Viva La Muerte

‘We have no fear of them,’ he shouted, ‘let them come and see what we are capable of under this flag.’

 A voice was heard crying ‘¡Viva Millán Astray!’

 ‘What’s that?’ cried the general. ‘No vivas for me! But let all shout with me “¡Viva la muerte!”’ 

The crowd echoed this famous slogan ‘¡Viva La Muerte!’. 

He added, ‘Now let the reds come! Death to them all!'

Hugh Thomas ‘The Spanish Civil War’ (1961)

‘The Long Defeat’ is an album about the losing battles we fight for the things we care about.
Among other things, its about the time I put into unrequited love and the way this can force you to look your own weaknesses in the eye and adapt.

This song is called ‘Viva La Muerte’, a soldier’s slogan from the Spanish Civil War, used by one of life’s true baddies, Jose Milan-Astray, a Francoist general.

In English: ‘‘Long Live Death’.

Years ago I watched the (1995) Ken Loach film Land And Freedom and was inducted into the Spanish Civil War fascination that’s so common amongst lefty bores like me. Franco's Spanish Legion were notorious for their brutality: barbarians, revved up on the idea of destroying things. Milan-Astray the most merciless of the lot. The phrase 'Viva La Muerte' was first used in response to a priest’s plea to temper the Legion’s killing and offer clemency in the war effort: ‘You will win, but you won’t convince’.

Milan-Astray spat a contemptuous reply: ‘Viva La Muerte! Long Live Death!’

A disfigured monster reminiscent of an action movie baddie, Milan-Astray had seen so much injury in war that he was said to have more ‘shot away than remaining’. 

One arm, one eye, one leg, two fingers on his remaining hand and a body riddled with bullet holes. A man made up of ruin, who had found in his disablement a calling to make ruin of others. 

Ruination changes people in profound ways. When a relationship that defined my young life ended a number of years ago a hurt settled in its place that changed me. Hard to shift, like the buried head of a tick, and just as likely to end up becoming poisonous. 

There exists a club of people who’s ideal of love was disfigured by the experience of unreciprocated feelings. I put a lot of my life on the line for an idea of what love should be, shelving some dreams for others and taking the kind of gambles that involve jumping life's tracks from one station to another, carrying a flame through the years wherever it took me.

Then finding it extinguished, disappearing with the sudden, cold vacuum left by a candle blown out in a storm of hurt feelings, confused as to whether its light had ever existed at all.

There's shame in admitting that you loved someone that didn’t feel the same about you and that doing so kicked the shit out of you. As much as I wanted to hide that experience and try to put it behind me, I found I couldn’t write about anything else. The more I did play and talk about our new songs, the more people would come up to me and say 'I have felt like this too'. A secret society of people who's emotions wouldn't play ball and allow them to act with more self respect. Who's heart was more like a dog with a habit of laying down in the street and fighting at a lead. Waiting around on an answer that would never come. We aren't supposed to talk about it.

To have a very long relationship that took away your youth end in acrimony and little explanation is a loss that takes a long time to properly mourn. It's to watch as thousands of memories of afternoons and evenings, acts of kindness and frustration, are tipped away like a truckload of anonymous casualties into an unmarked grave. It’s to be unable forever, as you were once, to use a conversation’s alchemical re-animative power to remind yourself of the thousands of small details in the life behind you. Memories that once served as driftwood to clasp to and keep afloat in life's rushing waters.

A whole era of a life came to feel like the espionage secrets a spy keeps with them ‘til death. The list of confidential information that only exists between two people alone: the places stopped at on a car tour, the names of mutual friends that vanished, a holiday in Iceland, a toy bought in a fair in Germany, the children's names picked out and reserved, never to join the world. Things that go missing during the ensuing haziness of years passed. 

Viva La Muerte and the other songs I wrote with Feeble Strength became a set of consolation songs, trying to focus on what I could find that was meaningful to me in a life where I felt I’d repeatedly bet on bad horses and found heartbreak again and again. To wrestle something that felt good from wreckage. 

It is humbling to learn how little your endeavours have mattered to someone. I had tried to figure out the value of mine as a bankrupt debtor might pass the family jewels over a pawnshop counter to be inspected. 'How much was this worth?’, ‘how about that, how much was that worth?’ to a broker with a loupe in their eye and silence in their mouth. 

I wondered how many of us find ourselves thinking we can trade a history of good deeds for help. As though love had a form of ledger that I could refer to and cash-in on. Never really understanding that the deeds were done for a different person altogether - one who had at some point, without my realising, clambered into a gap in time's fabric and disappeared from the world forever. Someone that had probably never have existed at all. The ledger was irrelevant.

Part of understanding the lesson of heartbreak became finding a way to exorcise the need to hear that the time I had spent was important to anyone but me. To accept that it would always be important to me and that I couldn't change that no matter how I tried.

Walt Whitman wrote ‘there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another’. I wanted to look at my bank balance and show what, in all this time that seemed squandered, there was in there that had been paid. 

Doing what I could to lift someone else up had been the great thrill of my life to that point. It taught me about the risks that we take when we love another - we can't determine the value of what we give, or how well received it will be, or whether in life’s long vista we will have mattered to someone as we hoped.

I came to know what a fundamentally insane thing it is to know all this and to give anyway, with a sense of hope and our fingers crossed. That we love another for and in spite of themselves - part automatic reaction and part choice. It forced me to look in the mirror hard, look at my own habits and do what I could to grow and to really understand what it meant to be on someone's team.

"Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love." Eric Fromm

As I accepted that I'd never had what I thought I did, another kind of sad thought emerged: what if?

What if I had known the kind of partnership that had lived in my imagination? What if I had found someone to be a teammate; who wanted me to succeed? someone to lift one another upward through life’s hills and valleys. Someone cared about how my life would turn out, who wanted to help me when I needed help. What if?

Try as I might to outrun it, the question found a way to come back again and again for a longer time than it seemed right to admit. Catching me alone in parks, or at pubs with friends, driving home on evenings, in work afternoons, waking up on weekends. Found me in tears of jealousy every time I overheard a conversation about a couple that had been there for one another in hard times, or that had worked through their differences, or talking about their shared memories of being young together and the bond formed by their adventures. Like a child with its nose pressed up against the glass of a toyshop window, imagining what could have been. This ever present ache tripping my mind over whenever it found me, like leaning on a trick knee that collapsed under the awkward weight of ‘what if?’

A vivid dream had came into being once in my life, over a few drinks at The Head Of Steam, Newcastle. I was 21. A fluorescent cascade of possibility and magic that can only infect a person at such an age.  I woke from it a decade later like I’d exited a coma, with seemingly nothing at all to show for my time. Few photographs, few traces of anything. An existence stripped of everything that had felt important.

Life asked me to embrace the destruction of that dream, to burn it to a cinder the way Millan-Astray and his soldiers would set a village ablaze, without remorse.

Receive no mercy, show none in return. Drag a dimmed light through the years after a written-off existence, clinging to the hope it will spark somewhere and fire again. The same purpose that had flooded my young life would return somehow, in some new form.

Halting to bury something I held so dear but with no other choice, I told myself that I would ‘fake it until I made it’ and set about trying to put a spade into the soil. To dig a hole big enough to fully bury this disappointment could take longer than I'd ever know.

I would march back out into the world knowing there was no way to hide the bruise any longer. To accept the flaws that a long relationship exposed and to be more honest about them. To take on my lessons and become a better person. To try not to make the same mistakes again. A boxer learning to appreciate the canvass he falls onto for the chance it gives him to get to his knees and stand again. To love again.

To kill that old dream was the hardest thing I had ever done. Long Live Death.

Viva La Muerte

Amy - I don’t feel so strange, do you?

Of the difference in my mind and my shy dreams 

And all of it 

What you thought of as an anchor

I made into an oar

What you thought of as an anchor

I made into an oar

Amy, I remember me and you

Pulling chewies from the pile in the carpets of the world

I see more than I did, now

But as ever before

How do we know?

All of my answers are the same as anyone’s

What you thought of as an anchor

I made into an oar

What you thought of as an anchor

I made into an oar

And It was killing me inside to ask you

How do we know?

All of my answers are the same as anyone’s

We stand outside and starving now 

Among the messes that we’ve made 

Of the wonders that we built

You and I

You and I, You and I, You and I, You and I, You and I, You and I (etc.)

Killing something wonderful

You and I