Never too old, never too young!

My eighty year old mother was off-loading her growing anxiety about the new one-act play we are due to start rehearsing shortly: “darling you, don’t understand! It’s my short-term memory that’s going. Even when I’m giving talks, I can’t seem to find the right words anymore.” Most people would be filled with compassion at this complaint which conjures up images of poor Iris Murdoch as portrayed by Judi Dench in the film about the writer’s tragic loss of memory in later life struggling to understand straight-forward questions in a television interview. I, however, am my mother’s son and share with her an impatience towards the moans and groans of others. Moreover, although I am approaching fifty I am still relatively fit and healthy and find it hard to appreciate how the brain gradually loses some of its basic functions in advancing years. In fairness, I also know my mother from of old and am used to her initial resistance to stepping out of her comfort zone. “Just you wait to till you’re eighty,” she declaimed. “I would be delighted if my children still wanted to work with me by then,” I reposted. We shall see, we shall see. This new play is about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and is written by my friend Simon Machin. Simon is around the same age as me and has spent most of his life dealing with numbers as an accountant, despite reading English at Oxford. He feels as though he’s buried his literary talent in the earth for too many years, and having completed the play, “Poison in the Blood” Simon declared he had at last found his vocation. “You’re never too old,” I replied, sharing his enthusiasm. His play is partly about the realities of old age as Rossetti faces her final ‘bleak mid-winter’ in her house in Bloomsbury. Knowing death is imminent, the poet is concerned to protect her legacy from prying biographers (yes, I suppose we are guilty here, too!) and thus she is destroying old letters which might be misinterpreted. More importantly, Rossetti is concerned to preserve her soul from the intrusions of predatory priests keen on extracting death-bed confessions from such an eminent public figure. The poet was by all accounts a somewhat haunted figure right up to her death in spite of her robust Christian faith, and this is reflected in much of her brooding, melancholy verse throughout her life. Poems such as ‘Think of me when I am gone,” are often read at funerals. Simon’s play sensitively depicts Rossetti’s ultimate triumph over her dark side without ducking the complex factors which contributed to much of her unhappiness. At the end of the play, having politely declined the reserved sacrament for the sick and dying offered by the intrusive priest Rev. Gutch, Rossetti bites into a juicy ripe peach allowing the syrupy juice to trickle down her neck in a most inappropriate way for a Victorian lady. This fleeting gesture graphically symbolizes the character’s ultimate discovery of the sheer sensual joy of life once she has freed herself from the binding constraints of a censorious society. Such a world as this with its rigid, moral codes and religious fundamentalism suffocates the soul like a whale-boned corset. If the play has a simple message at its heart, it might be: “you are never too old to find salvation, you are never too old.” The reminder that we are never too old for all sorts of things, was beautifully captured in a recent documentary presented by Alan Yentob about ‘The Company of Elders,’ a dance troupe funded by Sadler’s Wells Theatre whose members range from sixty-one to eighty-five. This company travels around the world performing complex modern choreography in internationally renowned arenas, as well as off-beat community venues such as a gay bar. The choreographer working with them on their current piece remarked how these elderly dancers brought a quality onto the stage which younger performers in their prime found elusive. This was perhaps a generosity of soul ripened through good times and bad. This was most apparent when they work-shopped a scene about their memory of the blitz and the reality of evacuation. The stooped figures with those deeply-lined faces lit by haunting, sunken eyes captured an image of childhood vulnerability relived from a distance of many years. The choreographer could hardly speak when he debriefed the exercise; he was extremely moved. One of the many follies particular to our age is to assume that only the young and beautiful can reflect the power and the glory of life. This is often apparent in Hollywood especially for female performers who are discarded as soon as their skin sags. It is also implicit in many other walks of life today such as in politics where each of the current leaders of our main parties are still learning how to raise young families. God reveals his majesty and might (which includes his child-like vulnerability and profound wisdom) through the whole spectrum of humanity and often most poignantly at the extremes. “Out of the mouths of infants you have ordained praise” declared the psalmist. Never was this more powerfully demonstrated to me than by a choir of seven year olds from Southwater Infants School in Sussex. They were performing in the chapel of Christ’s Hospital School along with some older children. I was particularly struck by their rendition of an up-beat version of “The Lord’s My Shepherd.” They sung the refrain ‘And I will trust in him alone’ with such disarming conviction that I am sure the most militant atheist would have melted in their pew. At the end of the concert the choir filed out of the chapel to a spontaneous standing ovation. I spoke with the director of music at Christ’s Hospital about the infants from Southwater and he highlighted the sheer visceral impact of untrained (though not untutored) voices singing for the sheer joy of being alive. You’re never too old, and you’re never too young to serve the living God.

Symphony No. 7

Symphony No. 7

A year or so ago my wife Rachel was asked to take over as leader of the Horsham Symphony Orchestra. This was set up in 1971 by the then director of music at the nearby Christ’s Hospital (a Bluecoats school )with a couple of local residents. Since then the HSO has contributed richly to the musical life of this West Sussex market town giving three major concert a year at the Capitol Theatre. The fifty or so members of the orchestra are largely amateur but are conducted and strengthened by a handful of excellent local professionals. They also invite well established soloists to perform major works with them as often as possible and are currently conducted by the prolific Steve Dummer. They describe themselves as a “friendly orchestra” who welcome new members of all ages and indeed there are a handful of very fresh faced lads and lasses in the string and brass sections in particular. They rehearse for their termly concert on a Wednesday evening and on the day of the performance they spend several hours aiming for the polish and control live performances invariably demand.
On Saturday evening I took the girls (both aspiring string players) to see their mum lead the orchestra in Dvorak’s seventh symphony as well as accompanying the pianist Benjamin Pope performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 K467.
The seventh symphony was written with the grand intention of “moving the world,” and it is certainly full of high drama right from the start with its brooding string sequence establishing the tempestuous tone of the score. The symphony came in the second half of the programme and I had the impression that the orchestra was by now fully warmed-up and open to the spirit of Dvorak’s soaring music bringing it wonderfully alive some century and a quarter on from its original performance. The marvellous thing about experiencing live, as opposed to recorded music, is that you can sense so much more the mood of the musicians as the piece unfolds. You can perceive the gradual awakening to the transcendent power of the music drawing them into that almost mystical plane of inspiration required to really connect with the really great classical compositions. It is perhaps especially intriguing to observe mainly amateur performers, whose weekdays are taken up with various civic and municipal roles or looking after their young children, finding an outlet for their artistic nature under the dramatic glare of stage lanterns. Moreover there is something almost trance-like about the way a fifty-piece orchestra grouped around their conductor find the extraordinary collective energy and acute sensitivity demanded by a composer such as Dvorak. Seeing the string section sawing and swaying as one to the mysterious patterns majestically traced in the air by the conductor’s baton is highly dramatic in itself. Moreover the HSO make a deeply resonant sound and even as a classical layman I could sense that they had been brilliantly guided and prepared by their conductor and leader to respond to the complex moods and musical ideas within the piece as well as its overall emotional arc. I was particularly struck by the programme notes about the symphony which I hurriedly read in the interval to prepare myself for the composition. I learnt that Dvorak had shortly turned down a commission for a major opera in Vienna, because the producers insisted the libretto be written in Austrian rather than his native language. At the time there was a wave of resentment in Bohemia towards Austrian imperialism, and Dvorak felt it would be a form of betrayal to comply with the producer’s demands and so he turned down this opportunity in spite of his ambition to be an internationally known opera composer. The programme implied that this, together with his mother’s death, gave the seventh symphony its distinct air of conflict. As I watched the orchestra become increasingly transported by this turbulent mood, I reflected on how this spirit of defiance in the music might resonate with the individual members of the orchestra. We live in an economic system that leaves us precious little time to express our artistic talents. Most of these musicians would struggle to find the time to make their weekly rehearsals let alone the hours needed to really master the score. They must instead follow the tempo and rhythm of market capitalism with its dreary cycles of buying and selling, and profit and loss, in order to keep afloat in the flood-tides of the credit crunch. Such mechanical, repetitive cycles lack the heroic drama of Dvorak’s grand symphony with its surging passionate intensity. They too often reduce our lives to a grim and colourless struggle to hold onto our job so we can simply keep our money lenders at bay. This is a tragically reductive picture of who we are truly called to be, as people made in the image of the divine creator. We are infact all artists called to respond to the music of the rolling spheres, and the melody in our souls in many varied creative ways. However, like Dvorak we too have to take a stand against those forces which would rob of us of our true identity and turn us into a mere function of the state. Here at the civic theatre of Horsham in West Sussex, fifty or so ordinary citizens dressed in black were giving up their souls to the transcendent power of a grand symphony and reminding the several hundred members of the audience of the magnificent drama of being alive.

Heart of Darkness

The latest challenge of my monthly book group was to read ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. The closest I had got to this or any other novel by Conrad, was watching the loose film-adaptation ‘Apocalpse Now’ some thirty years ago. The film shifts the story from nineteenth century Africa to the Vietnam War. I vaguely recall Marlon Brando cowering in a cave intoning that most darkly poignant reflection on the human condition found in both the book and movie: ‘the horror, the horror.’ Both narratives focus on a long journey up the river (in Conrad’s case the Congo) to recover a character named Kurtz who has become deranged by his encounter with the deep, dark, jungle. Conrad causes us to question whether it was the rampant imperialism of the so-called civilized world which he served, rather than a return to the primitive origins of civilization itself, which led Kurtz to such dark despair. The book is as dark as its title, both in its grim perception of humanity, and its lack of illumination of the central character. We are left with many doubts and questions, which is no doubt Conrad’s aim. I suppose it’s the kind of novel that gives a certain type of art and literature a bad name with those who are impatient with modern practitioners. They criticise such work, believing it wallows in its own negativity, or deliberately seeks to confuse its audience by playing games with conventional form. Christians, it has be said, have a somewhat embarrassing track-record of recoiling from such art, quoting St. Paul’s admonition to the Philippian church to think on ‘whatever is pure, whatever is lovely whatever is admirable,’ to justify their reticence. This is often, though not always, to misunderstand both St. Paul and the nature of such art and literature. In ‘Heart of Darkness’ Conrad employs a particular form of quest narrative known from the Ancient Greek period as katabasis. This kind of narrative took the form of a hero’s journey down into the world of the dead, in order to help him gain wisdom and understanding. Writers like Homer and Virgil established a literary form which would influence many of the great writers throughout history right up to the present day. Indeed this mythological structure gives us profound insight into the nature of the Christian story. Christ can be seen as an archetypal mythological hero who descends into the belly of the earth, into hell in fact before ascending to heaven, to bring salvation and ultimately the gift of the Holy Spirit to mankind. Thus the literary pattern reflects the profound spiritual journey at the heart of the divine/human story. Conrad’s story whether intentionally or not takes us into our own heart of darkness, our own hell. This is not some savage jungle far removed from our green and pleasant land, but the basement of our own civilized society. European Imperialism as depicted by Conrad revealed the ruthless savagery concealed by the clipped vowels and starched collars of the capitalist bounty hunters. Marlow, the teller of the story within the story, relates his experience of seeing native slave labourers dying of sheer exhaustion on his way down the Congo: ‘as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.’
Contrary to popular misconception, Christianity does not sentimentalize the human condition or seek to escape from it any more than Conrad did in his book. The Cross of Christ similarly reveals humanity’s ‘pitiless folly.’ By taking us on this katabasis, this desent into a heart of darkness, both the Bible and Conrad’s novel purge us of all the false illusions we surround ourselves with to avoid radical transformation. At the end of the novel, the narrator leaves us with the image of the tranquil waters of the Thames flowing out and beyond ‘into the heart of an immense darkness.’ These are unsettling and even profoundly disturbing words, but they still have a terrible ring of truth today. When Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, stood up at Pentecost to talk to the crowds he revealed deeply troubling truths about the human condition which left his audience ‘cut to the heart.’ The Church which was built from that great speech by the apostle was erected on a deep recognition of our human capacity for evil, when we turn away from the fount of all goodness. Although we can rejoice at Christ’s descent into darkness to set us free from sin and death, we still have much to learn from art which reminds us just how much we need redemption.

Johnny Depp for Pentecost

It was a couple of nights before The Day of Pentecost. This day, which was not so very long ago celebrated as Whitsun, passes by almost unnoticed, even in some churches. The liturgical calendar is fading from our collective memory. My family had decided we were due for a film night to mark the end of half-term, (no one mentioned Pentecost;) so while my eldest daughter was having her braces fitted at the orthodontist, I looked in the library for a DVD.
“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” is an intriguing sounding title and I knew my daughters would be thrilled with anything featuring Johnny Depp; they were not disappointed. Gilbert Grape lives in Endora, Iowa, population 1,901, “Describing it,” says Gilbert, “is like dancing to no music… It’s a town where nothing much ever happens, and nothing ever will.” The film’s opening shot, is of a long, straight, empty road sloping down and then up toward a flat, low, horizon. Gilbert is waiting by the wayside with his mentally retarded younger brother Arnie, for the annual arrival of long distance travellers in their camper vans. That it seems is the highlight of Gilbert and Arnie’s year. It’s not just this dull neighbourhood which is “eating Gilbert,” however, nor even his brother’s condition; it’s his family’s unresolved past. His mother had been the prettiest woman in the neighbourhood until his father was, “hung out to dry” seventeen years ago- (he hanged himself in the basement). Now she is thirty six stone and has become a virtual recluse which inevitably makes the bored local population all the more intrigued. She lies on the family sofa like a beached whale and when she moves, which is rarely, the timber floor creaks and groans under the strain. Eventually Gilbert’s friend helps him to put some supports under the floor-boards, which I suppose is a metaphor for how the family treat their own shaky existence. They live with it rather than confront it or seek to change it. A story such as this needs an “inciting incident” to tilt the even balance of the plot and create drama. This is provided by the arrival of a mysterious, beautiful, girl called Becky, with her Grandmother in one of the caravans passing through Iowa. Some sort of engine trouble impels them to stay longer than intended and Becky, who is like a breath of fresh air in the stifling summer heat, becomes Gilbert’s lover and ultimately his salvation. I won’t spoil it by giving away the details of the plot, but let me just highlight a couple of images from the film which made an impact, and got me to think about The Day of Pentecost. The first is that long road leading in and out of Iowa. Gilbert and Arnie wait there again at the end of the film. It’s one year later but this time they are planning to take off with Becky and her grandmother in their caravan, to explore the highways and byways beyond . When Arnie asks his brother whether he will be able to come along, Gilbert says: “We can go anywhere we want. We can go anywhere.” The image of the long, empty road disappearing towards the horizon had been like a symbol out of a Samuel Beckett play at the start of the movie- a symbol of futility; the road to nowhere! Now that same shot of the vanishing point on the horizon was pregnant with the notion of arrival, departure, moving on, and change.
The day of Pentecost began with waiting, too. The disciples were all together in an upper room when the Spirit blew through it like a tornado, propelling them out to the ends of the earth to preach the Gospel. Moreover, the image of the disciples huddled together in the upper-room on that day reminds the reader of how those same disciples had gathered behind closed doors, paralysed with fear, following the crucifixion of Jesus just days before. In both the film and the Biblical stories we are being shown how the bleakest landscape, or the most apparently confined space can be transformed by the power of love.
The second image in the film was of the family house all in flames. This is done deliberately by Gilbert for a good reason which I shall leave you to discover for yourself. Again the sight of the wild, wind-fuelled fire gutting the old timber house against the darkening sky is profoundly symbolic, and the director makes the most of this sequence. Gilbert and the family are no longer willing to prop up the past with its sadness and shame eating away at their life at home; they have come to a place of cleansing and a new beginning, which can only be effected through fire. This recalls the coming of both the wind and fire at Pentecost described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Fire is sometimes profoundly destructive, but in both these cases there is something inspiring about the orange blaze which erases the past with its darkness and decay and ushers in a new dawn with a fresh horizon. This idea is beautifully captured on film as the image of the fire at night dissolves into a close up of Gilbert’s face against the grey scudding clouds of morning. He is purged and transformed over night, and thus the next shot of the open road which ends the film is now full of bright hope. “What’s eating Gilbert Grape is a marvellous film for any time of the year, but I particularly enjoyed it at Pentecost.