Lowering the Bar

The great journalist HL Mencken was once asked how he managed to produce so much and where he got the ideas for his perpetual newspaper articles. 'I sit and squeeze my brain until something comes out', he answered.

This workmanlike approach to creativity has always greatly inspired me ever since I heard it, and hardly a sermon-writing session befalls me than I find the words running through my mind. Sometimes what comes out of my brain is nothing very impressive and I have the distinct feeling that I've said it all better, and many times, before. But words still need to be produced. Sometimes the business of a priest is silence. I like those times. But, at least just as often, it is words. 

This week has required quite a number of them. The specific occasions were:

Sunday: a funeral homily and notes for my ministerial review the following day.
Monday: a homily for the All Saints' mass on Tuesday; notes for a staff meeting that we decided to do via email as there was no time actually to meet.
Tuesday: polishing up a plan for a session with the ATC that evening, and suddenly realising I was down to do two sessions, necessitating writing something completely new with the aid (arguably) of Powerpoint; a public statement about 'an extreme pastoral event' in the parish; a homily for the All Souls' Day mass on Thursday.
Wednesday: a story and surrounding discussion for Church Club that afternoon; a set of articles for the public newspaper we send around the parish; writing the liturgy for the Family Service on Sunday.

(Thursday was a day of talking to people rather than planning or writing, and Friday I was off).

Saturday: a homily for the evening service on Sunday.

Now, I am not describing any of this to elicit sympathy: although this week demanded an unusual quantity of creativity, there was just about enough time to get it all done (especially as a couple of time-consuming appointments ended up dropping out of the schedule) and despite it being on the hectic side it's better to be occupied than kicking your heels and castigating yourself for it. What it illustrates is the sort of low-level creativity that clergy are so often involved in. Nothing is very high-powered and had I spent ages polishing my work I would never have got it all done. Not for the first time, I find that the creative side of parish life is on a par with hack journalism: we sometimes have to produce stuff which is good enough and be content with it, squeezing our brains and not being too precious about what comes out. All my stuff this week was good enough. At least I hope it was.

Grapes of Regret

This year the grapevine in the garden fruited more heavily than ever. In the first year I noticed it (I can't believe that was the first year I came here, but perhaps it was) I got a couple of small bunches of edible grapes off it, and, since then, nothing. But this year, this year, there were festoons of grapes, a couple of dozen bunches at least. This was the one with the biggest, roundest, most enticing-looking grapes, so I used it as a test.

The grapes were vile. Almost inedibly sour. I left the rest to the birds, as they seem to like them.

Fra' Ghoulies an' Ghosties an' Lang-Leggedy Beasties

'I've always defended Harry Potter', Marion the curate told me this morning, 'but now I'm not sure ...' She was referring to a BBC documentary she'd seen last night about the background to the books, which included an interview with author JK Rowling at the new exhibition at the British Library, 'The History of Magic'. The show includes items such as Ms Rowling's notebooks as well as magical paraphernalia from across the centuries, among them some of the ritualia I found so queasy when we saw them at the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, all hanging off the hook of the Potter series (and the timing of Halloween). Ms R wasn't alone on screen: alongside her were members of a family who claimed they were 'fourteenth-generation wand-makers'. This would take their profession back into the mid-17th century, and that doesn't seem that likely to me. Wands seem to come into vogue with the 19th-century magical societies, and you don't see illustrations or read descriptions of magical practitioners from earlier times, cunning men and village wart-curers, using wands (unless there's some confusion with the rods employed by dowsers). Rowling apparently looked increasingly uncomfortable, and felt compelled to contribute, 'Remember that I made all this stuff up. It isn't real.'

Well she might wince. The British Library puffs the show with the lines, 'Have you ever wanted to delve into divination or ponder the peculiarities of potions? Now you can ...' The film the Library has released to accompany the display promises that 'the gargantuan Ripley Scroll' will show visitors 'how to make a Philosopher's Stone', which of course it won't, because there is no such thing, and still less is what the Scroll purports to tell you how to make anything like the Philosopher's Stone of the first Potter novel. Oh, what a killjoy I am sounding. Of course this is all just marketing and will be a long way removed from the inevitable staidness of the show itself, but what's being marketed is unreality.

Conservative Christians make this whole argument ridiculous by implying that every child who picks up a Potter novel or goes out with a group of friends dressed as Spiderman, assorted pirates or ghosts, is going to be invaded by the forces of the Enemy, and in doing so they blind us to the fact that they have half a point, which I think I am only beginning to appreciate. If there is a force of evil active in the world, it can only work through us. Our fears, desires, miseries and delusions are its raw material and it cannot manufacture them on its own: it needs us to offer them up. The near side of the fantasy universe of Harry Potter is fun and at its deepest a narrative of courage and loss; on its far side, though, is unreality and unreason, a universe which functions according to occult rules - as good as none, in other words - a realm of madness. Fourteen generations of wand-makers. I heard complaints on the radio recently about the cruelty of some commercially-available Halloween costumes, and cruelty and madness have a relationship, too. This all takes place within a consumerist economy which is by nature amoral and tends to escalate whatever tendencies are at work in it.  

The BBC website yesterday reminded me of Ghostwatch, the notorious spoof documentary about an investigation of a haunting in a suburban house. I remember seeing that on Halloween in 1992 and, before an allusion to something that I knew was untrue alerted me to the fact that the programme wasn't real, I was as unsettled and disturbed as anyone by what I was apparently seeing and hearing. One young man, of course, was so unsettled that five days after the show was broadcast he killed himself, unable to escape the constant thoughts of ghosts. He had fallen into a vortex of fear from which reason could not rescue him. This, and not any supernatural incursion, is what it means to come into the grip of the Devil. 

Provided the pumpkin lanterns and the cut-out bats and ghosts hanging in festoons are a tiny dose of fear that inoculates us against the disease, all well and good. But it could be that sometimes they light the way to a country where there are no landmarks, where we do not know where we are, where there is nothing but unreality and reasonless waste, and we are right to dread going along that path.

Modern Gothic

It's nearly Halloween, after all.

The online news branch of media company Vice is known for many things, and journalistic excellence used not to be one of them. Their London office used to produce, in general, snide, ill-informed, would-be-clever clickbaity nonsense that you learned never to take seriously, or ideally not read at all. It was a great surprise to me to hear Vice News journalists being interviewed on the BBC and brought into discussion programmes as though they actually knew something, and even more to realise that the company had gathered a reputation as a committed and serious news organisation. Even the London office got the message.

More than one person I know called attention to this recent article on the UK Vice website about Goth, as part of a series on subcultures. The writer spoke to ten people who identified as Goths (I use that phrase carefully because of what comes next) aged between 18 and 31. They talked about becoming Gothic (‘I felt the boots were wearing me’), their reactions to feeling accepted or disdained (and occasionally attacked) by the wider community, issues of identity, definition and diversity, bewilderment at being assumed to be Satanists, and the effect of the murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007. Of course there were occasional infelicities (including on the part of some of the interviewees), but the overall tone was supportive, underlining what Catherine Spooner has said in Postmillennial Gothic about the increasing public approbation of Goths and Gothic. What a long way we’ve come since a Guardian columnist could write in 2002 ‘sullen, suburban and witlessly morbid, Goths have lingered like the living dead while other youth cultures have come and gone’, accusing them of ‘infantile notions’, ‘middle-brow suburban myopia’ and ‘paucity of imagination’. Shame it took a young woman having her head stamped on until she died to change that.

I liked what the young(ish) self-identified Goths had to say. Simone claimed that “The scene is becoming more diverse than ever, people are expressing themselves with more freedom than ever before without fear of judgement”. Klinga said 

It seems like the goth scene is much more open and diverse than in past years, there's still a bit of elitism but it seems to be dying out. There's lots of people in the gothic (and alternative) community that are kind, open minded, willing to talk to you and make you feel very included no matter how much of a goth you are. I feel like the gothic culture is much bigger now days, mostly due to the amount of subcultures that were created to the standard "goth" image, such as pastel Goths, nu-goths, Lolita Goths, health Goths... the list goes on.

The young man whose picture accompanies the article, Arcade, is a friend of my accountant Ms Death-and-Taxes, and illustrates the point; he’s wearing New-Rock boots (obviously), but a black faux-fur-collared coat from Bench, which is not usually considered a Goth retailer. Good.

Not everyone is completely happy with this. One person I know who linked to the article is Mal, a Goth DJ who’s been there right from the very beginning, and regards the  changes in the Goth world with emotions that shift between wry and irritated. I greatly honour the man, and his wife Bernice, but his and others’ statements on the matter do remind me of Mojo Nixon and Jello Biafra’s track ‘Nostalgia for an Age that Never Existed’:

You stay home, mad at the whole scene

For refusing to freeze

In nineteen-eighty-three

Mal is among a class of older Goths who have struggled for years to keep the torch burning, who have battled their way across the country to run and attend club nights playing music that fits that early-80s template. It’s not a surprise that they don’t respond well to these hard-won, scarred badges of identity being taken away from them as Goth transmutes into something less oppositional and marginalised. One person commented rather beautifully:

Goth is goth - pure and simple, the silly prefixes that became are a result of other alternative tribes that may have had the tiniest of dark leanings getting lumped into the ever expanding melting pot. As a result you get so far removed from the initial concept that for many they don't really know what it is anymore or didn't to begin with. I got into Goth in 1991 - I was 13 and really caught the tail end before imo actual goth music went underground. There I think was the changing point. To me first and foremost it's about the music - I wore my clothes, and still do to symbolise who I am, my tastes, the music I love with every fibre of my being - it's what kept me going in my teens when I was chased, spat at, verbally abused etc. It seems now it's all about fashion and no substance and way too much confusion over what actual goth music is.

The tension between ‘concentration’ and ‘extension’ is familiar to any kind of subcultural grouping, including Christianity. When exactly have you strayed so far from what the ‘thing’ originally meant that it’s no longer recognisable for what it was? Where are the boundaries beyond which adherents must not stray?

The trouble with maintaining that to be Goth, Goth must what it was in 1982 is that it never was that even then. I related a couple of years ago about meeting early-80s Goths who described cheerfully going to club nights that played entirely different sorts of music, wearing entirely distinct brands of schmutter, and thinking nothing of it because at that stage they didn’t know that they were supposed to be acting in an exclusive, oppositional way. The very band around whom the Goth world coalesced in many ways – although they were, like true Goths, always horrified by the very idea – was Siouxsie & the Banshees, and their music never stood still. They didn’t have the deliberate, restless need to experiment that PJ Harvey has, true, and their musical referents went no further back than Bowie and Bolan for the most part, but over their 17 years of active music-making they drew in a huge range of influences, chewed them up, and regurgitated them as Gothic. It was dramatically, excitingly creative, and I enjoy discovering bands who, in their own ways, do the same now. What’s the point in sounding exactly like the Sisters of Mercy in 1984?

Admittedly, I’m an entirely fake Goth because I came at it through culture and not through music; although I knew about the Banshees, I’d come across very little by other recognisably Goth bands and tended not to like much of it when I did. And I did it at a time – the mid-1990s – when Goth barely existed. The only Goth I met during the time when I was first identifying myself with Gothic was a young woman who came to the museum in High Wycombe researching local ghosts and who interviewed me on the subject. I started thinking about what Goth and Gothic were, and developed some very definite opinions on the matter, most of which I abandoned when, a few years later, I met some real participants in the subculture, which was just about to swing upwards again, and realised it was far beyond me to control, define, or even comprehend within my knowledge. I abandoned myself to the flow and it was vastly liberating. I was freed to enjoy the welter of incomprehensible and yet mysteriously, miraculously united eclecticism that I found at places like Intrusion, the club in Oxford. In the end, what I found most lovable about that world wasn't the music (most of it didn't resonate with me), or the style (which I never really adopted), but the companionship, a group of people who shared the same referents and language: a sense of home.

When Goth was rescued from oblivion in the late 1990s, it wasn’t early-1980s Goth that did it: it was the pagan movement and the bands associated with it, the internet, and very elaborate neo-Victorian dress styles that only bore a remote relationship with the more punky business of a decade-and-a-half before. The individuals attracted by that then discovered early-80s Goth, but very naturally didn’t see the need to confine their attention to that template. And so we’ve gone on, via Steampunk, Cybergoth, Lolita, CorpGoth, health goth, and all the things that my friend Cylene has tried out that nobody else seems to want to copy. And these subcategories aren’t all a matter of dress: they have ramifications in music, film, literature, art.

The blessing and the curse of Goth is that it isn’t, and never was, an isolated phenomenon: it’s part of a bigger, grander, deeper current in the river of experience and desire called gothic, and will continue to feed into wider culture and be fed by it. It can’t be constrained or controlled by anyone, and I don’t care. I like that about it. 

Got to Keep On Walkin'

You know a little about my relationship with music; that of my parents was uppermost in my mind the other day when Fats Domino’s death was announced. It’s not as though music was always echoing round our bungalow in Bournemouth when I was small, and when it was, it was a small selection: a bit of country (Slim Whitman, John Denver) and a bit of rock-and-roll (Jerry Lee Lewis). I liked the stories in the country, and the energy of Mr Lewis, although even when small I could tell that both had a considerable element of what one might now not unfairly call camp. Fats Domino was a bit different. I was intrigued by his name which struck me as very odd. He was indeed quite a portly gentleman to judge by the record sleeves, but I found it remarkable that anyone could share his name with the little black-and-white wooden gaming blocks I had a box of in the toy cupboard. Once I was aware that there were different kinds of music, I asked my dad once what sort Fats Domino’s was, and he said he wasn’t sure how to describe it, but thought it was probably more blues than anything else. It had a beguiling sort of melancholy to it.

I never fathomed my parents’ fondness for schmaltzy Country & Western (and don’t really want to; there is of course, as I’ve discovered since, country music which is far from schmaltzy, which is bleak and desperate and dark), but that aside, they did their growing-up in the 1950s and much of their taste clearly went back to that time. They went off Jerry Lee a bit in 1990 when he was booked to play in Bournemouth, no less, and they were among the crowd who waited, and waited, for him to turn up, fruitlessly. The rest of The Killer’s UK tour was cancelled. But Fats Domino remained, eternally at his piano and unfailingly beaming from those old record sleeves.

Hurricane Katrina levelled and flooded New Orleans in 2005, and the TV news showed residents being evacuated, among them ‘Rock and Roll legend Fats Domino’. He was by that point so legendary that my mum and dad had assumed he’d died years before and his continued existence came as quite a surprise. Ever since then I’d felt that his subsequent years were a bonus.

The connection was forged more powerfully when my dad died and mum had to sort out the music for his funeral. She sat with a retired priest attached to the local church and went through some options, and eventually settled on Fats’s ‘Walkin’ to New Orleans’. The song’s lyrics were far from apposite in some ways – ‘You used to be my honey/Till you spent all my money’, Fats complains – but, up to a point, that doesn’t matter on such occasions. When dad was carried out of the church to that slow, insistent swing (were the undertakers’ men, despite themselves, swinging a little, too?) he was on another journey, like Fats. He knew next to nothing about New Orleans, which in Louisiana Creole manner Fats pronounces Orlon, but the point was that New Orleans was somewhere else.

I got no time for talkin’

I got to keep on walkin’

New Orlon’ is my home

That’s the reason why I’m goin'

Yes I'm walkin' to New Orlon'

I spoke to mum the day after the news. She remembered how dad and his best friend Dave had waited with bated breath for the first Fats Domino record they bought to come in stock at Beales in Bournemouth, all the way from Imperial Records in California, and dad had called her with great excitement to say they’d got it. For years Fats was nothing more than a name, really, a link to who they’d all been all those years ago, but evocative enough for all that. Mum admitted to a tear or two. ‘You’ll think I’m silly,’ she said. It’s not silly to mourn the loss of a comrade in the battle of memory, of remembering who you are, and those who love, the battle to carry on saying ‘We matter’. 

Bulldoze the Lot

If I get up reasonably promptly in the morning, for a few minutes I coincide with Farming Today on Radio 4. Even though it’s clear that farmers always have some complaint to make about the weather, no matter what the weather has been like, it’s an interesting insight into a world I have no other contact with, in my suburban environment. The programme’s reports aren’t all specifically about agriculture, but also look at rural society and issues facing it more generally (they regularly discuss internet access, for instance). A little while ago there was a series of pieces about the role of rural churches and what alternative uses might be made of them in a time when church attendance is mainly small. Listeners’ comments were broadcast. ‘No effort should be wasted on these useless buildings,’ went one, ‘bulldoze the lot and build houses’.

A little while later I was alerted to a discussion on a Facebook board that covers Hornington and the area around: someone had gone into Swanvale Halt church and found a couple of youngsters cycling around inside. It wouldn’t be the first time. Most of the comments concerned issues of respect and manners, and a few ribald statements about what Jesus might do, but one fellow suggested ‘Good for them, at least they’ve found a use for a useless building’.

I’m not suggesting such sentiments are common: in fact it’s clear from the reactions (or definite lack of reactions) to them that they are marginal and, for all I know, the Farming Today commentator and the chap on the message board are one and the same. Nor is it possible to judge whether they fit into something more coherent and thought-out than simply a spasm of irritation. Is this standpoint confined to religious buildings, or is it a utilitarian objection to any old structure which has outlived its original purpose? Whatever the truth of that, it’s worth noting that some people, at least, look at a church in the centre of their community and heartily resent its presence. The word ‘useless’, that unites both these comments, is probably the mildest of the epithets that might have been applied.

Three Episodes of Unreason

On Wednesday, we had celebrated communion at Widelake House, the local care home. Arthur usually plays the piano on these occasions and I give him a lift home. While doing this he was in the back seat of the car – I’d already dropped someone else off who usually occupies the front passenger seat. And chatting in his customary light tone which was not all that easy to hear. I suddenly realised I was automatically tapping the volume control of my car radio to turn him up.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

Later, Trevor called.

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Er, what do you mean?

Trevor: Someone’s doing bread.

Me: Yes, I heard you, but I don’t understand. Explain it to me.

Trevor: Someone is eating bread so that I will go back into Satan.

Me: No, I still don’t really get it. How can eating bread make you ‘go back into Satan’, whatever that means?

Trevor: Satan can bless and curse his people and the occult meet and eat holy bread like we do in church so that things will happen, and they’re doing it to make me go to Hell.

Me: How do you know this is happening?

Trevor (as though I’m an idiot): I can smell bread!!

. . . . . . . . . . 

Later still, it was the after-school club at the infants’ school. I was sat at the table with Lauren, who has a philosophical turn of mind for a five-year-old.

Lauren: You know everything because you’re a vicar.

Me: Oh, I don’t think I know everything.

Lauren: What don’t you know?

Me: Well, I don’t know what I don’t know. If I knew what I don’t know, I would know it and it wouldn’t be what I don’t know. 

Lauren: That doesn’t make any sense.