Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Eight - Choice And Change

With the voluntary work and other social activities in lieu of engagement, with me meeting too many people for me to try to recall here, my life felt like a comedy show in which Graham R was a figure who was called up as an off stage character. I was onstage and every so often in  my head I the repeated catch phrase 'Graham I am here, where are you nowadays?'. Other people might say that I was difficult to make easy going light friendships with, because I thought too much. I would have said that I missed him and I was missing longevity in relationships. Even as I had always had very few long term friends. 7

Even as I knew Pastor Lou would leave before the work with him was done, I still saw him with whoever was his assistant on the day. Circa 1990 anyone who liked popular music had a choice of format. Tapes were popular, vinyl albums and singles held their value for playing and as artefacts, symbols of the times they represented. The Compact Disc had edged it's way into record shops but took up the side aisles of record shops, rather than being the main attraction it would become. I had a lot of singles, over 150 albums and more tapes than I had time to play the music on them. What I had was normal for anyone who had been buying and listening to music for nearly twenty years, (singles), thirteen years (tapes) and about twelve years (albums). I was a collector, and books and recordings of music were what I liked collecting. As far as I could reason it, all collectors were alike. Whether the collection was cookery books, such as those on the shelf in the kitchen of Agape House, or the collection was yachts where their owner was a millionaire both were the same in principle. An unfurnished house was like an unfurnished life, a vacuum that needs relatively little pressure before objects with values attached to them will make themselves at home in it.22

In some ways I had turned out like my mother. But as I started to see her now, she was more a hoarder then a selective collector. Her motive for collecting or hoarding was her reaction against the rationing she grew up with. There, doing without and living on the leftovers of others as a child had been painful for her. Her hoarding was an insulation against the pain of her childhood. To part her from what she hoarded was remove what she used as insulation against her memories of childhood. She could have been an illustration for the old Goons joke

Husband: Doctor my wife thanks she is a hen  

Doctor: well tell her that she is not a hen.

Husband: I would but we need the eggs.

In my journaling I had gone into many battles in ink against the memory of mother. In the journals she was both the hoarder and the person who liked rationing other peoples hopes as some self justifying figure who could not recognise how she both raised the hopes of those around her with certain expectations and then destroyed those hopes with a lack of support, little realising how she also stymied herself.  37

I no longer remember any detail about the discussions we had about this 'spirit of death' I had renounced. Looking up the phrase recently there are Biblical stories that infer the idea of 'a spirit of death', and many texts too. But none of them quite use the phrase as it was given to me. Pastor Lou knew that I avoided empty dramatics and preferred reason. He had a difficult task when he was guiding me in conversation towards thinking about disposing of the music that I had collected. I had collected it partly as way of being like other males my age, partly because it entertained me, and partly because it was side of my life that my family wanted nothing to do with, so it served me as a hedge against them being more controlling of me.46

Even with caveats about discernment, this was difficult terrain. The quantity of music that I had to listen to was what disturbed him, where for me the quantity had risen slowly, so seemed normal as it grew. I understood his idea of something being 'of uncertain spiritual provenance' but I was uncertain how to act on it. In the examples of books and records being publicly burnt that I knew the burnings were encouraged by leaders who were far more idolatrous and corrupt than anything they encouraged to be burnt. Even if I privately destroyed my records, copies of them would still be available to be bought and sold second hand for as long as people bought and sold records. Finally Lou knew that he had to be sure to not appear to be like my mother had been to me. There she had felt herself to be at her safest when she made me like what she liked: there narcissism has imitated and replaced family bonding. Whether my family's values were either parental narcissism or the genuine values, they had come unstuck on the way. What else would explain why I ceased to identified with my family? 59 

The records were worth quite a bit in monetary terms. Like any collector I also took a certain pride in the records and tapes. Collectors do that. I was unworried at how much music might be more of 'a comfort blanket' than I had realised. I was on the dole. I was solvent, but could not afford to be wasteful. l was quite capable of seeing what I had as manufactured material objects, similar to other manufactured objects. If I sold them it was his doubt, not mine, if he did not know whether 'the spirit of death' that had been in me might, and was now out of me, might be in the records and go into the mind and body of the person of whoever bought them.67

Just as if Pastor Lou might doubt the virtue of the values behind the group therapy that I was on a list to receive, where I might pin genuine hopes of change on the therapy as a means of off-loading a past that was past its use-by date, then we had to respect each other's different opinions.   

Pastor Lou and I eventually settled on a compromise. Faith had to be a comfort, to affirm the believer. I would reduce the amount of music I had at a rate, and by a means, that I felt comfortable with. My first decision was to wipe a lot of tapes and gave them to the church. That seemed like affirmative recycling. Not once as I erased the music on over fifty C90 cassette tapes of The Grateful Dead playing live over the decades did I link what I was doing to the original intent of generosity of intent that there had been in recording the music. Whatever the central virtue and generosity of The Gospels, down the ages people have been generous with their material goods for reasons other than direct obedience to God. 79

I was still allowed to like the idea of playing the songs written by the long dead, or in tribute to the long dead, as a way of paying debts that the long dead could not pay off when they were alive, which was the origin story behind the name 'The Grateful Dead'. But I had to be discerning as to how buy into it as a story. White blues singer Janis Joplin (1943-1970) buying a tombstone for Bessie Smith (1897-1937) with Bessie's name on it for 'The Empress of The Blues' when previously Bessie had died without a stone marking where she was buried was an act in that spirit of reparation. 86

I preferred stories like that over the latest BBC 2 television reporting of the Gulf War, where on 'Newsnight' the reporting became some macabre video game with commentary that viewers regularly stumbled into by accident, before they turned away, repelled by the presentation. 89

The vinyl albums were a bigger problem, both figuratively and literally. The one hundred and fifty albums took up quite a lot of space in my room. They represented a lot of friendships gone. I no longer knew the people I had once shared the music with, and I knew better to imagine making the clock move backwards so that I could live in pasts that nobody else wanted to. I had noticed that in the likes of HMV and Virgin the racks of CDs were expanding. The album racks were shrinking. CD versions of what I had collected on vinyl were the future. I had no engagement with CDs as a format. 

The choices were between me getting no money from discarding an album or getting some money for it once, and the money being whatever the market could bear to pay me at the point of sale. So with the friends I had once shared the music with gone, and the format I liked my music in in retreat in popular awareness, I became one of an unknown number of young men, maybe 10,000 a month, maybe more, who sold off their record collection to an unknown future. 100

I thought that whoever bought my albums could, and would, choose their own spiritual battles whilst listening to the music for themselves. Such battles are part of our free individual choice. The change in technology had pushed me to sell what I had, whilst it had commercial value. The changes in my life where I had lost my friends was the bigger and more personal change. But both personal change I had gone through, and technological change, had combined to prompt me to downsize my record collection at a rate I was at ease with.108 

If Graham R had been there to advise me he would have needed to be both a good friend and a person who would stay around and see me often if he were to be the one to persuade me to keep my vinyl. But he was not there and I had to act on my own without his support, just as without me around wherever he was, he had to act with the friends who were there to support him.113

As I felt ready, and without Lou to report back to, I sold more and more records, until I had reduced what I kept to a rump of about thirty albums. I chose a view of life where The Grateful Dead and other inspiring counter culture musicians like the UK based Roy Harper became less literal and material as guides to me. Their lyrics were still guided me, their songs were still ear worms. But I did not need the physical product, the record or tape to refer back to. As their lyrics and tunes drifted in and out of my head, and so easily came and went, when they left my head so my head  felt a lot lighter.120 

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Nine.