Gavin Bryars The Sinking of the Titanic/Jesus’ Blood Never Failed me yet

The story of the Titanic held me close to all the panic and unfairness that comes with most tragedies both large-scale and small-scale. I am sure that my faintly obsessive personality (disregarding diagnoses that I variously question and accept on a daily basis) is ingrained and lasting now; I notice how closely they paralleled (and still do) my father’s own obsessions. Once I was in a musical with him, a miniature mini-me Fagin beside him. We sang a lot of duets together, on stage and around the piano as a team. I think that role has stuck with me, for good and bad. He had lots of books etc about this particular maritime disaster. It frightened and appalled me so much, and I kept it fresh in my mind – I see all too clearly these connections; what do you do in those last minutes as life is gasping itself away, and as you need to accept loss? Sirens and icebergs all coming to get you in the night and changing the world irreparably. The dramatic pathos given with all the beautiful and sad stories of bandsmen playing the painful songs they were said to play right up until the last minute as the moon and the earth went down..

This piece by Gavin Bryars is a long and slow death which throws all of those songs “Autumn Leaves, Abide with me, Nearer my God to thee” into the air and they fall and float back and forth while the last recorded voices of those who saw and came back from it all discuss memories of luggage and the cold sea. I never heard this particular piece at York. I studied a module called “text and music” with Roger Marsh, and he played us the second track, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed me yet. Then I found this CD in the James Thins in Edinburgh on the bridges.

I feel seasick listening, I am swaying in my room. This is minimalist, in the technical sense, but it feels so rich with guilt and love it’s painful to listen to. It’s almost too much. I bought this in March in Edinburgh, the first March. Things had started to prove themselves to be going wrong rather than it just being an unnecessary whistling around the back of my ears – mistakes and murders were being set in concrete and the lines were showing the way it was all going to end – I was in love and feeling at least a little in control of the bus routes. That’s not true – I was feeling in control of walking. Bus routes came later. I feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole, with all the descriptions of the furniture rushing up against her, swirling in the air as you descend the slow free-fall. I dreamt about Peter Pan last night, I had to rearrange the chapters into the right order. I read the words and thought how the scanning related to a Symphony. I could hear the relevant music in my head and I remember Cemetery Road where I thought I saw the door to the under-stairs cupboard shaking. George said it was because I was tired. See, memories now rush up against me in no particular order in the same way.

Has this been done live? When Dan and I lived in the white-red-yellow-green flat in East London Street, we tried to listen to a concert on Radio 3 where an orchestra played a variety of Warp-label pieces. A live version of this was attempted, but the reception down there in the basement was so terrible we couldn’t make much sense of it, if any. I copied this CD for my last supervisor on my last placement, as he and I talked as much about Phillip Glass and Gorecki as we did about housing law and mental health. I think he found it too much. The corridor in my flat is dark, Sam is asleep after some debauch last night. Jack is coming over later. Jeanette Winterson talks about the measure of love being loss.

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. The long slow arc of becoming and of leaving. I heard this in one of those text and music lectures done by Roger Marsh at York in the spring of my third year, when I was really starting to lay down roots of what I thought I meant about music and myself and people around me. It’s documentary music, I realise now, having made myself survive all those long and horrible strains of Barry Hines and Peter Watkin. You cannot turn away. You can hear voices and footsteps in the background of those who are not caught sitting under a bridge singing to themselves. The old man, who we are to assume is weeks, if not days away from death, sounds so in tune, remains there all the way through the looped and looped and looped singing. Tom Waits recorded a “duet” with the taped man (oh who was he? Does he know?) which I like the idea of, but the reality matched nothing I wanted (I stamped a musical foot in temper in my head, not in appreciation).

I bought this, full of bubbles and excitement that I had finally found it (the knowledge that all the amazing things I had learned and discovered in York could also be bought on a high street in almost any city, even bad ol’ Edbra). Dan, Chris Heppell and I sat in Susie’s flat listening to it – we were bunny-sitting and Whisky and Murphy flopped fatly around. Was Kirstie there too? I have a photo of her impersonating a rabbit in the same page as Chris and Dan both stroking Murphy, the king of all the rabbits. Intense, said Chris, as the music came to a close. I find myself singing along with sincerity.

I think about Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire by Nabakov and the point and pain of academic analysis coming into diseased context with unhappy memories. I love that book, it’s old and battered now in the way that well-loved paperbacks should be.
I think about Maya Angelou’s comment that when things are going badly, the smallest triumph is accorded to the Lord and Saviour, and when things are going well, the Lord descends the list of contributors remarkably quickly and instead individual pluck and grit are cited. That’s the sadness of the song, Jesus’ blood (oh the old-time-red-wine) clearly has failed him, but it’s an inverse failure (is it?) where consolation is taken as triumph. I want to cackle and crow at the man (whose eyes may be cataract-milky and whose hands are probably shaking) “He doesn’t love you, he never loved you, it’s a trick” and go rocking-horse into the night under the bridge, but I know that the bitterness and pain surrounding that is its own inversion, and the stupid ones are probably the happier. It’s nice to ignore things when they prove problematic and happiness is a dangerous business. Oh, choirs of angels. He is drowning in the music and we are watching him go.