Gunpowder, band-wagon and lot: Part 2

There was once a boy, born not long after the war when food was still in short supply and when you ate everything served on your plate and Sunday School sandwiches were graced with no more than a feint smear of butter and fish paste or Marmite. He was an unusual boy, not talkative, hating organised sport, preferring his own company, searching the library next door for books about electricity when others took fiction, running when most folk would walk.

Broad Haven, Wales

This boy was enchanted by the wonder he discovered in music, flowers, colours, sunsets, building imaginary water-works in sand, messing with bulbs and batteries, getting his father's model trains to act as if they had inertia. And, just occasionally, by literature in passages like:

I stood on the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shore-wards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave... A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible. I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human embodiment of the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed, and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could bear it no longer... Phantastes, George Macdonald.

or, recalling his own childhood experiences of fever, his head feeling as if it were detached, swollen into an infinitely hard, throbbing globe, too heavy to be raised from the pillow but about to shatter into a thousand pieces if it had, like: "Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid upon the pillow, my own head once removed..." Or, coming out of the fever, when "I surfaced at last from its endless delirium the real world seemed suddenly dear... I heard its faintest sounds; streams running, trees stirring, birds folding their wings, a hill-sheep's cough, a far gate swinging, the breath of a horse in a field. Below me the kitchen made cosy murmurs, footsteps went up the road, a voice said Good-night, a door creaked and closed - or a boy suddenly hollered, animal-clear in the dark, and was answered far off by another. I lay moved to stupidity by these precious sounds as though I'd just got back from the dead. Then the fever returned as it always did..." Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee.

This boy had had a sheltered conservative Christian upbringing and "gave his heart to the Lord" when ten. Attending a small dame school he at first failed the 11+ not realising that one went to school to learn but, having opportunity to resit and heading his father's injunction to try harder, passed, went on to grammar school and finally university where he attained a 1st class Honours degree. Encouraged by other believers there he left university with a heightened desire to "serve God". 

Years passed. He trained as an electronics research engineer, served actively in church, prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and assumed it "by faith", met and married what would become his best friend, together doing what normal people did in buying a house on a mortgage and starting a family, until...

His parents were aghast on hearing his decision to give up a well-paid and secure job and the qualifications that went with it, and to sell the house he was renovating with their help, all evidence of their love and care for him, and to join a religious community to stake out a life apart from the world system as far as was feasible, along with others who, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth and, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised.

No regrets: he knew better. This movement he had stumbled into was radical, cutting-edge. He would become part of the first-fruits, destined to rule and reign, to live forever, being no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. 

And yet he found that, whereas others testified to dramatic feelings when baptised in the Holy Spirit and a renewed desire to read the Bible, and appeared to get ecstatic during praise sessions, he was left largely unmoved. When, after church, others said how much the praise and the "word" (preaching) had uplifted them, he obligingly smiled, but to him church meetings were something Christians were expected to endure in order to be, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some. It wasn't that he was incapable of being moved: he could not deny feeling strong emotions of wonder when, for example, reaching a mountain peak or enjoying a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, even though this composer had no profession of faith in God. For years he had starved himself of such "worldly" music for the sake of the gospel, supposing that it might be demon inspired. Similarly, after giving in his notice, he had kept away from anything electronic for many years during which, unknown to him at the time, the IBM Personal Computer had made its debut. Such was the zeal he imagined he had: ten out of ten for effort but disappointing results.

But worse was to come...

(continued in Part 3)    (go back to Part 1)

Beauty or the Beast?

Yesterday in London.



It is now Sunday morning: I am sitting here, quiet and alone, in great-grandma's lounge listening to Rachmaninoff portrayed by Александр Малофеев with conductor Kristjan Järvi: such beauty, such wonder, such rendition, their interaction, their humility yet expertise. Albeit my tinnitus always there, a constant reminder of mortality so evident behind quieter passages.

Rachmaninoff second piano concerto

All his concerts have been cancelled or postponed as Alexander is currently unable to perform because of coronavirus lockdown, yet protestors in their thousands are ignoring social distancing. How is it even possible for two such extremes to voluntarily coexist on this planet? Who are these people flouting law and order, killing, maiming, destroying, as if that were valid compensation for exacerbated police brutality the other side of the globe? Have they not yet discovered joy, beauty?

And yet even in a concentration camp the birds sing.

Repetition

C S Lewis, story teller par excellence

No I am not doing a pep talk on C S Lewis. There are too many others out there doing that, and doubtless better than ever I could.  Suffice it to say that his fiction had a significant part in moulding my upbringing.  In this post I am merely using his insight.

Although repetition can be used to good effect, for example in education or to convey a superlative in poetry, some things are too good to be repeated in too small a timeframe.

"Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from the trees... He picked one of them... Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment's hesitation he put the ' little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight... It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on Earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. 'Not like that' was all he could ever say to such inquiries. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the child-like innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this 'reason'. It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day."  Lewis, Perelandra.

I concur wholly with this principle.  Sometimes even a long interval may not validate a repetition - I would love to repeat the walk I described in Euphoria but I doubt if the magic would work again even after so many years. Somehow forced repetition does not satisfy. The thrill in listening to Rachmaninov's second piano concerto wears thin if repeated too soon. The ecstatic first few bites into a crisp rhubarb crumble served with clotted cream dull in that unnecessary second portion (memories of last Sunday).

Without doubt we were created to enjoy delight to the full. But perhaps forced repetition is the divide between delight and lust.