bound to see whatever I need to see in it. It is my way of communing with my father's final moments. But of course none of it is this simple. Even if Dad had picked the album as precisely as I hope he might, my dissection is still likely to be wildly inaccurate. That's the trouble with words; that's the trouble with humans. Laden with secrets. The overarching comfort is that Dad was perhaps contemplating bigger things than his own blighted life, but it also makes my brain boggle as I have desperately tried, over and over and over again, to find the exact lines that gave him comfort, gave him strength, gave him affirmation—and that would perhaps give us the goodbye he could not find the words for. That would give me my wise, kind, loveable Dad when I needed him. Was he using Cat Stevens’ piety to buy himself some forgiveness from whatever he thought was on the other side? Was it, then, a prayer? The album conjures countless thoughts in ever-morphing multi-layered density. Sometimes I will mull just one brief thing, one small detail, and sometimes it will all scream at me at once, which can feel a bit like madness has just dropped by like a tornado through my blood. I don't just listen; I viscerally follow the notes. I can feel it. The tumbling of the notes makes my cells drop a few flights in my guts, their ascent can feel like Dad pulling me up by the hand, telling me off for being so silly. Sometimes it is kind, a gentle palm on my cheek. Sometimes it is a brutal slap. 36 minutes 40 seconds is a perfectly respectable amount of time to invoke your father's death, dwell on details, have a mid-ranging contained breakdown with an appended general existential crisis concerning your own mortality, and then recover yourself like nothing happened. You can even, when you become more adept at it, squeeze one in before going out and no one would ever suspect. Other people do it with other kinds of alone time—internet flirting, masturbation, face masks. I have myself a little Sing-a-long Suicide Soirée, then I go to the supermarket or the pub. And no one would suspect that I've been staring at the CD case wondering what his DNA would taste like; I used to suck his thumb as a little girl, would it taste like that? The metallic salt of where I came from? If I licked it would some strange genetic sorcery happen and whip up his voice or a hologram of him like Al in Quantum Leap, or would I just clean it all away with my stupid spit? Because I don't know which song was the last one he heard, which moment, which lyric, every second of the album is “the moment”. Which means I've repeatedly stretched his dying out for 36 minutes 40 seconds, for well over a decade; which seems a little unfair on the poor bugger really. Occasionally I am gripped by panic that he outlasted the music and was left in silence, just the spinning whir of the CD in his ear as it slowed to stationary. Did he want to reverse the process? Did he know he was dying and wish to God—literally to God; his agnosticism flipped like a coin to land on “believe”—that he wasn’t? After a decade of listening to the album with varying regularity and obsessiveness, I've sort of given up on stitching the lyrics together to make the goodbye letter he'd surely intended us to have. Sort of given up on trying to find “the moment”, or “the message”. I noticed after a while that sometimes I don't even really listen to the words anymore, I just sing along. I never get very far, mind, before the lump appears. The immoveable boulder that stoppers the throat. Then there's no more singing. If I listen to Tea For The Tillerman when I've had too much to drink and I let myself go into the danger zone, I close my eyes and can feel the notes, imagine the sensations he felt before he went. Perhaps I put myself through this to keep him company. I don't want him to be alone. Sometimes I feel guilty that I am still so caught up in it. I feel ridiculous. I know I'm ridiculous; I have the decency to be disgusted at myself for being such a drivelling mess. I know what will happen when I reach for the CD, pop it in the machine and press play, so why do I do it? I worry that I have some sort of unnatural problem in wanting to keep the pain alive, but then I feel utterly convinced that this ability to wallow is totally natural. I crave the pain because the pain is one of the things that keeps him alive. The pain is how I know I loved him. Grief is the continuation of love when someone has gone. When that goes, he starts to fade. And then what? There are days when I yearn to go back to the sharpest points of pain, when I myself have not wanted to be alive, because I fear I am drifting away from it all. I worry about drifting too far; that I will lose him; that he will lose me. His little boat dipping out, tiller in the wave, over the horizon into nothing. Dad left behind one other Cat Stevens CD in his reduced collection: Teaser and the Firecat. Eventually I turned to this as a natural progression when Tea for the Tillerman gleaned no real farewell revelations; part of me still on the trail for clues that would lead me on to something. The “thing” I was looking for. His goodbye. The thing that would wrap it all up and give me—and by extension, him—peace. I could not believe he had not left that. If Tea for the Tillerman is the album I clasp to my chest tight as my skin, Teaser and the Firecat is the album I feel more able to share with people. Recorded in 1971, a year after Tea for the Tillerman, it is a much lighter, prettier album. On it is the song Morning Has Broken, one of the few songs I remember Dad singing when I was a child. Badly. God he was an awful singer. I always begged him to stop, but of course I miss it now. I wrote a play the year after Dad died, named after one of the songs on this album, Moonshadow. I used the music throughout the play, at moments when I could not write the words I really wanted to say. It seemed like the only way I could try to say hullo to him. And goodbye to him. Music succeeds where words fail. Maybe that's why he wanted to leave us with that. Samaritans are available 24 h a day to provide confidential emotional support .Call 08457 90 90 90 (UK) or 116 123 (ROI), email [email protected] , or visit http://www.samaritans.orgThe National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the USA (http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org) provides 24 hour support on 1-800-273-8255 Samaritans are available 24 h a day to provide confidential emotional support .Call 08457 90 90 90 (UK) or 116 123 (ROI), email [email protected] , or visit http://www.samaritans.org The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the USA (http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org) provides 24 hour support on 1-800-273-8255
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