April is the cruellest month, I’m told, and some days I can believe it. Just about everyone I’ve ever known who was born in April seems to think it, too, but maybe that’s just because it’s one of those ‘things that gets said’, and if you grow up hearing it often enough, maybe you’ll eventually come to believe it.
When T.S. Eliot wrote those oh-so-evocative opening words of “The Waste Land” back in 1922, I wonder if he knew that he was writing something so memorable, so quotable, or is it just that a generation or two had to learn it in school and we can all remember the first line if nothing else? I can still vividly recall the first eight lines or so of the “O for a muse of fire!” speech from Henry V, because we had to learn that quote for “O” level English Literature, although after that it gets a bit blurry and, because I’m no actor, no matter how often I’ve tried to pick up and learn the rest, it never sinks in.
It must be rather marvellous to have written something and then to hear other people using it. An expression or a turn of phrase that you know that no-one had ever used before that becomes commonplace because you made it so. Maybe that’s one of the things that makes a career in popular music seem so appealing; one day 40,000 people might be chanting your own words back at you, or you’ll be sitting in traffic and your song will be carried along by the breeze from someone else’s in-car stereo. Sometimes I will admit that I have, rather cynically, put a piece of dialogue into one of my plays because I think that it’s quotable, but usually those are the first lines that you have to cut because they can seem almost incongruous and out of character. Then again, I’m not a successful playwright, so maybe I just have a moribund turn of phrase anyway and perhaps should make more attempts to dazzle rather than less.
It’s interesting too that when you hear comics or comic writers musing over the impact of a catchphrase, more often than not the fact that it has even become a catchphrase is beyond them because it was never intended as such, so I guess that it just proves that you can never predict what’s going to become popular.
One of my favourite observations comes from William Golding, talking about the movie business: “Nobody knows anything”. He uses this to illustrate the point that no-one sets out to make a bad movie, but you can never tell before it’s released quite what is going to float the moviegoers’ boat, which is probably why all the executives and focus groups are pretty much pointless. Personally, I think this rule applies to pretty much every marketing department on the planet and those three words should be standing in six-foot marble-effect letters in every office of every building making every product in the world, just to remind them of how utterly pointless their planning might prove to be. Nobody knows why one thing takes off and another might bomb, it’s just people, and you really can’t predict people.
Especially in April.
Cruel, cruel April.
So, why is April such a cruel month? Is it because it is the beginning of spring and so represents the birth of new hope that we all know to be ultimately doomed by the eventual inrush of next winter? Is it more mundane than that because it is something like the start of the new tax year and the time when all those new laws get implemented? Is it just that wretched humour-free opening day that is poached on the griddle of being “a bit of fun” but which inevitably leads to the ritual humiliation of someone or other? Or is it just something else, a sense of foreboding, impending doom or hopes dashed? I doubt that, really. Those sorts of things can happen at any time in my experience, and, ultimately they are just numbers and slices of time in a calendar that is nothing but a human construct anyway. That we chose to call it “April” and allot to it all these allusions is merely a quirk of history, a twist of fate and the outcome of nothing but circumstance. We decide to call that particular group of days “April” for a few centuries and then one of us decides to label it “cruel” and we all go along with it. Indeed was April ever considered to even be “cruel” by anyone else before Eliot opened our eyes to the fact?
Certainly, although perhaps only coincidentally, I felt a change in the air as this month turned, and it didn’t feel as if it was in a good way. Things seemed to unravel rather quickly, and I found it a struggle to see the point in anything very much. My own sense of being needed or wanted evaporated as the temperatures rose, and my spirits fell correspondingly at a time of the year when they should have been lifting. Spring is in the air, and the sap should have been rising, but instead, lurking moodily under a duvet and telling the world to “go to hell” seemed a much more preferable option, even though, in the end, I chose not to take it. All about me the world is coming back to life after months in the darkness but yet, somehow, this is failing to penetrate my own walls. Maybe they’re just too thick, too well-built, constructed too sturdily in order to protect me from the ravages of winter and that cruel, cruel world now being so radically transformed during the cruellest month. Sometimes the only way to get through those self-made barriers is to batter them down from within, although that would seem unlikely.
It feels safer here in the dark.
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