One finds this in Cupitt from first to last. A favoured image is that of insects, pond skaters traversing the surface of things, reacting to the contingent ripples in the water, ripples which just happen to be what is there (rather than what is not there). We also hear about butterflies, and songbirds who only live for half a day but sing their hearts out for that brief span.
No time to worry about what we say, or, more to the point, what it feels like when we say it. We should live as if each day were our last. The picture is of creatures burning themselves out like the sun, doing whatever it is they do to be what they are.
Birds sing, insects flutter, suns blaze, but – wait a minute – men and women just do take heed of the morrow. Suddenly Cupitt has a problem.
We may be grateful for modern healthcare, but then what is the real point of wanting to recover from an illness? To get back to worrying about longterm planning in modern healthcare, or whatever other social utility makes us ‘useful’?
Cupitt is tempted by this yet recoils from it too.
His compromise position is that ‘burning ourselves out like the sun’ means dismissing existential and material anxieties but taking heed (playfully) of social progressiveness. Solar ethics rediscovers ordinary speech, and finds it to be extraordinary in the remarkable work it does in bus queues and hairdressers’ shops. Workaday words are the new poetry, and we should be glad about it.
The implication is that (pace T S Eliot) in the end is our beginning, which we now know for the first time. Yet this may be less congenial than it sounds.
A fondness for playful or easeful speech is by no means the same as just plunging heedlessly into everyday talk, however verveful the latter may sound.
To illustrate: in the weeks before she died, my cantankerous aunt – solidly working class – heard Beethoven’s symphonies and quartets for the first time and said it had been the most wonderful experience of her life, and that she would have loved to have known this music earlier. ‘But I never thought it was for the likes of me’.
Yet symphony orchestras doing ‘outreach’ work in poorer communities are often told to keep classical music to an accessible minimum and concentrate on television theme tunes, and ‘songs from the shows’. In schools, children are to be allowed to handle the instruments, but should not be bored by hearing that Wagner comes after Mozart.
No doubt all of this will be a condition of the local Council subsidising what it perceives to be elitist entertainment, and there’s the rub. They don’t know what the original privilege is.
The privilege is Beethoven, not the middle-class milieu that would hijack him. However, by telling orchestras to keep him out of school visits or community concerts, educationalists and community strategists give the game away: they obviously have no notion that they’re democratising access to his symphonies. A straightforward modern egalitarian impulse, fresh and well-intentioned, turns out to be prosaic and hidebound. But the answer is not to be seduced by scepticism about egalitarianism (as I once was) but to ask at all times if we are sure we know what our egalitarianism is really for.
However, if public discourse is in such a state of disrepair that people are confused about whether genuine egalitarianism can be reconciled with the assumption of Beethoven’s world-historical stature – dead white males, etc. – then those who can reconcile the two easily are going to feel increasingly hurt and disaffected. This wound may then turn infected, and begin to close. The poison will no doubt be right-wing, or worse. I know this to my cost.
So can the wound be kept open and fresh? Don Don Cupitt and Everyday Speech David Wemyss ruminates on some of the pitfalls of the ‘ordinary’.
Cupitt certainly comes to mind here. He has been a marvellous presence in British theology for more than thirty years. In his edifying pictures of pond skaters and songbirds and butterflies, he breathes new life into the old idea that timelessness is real – utterly and wonderfully real. But, in relating this to a vivid affirmation of ordinary language in all its idioms, he has never expressed wariness about what might be called doctrinally-settled speech, which is a pity because he is particularly wellequipped to do so without himself lapsing into the doctrinaire.
How would such wariness be expressed? Well, for example, politically correct language is sometimes said to amount to no more than an extension of good manners. But, then again, like a modern extension added insensitively to a beautiful old building, such language is often an ugly and graceless defacement impeding easeful style. In conversation, easeful style tugs on the formative tissues of liberty, and protects genuine differences.
There’s a lot of truth in that. Yet none of it is absolutely true.
My conclusion – very much contrary to what I used to think – is that politically correct speech is theoretically fine. It’s just likely to be unstylish and clumsy in many actual instances. And it may blind people to beauty and liberation. I suspect that Cupitt knows all of this. If he were to write about it, I think the outcome could be a richly-nuanced ‘late period’ in a life sorely troubled by language but dedicated to an unsurpassable joie de vivre. I’d love to read that essay or book. So I’m finished now, Don. It’s over to you.
NOTES 1. Don Cupitt, The Long-Legged Fly: A Theology of Language and Desire, SCM Press (1987) p. 26. Cupitt observes that ‘there can be no doubt that the force of our speech is a matter of great moment to us, for we spend a surprising amount of time in reviewing our past conversations in order to decide whether we have managed to express ourselves as forcibly as we should have done. In banter, we are particularly pleased with ourselves when we are able promptly to find a spirited retort, and contrariwise we reproach ourselves bitterly when we are conscious of having responded feebly.
We were dull-witted, slow on the uptake, and the right words did not come to us until too late’. 2. Don Cupitt, The Religion of Being, SCM Press (1998). ______________________________________________ David Wemyss lives in Aberdeen with his wife and family and works in local government.
Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. The Orchestra is part of El Sistema, the Venezuelan Music Education Scheme that has enabled half a million children, including some very poor, to play classical music to a high standard.