Ronald Fraser Yule 23 Pennan, Aberdeenshire. rfyule@rfyule.demon.co.uk William Imray’s correct email address is: biro33@aol.com letters sof 72 July 2005 16 William Imray writes that he is pleased with the response to his Attempt to Produce and Open Liturgy, an extract from which appeared in sof 71. He has now sent out the complete text and music to three enquirers, including a member of the Steering Committee in SoF New Zealand, where they hope to perform the liturgy.
This was despite the fact that his email address was printed incorrectly. Many apologies for this. His correct email address is biro33@aol.com I have seen the beautiful hand-written music, but have not yet heard it as, he says, it needs a choir.
I was thinking about the fact that we may regard music as ‘more spiritual’ than words, whereas in some ways it is more physical. Singers must breathe well. I have watched my son playing the trumpet and at times go bright red in the face with effort. Imray himself is an organist, which is hard work. Secondly, music can move us more immediately than words. Indeed, sometimes when different words are set to the same tune, the words may act as a mental check on our ready emotions.
For example, we might happily get carried away by the hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken...’ but worried when the words turned out to be ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
One way in which ‘poetry aspires to the condition of music’ is that in poetry the physicality of the words (the poem’s rhythm, melody and shape) is very important, the spoken word. Hopkins calls poetry ‘the darling child of speech and lips’. Of course, the spoken word has its own rhythms (and I am sure Imray, for one, could tell us about the many difficulties of setting words to music).
And just as different creatures have their own basic rhythms, so do different spoken languages (for example, English is stress-timed, whereas French is syllable timed). Our first experience of rhythm is in the womb.
As the foetal heartbeat is faster than the mother’s, there are two different rhythms going at once, so even the unborn probably get an inkling of counterpoint rhythm!
Abelard’s hymn O quanta qualia celebrates the joys of heaven:
Nec ineffabiles cessabunt jubili quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.
There’ll be no ending the unutterable praises that we and the angels together shall sing.
The operative word is ‘unutterable’.
Traditional angels are pure spirits; they have no bodies and are not in time. Therefore they cannot make or utter songs and poems like ours on Earth. It is our rhythmical mortal bodies that not only give our musical and poetic utterances power over fellow humans, but make music and poetry possible at all. See Anthony Freeman’s article on page 5 for Aquinas on the problem facing the disembodied human.
On our Earth ‘everything is rhythm’. I notice than in TV Wildlife programmes every single thing a bird or animal does is described as purely instrumental behaviour for survival. This is probably correct and of course it is hazardous to claim any knowledge of what it feels like to be a creature of another species. (Nevertheless, my cat...). However when a robin sings so deliciously, isn’t it possible that it feels some kind of joy, as well as doing its biological duty to attract a mate?
Perhaps we cannot know, but the robin’s silvery song, the blackbird’s more ‘talkative’ riffs and the cat’s contented purring are not alien to us; wordlessly they communicate something about what it is all to be fellow creatures of the same Earth, related in evolutionary descent and part of one eco-system. Earth is our common matrix, from which human consciousness emerged, with our power to make poems and songs.
Human music is earthly and we give Earth a human voice.
A poem is not just a physical utterance ‘aspiring to the condition of music’. It is made of words and words mean to say things. (However, a poem will have resonances for readers beyond the writer’s intentions, especially if it lasts for centuries.) I don’t agree with the dictum that in poetry there should be ‘no ideas but in things’. Although physicality, the appeal to the senses and images are very important, it is a dire restriction of poetry’s scope to ban any abstract ideas. Its scope must be as broad as the human mind itself. Another dire restriction of poetry’s scope is the postmodernist Huis Clos insisting that ‘a poem is just a self-referential verbal artefact, completely focused on language,’ in the jargon, just a ‘text’. I think poetry, and human dignity itself, depend on glad recognition of our earthly home and kinship, together with our ongoing struggle (‘intolerable wrestle’) to understand and express this life truthfully, poetically, musically – body and word. Then act as wisely as we can.
Mayday Notes Words and Music Ken Smith reviews Where We Are Now Pamphlet by SoF North West England Group. £1.25 Life is partly about telling stories, and maybe trying to find one to live within. But as a former fundamentalist of a fairly rabid sort, I have a fair few irrational misgivings about Testimony telling. So I agreed with some reluctance to our editor’s request for a short review of Where We Are Now – a booklet from the North West England SoF Group. Having read it several times now, I’m glad I agreed, because life is not only about telling stories; it’s also about listening to others telling theirs. The booklet consists of 11 pieces of personal story-telling from one of our most lively local groups, with a strong emphasis on the interim nature of such story telling – i.e. true for me and true for me now.
At the end of a very funny Peter Cook and Dudley Moore dialogue about religion, the pair conclude that it would be better if no one had ever been told about God.
Peter Cook confesses he’s never told anyone about God, and Dudley Moore says: ‘Neither have I, Pete!’ Twenty five years down the line and after most of a life time trying to teach theology, I have to confess more than a little sympathy for the sentiment.
But people have been told about God. Lots of people remain happy with ideas associated with the word. By contrast the Sea of Faith exists and prospers partly because a lot of other people, having been told about God, are no longer happy with what has traditionally been said. As a bereavement counsellor I am interested in all kinds of loss and the way people deal with the ensuing grief. The loss of faith is one of the most profound. A number of the contributors to Where We Are Now honestly refer to this sense of loss, looking back with a certain wistfulness, finding it hard to let go. One could almost say that it is a theme that runs through the booklet. Truthfully, it is actually quite hard to give up the idea that one is going to live for ever, or that there is something eternal about the significance of our small lives. Which brings me back to Dud and Pete. Given that theological reflection is a minority sport, are we the worse for having been told about God – or specifically, for most SoF members, the monotheistic western god?
And given the traditional division between those who do and those who don’t believe, where do ‘those who don’t’ go from here so that what we engage with, in both thinking and living, gets bigger and the self that is the engager gets smaller?
So, buy it, read it and write your own.
Where We Are Now is available from Andy Kemp, 12 Sandringham Avenue, Hoylake,Wirral CH47 3BZ.
Price £1.25 -cheques made out to ‘Sea of Faith North West England Group’.