If Love Remains

Ink 19, by Carrie Nuttall, from the book Rhythm and Light, 2005

The 1984 Rush song Afterimage is a song about loss. The lyrics were written in memory of a personal friend of the band who had passed away, and Neil Peart wrote about feeling the presence of absence, the confusion that follows having strong sense memories of a person, of voices, of footprints on a wet summer lawn, and how they can be such physical, concrete memories and still be gone forever: the awful absence of presence.

An afterimage is a bit of a physiological oddity. It's a visual image or other sense memory that exists after the stimulus that caused it is gone. It's looking directly at an object in the sunlight and then closing your eyes, but still seeing the object in the frame of dark that closes in your field of vision. It's conjuring your father's voice or the sound of his whistle for you to come in from outside, even forty years after your childhood, and ten years after his death. In Afterimage the lyrics say I feel the way you were, and an afterimage is the experience of feeling it as a sensation.

For the past several days I have read tributes to Neil Peart and the social media posts of friends and fellow Rush fans. I've listened to Rush albums and I've watched several videos of favorite drum solos from concerts, including the one from the Clockwork Angels tour I saw in person with my son Tucker. The tributes from Rush fans I've never met refer to songs and sounds and sights that are so physically familiar to me: I saw Neil Peart at his drum set many times in my life, and once sat so close to the stage that I felt the thud of the kick drum in my body. I've heard the beautiful cymbal work at the beginning of The Spirit of Radio, seen the blur of sticks and steel, and the bob of the drummer's head moving back and forth like a pendulum keeping an intricate clock balanced and on time. All of these memories are so concrete and hold for me both presence and absence; like a cymbal crash, they reverberate.

As the initial shock of his death was replaced by confusion, the presence of absence and the absence of presence, I was glad that the strongest feeling that came my way was of gratitude for work that I found so inspiring, both as a musician and as a writer. I know cannot do much to lessen the grief of those who were close to man I did not know at all. So my feeling of gratitude is a privilege; I did not lose a man who I knew and loved personally, as much as I lost a man whose work I know and love. 

Earlier this week I tweeted in response to particularly good tribute to Neil Peart from Billboard.com that these tributes are touching, but I'm feeling like advice Neil Peart shared from one of his heroes, drummer Buddy Rich, is actually the way to mark the passing of Neil Peart and honor the impact of his work on my life. As Neil told the story in his book Traveling Music, Buddy Rich threw a concert to honor one of his heroes and fiercest and most competitive contemporaries, Gene Krupa, who was quite ill at the time, and Buddy, who was described as a bit of a curmudgeon, said about the event that he thought it was a better idea to give flowers to the living, rather than to give it to a person after he has died.

This is good advice: focus on the living and on living to the best of your ability, every day you have the chance to do so. But what to do about loss and grief, which is a price we have to pay for the great good fortune of being alive.

Peart's legacy and lessons and lyrics that were so kinetic with life also do provide wisdom about how to measure what we've lost:

And if the music stops
There's only the sound of the rain
All the hope and glory
All the sacrifice in vain
And if love remains
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price
But we will not count the cost
                            (from Bravado, 1991)

Neil Peart is gone, but he left more than the sound of the rain. He left his work, the music and writing that I love. There is a quote I remember reading from a little book of Zen sayings: Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what the wise sought. I will seek the wisdom, with integrity and closer to the heart. Flowers to the living, including myself. And if love remains, it will be worth the cost.