Arabic is a wholly language. Language in which the angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. The holy language of the Koran is one whose themselves and consonants in and of themselves have some materiality and thus impact on the lives of those around. This idea of language carrying on certain magical properties reminded me of the work by Robert Graves in “the White Goddess”. Third to the early language used by the Bards.
St Paul as a prophet
Christianity has this unfortunate obsession with the figure of Jesus Christ. In turn has been a constant struggle within Christianity to return to the original figure of Christ as a way of combating a form of legalese religiosity which installs itself. Every movement like this faces the issue that the actual content of the Gospels, the words and acts of Christ himself, did not carry explicit rules and regulations for any form of social order beyond a very nominal ethics (and perhaps a transcendent imagination). Jesus Christ sits there is something to which Christianity returns Europe’s offers little order and indeed gives great space for interpretation via the same mechanism.
If only the church would except its indelible debt to St Paul, it may be easier to organise the faithful, as St Paul did offer more explicit explanations for how to live your life. In this sense St Paul stands out as a form of Prophet. And may lead you to be a more appropriate banner than Jesus around which a revitalised church might place itself. In this way St Paul is a prophet.
Walsingham – You Only Live Once…
It wasn’t difficult to find our way to Walsingham but when we arrived it wasn’t clear what we should do. I had persuaded my partner and our three children to come with me to visit Walsingham. My partner was interested in going but the three children had asked me “what is it?”. It’s the site of one of the most important mediaeval pilgrimages I explained. That didn’t seem to cut much ice with them so I decided to offer them a treat when they got there. I’d give them a little money to spend in the gift shop. Everybody was quite happy with this so we negotiated the small roads and found ourselves following narrow lanes towards Walsingham. There was nothing obvious about the signage, nothing to indicate that we were heading towards anything other than a small village in Norfolk. The road arrived suddenly somewhere that we assumed must be Walsingham.
Hamlet 2 & Tsotsi
I watched two films last night, both by mistake rather than planning, practically the only way I see films these days.
Hamlet 2
I started watching this and in an early scene when Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) was emoting I turned to my friend and said “God I hate actors” which was appropriately misplaced as many of his friends are actors. So in slight shame I stuck with the film and gradually became engrossed. I really couldn’t see where it was going. I was annoyed and embarrassed by Steve Coogan’s rendering of the over-emotional main character. When the finale came along it all became clear and while it ended the film, a little like the end of the recent Nativity 2, it also popped the bubble with a message that was, what else should I expect, very ordinary and mundane: you the adult seek your father’s understanding and through recognition of that come to offer (shout out) your forgiveness to him. But that is where I feel uncomfortable with my own reaction. Why do I continue to find films which offer a resolution to a crisis unsatisfactory? On a naive level I continue to tell myself some narrative about life not actually being like this, as if resolution was never actually found, as if maintenance of conflict was somehow more honest than what is a temporary resolution at the best.
Tsotsi
Immediately following Hamlet 2 a film started which also caught my attention. Earlier that day I had been on the telephone to a friend who has been recently deported back to Zimbabwe after over 10 years as an asylum seeker in Britain. He is struggling to find a new life in Zimbabwe and I, along with a handful of his other friends here, and offering him some limited financial support, hoping that this will get him through these initial difficult months. When I started to watch this film which is set in South Africa I was suddenly brought face-to-face with a question: where I had my friend been sitting when I was speaking to him? What sort of life surrounds him back in Zimbabwe? What level of difficulties is he facing and with who does he face this?
Tsotsi tells the story of a young man, nicknamed Tsotsi (thug), who following an impromptu hijacking of a car finds himself taking care of a very young baby. His relationship with the baby and the substitute mother he finds to feed the infant, lead him back through the emotional tragedies that brought him to such a state of alienation, resulting in a change of nature? A new way of acting? Once again the film offers a positive resolution to a violent and difficult situation.
I read a review of this in the Guardian following the film which criticised it precisely for its eventual comforting message. On one level I can see the sense in this. The social, economic, political, the material conditions of life insist that disturbed and violent people emerge. Yes, this cannot be overcome by the appeal to particular circumstances around engagement with a bourgeois morality embodied in a young baby, the notion of natural impulses having on some level a beneficial impact. Yes, the changes need to take place at the structural level. But why the disgust at resolution being shown?
The idea which is reviled is that this is a sop to the masses and above all a way for the negation of responsibility. That the notion of personal redemption, in this instance through a form of psychological maturity, is to avoid the issue at hand, to negate the value of large-scale social reform. So the true radical in this context would do nothing but share the bad news, avoid people who had found ways out, do the opposite of the newspaper that I find sometimes distributed locally, Positive News. So I, rather like the young woman Melanie I once accompanied to film about a couple’s relationship collapsing, who cried greviously during the film, I find myself not comforted by the resolution but not disgusted.
apostasy
The conceit of the development of Renaissance humanism was that, like Hercules, “man” could perfect “himself” and become a God. The apostasy of Salman Rushdie was to take the word of God and relativise it, offering a human interpretation to something inspired and directed by God. In the Western intellectual tradition, the Western philosophical tradition itself originating with Socrates, who died himself an apostate; the human, the individual even, is in a profound sense God’s equal. In order not to deny, the denier being a favourite figure of the Judeo-Christian-Platonic world, or to simply die an apostate we need people willing to deny and to die for their apostasy.
God is Beauty (not a compliment I fear)
I was thinking about a friend going away for a week to The New Wine Convention with the Church of England group of which he is a member. I was thinking how could he possibly believe in God enough to go away like this? I realise this was a mistaken question. For me, now, finally, I understand that God is like beauty: a quality of experience and not some thing existing independently of experience. And I, of course, could not go away and take seriously the idea of absolute beauty except perhaps as entertainment. Although this is what the artists of the romantic period appear to have done. However I could not entertain looking for pure beauty, a beauty that exists outside my experience of this something as beautiful. My friend as far as I understand is going on a quest for his own experience, for what he wants God to be. God is the experience of which he goes in search: The Church of England. So God’s speed.
Leader notes
Yesterday, the 3rd August, I was listening to report on radio 4 of the endorsement of Hassan Rouhani by the Supreme Leader. I can’t find the audio file to link to it but there was in the background this extra-ordianary soviet style choral singing going on that seemed so unlike what I would have expected. It was rather Star Wars and very Stalinist, Soviet.
Ramadan and Christmas
It is Ramadan once again. It is the measure of the year, a movable cycle that is both feast and beast. I met a Welsh convert the Ramadan other day and I asked him how long he had been a Muslim? He replied that this was his fourth Ramadan. I compared it to Christmas in conversation with my closest Muslim friend.
Why? Because I am always looking for similarities, patterns shared between people, groups or even history. So what was Ramadan I keep asking myself? I didn’t feel that it related to Lent in any sense. Lent is both watered down and also celebrated by so few people and a prime function of Ramadan is that it is celebrated by nearly everybody, from the outside it appears that all Muslim people are actively fasting throughout Ramadan.
So searching further for some space of parallel I found myself thinking about Christmas. Partly this is because Christmas appears to demonstrate the exact opposite to Ramadan. Christmas is about eating too much, overeating, about drinking, about gorging, almost about gluttony and some sense. It is about giving things away but also about anxiously receiving things, getting things from other people, spending money. I think Christmas looks strange through the eyes of Ramadan and it was this strangeness, the uncomfortable parallel which started to form a new thought in my mind.
Ramadan carries denial. I’m not suggesting that people are living in a state of denial whilst waiting for food but they are denying themselves food, something they do not do in the formal day-to-day pattern of the annual cycle outside of Ramadan. Ramadan is about celebration around food, the eating of food every evening, the waiting expectantly for food and the gathering together in families, amongst friends, sharing, giving and taking food. There is also some element of suffering and Ramadan, born of the denial there is a necessary privation in Ramadan.
So how do the two relate? Well at Christmas we celebrate. We don’t need to ask questions about the religious context of the event we simply celebrate it. We as a people, the Judaeo-Christian people, take part in Christmas even though the religious events have receded into what becomes effectively a cultural memory of what we did believe, of what somebody else might have believed, whereby we count on other people, possibly, to believe on our behalf. Ramadan is not like this but Ramadan does include everybody. The doubter, smoker, the adulterer, the person who little attends mosque during the year and perhaps not at all even doing Ramadan. It is inclusive and sits as a form of definition of who you are. Whilst God sits there somewhere in the background it is a demonstration to each other and to other people. Christmas similarly doesn’t require God any longer; it has a life of its own.
Beyond that Christmas also evades happiness and includes suffering in a profound way. Western civilisation is rife with notions of the lonely individual, isolated, unable to relate to other people at Christmas. Perhaps at Christmas more than any other time of the year it is considered appropriate to offer solace, to open a soup kitchen, to give and to be generous to other people, the knowledge being clear that people are at their most lonely and at their most vulnerable during a period of intense festivity.
So the three points of comparison which I draw are:
1) They are great festive moments of the year around which the year turns.
2) They are feasts kept by everybody who wishes to be identified and identifies themselves within their cultural religious tradition and which seem undoable to others.
3) They are periods of both privation and denial as well as great festive moments, periods of intense isolation, the giving of gifts, and of a very visceral love of the physical, the flipside of waiting to eat and drink.
A Good Muslim
A close friend of mine brought one of his closest friends to visit me the other evening. This latter man brought with him his daughter who was 28 years old. The occasion was a shared meal and he had driven up from 100 miles away to have dinner with my friend during Ramadan. Conversation continued and B told a long and very animated story of his trip to New York recently.
He had been warned by his mother that he might be mistaken for a terrorist, B is from an Indian Muslim family. This is exactly what happened and he found himself under interrogation at the airport in America by Homeland Security. He was of course released after some time but during the questioning he was asked “if he was a good Muslim?” Now, B is in fact a weed smoking man of many years vintage. Yet he is a good Muslim. He has been on the Hajj. He is a Muslim. However during his questioning than America in order to diffuse the situation he said “No, I don’t go to mosque”.
Following this his daughter spoke about the trip she had taken where she had been crossing from Palestine to Israel or the other way round. She had been asked the same question. She said something like this:
“Then they asked me if I was a good Muslim and I thought to myself, leave me alone, I’ve got to say yes, it’s the only thing I’ve got left.”
What all this means I can only hazard a guess. What I understood was that this young woman, left to her own devices in a sense, had retained effectively very little of the cultural traditions that were her grandfathers and grandmothers. The one thing that was left was that she was a Muslim, possibly in some sense the good Muslim, the question of being good or bad being very dodgy. So when she was asked this question it produces something else.
No wonder people return to their religion through all these years. It is what they have left?
Clay Pipes
Here is a selection of clay pipes which I had the pleasure of seeing at a friends house near Barnsley. They are a very small part of an immense collection, not particularly of clay pipes but of minerals, bottles, disease from the industrial past. They have been brought together by a man who coming from a mining background became an accomplished artist specialising in what might loosely be called landscape painting. His collecting, the exhibition of his collections and is artworks are so closely linked that it almost becomes pedantry to separate them. So, these clay pipes were dug from a Barnsley domestic spoil heap. The painting is I was told already present and Yes, the first one is a lady on the loo:
