30 Day Music Challenge: Day 10

‘A song that makes you fall asleep’

My choice for this is ‘A Coral Room’ by Kate Bush… but I want to point out right from the start that it makes me fall asleep in a peaceful way, not in the sense of falling asleep from boredom …

And yes… the suspension points are deliberate…

‘A Coral Room’ was written by Kate Bush in response to the death of her mother, and as such it’s a very moving song. All kinds of images surface from her memory of her mother and the lifetime they’d known each other, and a personification of the grief she feels at losing her, in a kind of musical stream of consciousness… intersected with pauses and silences and suspension points of thought. The silences are less an absence of music as a musical catching of breath… a thought followed by a moment’s reflection…

… and that is just so like the experience of listening to music late at night.

Music in a darkened room is a music all of its own. The music when the radio comes on in the morning… the songs whose words half-weave themselves into a half-waking dream… as you come round and break the surface of the day… like a diver… avoiding the decompression of waking much too fast. The music you hear late at night, like that… you hear a few lines, you drift, you return for another few lines… and ‘A Coral Room’ is just like that, with its pauses and its fleeting, shifting images and its feeling of gently accepted sadness. The images, a crab scuttling across the sand, fishing nets, a whole world shipwrecked on the seabed, memories from the past… those metaphors of loss are like the fleeting images of a day as you fall asleep. The fleeting images of a lifetime as your life flashes before you as it ends… the fleeting images of a lifetime as you’re left to remember somebody you’ve loved… the tiny details of the things you associated with that person… barely registering at the time, but suddenly more important than anything else in the world when they’ve gone… a jug… a ritual… an old musical-hall song…

The ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’ section of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ has always resonated with me as one of the most beautiful and moving things I’ve read about death… about everything ending and life going on… the tides crashing as the lost one is lost. And something about this song… its imagery, its pauses… brings that poem firmly to mind, like a rip tide carrying an image back to shore.

I often have difficulty with sleeping, and as I write this I’ve had several wakeful nights, or nights of nightmares. If death is like sleep or sleep is like an imaging of death… then perhaps being carried towards a drifting sleep by a song about remembering someone’s life makes sense.

‘To sleep, perchance to dream…’