Immortals

Today one of the albums I played while working was “The North Star Grassman and The Ravens” by Sandy Denny who we lost when she fell in 1978 at the age of 31, less than half my age. And I was listening to this wonderful music more than forty years after she had left this plane. I have chosen her most beautiful song to lead this piece , but this is just one of many songs.

I have a lot of her albums including her work with Fairport Convention and Fotheringay and that started me thinking. I can’t hug her or see her in the flesh but I have all these recordings in my possession and there are lots of videos of her on streaming platforms so I can watch and see her any time I like.

So really isn’t that a sort of immortality, her voice in her songs will always be with us and as long as there is power and the technology to stream Sandy Denny will always be with us.

It is one of the reasons that I write and compose music, I would some trace of me here once my body gives up, although , like everybody else I believe that will go on forever.

When David Bowie passed lots of people felt as though they had lost a close friend, although the closest they ever came to him was seeing him in a live concert. I never so him live but have all of his records starting at "Space Oddity" , prior to that I felt it was sub rhythm and blues and Anthony Newley. Bowie knew he was leaving when made "Blackstar" , check out the lyrics to "Lazarus".

When artists die it hits some more that others, but I remember incidents when John Candy and Oliver Reed passed , the film's the were working on were completed with digital representations of the actors. So in these instances death did not finish their contribution.

CGI and AI has evolved a long way since then and there have been suggestions of making films featuring computer generated versions of long dead actors. I don't think this has happened yet.

The follow on from that is could you, via AI and CGI recreate a digital version of a lost loved one. There are various TV series and films that have posited this and I do find that very creepy and disturbing.

Moving tangentially that takes me to the concept of teleportation , a staple of science fiction such as "The Fly" and "Star Trek" . When a body is teleported is the teleported body a facsimile of the original or is it the original? Is Captain Kirk Captain Kirk or just another copy of Captain Kirk, perfect in every way but still a copy

And back to the original premise of this , that our and our admired artists digital legacies do confer at least a semi immortality. Shakespeare and Mozart are immortalised by their artistic legacy though we can never converse with them or touch them, though there may be digital versions of them already in cyberspace ready to talk with us.

The digital images , videos and writing that is stored in cyberspace is an accessible fount of memories that, as long as there is power, will always be there for us.

I share pictures , video and a lot of writing via my Seven days in blog , Vocal , YouTube and Instagram and that means I will be around in one form or another for a long time , and that option is available to anyone with access to an internet connected device.

So play records , watch videos , read books , listen to music , enjoy films and take advantage of the art of these effective immortals in this amazing twenty first century.