Holding On To Both Ends

Partway through the morning’s printing and copying, I discovered that we had no white copier paper in the church office. For heaven’s sake, it shouldn’t be hard to keep stocked up with such basics, I chuntered to myself, and headed out to the Post Office to buy a ream of 80gsm white. In the church I met Karly, who I’ve seen in and out over the last seven years. ‘I’ve got terminal cancer, I’m so frightened’, she blurted out. We sat for a bit while she unloaded some of the hurt. ‘I’m only 32 and I’ve got nothing to show for my life … I came out of prison and was really going to turn things around. I hadn’t had a drink for 14 months and now I’m drinking again. I don’t even like it. This is my punishment for everything I’ve done.’ Karly had to see the doctor that afternoon and then tell her family. ‘My mum knows there’s something wrong. How does that happen? I’ve got to try and do something good so people remember me well’.

I feel no more confident at dealing with these emotions than anyone else would, apart from making it clear to Karly that what she’s undergoing isn’t a punishment. I’ve told her to come back again and we’ll speak to try and work out what she might do with the time she has left, but I don’t know whether she will. For some reason this strikes me very hard, harder than when my lovely college friend Sean had the diagnosis which led to his death at 38. How do you even begin to assimilate news like this? How would I?

In the evening it was the annual Christmas service at Smallham Chapel (as in the photo), part of my routine even though it’s outside my parish, having taken the service, shockingly, for six years now. For some reason there were more people there than ever, and about 8 souls had to stand at the back. Lots of people told me it was their first visit, including a family who’d just moved into one of the farmhouses on the estate who all solemnly crossed themselves at the blessing, always a good sign. Two small girls played clarinet and flute for the quiet carols. ‘As a lapsed Catholic with a lapsed vocation,’ one man said to me, ‘that service and what you said had more real religion to it than many a cathedral’. And I hadn’t said anything earth-shattering, just the usual kind of thing about God coming to take part in all the mess of human life, born in the less-than-propitious (or sanitary) surroundings of an animal stall. But you somehow have to hold together children petting a sheep to the sound of a clarinet on the one hand, and on the other a young woman being told she’s going to die: otherwise religion ends up far from real, far from true.  

Knowlton Rings

As the light failed towards the end of a bright Boxing Day afternoon we managed to get to Knowlton Rings, another of my favourite Dorset places, on the way back home from my mum's birthday. It's a site that invariably appears in any book or account of numinous ancient places in Britain, a Norman church strangely set in a henge monument many centuries older, the pared landscape of Cranborne Chase around it scattered with bowl barrows. Some will talk rashly of ley lines and earth energies, but what the thinking of the builders of St Michael's Knowlton truly was is anyone's guess. 

These places seem timeless, and across the years my photographs of them barely differ apart from the varying moods of weather and light: I have one from 2010 taken from almost the same angle as the above shot, with my dad just leaving the ruin. I was looking after him for a few days when my mum was in hospital, trying to find things to do that would distract and not distress his fragmenting, dementia-disfigured mind. Time does, nevertheless, affect these ancient sites, biting the walls and sprouting encroaching plants, but much more slowly than it does us, so we can imagine that they stand changeless, compass points of who we really are.

'I hope you don't mind me bringing you here', I said to Ms Formerly Aldgate. 'It's peaceful', she said, which of course it is. 

All Over Again

Attendance at the indefatigable Crib Service was down a bit this year, although part of that fall may have been due to ‘accounting error’ – two different people doing the counting, one of whom tends to err on the side of generosity, and the other regularly underestimating. The other services were all up a bit, enough for them all to feel upbeat and encouraging rather than threadbare, even the 1662 Prayer Book service this morning at 8am, and a high proportion of the congregations weren't regular members of the church.

Every year I tell myself I need to revise the order for the Midnight Mass, and every year I forget as soon as it’s over: I must do it this year. The benefit of celebrating the mass facing east was revealed at the Midnight as the thurible came open while I was censing the gifts and sprayed ash over everything. The choice was whether to empty everything out and start again, or soldier on and cope – given that time was ticking I picked the latter, and scooped the ash out of the chalice with an extra host. Clearing up, I got to the bottom of the hosts in the ciborium and found a little pile of ash, which having again screwed up my fortitude I ate in case there were fragments of bread in it (rather than go to the palaver of burying it). I’m still here so presumably no harm done. Of course all this was entirely hidden from the congregation and you are not to tell anyone, especially not if they are wearing a pointy hat or a purple shirt.I am filled with gratitude for all the lovely people I am privileged enough to have around, the players who act out the Nativity at the Cribbage with such gentleness and sensitivity (especially when this year a collection of small girls came up impromptu to inspect the baby), and the servers and helpers who make everything work so smoothly despite me mucking it up now and again.

At four-ish, having been to the local lunch for those who would otherwise be alone (I escaped before Citizen Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor's speech), I got down to the church to say Evensong. I sat and prayed through the prayer slips left at the candle stand and the stars written out at the NCT nativity service and the Blue Christmas extravaganza a few days ago. A strangely child-like hand relates a prayer ‘to help me get rid of my fear of death’. Someone else prays for their father with dementia and their mother who cares for him. There are a scattering of memorial prayers for lost loved ones: one says ‘blessed are the broken-hearted, for they will be reunited’. A child I know thanks Mary for having Jesus. And so they go on, all the way through the pile. A few I can’t read at all and just commend them to God. For being able to take part in these prayers, ‘privilege’ is hardly the word. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Blue Christmas

It seems to have developed in the USA, the Blue Christmas idea: a church service that acknowledges that Christmas isn't all children singing and general loveliness, but is bloody hard for a surprising number of people, because of bereavement, bad circumstances, or many other reasons, all of which seem to be thrown into pitilessly sharp relief by the surrounding standardised mirth. These people still quite want to mark the season, but don't necessarily feel able to buy into the whole package (and 'buy' is an apposite metaphor). So many conversations I have with people around this time of year revolve around similar feelings, feelings which go unrecognised by what happens in church. 

I thought doing Blue Christmas might be helpful. I considered it last year but ran out of time, and this year spent a while planning how it might work. Using material drawn from elsewhere, including from an Anglican church in Teddington which seems to be the closest to us trying something similar, I put together an order of service, consisting of prayers, a couple of readings and quiet hymns, and made up a plainchant office hymn which nobody spotted was a made-up plainchant office hymn. I sang this with Marion our curate's son and despite my incipient cold and his lately broken voice which at the moment wobbles around tenor we managed to get through it, and the Nunc Dimittis. Another congregation member who is a very accomplished musician played the violin. I arranged the church as in the photo, the icon of the Nativity I mentioned a few days ago surrounded by candles and the benches arranged in a semicircle around. Everyone was issued with a paper star to write a prayer on, if desired, and these were left in front of the icon during the quiet bits. 

Marion thought it was 'the best Christmas service this year', which was gratifying, but it only attracted one person who wasn't a regular member of the congregation (who came 'because I heard you were doing it and wanted to see what happens'). It's a far cry from what the Teddington folk said happened there, where lots of people turned up merely from a few flyers left in the pews. It wasn't really intended for those who'd be in church over Christmas anyway. It may be one of those things that everyone says is a good idea but turns out not to work here even if it does elsewhere. We'll see what happens next year. 

PS. Marion took the order of service to someone whose husband's funeral she'd taken and she prayed through it on her own.

No Blinding Light to be Had Anywhere

This is a very lazy post indeed as it mostly consists of someone else's words, but it's too good to let go by. Dr Abacus points me towards the recently-late AA Gill's account of his conversion to Christianity. I see it as a model exemplar of how to 'do evangelism': always be truthful and don't care too much.

"I am a reluctant Christian. I was once interviewed by Lynn Barber and I told her I was a Christian but not a homosexual . . . she didn’t believe either. “You can’t be a Christian,” she said, in her parlour maid’s voice, “you just can’t.” Well I can, that’s the thing with religion. Absolutely anyone can. “But you’re not remotely Christian,” she continued. “It’s another contrarian affectation.” What, like bow ties? “Yes.”

"I wish it were. Having a dose of religion, in my milieu, at this time, is as awkward and inconvenient as not having it in 17th-century Norwich. It would be so much more socially easy to be a vain fashion atheist.

"I was brought up by atheists. I honestly thought I was immune to religiosity. And I didn’t catch it in a Methodist way after signing the pledge, I began to have vague spiritual unease because of art at the Slade and that really was contrarian. I’d go and sit in the back of churches and feel wordlessly moved.

"There was a family friend, an Irish Jesuit and university professor, who occasionally took me out to lunch and I would confide in him. He was a radical libertarian theologist, which was exciting, and he said if at all possible religion was something to be avoided.

Who would willingly lumber themselves with a book full of medieval rules, superstitions and the possibility of an eternity’s agony by choice? Far better, he said, to adopt a general humanitarian goodness, be thoughtful, charitable and kind and trust in the benevolence of providence to see you all right. He pointed out that, statistically, religious belief had no actuarial benefits: you didn’t get to live longer, or have less cancer; religious people didn’t have prettier spouses, politer children, more sex — quite possibly less sex — nicer offices or better weather. They did, on the other hand, get guilt (point of order here: it’s the Catholics and Jews who get guilt, Protestants and Muslims get shame). And of course remorse.

"You don’t really believe that, do you, I said. “Adrian, I wish to God I did, but I can’t because the space is already filled with a belief in God.” I think I’ve got it too, I said. “Which flavour are you?” Well, that’s rather the thing, I’ve got a formless faith.

He said: “If you want my advice, go with what’s closest to home. Faith is ethereal, the practice of faith is cultural. If you become a Zoroastrian or a follower of Cao Dai, a marvellous Vietnamese Christianity that believes Muhammed, Moses, Louis Pasteur, Shakespeare, Lenin and Victor Hugo are all saints, then you’re going to have to learn a lot of stuff . . . and get over a whole lot of other stuff before you get to the good stuff and it’ll have very little to do with your soul.

"“Weren’t you baptised into the Church of Scotland? I’d stick with Protestantism. Actually, I think it rather suits you . . . low to middle. Anglo-Catholicism would bring out the worst in you, all the dressing-up would get out of control and you’d become an architectural pedant doing brass rubbing.”

"So that’s essentially what I am — a lazy, middle-range Protestant with a mildly pedantic crush on the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer."

Heresy in Unexpected Places

For an upcoming service I wanted, or thought I wanted, an image of an icon of the Holy Family, so I did what anyone in my situation would do and went Googling for one. Partway down the page of images came one of an icon defaced with a large red cross, as you see here. What’s that about, I wondered, and it led to this Orthodox website.

Their claim is that this image is heretical and has no place in Christian tradition. That may make you blink a little, as it did me: it’s quite a statement to make, as the picture looks entirely innocuous, touching even. But the argument is this: that it attempts to corral the truth of the Incarnation, that God is come among us and that human life is therefore transformed, into an essentially worldly agenda by creating an image of the eternal Son embedded into a human family, rather than a human family changed by the eternal Son coming into it. It makes Christ marginal in his own story, makes him the son of the couple called Mary and Joseph, rather than the everlasting Second Person of the Trinity to bear and care for whom their vocation is. The website then links this with arguments about the perpetual virginity of Mary, arguments which go back a long, long way (those who doubted it on the basis of some passages of Scripture were ‘enemies of Mary’, said St John Climacus in the 6^th century), but I think these are a bit beside the point, especially as I don't have much of a problem with the idea of Mary having borne children after Jesus. 

It was a point which had its effect, though, I have to say. As I looked at the Holy Family icon I could see more and more what this faintly extreme corner of Orthodoxy meant. That image, of Mary embracing Jesus and Joseph embracing them both in an attitude of fatherly, husbandly concern, may well be what happened historically, but that’s not what icons are supposed to depict: they delineate heavenly, not earthly realities, eternal dogmas and not the fleeting accidents of what happens here. And in heaven Jesus is the focus, Mary is eternally his mother, and Joseph looks on supportively from the side. This is not an ordinary family, nor should it be reorganised to serve propaganda that elevates the human family into a religious principle.

So I won’t be using that image. Instead I found this one, from the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem (where better), and that seems more correct.

Duae Divae

Once upon a time I corresponded, via the intermediary of her agent, with Diamanda Galás. I wanted permission to use some of her lyrics in a compendium of Gothic culture I was putting together. ‘Ah yes, this is the gentleman who wrote that lovely piece about me … Of course he can use it’, she said, purring away, I liked to imagine. Phew. I’m not sure what she’d make of this.

I first came across Diamanda Galás in the form of her very uncharacteristic ‘speed gospel’ album from 1988, You Must Be Certain of the Devil, which I picked up at a second-hand record store in Oxford. That recording is pretty accessible, but I swiftly discovered how challenging the rest of her output tends to be. Nevertheless, I could hear a genuinely prophetic voice in her concern for people with AIDS and mental illness, or the victims of genocides the world preferred to forget about.

In case you don’t know, Galás’s masterpiece is the Plague Mass of 1991, a scarifying but spellbinding examination of the malign relationship between religion and disease which uses liturgical texts to align the bodies of those who suffer sickness with that of Christ in the Eucharist. I see it as a Christian meditation of profound meaning and importance. I’m also slightly and scandalously tickled that when I lent it to a Goth music journalist friend to listen to in 2000 she turned it off after ten minutes saying it was ‘the most disturbed thing I’ve ever heard’. I saw the diva herself perform in London in 2001 and again two years later: I felt as though I should have a medal really, with a bar for the second occasion.

My impression was that Diamanda had gone off the boil in recent years. I watched a couple of recent concert videos on Youtube which suggested that the famous multi-octave voice might be getting a bit ropey as she edged through her sixth decade, and failed to find anything new that she may have been doing (actually there was a bit, though her publicity seemed to be somewhat neglectful, and she is still performing – this year more than most). So I hadn’t given her much thought of late, though I continue to pray for her in recognition of her at-least-once-prophetic role.

I had no idea until very recently that Ms Galás had expressed any opinion at all about PJ Harvey. But, in 2009, I see, she remembered back to 1995 when ‘There were friends of mine, drag queens, calling me saying “there’s somebody who’s dressing like you, wearing your hair, studying your vocals, wearing your makeup.” At first I said “I don’t want to know, I’m working”, but then I went to one of her concerts. And I’m telling you, if you’re gonna do me in drag? You’d better be taller than me. And tougher than me. And you’d better be a man.’

Oh dear. It reminds me a bit of what Ms G said about Patricia Morrison, then of the Sisters of Mercy, another very inappropriate comparison: ‘she’s so much taller and fatter than me [I think poor Morrison is 5 foot nothing] and she dresses so badly’. But then you can find film of PJH being terribly snarky about Kylie Minogue. It’s more than a little perplexing that charismatic women musicians feel the need to scorn one another so and, even when they’re outspoken feminists, to enlist gendered imagery to do it.

The Blessed Diamanda’s friends were somewhat misinforming her, anyway: although she and Polly share an interest in extremity and therefore both inhabit corners of the great Gothic continuum, there’s barely any other correspondence between them on any level, musical, thematic, stylistic, or personal. That To Bring You My Love moment in 1995 marked the sole point of convergence, and that’s because they were both looking to something beyond them rather than one to the other: a Goth-girl visual rhetoric that stretches back into the past as far as Theda Bara and the Marquesa Casati, and ultimately to Romantic and Symbolist depictions of ‘fatal women’ in the art of the last quarter of the 19^th century. Ms Galás might relate her black ensemble to culture and heritage (‘ever since the age of 12, my brother and I dressed like this. All my relatives in Sparta have these immaculate white houses, and then they come out and it’s black, black, black in the middle of the day’), but, really, no Pelopennese peasant woman ever looked like that. Maila Nurmi may have done, but she was Finnish. One reviewer in Uncut’s recent Polly festschrift says that in the mid-90s she began copying ‘Diamanda Galás’s rictus-grin’, but that’s not what Galás herself took exception to, and frankly as a singer you have to make some fairly funny faces to get the sounds out. She still does that, twenty-odd years later.

Never someone to love so much as to admire from a safe distance, Galás has not merely obscured the truth about herself but actively distorted it, making it hard to warm to the person that might lay behind. She invented a lesbian vigilante squadron, the Black Leather Beaver Patrol, which she would periodically claim she led, and gleefully informed one interviewer that ‘everything I tell you will be lies anyway’. So when the genuinely moving truth poked through the surface – the death of her brother from AIDS, as well that of as her best friend – you didn’t know quite how much salt to take it with. Was she really married to that best friend, or was that another piece of embroidery? Has her father really died in a road accident at the age of 91? That there might be a gap, or several gaps, between appearance and reality seemed very probable from an exchange in the correspondence columns of avant-garde music magazine The Wire in 2000 after someone questioned whether Galás could have studied the subject she claimed at the ‘Scripps Institute’ in California, at the time she claimed. This provoked a frosty, detailed, and clearly furious response from the singer, quite different from her usual dramatic and expletive-laden statements; but a very curious one, which, according to how you interpret the dates she gave, implied that she was an undergraduate at the age either of 14 or 10. Neither of which is likely.

This 2011 concert in Barcelona tells you everything you need to know about my current issues with Ms G. There is no mistaking the virtuosity of her piano-playing or vocalising; in that, in fact, lies the issue. The texts she musicalizes and the songs she covers tend to be overwhelmed by what she does to them. The first number, ‘Anoixe Petra’, is a gorgeous 1960s Greek laika song which she strangles with arpeggiation and vocal gymnastics (it led me to the original, much more moving version by Marinella). There are often absolutely luscious introductions to the songs (her version of ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kanst’ a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath set to music by Liszt, is a case in point) but then the Galás-isms start and the text is swiftly crushed beneath the pyrotechnics. Vocally, it isn’t that she can’t sing gently and intimately, but she steers away from it into a snarl that sounds impossibly comic more often than I suspect she intends. The set concludes with that melancholy standard ‘Gloomy Sunday’, in a significantly more mannered form than the recorded version on Malediction and Prayer (1998): this is an artist of unimaginable talent becoming, perhaps, misled by her own ability.

It’s all frustrating, because when you read Galás’s offerings about life and art, as in the 2013 lecture assemblage of poetry and essays, ‘The Mouth of the Crocodile’, it can be both interesting and moving, and you can see her point notwithstanding the uncomfortably violent expressions she sometimes employs. But despite her insistence on musical radicalism and the pointlessness of standing still artistically (exactly as Polly does), truth be told, she hasn’t shifted very far at all, continuing to deploy the same weaponry she’s been polishing for the last thirty years – unless there are subtleties this non-musician can’t appreciate. ‘Anoixe Petra’ in the Barcelona concert contains elements that are exactly the same as the wonderful performance of ‘Keigome Keigome’ on Malediction and Prayer. I know what she’s trying to do – to capture the incantatory and exorcismatory qualities of texts as a form of activism, as part of a conversation between the dead and the living, and a call to arms, which is all entirely admirable. But I’m not convinced the exercise really achieves that. Sitting at the piano, she’s entering the world of these texts, but can anyone else follow her?

A very interesting-sounding project on the extinguished cultures of the Near East, ‘Nekropolis’, never emerged, but Galás’s website mentions another work in development, Das Fieberspital, so I will do my best to keep tabs on that, and see what transpires. Her significance and worth transcend my queries, and I’ve been sadly neglectful of what she has to say.