Beyond The Mead Hall
One evening during the winter following my eighth birthday the magnitude of death occurred to me. I was sitting in the yellow light of the living room, the curtains undrawn, so that I could see the little black squares of night through the panes, and in a moment understood that I would one day cease to be. The soft pile of the carpet melted away, and the light in the room seemed to pull apart from me, so that I floated or fell through a growing and darkening void. And as the world became immaterial, I became more substantial – heavy and thick and vulnerable. I could feel the pulse in my neck, the rise and fall of the breath in my tight chest, and I became aware of the muscles and tendons that held me together as if, for the first time, they all might fail.
What happened next? I don’t recall. I remember ebbing back to awareness some minutes later upstairs in my bed, with a sense that the world and my place within it had changed.
In the months that followed I dwelt on magnitudes: the age of history, the vastness of the universe. But these were so beyond the compass of my short life that simply to exist in the everyday became impossible. It was as if, having glimpsed new horizons, my mind had stretched beyond its limit. I became for a time an un-childlike child.
My mother took me to a healer who practiced craniosacral therapy, which in our particular town on the south coast of England was not at all unusual. Each week I would drink a glass of lightly scented water in her consulting room and lie on a folding table while the sound of traffic drifted in through the draughty window. She spoke softly and held her hands on me, gently moving and touching my head with her fingertips. And in time, I improved. I learned to forget my fear. Perhaps it had nothing to do with craniosacral therapy. Perhaps all I had needed was a reminder of touch; a something
to counterpoise the nothingness. Or perhaps winter simply gave way to spring.
In his Ecclesiastical History Saint Bede records the Christian conversion of Edwin, a seventh-century king of Northumbria. The king is already personally convinced of the benefits of Christianity, but he gathers his witan – his council of wise men – to assess the merits of the new religion for his kingdom.
During the meeting an unnamed man, evidently prone to poetic fancy, articulates the anxiety at the heart of their pagan worldview. The life of mankind, he says, is like ‘the swift flight of a sparrow through the meadhall where you sit at supper in winter.’ While inside, the bird is ‘safe from the wintry tempest,’ but in an instant ‘he vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again.’ To this Anglo-Saxon’s mind, life is the hubbub and comfort of the mead-hall, the blazing fires, the feasting, noise and merriment. But what comes before and after it is dark and cold and unknowable. Beyond the mead-hall is a strange and lonely place.
The image seems to resonate. As Bede recounts it, Edwin immediately instructs his men to destroy the idolatrous altars and temples. Paganism makes way for Christianity. The darkness of death is banished, for a time.
Fourteen hundred years later, it would be fair to ask if the dark is creeping in again at the window. Whether religion ever offered the comfort from mortality that Bede suggests is questionable. But in our own time, the fact of death appears to be increasingly difficult to reconcile with the way many of us live our lives. It is existentially terrifying because we are individualists. It is unfathomable because we are materialists. And it is unsurmountable because we are agnostics. For us, life is again that swift flight of a bird through a lit room.
What I experienced on that winter evening as an eight-year-old was my first glimpse beyond the mead-hall, though it would not be my last nor my most enduring. And as I have grown older and put words and thoughts to this feeling, I have become preoccupied with this question: how do I live my life in the certain knowledge that I will die?
For those of us in the queer community, the question holds especial poignancy. How do we celebrate our hard-earned freedoms free from guilt, while knowing that we owe those freedoms to people who have lived and died before? How ought we to comprehend that our community was ravaged by an indifferent and brutal plague just a generation ago from which happenstance alone saved us? And yet, having advocated for our rights as individuals, having asserted our freedoms on the grounds of our essential human dignity, will we then be able humbly to give way to death when it comes?
As we grapple with these questions, the solace must be in realising that we are not after all alone. As students of art or literature will attest, culture is littered with countless memento mori. They hide in the punchlines of jokes, in the twists of stories, in the unexpected note or image, betraying our perennial preoccupation: that which we fear but do not understand. They are left behind by people who, for a moment, turned their backs on the bustling benches and roaring fires. Who perched themselves in the cranny of a window and dared to look out alone into the dark. And perhaps they saw, in the glow from the hall, a few dimly lit shapes from which they tried to fashion meaning.
It is two decades since that winter evening when I glanced out into the black, and now I am sitting in the dark, looking into the light.
It is spring, 2018. On the stage beautiful men speak lyrical words and we are three hundred people transfixed. This is one of the first performances of The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez’s sweeping two-part drama about a group
of young gay men in New York in the teenage years of the twenty-first century as they try to make sense of their place in history. And it is a story we seem to need. Every seat tonight is occupied, many by queer people, young and old. The play will sell out the remainder of its run here and it will later move to the West End where it will be seen by thousands more. It is that very rare thing in theatreland: a hit.
I think we are here because we want to understand something about these men, who have brunch and campaign for Hillary Clinton and discuss art and fall in love – who are, in short, like us. We want to understand how they live vibrant and meaningful lives in the shadow of death, because we urgently want to understand the same of ourselves.
The answer comes suddenly and unexpectedly: the dead speak. Just one at first, and then a chorus. And we see that they have always been here. They were just waiting.
The house lights go up and I realise the man next to me is crying. I feel that I am too. We acknowledge one another, politely. We all flow out onto the streets of south London and hail cabs or dash through the rain to the tube, returning to our lives. But like an eight year old boy who looked out of his living room window and saw the night, we have all been changed. Essay Prize Competition 2018 Second Place