Stone can only offer you its stillness, The fact of its materiality. Its quiet unobtrusive existence that just is. It will never clamour for your attention. It could never hope to gain it anyway, competing with the hyper-stimulating technological landscape in which we dwell.
As an artform scultpture has none of the bells and whistles of music, dance or film to seduce the senses and arrest the emotions, drawing them wherever the artist may please. It does not even have colour to manipulate you with. But it is there, never too far away if you care to notice it. Solidified, petrified, compressed life from millions of years ago. Asking us to zoom out beyond our brief turns on the merry-go-round to contemplate geological time, the endlessly slowly, subtly-shifting ground beneath us. Ireland was still attached to mainland Europe when this Kilkenny limestone was being formed from compressed marine life. Cosmic time.
A nunataq is an Inuit word to describe a fissure in a rock edifice where life can survive. Recent DNA tests show that a strain of sandwort arenaria ciliata found exclusively on Ben Bulben’s limestone plateau has miraculously survived the Ice Age nestled in a nunataq for over a million years. These extraordinary rocky refuges have captured my imagination and inspired the body of work I am presently engaged in. I have papered sheets of gold leaf into the crevices, places where what is precious might survive the ravages of the outside world.
What essential internal golden nugget of me will survive as the harsh realities of a marriage breakdown buffet me about? What precious forms of life will survive this merciless Age of Extinction and wanton ecological destruction? What precious vein of natural material will be saved in this time of accelerating technological advance and algorithmic reduction? What can be saved? Where will the nunataqs we need be? I stay nestled in the gold-leafed crevice and hope the harsh winds will blow past, allowing me to survive.
They turned up at the door dressed all in black,
from their baseball caps and bomber jackets down
to their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen
or bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill
or some kind of security syndicate,
shifting on their feet, in uniform,
black-gloved hands bearing black briefcases.
One of them did the talking, one was silent.
I told them of the massacred bananas,
savaged in their skins on the kitchen table,
and how I’d thought it was the live-in landlord
tripping home from a spree whose bitter end
involved the bananas taking an awful beating.
But seeing the state the place was in next day,
he’d thought the same of me. That’s when we knew
there were some hungry monsters in the kitchen.
So, casing the joint, the men inhabit the kitchen
and fall to all fours, closing on the kill.
The dishwasher gets dragged out, and it’s like
lifting the stone on a woodlouse colony.
The wall had been unfolded from the floor
like a turned page; and the cave’s mouth revealed
the shredded remains of the wall, the copper pipes
and a burial mound of apple cores and nutshells.
So then I told them of the landlord’s apples
taken from the bowl and, one by one,
carted up the corridor and left
like the scene of a lynching or line-up execution
after the firing squad had done its work:
the butchered fruit, at two-foot intervals,
arranged like a sacrificial offering
in a ghoulish symmetry of rotting heads.
And I told them of the unfathomable noise,
that thumping from behind the walls at night
like a house party got out of control
somewhere down the road, or maybe next door,
or in the next room. When you went to look
no one was there. All you found were the scraps
churned up from the dustbin and flung to the floor
as the scratch of claws retreated across the roof.
Back in Calcutta, Ajit would impale them on a spear, standing over the manhole killing rats like shooting fish in a barrel. One time, from behind my bedroom door, a writhing hairy thing the size of a hen appeared on the end of a prong, under my nose, as I drank my rum; and I jumped out of my skin as Ajit took off laughing down the hall.
Here in the kitchen, the men recall the foxes
they’d stalked this morning halfway to the heavens
in the open air at the pinnacle
of the latest mile-high plate-glass monolith
rising out of the rubble at London Bridge,
reaching an impossible perspective
seventy storeys upwards, in the grey
and swirling skies directly under the flightpath.
They’d been living on the sixty-seventh floor
of Europe’s tallest tower as it went up,
surviving on the builders’ scraps, said the quiet one.
It’s dark when we clock on. If you miss your step
no one would catch you; no one would know you’d gone.
The city was a circuit board, its grid
lit up with diodes in the night, then dawn
was spread like a map in pink and grey beneath you.
And to hear him tell it, me and the landlord
hang off a cliff, transplanted by vertigo
down to the streets below, looking out through the eyes
of animals on the sprawl that, at first light,
the foxes contemplated from the sky:
rabbit warren, anthill, molehill, rat run…
You could step out into the atmosphere, he said
with a faraway look, go strolling down the river.
Timur Moon works as a psychotherapist at hospitals and clinics in London. Formerly a journalist, he worked as a reporter and correspondent based in the UK, South Asia and the Persian Gulf. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and continues to write poems.
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a giant among philosophers, though she only published the first of her nineteen books at the age of fifty-nine, a feat which is unfathomable today in more than one respect. That anyone could start so late and produce so much, and so vibrantly (she produced in addition over two-hundred-and-eighty articles) is close to miraculous – her last book What is Philosophy For? appeared just a few days before her ninety-ninthbirthday. But more than that, that a philosopher could wait until she was actually ready to say what she wanted to say is something that is hardly permissible today – ‘I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I’m jolly glad because I didn’t know what I thought before then’, she explained.
Mary was an adult among adolescents, but she remained in a permanent state of youthful rebellion. One of the constant themes of her work is meta-philosophical. ‘Despite its irritating features’ she tells us, ‘philosophy is not a luxury but a necessity’. Humans need philosophy whenever things get difficult: politically, ethically, personally, psychologically, scientifically, emotionally. Any area of the messy, brilliant, muddle that is human life can be an occasion for puzzlement or anxiety, and this is where philosophy, with its ability both to get down to the nitty gritty and to bring the big picture into view, comes in handy. It is not an affair reserved for the ivory tower but an activity as much part of human life as raising children or preparing food.
Philosophy ought not to be produced hastily to satisfy assessors or auditors. Work of that sort, Mary observed, is almost bound to be negative — to work quickly one must almost invariably accept the background assumptions of predecessors and complain only about the details. In contrast, Mary’s work, and her view of philosophy in general, was both positive and holistic; while the philosopher needs something of the doggedness and rigour of the lawyer, she also needs the vision of the poet; to be able to see how things connect, to understand how thought gets mired in confusion when the myths in terms of which certain concepts are intelligible no longer serve us. And in this case what is needed is an ability not only to diagnose but to create– myth, image and metaphor. Mary’s exemplification of her own image of what philosophy should be, and involves, was peerless. Her prose was starlit by quick and vivid turns of phrase that took thought in new directions. Philosophical argument, she writes in her last book, is more like chasing rabbits than mining for nuggets of gold.
Two myths that no longer serve us resurface in Mary’s work repeatedly; the myth which see humans as opposed to animals, and, relatedly, the myth of the social contract which pictures us all as unconnected to each other as atoms stranded in the void. (Mary reminds us that the myth was created for seventeenth century male house-holders performing their civic duty on behalf of their household: it forms part of the background picture against which female emancipation seemed to many incoherent).
Both myths, transposed to the contemporary scene, are destructive to human life, and the task of the philosopher – whom Mary compares to a plumber – is to sniff out the problem and to replace stagnant concepts with those that aid the flow our thinking and living. In picturing human in opposition to beast, we constrain possibilities for theorizing and acting in relation both to each other and to animals. If we change the picture and think of ourselves instead as a kind of beast—a human kind—we open up a different ethical vista. We might now recognize each other as creatures of passion, instinct and habit (as much as creatures of reason) and—as Cora Diamond has put it—also come to see other animals as our fellows.
Likewise, in thinking of ourselves as featureless individuals or egos, loci of choice and unconstrained liberty, we dishonor and fail to make central in our philosophical theorizing the material reality that should be our very topic: how to live, and how, as human animals, social animals, we are radically and essentially dependent on each other. Mary’s work teaches us, reminds us, that our lives are held together through all manner of affective ties, fragile and precious, sometimes volatile, as well as the bounds of friendship and love. And this insistence brings into view another current of Mary’s thinking. Traditional philosophical ways of thinking about the human subject are gendered. A philosophy that falsifies women’s experience is bad philosophy.
In turning again and again to the human scene, our shared forms of life, our human nature, and our capacities to create myth, image and narrative, Midgley evinced a philosophical attitude characteristic of three other distinguished moral philosophers of the last century, all of whom were her contemporaries at Oxford during World War II: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. All these writers, like Midgley, are recognised as re-appropriating a classical emphasis, derived from Plato and Aristotle, on human nature and virtue, which they then electrified with the teachings of Wittgenstein. In the years immediately following the war, the Quartet met regularly at Philippa Foot’s house in north Oxford to discuss the orthodoxies of the day, which, as Midgley wrote recently, they saw as disastrous and to which they voiced a unanimous and joint “No!’.
This story of the Quartet is important, not just from the perspective of gender activism in philosophy, but because it reminds us of precisely those facts that Mary’s philosophy makes so plain. Philosophy, like human life, is not a pursuit for an isolated individual but for a group, a collective, a gang. An isolated thinker soon becomes drawn to fantasy, consolation, and narcissism: this group of friends in Philippa Foot’s living room remained firmly grounded in reality.
The collaborative nature of philosophy is something that Mary has taught us, not only by her writing but by inviting us into her living room, where for the last three years we have regularly shared tea and biscuits and talked about topics as various as G. E. Moore, octopi, and Brexit. Mary animated the past for us as she painted vivid pictures of herself and her friends discussing Plato’s forms, plotting against R. M. Hare, ice-skating on the frozen Cherwell. She helped to make real the philosophy of A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin by locating it in space and time. But these conversations, so precious to us now, became something more than philosophical ‘research’ (a label Mary despised).
As our friendship with Mary grew we came to rely on her sane, wise and philosophical outlook to help us not only with our work but with our lives. Philosophy as therapy came to life in Mary. In her living room our gripes about the impact agenda, the marketisation of the University and the pressures of the REF were transformed into occasions for philosophical work, historical reflection and calls to action: ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’, she would ask.
Mary’s imagination and sense of a job to be done remained inexhaustible even as her bodily frailty diminished her physical territory to a couple of small rooms in Jesmond, Newcastle. Philosophers around the world were sent missives from her computer—‘Is history of philosophy still being taught?’, ‘Is it true that no-one reads Kant these days?’, ‘How can I find out more about Transhumanism?’. And she would send us out on missions too, waiting patiently for reports, while we went about looking in archives, chasing references, interviewing friends and giving talks about the Wartime Quartet (or, as Mary suggested, the Re-Socratics). We are terribly sad that we won’t have a chance to tell Mary about our latest trip to the Anscombe Archive in Philadelphia (‘Find out about Elizabeth’s family’, we were instructed. ‘We absolutely must know what was going on there!’).
Something feels strangely amiss in the idea of an ‘Obituary’ for Mary Midgley – not least of all the discovery that Mary was not, after all, immortal. An obituary gives notice of an ending. It does so by isolating an individual, treating her as a single organism whose complete life can now be told. But Mary’s story and the story of her contribution to philosophy is, for us, only just beginning. That story places Mary back in her context, among friends, one dazzling half of a hundred conversations still unfinished—she was writing to collaborators on the morning of her death. Those conversations must now go on with new interlocutors and under these sadder conditions. It is up to us to weave Mary’s work into our intellectual lives and in doing so make it part of a continuous shared effort to ‘make sense of this deeply puzzling world’.
This article was originally published for the Insitute for
You know your father used to go to school next to the Casino at Marino, him and his friends would play around it.
For years I would ignore my dad’s connection with the Casino, it was too incongruous a pairing to stick. Two histories known to one site but held discordant in my mind and never sitting side by side—always one leaving as the other entered. One is a topic of the history books, with its subject clearly delimited through Italianate paintings and Enlightenment-era discourse. An illustrious period of history, as we are taught, basking in the light of privilege. The other is closer to the bone, a murky memory passed down a generation. A privation I didn’t know in detail, in language, but rendered visible over time as his years crumbled away into tragedy.
Only later when studying the history of art would the two discrete worlds surface once again in my consciousness. Following the official account propagated by the history books and further confounded by the classroom teachings, the image of my father was conjured up and left floundering, left groundless against the staunch record that preceded him.
A casino is traditionally a small house designed for leisure and entertaining, a folly for the upper-classes typically built on the grounds of a stately home. The Casino at Marino, as artefact, took up just a snippet of the curriculum. Its teaching, however, echoed the rehashed idealism of neoclassicism, where a masterly imitation of nature was replaced by a masterly display of the idea, of the rational mind or idealised subject. The Casino at Marino was taught as any phenomenon set steadfast in the history books; its features analysed; its fashion surveyed; a few connections to important men told. I amhistory, it said.
As the record goes, for about two hundred years after Poussin, Lorrain, and Rubens, the institutional practices of the academies would nurture a host of painters across western Europe and, in turn, would see them ossify in their galleries and studios, regurgitating one mythological tableau after another. ‘History painting’, after the Latin historia, meaning ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, was the most hallowed genre of painting at the time. This ‘grand genre’—so admired for its glorified rendition of myth or historical event, or a blending of the two—justified a return to old styles and a retreat from the present.
At college we studied the revival of classical architecture as fashioned in the homes of the landed classes in Ireland. The gentry lined their great houses with columns and pilasters, their halls with Roman busts and figurative sculptures set back in niches, an erudite display cultivated from their travels on the Grand Tour. Of the Casino, I learned that it commenced construction in the 1750s and it remains one of the most admired examples of neoclassical architecture in Ireland. I learned that it was the seat of Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, an important figure in fashioning the tastes and minds of Dublin’s high society at the time. And so on.
Such a history—stagnant, impervious to change, insisting on grand narratives—called for a re-examining. Looking askance, I learned that the land on which the casino resides used to be called Donneycarney, but as a sense of place is so tied to a sense of class, on acquiring the estate its new owner necessarily rechristened it ‘Marino’ after his beloved Italian destination. Thus, in one stroke, it was lifted from a locale that seemed too provincial, too mundane, and repositioned in the mind’s eye of its landlord. It earned a kind of classical placelessness, a new lofty trans-setting. In their world, everything became ‘grand’: the ‘grand genre’ of history painting; the ‘grand tour’ of Europe to sites of classical history; the ‘grand style’ of Michelangelo or Raphael, to be assiduously copied by academicians.
Over a hundred years after the Casino was founded, with that golden light of the leisure classes waning, the estate came into the ownership of the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of lay disciples who set out to get those poor-ragged boys off the street, offer a ‘basic’ education and to prepare them for industry, but most of all to teach them the ‘value’ of ‘hard work’ and religious observance. Their institution spread worldwide, as did the abuse.
Part II
Apparently he used to write poetry when he was younger but one day decided to burn it all. He said he used to write it spontaneously, squeezed into the white spaces of bus and train tickets.
The Casino at Marino—in a cinematic turn, as I envision it from a history lesson that breathes so close to me—was then recast in an altogether different light. Snapped out of its delusion only to confront a stark grey reality. Those inner-city boys, my father included, playing around the Casino were shunned both literally and ideologically from the gold-lit world of the Casino’s origins. That beam of enlightened thinking, so preciously preserved in the history books, entirely bypassing generations of poor boys living on the very property. For those boys who chose to notice it, I imagine, the Casino lingered about their playing grounds like an apparition — an idealised past further haunting the gloominess of their present day.
Allegations of child abuse against the Christian Brothers would start to emerge around the 1980s. Starting with a handful of easily dismissed complaints to an outpouring from the Brother’s global institutions. In a rare and reluctant admission of guilt, in 1996 the Christian Brothers released a statement starting with the line: “There are signs of that death in our congregational story.” It continued, “Such signs include undue severity of discipline, harshness in Community life, child abuse, an addiction to success, canonizing work to the neglect of our basic human needs for intimacy, leisure and love.”
“Signs of that death”, a phrase that both acknowledges the insidious force of clerical abuse whilst averting a direct collision with the issue. “There are signs of that death”, a clumsy sentence, weak and faltering in its expression of something so horrid. But it is a haunting set of words all the same. Clamouring, clasping at an expression that might hold the full weight of its implications.
Part III
Like flints from a fire History sparks into being. It wilfully shoots and splinters, enlightening some and leaving others in the dark.
Through the telling of this oft-repeated story of history, as I experienced in the classroom that day, I saw the elaborate structures of ‘history-proper’ crash into the shadow it cast upon my father and family. I was told his story without his name being mentioned. I became the child I might have been, proud of her father, and, despite everything, in defence of him. I thought, his story can be told, maybe shame doesn’t have to bury it and uncertainty doesn’t have to muzzle it. I felt the staggering height and glory of the Casino’s tale owed something to my father’s life, or perhaps, owed something to mine. Where history fell silent was the moment it laid claim to my life.
To see him, to talk to him, is to relive that death, not a sign, but an aching reality.
I am beginning to see my life. I am beginning to see the forces that shaped it, that weighed upon it, and nearly snuffed it out. I am beginning to see my life from the position of the end, from the imprint of a negative allowed to fester for too long, stumbling through histories and plaguing generations, fusing many to the same struggle.
Leah Reynolds is an art writer based in Bristol. Her latest piece explores the genre of auto-fiction, combining her academic background in the history of art with a personal narrative.
It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness; lulls to sleep the fretful child, and transforms the darkest landscape of a man depressed into a golden glowing cape.
It is not just the spice of life, but our very life blood, perhaps the central issue in human and animal wellbeing, giving complete absolute freedom, psychologically, inwardly, then outwardly, through singing, dancing or playing instruments.
It arrives with humour, typified by Enbie Blake, the ragtime pianist who, when asked, aged ninety, by Alastair Cooke, for his ‘Letter from America’, what he attributed his longevity to, replied: ‘I guess it was them French fries’. Or Jimi Hendrix, who before he died at twenty-seven quipped: ‘Once you’re dead, you’re made for life’. Likewise Thomas Beecham, the internationally acclaimed British conductor, who once suggested at a choral recording: ‘if the ladies will look more closely at their parts and see where the gentlemen come in, it will make for better reproduction.’
It also inspires poetry, such as the ‘Dance and Provencal Song and Sunburnt mirth’ of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – ‘While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy’
As my friend Jan Skrdlik put it: ‘Music is a special language to communicate everything from the heart’. Just hear him and his consummate pianist Petra Besa play with a passion, almost unheard-of in contemporary Classical music, to see how valid is that epigram.
Go back two hundred years to the Rev. Sidney Smith, who the American ambassador called ‘the wisest man, if he had not been deemed the wittiest’: for Sidney music was ‘the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth’, the former unfortunately no longer, considering the price of a ticket to Glastonbury Festival, or Grand Opera.
It is a dazzling world, from the first known song, the Hurrian Hymn no. 6 from 3400 BCE in Syria (would they have song now instead of bullets) to the 1264 pop variants of 2018 AD; if those first singers could see the variety of the folk/ethnic/jazz/blues/soul/RnB/Classical/electronic spheres they would surely gasp in awe. How quickly did it grow?
Of the three main strands, Classical and Rock come from the folk of cottage and hut. Classical Indian ragas, arrived well before the monastic parchments of Europe, which engendered late medieval composers like Lassus (listen to his glory on the Christ Church College Choir recordings, conducted by Simon Preston).
The stream of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque era of Bach (1650- ) and Handel’s legendary Messiah, a river flowing into the torrent of the Classical Age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (c. 1800); surely the latter brought us to the high water mark of musical expressiveness.
I wonder had any among the thirty thousand who flocked to Beethoven’s funeral heard all nine of his symphonies (including the 9th with its ‘Ode to Joy’), the last five string quartets (Op. 135 the final one, with a slow adagio movement that arrives from no where, has a beauty so simple and pure that perhaps only the Busch, Amadeus and Hollywood quartets have captured its sublime essence in a recording), or his piano sonatas, thirty-two in all with the Op 111 at the end giving one a vision of Paradise, as played by the Jewish-Austrian Artur Schuabel, whose preeminent gifts were expressed in his comment: ‘the notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the resides.’?
The rich Romantic nineteenth century saw a spread of greatness from France to Belgium – Cesar Franck’s violin sonata is unmatched – Spain, Russia (including the universally loved Swan Lake ballet of Tchaikovsky) to Italian opera. No way will we ever have another chain of composers like Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini; nor Belcanto singers who grew out of their greatness: Melba and Caruso are the best known, but can they rival Claudia Muzio the soprano, Fernando de Lucia the tenor, or Mattia Battistini the baritone?
I – The Irish Mist
Before looking in more detail at outstanding singing, let me dwell on the Irish miracle. From peat bogs, sparse sunlight, tragic potato famine, English oppression, less than five million living there today, the Irish have swept the world with intoxicating jigs and reels: so deft, poised, and elegant in set dances or even integrated with disco dancing, which I discovered at one New Years Eve party in Dublin that is burnt into my memory. It brought to mind Robert Herrick’s poem ‘When as in silks my Julia goes / then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows / the liquefaction of her clothes’.
Did one man, Sean O’Riada, mainly, inspire, from the 1940s and 50s, a flood of famous bands like De Danaan, Planxty, The Chieftains, the Bothy Band and instrumentalists like Jackie Daly who almost reinvented the melodeon; at a recent Milton Malbay Festival I listened to sixteen playing slow airs, with Jackie, Sam Burke and Brendan Begley having me in tears. Also there, during an Irish Set Dance ceilidh, Martin Hayes played such spine-tingling fiddle solos of fantastic grace and fluidity that it is scarcely surprising that his new group ‘The Gloaming’ should have elicited such critical responses as ‘Brilliant’, ‘Exceptional’, ‘Blissful’ and ‘Exquisite’.
At a pub in Spiddal, near Galway, you will find Johnny Óg Connolly, often with his Dad, playing melodeon; after Milton Malbay, you would not dare dream of encountering such rich tone colours, patterns so delicate, and virtuoso runs celestial, imbued with a poetry, arising from his great humanity, characteristic of the Irish in all walks of life. One cannot conceive how many instruments they can play from the utterly haunting uilleann pipes, via bodhrán (with its gentle and imaginative beat) to the tin whistle of Mary Bergin and Packie Byrne. And weekly, you can hear sessions for free in pubs throughout the land, from Kerry to Donegal.
As a singer, both for ballads, lieder and opera, John McCormack alerted with his unsurpassed natural tenor voice how deeply the human voice can delve in to one’s spirit, this mantle now assumed by those like Mary Black, Tommy Fleming, Dolores Keane, along with a unique group of sean-nós singers, uniquely expressed in Gaelic and unaccompanied. The discovery of the year for me was Marianne McAleer at the Sidmouth Folk Festival in England. One of her song moved me to the extent that she stepped forward to hold my hand. No greater testimony to the unifying force of music, and generous Irish nature.
II – Rock ’n’ Roll
Cross the Atlantic for a twentieth century musical revolution, led mainly by African-Americans and Jews. Beginning with the 1920s New Orleans Jazz of bands like Jelly Roll Morton, simultaneously of Leadbelly and other formerly enslaved Blacks who sang the Blues to combat sadness; there sprang up gradually the modern jazz of men such as Charlie Parker, Tamla, Motown, Atlantic Soul, R&B, Trance, Dance, Rap and onwards.
Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’, is magnetic like so many Blues numbers, and inspired Johnny Cash and folk supremo Pete Seeger to sing and perform it.
A high point of traditional Jazz was highlighted to me by an Exeter estate agent I once knew bursting into tears after listening to ‘Blue Horizon’ from the 1945 Blue Note recordings of Sidney Bechet, then on the crest of his soprano sax playing career. Dancing to the English Traditional band of Chris Barber in the late sixties, was also an unforgettable experience, confirming what joy Afro-Americans have bestowed on mankind.
From the Atlantic soul most must know the enveloping power of Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, but few can have sat down to supper with a daughter, Acacia, thinking the cream would be an eight-year-old bottle of Chablis, only for her to press the repeat buttons so as to hear Otis Redding’s ‘Those Arms of Mine’, twenty-seven times!
The legendary Louis Armstrong, trumpet hors concours and entertainer, becomes a symbol of the African-American love of life and laughter, with words like: ‘all music is folk music – I ain’t ever heard no horse sing’.
Erykah Badu is a sublime example of her community’s musical talents; aged seven, given a piano, she wrote twenty songs in the first week, crying ‘Music is kind of sick’. So free from modern constraints that she had three children by different men, home educating them in subjects like quantum physics and rare languages.
But is music now in poor health? And does technology help or hinder?
The early years of American pop/rock/country saw not only Buddy Holly, John Denver, but also Otis Redding die in plane crashes, in part down to having to play too many gigs. Since then, how many stars, and their fans have ruined their lives with drink and drugs, which is almost unthinkable in the folk and Classical spheres?
The deafening, distorting sound of PA equipment is another downside, or thrill, depending on how you respond. The plethora of songs and possibilities for delight is illustrated by my son Hawthorn pointing out how I can put four hundred thousand songs on a hard drive, which he worked out would take thirty-four years, listening three-and-a-half-hours daily, to get through. The fever of this passion is shown by almost two hundred thousand tickets for the Glastonbury Festival selling out within fifty minutes.
III – Musical Contrasts
Two countries can act as a sublime contrast. Have you been lucky enough to hear French chanson or the mystical, almost metaphysical sound of Indian sitar or sarod, grounded by the drone of a tambura, which with the light intricate drumming of a tabla leads to a deeply relaxed meditative state?
Thanks to my third daughter Natasha (you need family, as well as friends, to make you explore music), I tried to learn how to sing. Then sing in a classical raga mode. Talk about a revelation: going back to the first few words about complete absolute freedom, it is almost what singing Indian classical ragas allows, except that you move in the seven note, Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni scale.
I was taught by a Frenchman Gilles Petit, who can sing, dance, play any instrument from sitar to trumpet like an angel: but then he gives music by many routes a spiritual dimension. However, to learn how to sing ragas is a lifetime’s devotion, as with sitar. So beguiling an instrument that the Beatles combined with Ravi Shankar.
Taking their elegant language, their refinement, joie de vivre, the French gave in Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ an incomparable lightening of heart. Could this be what the seventy-percent of English people, who are reportedly depressed at some point daily, require?
As a young man seeing Maurice Chevalier at the Paris Olympia sing not only with voice but elbow took me into shocked joy; listening to Gilbert Becaud’s ‘Et Maintenant’ was dramatic, thrilling, statement about despair: ‘And now what I am going to do with the rest of my life … All the nights for what, for who / And this morning returns for nothing … I’m going to burn all these nights / In the early morning I will hate you … I really have nothing to do’.
Hardly understanding a word, I was, nonetheless, rivetted. The great signposts in this exhilarating genre are Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, and Jacque Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’, which offer romanticism gone wild: ‘I will offer you pearls made of rain, coming from countries where it never rains …. I will ride right there to see you dancing and smiling … Let me become the shadow of your shadow.’
Ignore French musical culture at your peril!
IV – Belcanto
An Italian baritone born in 1856 at the crest of the Belcanto age, whose voice was marked by coruscating runs, and an ever-golden tone, Mattia Battistini shone in the French opera of Gounod and his singing of Gomod’s song Le Soir is perfection.
Alas Ed Gardner’s description: ‘Opera is when someone gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings’ only hints at how exciting, ravishing that world can be. Through withdrawing from the stage for the three summer months, Battistini, uniquely, practised seven hours a day: how many could have matched his thirty-seven encores after one legendary recital?!
Sadly what was Grand Opera is now a shadow of its spectacular singing: the last truly great tenor Jussi Bjorling died in 1960. But at least the English Touring Opera still capture its magic through superb direction and staging.
I suggested you find De Lucia, the tenor, and Claudia Muzio, the soprano, to discover how expressive this art form can be.
Rarely nowadays one has the luck of hearing a throwback to the golden nineteenth century in the form of Ileana Cotrubas. In an almost unknown opera at Glyndebourne, her singing of Cavalli’s ‘Calisto’ was so warm, beautiful, captivating that she became the recipient of a case of vintage champagne (Louis Roederer, Blanc to Blanc, 1966).
Like Clara Haskil, and Alan Hacker, she has a sublime affinity with Mozart. If you are switched off by Classical piano, I doubt you could have resisted Clara’s playing it, I was certainly converted – in Chartres’s Cathedral Museum!
V – Czech and English
How does one yield to another musical genre? Is it great music or wonderful playing that is the key to Aladdin’s Cave?
Alan Hacker, the clarinetist and conductor, is a glowing example of what is possible. Rather than giving up after being paralysed by a virus from the chest downwards as a young man, he became what William Mann in The Times called ‘a musician to be treasured in our midst’. He was surely the equal of Anton Stadler and Richard Mulhfeld for whom Mozart and Brahms wrote renowned clarinet quintets, equally adept on an 1804 boxwood clarinet and the modern Boehm.
He inspired modern composers, taught so wisely at York Univeristy and Dartington, conducted both symphonies, some with original instruments, and opera – including Mozart in Stuttgart.
When interviewed by the BBC, in saying there were too many notes nowadays, he pinpointed how virtuoso fast runs by players had sidelined the prime of music: tone colour. The descending triplet in the finale of his first recording of Mozart’s Quintet is an exquisite example of his playing. But as the saying goes, ‘Behind every man …’ there is no doubt that his wife Margaret contributed hugely.
If you feel reluctant to move from orchestral to chamber music, begin with Schubert’s String Quintet (the first one that hit me) live from Prades with the Vegh Quartet and Casals, or a 2015 recording of Franck’s violin sonata in its cello version with the aformentioned Jan Skdrlik and Petra Besa. These Czech artists, like many from that land, are quite out of the common run; so don’t visit Prague only for the beer! The Lobkowitz Palace there has both two Canaletto paintings of London in the seventeenth century, and Beethoven manuscripts, surviving there after the court supported him at a critical moment.
Due to Rock/Pop dominance the extraordinarily rich and human folk scene, except in Ireland, is marginalized. However, the English put on almost three hundred folk festivals annually, much enlivened by new young talent and encouraged by the ground-breaking Spiers and Boden.
The breadth on offer is enthralling: Roy Bailey, an Emeritus Professor at Sheffield University, became a pioneer in songs about social justice – ‘Alyandabu’ with haunting harmonica from Rory Mcleod, is about an aboriginal woman who, when her rich husband died, and having had her children confiscated, fights back, is a marvel. Similarly Pete Morton’s ‘Two Brothers’.
I don’t care who started it, I just want to see you play I just want to see you smiling in the glory of his day … Israel give him his hall back. Just stop all the noise I can see your two very overtired little boys … Palestine I saw you kick him, Israel sit still … Put aside all your anger, all the sorrow and all the pain … One day in the future this won’t mean a thing …. …. , as brothers you’ll sing
A tour de force of a prolific, rhythmically-alive singer-songwriter who has transformed traditional songs like ‘Little Musgrave’.
The Folk World in the U.K. breathes balance, with song and dance, moderation and harmony, after the miracle, around 1900, of Cecil Sharp collecting, in only fifteen years, six thousand songs and dances; Rev Sabine Baring Gould got a further thousand plus, while Alfred Williams accumulated hundreds.
Sharp shows what we need to recover in music by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century folk song in rural areas was still an unbroken tradition. Whether labourer, thresher, cowherd, ploughman, pinder, goose woman, woodcutter, shepherd, cress-gatherer or bird-scaring boy, all trudged home to the accompaniment of song. Indeed in 1800, the poet John Clare’s father knew by heart over one hundred ballads.
But English folk’s salient feature is humour. Thus Colum Sands between songs always tells funny tales, including one about his aunt, who, aged seventy-five after getting electricity for the first time, would only turn on the light to find the matches to light the oil lamp. Or when playing to the Inuits of Northern Canada, he met a woman who told him that in her tribe the men outnumbered the women ten to one. So he said: ‘The odds are good then’. She quick as a flash, riposted ‘Yes the odds are good but the goods are odd’. The same element is evident in Roy Bailey’s famous children’s songs: Kangaroos like to hop / Zebras like to run / Horses like to trot / But I like to lie in the sun.
And of course there is Martin Wyndham Read, the great discoverer of Australian folk music, which he sings almost Belcanto; he has a store of hilarious stories from sheep shearers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8WXnewzk1M
VI – Musicals
In the world of musicals does ‘Singing in the Rain’ not stand supreme, for making you feel happy? And is that what we seek from it? But as with all music, hearing it live is so much more entrancing.
Umojo, a two hour explosion of South African black singers celebrating a century of music, caused the entire audience to go wild with applause at the end when I went to see it. For your romantic hunger, there is ‘Le Concert’, a French film featuring Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concert; just as pulsating is ‘Strictly Ballroom’ where the pasodoble reigns, amidst much humour.
Without the Jewish people, music would be a shadow of itself, in pop/shows/Classical: Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’, is one such marvelous testament. Try not to miss hearing Fritz Kreisler the violinist, revered in his time; will one of his stature ever appear again? His 1926 recording of the Beethoven violin Concerto is superlative in a field of one hundred or more versions. Might he give you a longed for musical breakthrough?
*******
A rounded perspective on music is incomplete without surveying other animals. The moving and beautiful film ‘The Story of the Weeping Camel’, set in the Gobi desert of Mongolia features yurts and people in magnificently bright clothing. When a she camel after a long and difficult birth refuses to suckle her new born the small village calls in the town musician with a small cello-like instrument to play, whilst a woman sings. Within minutes a magical transformation is achieved!
Recently Kathryn Roberts began her Cornish recital with the sad tale of the whale that sings at 52 Hertz, a frequency making it impossible to find a mate. And you can hear dolphins in Valencia, City of Arts and Sciences through a PA system singing to one another. How many other living creatures share this staggering gift of ours?
As a farewell, let Beecham take the stage once more. Probably the finest and certainly the wittiest conductor from the UK, and much loved on the Continent by composers and concert-goers alike, at his seventieth birthday celebration the telegrams read out included one from Richard Strauss, whose operas he brought to Covent Garden and Sibelius whom he championed, after which Beecham cried ‘Not Mozart?!’ Has there ever lived a more vivid interpreter of that man’s perfect music? I doubt it.
The featured image of Richard Wilson sitting on the shoulders of his son Hawthorn was taken by Toby Sirota at Meribel in Les Trois Vallees, France this year.
It was around this time last year that I had arrived back to Dublin after a short trip to Brazil. Prior to embarking on this adventure, I had finally completed my Master’s thesis, which discussed the stylistic development of Western Classical music in Japan. The third chapter focused on the post-war era of the country, specifically on an artistic movement which throughout the 1970s and early 1980s gave rise to many now renowned Japanese composers including Midori Takada, Joe Hisaishi and most importantly for my work, Satoshi Ashikawa.
During my time in the city of Sao Paulo, I was repeatedly overwhelmed by its ever-changing nature. I became obsessed with imagining a music best able to reflect the blending of these modern urban environments. I found an elucidating reflection of this pursuit in the liner notes of Ashikawa’s album, Still Way, where he noted how his concept of an Environmental Music can be understood as an:
object or sound scenery to be listened to casually. Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity. In other words, it is music which creates an intimate relationship with people in everyday life.
Upon returning to Ireland, my obsession with Environmental Music only grew stronger as it offered me boundless agency for creativity, this is when I started work on my first album, Laistigh den Ghleo. It was during the writing and recording process that I began to realise just how relevant Ashikawa’s concept of Environmental Music had become in modern times.
Instant access to music via streaming sites has changed our day to day relationship with music, resulting in most experiencing this art form in a passive manner. This offers an opportunity for Ashikawa’s concept of a static music to develop into an Environmental Music which blends and reflects our ever-changing environments. An Environmental Music which moves with the listener throughout their day. This is what I have attempted to develop with my last two albums, the aforementioned Laistigh den Ghleo and most recently, Gluaiseacht. In order to reflect the changing environment of the listener, the music that I have written does give into certain dramatic qualities, leaning away from Ashikawa’s concept of a music “which does not excite the listener.” However, I believe this necessary in my pursuit of developing Environmental Music within a modern framework.
My main hope is that Laistigh den Ghleo and Gluaiseacht help the listener reengage with their surrounding environment and also to recognise the multitude of individual pulses that comprise the world around them. Instead of using music as a form of escapism, Environmental Music is instead designed to create an intimate bond with the listener and their everyday life.
The Cassandra Voices musician of the month for September, Louise O’Connor, explores what makes a trad session so special.
I recently attended a large music festival in England where a trad session took over the night in a small fire-lit tent. There were Irish tunes, Scottish tunes, English tunes and a few Appalachian ones for good measure. Being an Irish fiddle player I was most at home with the jigs and the reels.
I sat and played for hours, mesmerised by the sight of a topless, heavily-tattooed man with a rainbow-coloured mohawk who sean-nós danced with ferocious intensity on a piece of wood throughout.
A trad session never fails to surprise.
These sessions have been a constant source of surprise and companionship for me for many years now.
Growing up in the Burren in County Clare, I played the fiddle from the age of seven. Aged seventeen I departed for university and the bright lights of Cork City. I hardly played in those days, preferring to listen to free jazz, contemporary classical music or the latest heavy instrumental rock band that my new urban friends introduced me to.
Fiddling at 3842m near Chamonix. Photo by Marc Cleriot.
I wasn’t to return to trad until, aged twenty-two, I found myself back in Cork after a period of travelling. The college gang had disbanded and I was in need of new friends. Cue the interjecting character of a French housemate with a passion for learning the bodhran. She brought me along to a session in a local pub. I befriended the fiddle player and was hooked. I was hooked on the atmosphere, the ritualistic nature of it, the sheer craic.
A series of lessons from that fiddle player I befriended and I was almost session ready. Apart from one thing: nerves. On the first occasion that my new teacher persuaded me to play in a session, my hands were sweating so profusely that it was practically impossible for me to play.
Things have certainly got better since then, and the meaning and importance of the session has grown and grown for me.
Céilí dancing in Germany.
In my years spent abroad, it permeated my experiences as a weekly ritual that allows release, a sense of stability and company on my many solo jaunts.
It is obvious how the session format was born out of the Irish emigrant experience in London and America, and the need to hold on to roots. Thanks to mass Irish emigration and the dispersion of the tunes, as a fiddle player I have been welcomed with open arms within the global fraternity of trad musicians. I leaned into the music and the dance as I travelled. I slowly started to depend on it.
Sessions in Oslo were my main social outlet. In Germany I organised céilís in the market square, while in Chamonix, I played tunes at 3842m at a temperature of -10. In Northern England, I picked up wild Scottish reels at the local session, and played them frantically on my lunch break, helping to relieve the stiffness of the office environment I was working in.
II – Among Old Friends
Returning to play sessions in Dublin was a slightly daunting task. I was no longer a novelty. Fiddle players are ten a penny in our fair capital. I forced myself out to sessions in the early days of Dublin life. I always feared I would not know enough tunes, and it would be embarrassing.
My first session came about after meeting a retired gentleman, who invited me to one in a nearby seaside village. It turned out to be have been running for twenty-five years, in a practically empty pub, and involved a group of retired men in their sixties upwards. I was the only female to have ever played in the session, so my arrival was a source of some bewilderment.
Overtime, however, they grew accustomed to my presence, and I settled into an uplifting weekly meeting. The session was more like a history lesson in Irish music, or a support group for musical fanatics. After each set the tunes were discussed; its origin; the historical recordings; the alternative key it might have been played in; the ornamental possibilities present in each one.
I absolutely delighted in the whole experience. Each person had their own seat, and had sat in that seat for twenty-odd years. Being granted a seat at that session felt like quite the honour, and I was intrigued to hear the stories of sessions and festivals in the 60s and 70s in London, Doolin, and Mayo.
At some point they would close their eyes and disappear into the reverie of music. And I imagined they were transported at times, back to these epic sessions they spoke of. The tunes were the same, the session was the same. The only difference was the passage of time.
When they told me short stories about each tune, it added to the magic of my schooling. I went away each week armed with a list of tunes to learn, and a story that went with each. My eagerness to tweak my trad vocabulary was renewed every week.
It was a gentle initiation into the Dublin school of trad from men most of whom had been playing for half a century.
III – Central Sessions
After a house move, I began playing at a session in the city centre, which is a more varied affair. Musicians drop in from all corners of the world.
It is the type of session where audience members are as much a part of the session as the musicians. They sit in for the chats, and contribute with a song or a dance. Many onlookers marvel at the whole process.
Like moths to a flame, tourists are drawn to the beat of the tunes. You see the sparkle of awe in their eyes at the frenzied energy through a set of reels, and the ‘earthing’ experience of a mournful sean nós song, which usually brings everyone in the pub to a halt.
We all savour the natural ebb and flow of the occasion.
‘You guys don’t get paid? Phenomenal! How do you know all the tunes?’ A young girl from Vermont asked me. ‘It’s an oral tradition’, I tell her. A tradition, truly, that is handed down by ear, by being involved in the session itself.
It is a much debated topic at a session, but you might never actually know what a tune is called.
IV – Trad Festivals
And then there are the trad festivals. I write this after my best summer yet of attending trad festivals. There is little in this world that gives me greater pleasure than heading West in my car of a summer’s evening towards a trad festival, with my fiddle and a tent packed up, and tunes racing through my head.
I camped at the Willie Clancy festival this year with my friend, a solicitor and concertina player in her 60s who I met in sean nos dancing circles. As it was her first Willie Clancy she remarked that if she lasted the whole week she’d be a different person… and she did. She camped the whole week.
And, as she said she would never be the same again.
The relentless music everywhere, the workshops, the set dancing céilís, the first wild camping experience, the wonderfully open and honest meetings with strangers.
All the components of a transformative experience that indeed has left its mark on her, uncovering courageous aspects of herself buried deep within. Maybe we were all different after that week of glorious sunshine, swims in the Atlantic and trad sessions by the beach. At these festivals, there is a different quality of time. There are days on end to sit and converse, to make friends, to learn new tunes and to gain new perspectives.
*******
The trad experience has certainly changed for me, from my beginnings being plagued by frenetic nervousness, to a point where, in the right lighting, and in the right context, I can even be persuaded to dance a step at a session or sing a song. I’ve constantly surprised myself while being held within the cocoon of the session.
It is as if the hot summer evenings of this year’s trad sessions melted my resistance in a way. I gave in to the encouraging wink and a nod: ‘Go on, give us a step.’ I cared less about perfection and more about embracing the occasion.
I have now started to give the same encouragement to others, in teaching ‘a step’ to groups in the form of céilí dancing. I want to involve people in the magic of the Irish music that I’ve been so privileged to be immersed in.
I’m glad that trad music has returned to my life, and it’s certainly here to stay.
Louise O’Connor is a fiddle player and runs Celtic Dance Party, teaching traditional céilí group dances. Her website is www.louise.ie. Instagram: @celticdanceparty. Facebook: Celtic Dance Party.
It is difficult to speak of abstract forces without personalising them, or investing them, magically, with consciousness and will. When we (by this I mean you; I never do this) refer to the markets as ‘growing jittery’, or ‘recovering’, we (you) indulge in the same thinking that saw maidens being sacrificed to appease volcano gods. When we talk of a giraffe’s necks being ‘designed’ by evolution to reach high branches, or a bat’s ears for echo-location, it is acceptable shorthand, but it is also a fundamental misrepresentation of natural selection.
So while it is strictly incorrect for scientists to ascribe moral virtues to inanimate processes, it is still possible to say that one of the virtues of the scientific method is that it is anti-fabulist. It is arduous, collaborative, impersonal, and counter-intuitive. It moves forward, as the process of evolution does, in hard-won steps more often than grand moments of individual inspiration, and although there may be room for the individual genius, and times when the lightning of pure spirit ignites and inseminates the fertile ground of laborious research, mostly it is donkey work that advances the project of universal knowledge, and it is not just unromantic but positively anti-romantic.
And this is a virtue because oh my goodness just think what it would be like if we trusted our imaginations and narrative impulses – those most charming, fascinating, and childish part of ourselves – with the serious and useful business of determining the movements of planets, or making our mobile telephones function.
Inspiration without moral authority is of course sacrilegious, which is why Frankenstein’s creature was an abomination, and why the original Prometheus was very properly housed on a rock facility and provided with access to vulture-based liver extraction technology.
We no longer believe that the sun is dragged across the sky by a chariot, or that the behaviour of rivers and oceans are governed by the whims of gods and spirits. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are objectively and absolutely correct in this. Your Tinder profile is not powered by app sprites, but by logarithms and sciencey things to do with sums, which I do not pretend to understand, but which I know to be real because the little computer that I carry around with me in my pocket has a digital watch and can take photographs.
There is no ghost in the machine, or divinity in the device. Your tablet was not delivered from the sky to a digital Moses on a mountain top; it was pieced together painstakingly by children in a sweat shop from lots of little bits of silicon or whatever, according to rules, principles, and facts assembled over the millennia by observation, trial and error.
It is one of the tenets of Creationism that creation cannot be in error, which is why fossilised Victorians in the Southern States of the United States cannot get their heads around the whole business of dinosaurs. In scientific methodology there is no room for error either, because if something is erroneous it is not science but nescience. And since no experiment conducted in good faith looks to a particular outcome, and the proper conduct of the scientific exercise scorns the idea of a ‘happy ending’, as priggishly as a vegan in a massage parlour, there can be no such thing as a failed experiment.
Of course an experiment can feel like a success or failure. It is hard to imagine Dr Frankenstein rubbing his hands in triumph because he had managed through painstaking research to verify another way not to create life. The universal feeling of rightness or satisfaction that lightens the human heart at the correct conclusion of a fairytale, the narrative conclusion of a fable, or the almost audible click that Yeats observed as being a property of a successful poem – the inherent appreciation of the justness, or beauty, of anything, especially of an idea, is an instinct that, while valuable to the creation of advertisements, is above all things, suspect in the pursuit of truth. And don’t give me any guff, please, about the idea of objective scientific facts being in itself a kind of fairytale, you fucking student.
Kepler is a hero because he recognised this; and Einstein is a figure of pathos because he did not. Kepler’s beatific vision originally reconciled the apparent irregularities of the heavenly spheres with the absolute elegance of Platonic solids. When the vision failed to correspond to his observed data, he wrestled with the data, urging it to conform. But he did not falsify it, or ignore the profound disappointment of a reality that fails to satisfy our equally profound, but not at all truthful religious impulses.
Einstein, on the other hand, succumbed to the human heresy that the external universe must be morally comprehensible, and apparently had some kind of problem with dice.
It goes without saying, I hope, that when I talk about Einstein or Kepler or the wider histories of human thought, I don’t really know what I am talking about. I know nothing about astrophysics or the precise differences between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, or indeed about Newton or Einstein themselves, except insofar that they are symbols in clever conversation.
But I suspect Einstein’s search for elegance and intuitive beauty was similar to Newton’s work in alchemy.
Their moments of inspiration are cultural nodes, and purely poetic. Is there a more prefect symbol than a falling apple for post-lapsarian revelation; what lovelier image for intellectual discovery than the journey on a beam of light?
Anyway, what has all this got to do with poetry? Well if the first function of poetry is entertainment, then the use of narrative and those concentrated nuggets of narrative that we call symbols is useful and natural and effective. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are beautiful. And they can be true, after a fashion.
They can be true if we demand from truth nothing more than emotional resonance. They can be true in the Freudian or Jungian sense of narrative being the only vector of meaning, which itself is fundamentally Romantic. If, however, we insist that poetry should address itself to actual truth, we are in a pickle.
I do not use the word pickle lightly. Modernism challenged the idea of narrative truth and ended up in autoprocticism. We have still not thrown overboard our dissolute mythologies, which includes the very idea of story itself. The use of dramatic devices are suspect because they are effective. Thought gorges itself on story, as flies are coprophagic, but the uses of narrative – since we are obliged to take account of objective truth – are as intellectually defunct as appeals to the Greek pantheon are silly and pretentious. Gods and heroes have their place in contemporary culture, and that place is called ComiCon.
The problem is not a new one, it is the corollary of the problem of free verse (Now don’t tell me that free verse isn’t problematic, you fucking beatnik). Q. Roland Lehr, the celebrated ‘sage, mage and king of rage’, has observed often enough, God knows, that formal conservatism in versifying is associated with narrow right wing politics. In certain cases – that of James McAuley, for instance – an understandable taste, and a developed talent for rhyme, metre, and syntactical sense found its expression in the perverse fabulism of orthodox Catholicism.
(Orthodox Catholicism, says you, is there any other kind?) And I forgive you for you have hit on a point worth making: that although the tapestry of gorgeous lies that constitutes Catholic doctrine is intellectually and morally unacceptable to any evolved adult, it has this at least to justify it: that it was up until recently taken seriously, and literally, as an interpretive framework for understanding the world. This gives it clout, which is more than can be said for the Marvel universe say.
But no matter its historical importance, and the sophistication and depth of its emotional and aesthetic appeal, the idea of the communion of saints is no more acceptable than the baroque minutiae of the sagas of Sith and Jedi: not simply because it is not true, but because its mendacity is grounded in an intuitive, and therefore inherently dodgy, appeal to a deep-rooted, primitive impulse to tell stories. And the rich linguistic imagination that may have been useful to our distant ancestors, while surviving a bewildering prehistory of poisonous berries, cave bears and anachronistic dinosaurs, is as embarrassingly dated now, and as destructive, as selling cigarettes to children.
One good question about all this is who cares? To the morally sound atheist the whole business of poetry and aesthetics can sometimes seem simplistic, a gallimaufry of oxypygical nephelococcygisms.
However, the value of a shared moral framework, either as crudely sanctimonious as editorials in The Guardian – or as cunningly wrought and intricately plotted as the storylines of the great English soap operas, which have been the United Kingdom’s crowning cultural achievement over the last half-century – is obvious. Whether this moral framework should have an aesthetic function as an entertainment, as the Iliad had, as well as primarily intellectual and theoretical function, as Emmerdale or Coronation Street have, is the question.
Where can we find a system of art that is commercially responsible, aesthetically amusing and allied to objective truth? There is mysticism in the tremulous bob of a quark, probably, but it is unlikely to strike to the soul of the general reader as effectively as the hackneyed beams of a discredited moon trailing its tiresome beams on an uninspired sea.
There is majesty and awe to be discovered still in the sight of a mountain range at sunset, if you like that sort of thing, and in the rank variety of living matter that continues to infest the planet in spite of humanity’s best endeavours to make the place more conveniently habitable. But these childish tricks of the light and inherited blood hardly have the gravitas that we demand of serious art (if they very idea of art as a serious pursuit is not in itself kind of ridiculous).
We cannot escape from story any more than we can divest ourselves of language, which is to say no more than a bird can break free from the shackles of flight, or loosen the muzzle of song. And yet the scientific method that frustrates the narrative impulse, that offers its material and objective gifts in exchange for childish images, whose stern practise refuse to obey the tyranny of the story arc – that bent rod of servility that defines the slavery of human whim, has not yet yielded up a satisfying and rigorous alternative to childish mythology.
Until we can imagine and describe our world in human language as accurately as we can using the divine language of mathematics, the best we can do is watch with a critical eye the rigorous moral thought experiments of Corrie, on ITV and Virgin Media One, with an omnibus edition on ITV2 every Sunday.
Place of storks and green-
clad chalk. Are the Gypsies still
perched on ‘The Warren’?
Camargue
Flamingo heaven,
white horses, black madonna.
Heart’s grey forgiven.
Camargue
Red dust on the shoes
of Gaditans carrying
Sara-la-Kali.
Storrington
At the age of eight:
the camp fire by their wagon
shed heavenly light.
Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Faber and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2016 and he is editor of their 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).
A cormorant dives to feed, then perches, its wings spread to dry. There are fish, there is a break in the clouds.
A freighter embarks, laden with necessary goods, including toys,
much as a researcher presents his findings.
This world is henceforth one in which these things have taken place,
and the gates that would prevail against them have so far failed.
J.D. Smith’s fourth collection, The Killing Tree, was published in 2016, and his individual poems have appeared in publications including Dark Mountain, New Verse News and Terrain. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science and the children’s picture book The Best Mariachi in the World. He works as an editor in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare, their rescue animals and no small amount of trepidation. More information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.
