Short Takes XIII

19/6/09: Why the bagpipes?

On Classic FM this afternoon I caught the end of a medley played by the pipes and drums of one of the Highland regiments. When it comes to the Highland pipe bands, I have an addiction, so must get to the bottom of why that skirl moves me to some of the most volatile emotions I experience.

Here are melodies that rouse in the same moment they haunt. The air pushed by those pipers through bladder and pipes issues from some high and orderly frenzy, a momentum that takes me outside all consideration of the human other. It is music that could lead me to storm the ramparts of hell or equally dissolve into outlandish, elated sobbing.

The pipes and drums are the earliest music I can recall from the Lisburn barracks, Northern Ireland, circa late 1953 where my father was an education officer. With a pal or two (girl and boy at that age) I could wander through gardens of broad lawns and rhododendrons to the edge of a broad parade ground where the bands rehearsed. Unforgettable, the sight of these troops coming on. Bonnets and busbies, scarlet jackets and green, sway of kilt, sporran, and the white ropework of the side drums, leopard skin of the bass drummer, bandmaster twirling and flinging his staff, the spectacle was deeper than theatre, yet also strangely distracted from war which was its lumen.

So they came on, reached the edge of the tarmac to turn and dissolve into themselves until they had emerged, perfect, marching in the reverse direction. Yes, deeper than theatre, it was dance because to watch these vibrantly decorated squares of bandsmen in their motion was to be thrilled by an arousal both remote and inexorable. Here were humans in impressive concert, a company made up of its individual parts yet profoundly removed from consideration of those parts in the concentration of the whole upon its object, which was a sound-and-dance, a haunting, dangerous accompaniment to the business of stabbing, slashing and carrying the day.

I was not yet five years old. Absurd to think my comprehension beside that parade ground might have been shaped as above. Indeed it had no discernible shape at all. But it was charged, and charged with the inchoate. I can say all the music that has subsequently appealed to me has done so, in part at least, because I have found it charged with the inchoate, that mysterious accordance where sound arouses a counterpart reaction of the nervous system, not visual in any crystalline sense, but attaching to phantasmagoria that beckons just beyond retrieval. I think how rare it is to be argued from liking a piece of music that has once taken root in the mind, how difficult it is to account for that liking.

So, do I like the wild skirl of pipes and drums because they conjure for me the old association of barracks where I spent my boyhood? No. In fact I might question whether it is a matter of liking at all. I hear that skirl, and I am taken over, and that sensation, dangerous certainly, also has to do with feeling oneself to be both at an edge of being and within a mysterious amplitude of being. “What kind of music will you compose in heaven?” Vaughan Williams was once asked. “In heaven I won’t compose music. I will be music,” he replied. And one glimpses that idea.

30/8/11: Viva the instantaneous wits

Alas I recognise I am a show-off, so will blurt, and yet I do believe I achieve the quick of communication more successfully by e-mails and letters than I can by being in personal proximity, or on the telephone. This is because I depend for my most effective utterance on the power of reconsideration. I must look at what I say to see the thing I am best at saying.

Viva the instantaneous wits, Sam Johnson, Ossie Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Dot Parker, Baz Humphries et al. But may these bravos, comfortably around their hearth (one imagines them), be patient with me, who must share their world and its declensions of modesty, arriving with my glowing coal to find them snoring in their armchairs, the embers having fallen through the grate, the moment of éclat now a matter for the record.

13/9/11: Those transferred folk

Will I ever meet my non-material acquaintance?

I speak of the seemingly realised people who appear in dream and, to the finest degree, behave as if they know me. Sometimes they have names and faces actual to my acquaintance, sometimes while the name is known, the face and body have been transferred from the name, for all that old intimacies will be taken for granted between us in the dream-confine. And sometimes these persons have formed along a line of provenance that resists tracking altogether, and yet his and more rarely her respective being has all the infinitesimal necessity of individuals newly “making a presence felt”.

Whatever the guise, the dream proceeds with this dreamer’s confidence that I know the being beside me for all the actual appearance might be its temporary vehicle.

Of course my consciousness is doing its shuffle-act. The dark matter of our emotional lives is transferred stuff—deep sorrow, for instance, finding outlet in some casual mishap, or a memory of x crystallising into an impression of yxy where y is the convenient accretion required for x to remain memorable.

And yet some of these people who turn up in my dream-life—I think of a recent Indian woman in her sari, or the middle-aged gent in suit and waistcoat with a round face—their startling characteristic is the self-possession they convey for all it lacks material basis. That is to say, I encounter them in the dream as I might do in life, with the assumption they have a prior experience of living that confers on them both wholeness and otherness. The nub is this. In the instant of the dream’s circumstances, I can understand they are like so. And yet it will be natural to encounter them later and elsewhere when they might be otherwise where this otherwise will be consistent with their being as encountered on the previous occasion.

Here, I construe, is one of the tests of being. An authenticity of presence leaves in the mind the idea of how this being has been in the past or might be on future occasions. So what is the status of my non-material acquaintance from dream? They seem to belong, not to a material fabric, it is true, but to a fabric of some kind … O yes.

24/9/11: Ego and dark matter

Is presence measurable as a quantity, so many units of ego-joules? Are some people simply immune from the mindfulness of others? While all persons may be accountable, some are not quite countable? Such folk exist and have presence, though one is not sure an actual ego has been in the room. They contribute their expressive powers to the sum of Creation’s Expressive Power, are talented or not, vocal or not, clever or not. But some pre-condition of their being must detract from their power of presence beyond any means they might have to alter the case. If they possess any distinct power it is, like cosmic dark matter, the power to escape notice. This can be enabling for some lives—I think of spies—disabling for others—I think of poets.

There’s a cosmic echo in this. If ego allows us to locate the presence of the star in our person, and if a strong ego’s effect on a weaker is to make the latter conscious of needing to seek unoccupied ground, is this a correspondence in human pathos for the balance of heavenly bodies and dark matter that we know inhabits our night skies?

I wonder if this correspondence is what my Poets’ Stairwell wants to disclose between Henry and Boon, that the strong ego instinctively seeks out its convenient dark matter, needs companionship with the yielding ego while this provides an aid to presence, discards it to the cold of space when that need intuits its well-being elsewhere. And all this going on at a level irrespective of well-meaning and the conventional desire to behave decently.

21/3/12: Return to a theme

I’ll return to a theme. Last night’s dream was a diptych-nightmare. Someone had brought a large number of cobras to a social occasion and released them, causing all of us guests to step carefully among the excited serpents. These were dark, striped by occasional white markings, had the girth of salami, and their hoods flared. Impossible, in the crowded confines, not to trip over them. At one point in this fantasy I was running, a cobra hung from my hand where its fangs were embedded, its gimlet eye locked on mine.

This dream was followed by scenes where I was with others in an arid, vaguely Wild West environment, and desperados were expected to arrive and begin methodically shooting us. There were odd, tumbledown hideouts, entirely inadequate.

In both these fantasies, my emotion was simple terror, which is to say, the certain knowledge there was no hope of effective intervention. The cobras, the desperados would finish me; I had no other knowledge beyond the fact this had not yet occurred.

Where had this serpent/desperado material come from? In recent days I have read Sev Sternhell’s account (in Quadrant) of the Nadworno massacre. In a separate provenance, my attention had been drawn by a correspondent to the casual 1942 murder of Bruno Schulz by a Gestapo officer.

Put simply, Aristotle’s “fear and loathing” is the emotion aroused in me by such nonchalant murders. When I hear about them my wish for the fortunes of the malefactors is straightforward, summary and unkind. But the energised moral settlement for such atrocities is not my focus here.

Rather, I return to my theme of the authenticity of dream emotion. By last night’s experience I know that, even at the age of sixty-three when I have fathered children, completed the larger part of a life’s work, lived longer than most of my ten thousand forebears, I retain terror as one part of the expression of my character. And this terror is in a guise no different to how such scenes might have presented themselves to my dreaming mind when these life goals were unfulfilled. Do the terror in waking life and the terror in dream insist on a different status in terms of what is real? At the level of consequence, how can I doubt it? At the level of depicting character, how can I overlook it?

I possess character. It is the place in my being that is both noun and verb, both entity and process. If character is an encompassing description, a part of its expression is being displayed in the way I dream. Dream has no especial authority to assert here the authentic self resides and unmasks what is true in the self. Such claims are bunkum because they try to pass off validity as sufficiency.

Nonetheless, dream cannot be omitted from a fair account of what it has been to have existence. The mystery is twofold. First, what does dream effect with regard to our preparation for waking life? And second, what strangeness in our own characters would we encounter could we but see ourselves in sum, the expressive power of all our mental activity—waking and dreaming—integrated in the one profile, insisting this was how he was?

4/4/12: A second read

Reading through St Matthew’s Gospel this time I was struck more by its frequent tone of reprimand and threat than by the essential and renewing substance of the Christian ethic I had taken from my earlier reading. That is, I noted more the usages of old authority than the new, workable considerations that could be brought to human relationships, to self, neighbour, state and God. I found more emphasis placed on who the Kingdom of Heaven would exclude, for all the marvellous re-evaluations of The Sermon on the Mount. In addition to this there was that Old Testament protection-of-the-tribe preoccupation with the purity of the womenfolk. What appeared to preside was an admonitory spirit.

Today I went to the Grammar School chapel for the memorial service of my old English master, the Reverend Jack Tyrrell. Jack’s effectiveness as a teacher lay in the serene, methodical manner with which he took us through our texts and the literary canon, though on occasion his voice could alarm us with a naval roar retained from his years as an RN chaplain. At weekends one might find him tending his half-acre of flowerbeds, his frame a little hunched, a handkerchief around his neck. Will a face describe the character of a lifetime’s activity? Reddened by the sun, here were combined the cleric, the naval man, the peasant, all at ease with themselves.

Now dead at ninety-five, Jack had left instructions that we should sing up with good cheer and however unpromising we might think our voices. The full church of celebrants did so. In my case I voiced bravely for Jack, decent man, effective teacher, and as usual on these Anglican occasions, I enjoyed the tune and singalong while trying to repudiate the actual sentimentality of the verses; a cracked effort, you might say. Then I listened to the eulogies as we learned how Rev T, on some occasion of school discipline, had permitted the miscreant to escape through his study window rather than give satisfaction to the classmates he knew to be gathered outside the door anticipating their fellow’s howls. A chair’s vinyl can make a fleshly sound.

And so I return to Matthew’s Gospel. These Christian occasions do require we submit to saying aloud substance we know to be the crass version of an intelligent and momentous revaluation of how humans might conduct their lives.

Is it so momentous? O yes. For instance, I ponder what is happening in the opening chapters of Mark’s Gospel where the idea is introduced that any of one’s fellows are eligible to forgive the wrongdoing of a person in their midst. It sounds like a simple proposition, but there’s a move on in the liberation of the human spirit, and it needs a historical imagination to focus on it. Forgiveness is no longer to be the province of authority; it proceeds from the human heart, not from officialdom. So taint, impurity, guilt, in this dispensation, need no longer be a lifelong Drang that disables personality. At the basis of his compassion, Christ understood morale and the effect of renewal upon human powers. It is for this we place him at a centre, for this his lifetime and the incisiveness of his intellect warrant our scrutiny and allegiance.

Nonetheless, this Faith in its details is an on­going thing-to-be-made by evolutionary process. The admonitions in St Matthew against divorced women are primitive tribal stuff and cruel. It is the intelligence of Christianity that needs to be upheld, and intelligence cannot be itself unless it is an unfolding thing.

20/4/12: We transfer our seething

Some nights ago, quick to accept provocation, I argued against Anthropogenic Global Warming because, until I hear convincing argument otherwise, I am persuaded by the sceptic case in this controversy, observing this side of the matter to have better reasoning and surer historical grounding.

However, equally I observe how quick I am to contend the issue, and readily concede this rides on a hybrid emotional tension, my sense of what is fair discourse on the topic energised by whatever handy, remoter disaffection the argument can find in my mental activity as an accelerant.

Can I disentangle what these remote “accelerant” sources are, in my case or anyone else’s in any given instance? They will be remote. Perhaps they encompass the dogging ill-fortune my work has encountered over the decades. Perhaps they stem from the contending disposition I inherited from my father, who valued reasoned truth. Or perhaps it is the sense of how vulnerable was fair play in the ego-aquarium that I inherited from my watchful mother. And there will be other stuff, transferring whatever is ill-resolved in my person into the convenient energy needed to communicate conviction on a subject I nonetheless and fairly hold to be valid whatever the seething, irrelevant matter it draws on for the manner of its saying.

The point is, one does not argue with one’s reason, one argues with one’s character. And this is as exactingly true for the rationalist as it is for the featherhead.

How therefore is it possible to judge the merit of any contention? For instance …

I assert a small glaciation is more likely this century than significant global warming.

You say that because you had an ill-resolved relationship with your mother.

In part, yes.

15/5/12: The despair enquiry

Here’s a dilemma. Each day I sit my two selves down to work, whereupon my Supervising self asks my Operative self, “Have you anything to add to what you have done that would not be either reiterative or merely chatty?”

My Operative, who still cherishes a prospect of years, for all he is inured to the intervals of low morale when imagination has the susurrus of a vacant hall, at length replies, “Maybe today is the occasion I should decently shut up.”

My Supervisor is compassionate.

“What will you do instead,” softly he puts that old Despair Enquiry, the momentum of a lifetime having gone into arriving here.

25/5/12: Outside the bank

We have had a cold and squally day. I have been out on errands, then a woman emerged from the Dickson Westpac bank, paused to remark my Icelandic jumper with its circular zigzag patterns of dark and white wool.

“Someone loves you,” she observed, smiling, already moving on.

And taking everything together I was able to call after her, “You’re not wrong.”