Friday 24 May 2013

Serious Moonlight 

Mysterious Kôr by Elizabeth Bowen


"That," said Pepita, "was what set me off hating civilisation"
"Well, cheer up," he said, "there isn't much of it left."
"Oh, yes, I cheered up some time ago. This war shows we've by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it."





This spiky variation on the 'eternal triangle', published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories in 1945, is set in war-time London at night. There are three characters: Pepita; Arthur, her soldier lover; and Callie, Pepita's flat-mate. The action pans out over the course of a couple of hours. Arthur is on leave, but with London so crowded he and Pepita have nowhere to go, except back to the flat, where Callie, well-meaning but naive, waits with mugs of steaming cocoa. Eventually they go back. Arthur sleeps on the couch in one room, while Pepita and Callie are uneasy bed-fellows in the other. Someone wakes up and stumbles around. Someone else gets up. A conversation follows. There are tears, a dream and, more than anything else, the moon - a mixed chalice of transformative light and glaring exposure - working its particular brand of tough magic on the protagonists' imaginations:

At once she knew that something was happening - outdoors, in the street, the whole of London, the
world. An advance, an extraordinary movement was silently taking place; blue-white beams overflowed from it, silting, dropping round the edges of the muffling black-out curtains ... A searchlight, the most
powerful of all time, might have been turned full and steady upon her defended window; finding flaws in
the black-out stuff, it made veins and stars.

Outside, with Arthur, between the street and the park, the moon flings Pepita's mind and spirit back to school and Andrew Lang's poem, She, a sonnet which Bowen had found both captivating and compelling in her childhood:

"Mysterious Kôr," Pepita recited, sliding her hand from Arthur's sleeve, "thy walls forsken stand, thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon."

Meanwhile, at home, the patient Callie is transported far beyond her loneliness, her staid upbringing and her complex of unconscious anxieties:

Below the moon, the houses opposite her window blazed back a transparent shadow: and something - was it a coin or a ring? - glittered half-way across the chalk-white street ... And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified the lateness of the lovers' return. No wonder, she said to herself, no wonder - if this was the world they walked in, if this was whom they were with.


 ******


The moon does funny things to people. So does war. So does London. Experience is heightened. People and objects occasionally take on a fantastic power of suggestiveness, hinting at the promise of hidden depths and potentialities on the brink of manifestation. At any moment, it sometimes seems, the screen of surface appearance might collapse and implode, folding inwards into a million gem-like shards, ceding place to a highly charged, poetically resonant world of art and revolution.

Every fundamentalist - political, religious or scientific - should read this story. What can you say? The mystery is the mystery is the mystery. We can't pin it down, can't nail it to our masts. It's always a step or two ahead, just around the corner, scuttling along those "wide, void, pure streets, between statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonnades. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came; with him trod the ermine dust of the endless halls, stood on terraces, round the extreme tower, looked down on the wide, void, pure streets. He was the password, but not the answer ... "

We should be glad. There are no answers. That's the beauty. That's our freedom. Mysterious Kôr.


Eyes Without a Face

A Contrarian's Conundrum


In Norse mythology, Odin descends, at one point, to the underworld to learn from the Norns - wise and ancient women - what shape the future is likely to take. The aged ones instruct the god that to find the knowledge he seeks he will have to pluck out one eye, hang himself upside down from the world tree, and allow himself to be pierced by a spear.

For nine days Odin's body hangs lifeless, his spirit ranging far and wide through all the nine worlds, on the back of the eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, an animal capable of breaking through any barrier. Odin saw and learned much. After nine days the Norns wet his lips with magical waters. He saw and learned even more.



I was thinking. It's funny. You spend so much time sometimes thinking about and speculating on future events that may or may not happen, and how you may or may not respond. You always imagine yourself acting a certain way. 'That's what I'll say,' you tell yourself. But when it comes down to it, when the long awaited moment arrives, you often find yourself thinking and saying thinhs entirely differnt to what was in your script. Why is this? Why do we seem to know so little about ourselves - about who we really are - those secret, deep-down motivations and guiding principles beneath the politically-correct and socially conservative veneer?

It's like Porcupine in Andrei Tarkovsky's film, Stalker. He goes to the mysterious 'Room' at the heart of the 'Zone', where your deepest wish - the most secret, deep-down desire - is made to come true. His visit's stated aim is to bring about a cure for his sick brother. When he returns to the world he finds himself rich beyond measure. His brother remans ill. The money doesn't make Porcupine happy. Quite the reverse. As they say, you never know until you get there, etc.

Take the other night, for example. I was sat in Fringe with a mate, discussing the outstanding longevity of Bernard Hopkins (the boxer). Eyes Without a Face by Billy Idol was playing on the jukebox. Great bassline. I was happy. A man in a trilby came up and said, "I'm opening a Tory party themed bar in the Northern Quarter. I need a business partner. What do you say?"

He went on to talk a little about his plans for the venture. He envisaged three rooms in all: a 'Free Market Room', where punters could buy and sell items to each other if they so desired, then a 'Philosophy Room', featuring books by famed conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton. We were then told about a 'Young Conservatives Room', where William Hague's classic speech to the 1978 conference would be played on a loop.

"What do you think?" said my friend after the intruder had gone.
"Not a lot," I replied. "Let's carry on as we were before. The guy's an oddball."

Oddball or not, however, I promised him I'd get back with my answer within nine days. It was two nights ago. I'm still mulling it over. That's the point of this post. I need a bit of help. As far as I can see, there are four possible outcomes for me to the adventure. It'll be one of -

A - Commercial, artistic and social suicide.

B - An insult to the people of Manchester and my late father, who was a strong Trade Union activist.

C - Impractical. Due to the free-market principles involved I'd have to hire staff on rolling contracts of 8 hours each and pay them two bob an hour,

or ...

D - A genuine act of rebellion and creative assertion against the prevailing political, cultural and social mores dominant in this city - from the Town Hall downwards - what often feels like a stifling complicity of thought and action. Is that typical of the Left is when holding the reins of power - politically, culturally, etc? Or do I just imagine it? Am I simply acting in the lineage of the 'Great Manc Contarian', à la Mark. E. Smith or Anthony Burgess?





Like I say, it's funny. Before it happened I had always thought my gut feeling would be one of A or C, while in the event I actually find myself wavering between B and D. Well, there you go. You never know until you get there.


*******


I do wish sometimes that I was a god and could ride on a magical, eight-legged horse down to the underworld and whatnot. I don't think I could hack all that Odin had to put up with though. Poor fella. I've never been a 'hard nut' in that respect.

So, there you are :-) Any suggestions gratefully received.

Stay golden. All the very best,

Confused, Withington.

Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? 

Where Are We Going?


Monarchy and the West: A Meditation



I originally wrote this piece, The Sleeping King, ten years ago in a post-9/11 ambience, where I was looking to define a set of clear Western values in distinction to the alternative worldview posited by radicalised Wahabi Islam. At the time I was very much under the intellectual influence of the Traditionalist school, with writers like René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon (both Muslim converts interestingly) playing a major part in my philosophical and spiritual formation.

I'm not quite so engaged, these days, with Traditionalism, though it remains a key reference point in my thought and work. So, if I was writing the piece again today, I would probably show a touch more generosity to the 'bottom-up' democratic approach, and maybe downplay a little the 'top-down' hierarchical angle. I've slightly shortened things, just to lose a bit of repetition, but apart from that there isn't really much I'd change. I might have been slightly harsh on the French Revolution in places, and I'm not sure Napoleon was quite the 'Arthurian figure' I cracked him up to be, but still. The essay also does not take into account the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011 and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee a year later, two events which provoked much chit-chat regarding the monarchy here in the UK.

One could argue that the moment of clarity I was grasping for in 2003 became dissipated and subsequently lost in military misadventures, not so much in Afghanistan, perhaps, but almost certainly, in my view, in Iraq. But in another sense, nothing has changed. We're still where we were - the same challenges facing us today as yesterday. The questions that exercised my mind in the Anthony Burgess review below are played out here again, this time on the civiliasational level as well as the individual. What is the West? What is it for? What does it do? In the words of Gauguin's famous painting: D'où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous? The concept of monarchy, so deep-rooted and archetypal in the Western imagination, suggests, for me at least, a couple of bricks and a tiny bit of mortar with which we might be able to begin crafting (or recrafting) an intellectual and spiritual structure, not unlike the great cathedrals of old perhaps, of real interest and permanent value.






The Sleeping King


Beauty is not only a terrible thing, but also a mysterious thing. There God and the devil are fighting for mastery and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.


'The Kingdom of Heaven lies within'. Endless repetition might have dulled our senses somewhat to the significance of this phrase, so it is worth re-iterating that, in the last analysis, all things of value lie within the human heart and imagination. This is not to imply that there is only the human heart and imagination. Far from it. The inner and the outer interlink and dovetai togetherl, a prime example being our latent sense of royalty, this intangible but seemimgly inbuilt human awareness of a royal principle at work through the vicissitudes of the historical record.

Monarchy, seen in this light, is a natural and organic form of government, understood intuitively by individuals from widely varying backgrounds and levels of intelligence. Legitimacy is conferred from above (the Divine) rather than below (the people), but monarchy remains part of the natural order and stands at a  substantial remove from some random and artificial 'system' of government imposed on a pliant, submissive population. The monarch is a symbol of his or her people's liberty - a guarantor of freedom of conscience and speech - existing not so much to rule as to serve. This Christological function finds expression in, among other places, the legendary cycle of King Arthur and his knights, where we find a body of lore and a central mythological motif common throughout the West and beyond - that of the sleeping king, destined to wake at his country's hour of need.





The hold of monarchy on the human imagination is markedly weaker today than at any time in the past. The days of Charlemagne and Athelstan are long gone. Since the decline of the Middle Ages the focus and dynamism of the West has tended to revolve around the external world, to the detriment of the inner milieu that animated Medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich, and inspired the construction of the great cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, York, Durham, etc. Western society has been de-sacralised and rationalised to such a degree since that it has become increasingly difficult for what we might call 'supra-rational' concepts like monarchy and contemplative, religious mysticism to gain any degree of purchase in the contemporary imagination.

This link between Divinity and royalty is a crucial one. In a well-ordered polity the sovereign acts as God's regent; so when, for example, the Medieval French kings abrogated power from the Pope, they unwittingly undermined their own legitimacy and raison d'être. Their lust for hegemony only succeeded in tipping the balance of the natural order askew and sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Once this natural harmony is thrown out of kilter it becomes very difficult to restore the balance. The French Revolution and the bloodletting which followed are fine illustrations of the chaos which can often result from a shaken hierarchy. In the 1790s, however, matters had not yet descended to such a pass that the situation was wholly irretrievable, and Napoleon's more or less principled autocracy restored a little of the equilibrium and saved France from unmasked brutaliy. But by 1917 the world had been de-spiritualised to such an extent that the fall from revolution to tyranny was able to take place largely unimpeded. An Arthurian figure like Bonaparte would have been unable to make an impression on post-1917 Russia simply because he belonged to a different era where the royal principle still commanded a central (if somewhat diminished) position in hearts and minds.




C.S. Lewis famously remarked that 'one can tell the extent to which a man's tap root to Eden remains intact by his attitude to monarchy.' Inner and outer harmony begin to disintegrate when this tap root, this intangible and utterly mysterious quality is weakened and subsequently severed. If man - the microcosm - falls into step with natural hierarchical patterns, then the outer world - the macrocosm - flows likewise in a harmonious fashion. The human heart is the point where microcosm and macrocosm meet, and it is here that the future of monarchy - our very own future as a thinking, acting species with choice and fee-will, in other words - will be decided. The heart is the throne of the 'sleeping king'. We will flounder and struggle to restore kudos and depth of meaning to royalty in the outer world unless we come to acknowledge this royal aspect within.

The task will be difficult. We live in an obtuse, chatter-filled, technologically-driven age, where talk of 'hidden kings' and suchlike will inevitably appear obscure and inaccessible. Nonetheless, the responsibility and challenge is ours to start setting some kind of creative, imaginative agenda - through literature, art, film, music, dance, drama, politics and philosophy. There are forces arraigned against us, powers of iron and stone, seeking to rob us of vision, reducing us to impotent cogs in a vast collective machine or, failing that, to mindless, zombified consumers, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist icongraphy. 

It isn't good enough. Not for the West. Not for human beings. We are more, much more, than economic units shuffling around like atoms in some demented 'free-market' disco. Our lives are more, much more, than a shapeless, rough and tumble scramble for comfort and security. Life is, or ought to be, an adventure, an exercise in nobility, and the traditional job of monarchy is to serve as role-model and exemplar in that respect.

As for us - as for the future - well, the revolution starts from within, with a heightening in our level of consciousnes and a deepening of our perception. Our task, our mythological function and responsibilty, is a twenty-first century quest for the Golden Fleece - to unveil the monarch within, and awaken the sleeping king.


*******


P.S.  This motif of the sleeping king has exercised my mind for many years. Must be something to do with reading The Weirdstone of Brisinganen when I was very young and bobbing down to Alderley Edge a couple of times with my dad :-) Anyway, the same theme is at the centre of a new short prose piece, Phoenix Fire, and the twelve haiku that go along with it. Written from the perspective of a former French Resistance fighter, the work explores the intellectual, spiritual and mythological links between Britain and France. Created in partnership with the fine artist, Rob Floyd (www.robfloyd.co.uk), Phoenix Fire will be featured at this year's Didsbury Arts Festival (22/06 to 30/06). The venue is Christ Church in West Didsbury and I shall be previewing the prose piece on this site nearer the time.

All the best, jf.



Friday 3 May 2013

War in Heaven

Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess


'If we're going to save the world,' said Hillier, 'we shall have to use unorthodox doctrines as well as unorthodox methods. Don't you think we'd all rather see devil-worship than bland neutrality?'




At primary school, in the early '80s, I became involved in what, for want of a more glamourous phrase, we called 'spy clubs'. There were two clubs, each with just one member - let's call the individuals Alfred and Guthrum - with an extra member joining one or the other occasionally. That was myself. The double agent. The 'third man'.

'We know all your secrets,' Guthrum and I informed Alfred sententiously, violating the sanctuary of the cloakroom, where he sat tying his laces. His mouth formed a perfect 'o' of surprise and shame. Guiltily, I looked away. The hats, coats and scarves on their wooden pegs reminded me of Narnia and the wardrobe. It must have been winter. After school. Some extra-curricular activity. Certainly the playground was dark and frosty when Alfred fled. He was a broken reed, but we knew he'd already be scheming revenge, which was, of course, exactly what we wanted. It meant the game would go on.

Because that's all it was. A game. There were no secrets. Nothing either the British or Soviet authorities needed to be notified of. Why did we play it then?

I doubled up as an altar boy in those days. Perhaps that's why I empathise with the religious perspective offered by Denis Hillier, Burgess's protagonist in this 1965 spy novel:

'But what's it all for?' asked Clara. 'Agents and spies and counter-spies and secret weapons and being brainwashed. What are you all trying to do?'
'Have you ever wondered,' said Hillier, 'about the nature of ultimate reality? What lies beyond this shifting mass of phenomena? What lies beyond even God?
'Nothing's beyond God,' said Alan. 'That stands to reason.'
'Beyond God,' said Hillier, 'lies the concept of God. In the concept of God lies the concept of anti-God. Ultimate reality is a dualism or a game for two players. We - people like me and my counterparts on the other side - we reflect that game. It's a pale reflection. There used to be a much brighter one, in the days when the two sides represented what we know as good and evil. That was a tougher and more interesting game ... '



*******




Tremor of Intent is a short book. In terms of story, it is a magnificent romp. Depending on your view, the novel sees Burgess either at his swashbuckling best or his most preeningly pretentious: 'I had waited in every evening, listening to Die Meistersinger. When Roper rang, Hans Sachs was opening Act III with his monologue about the whole world being mad: 'Wahn, wahn.'

Returning to school days briefly, I recall the frequency, throughout those 80s days, with which we were exhorted to 'stand on your own two feet,' 'But what am I to do,' I recall querying, 'once I'm on my two feet? Just stand here?' Those are the questions, behind the whizz-bang pyrotechnics, that this book plays with. Who am I? Why am I here? Now that I'm here, what do I do? It is an existential novel, with a premium put on commitment and engagement. What do I stand for? How do I act out my beliefs in the world? 

What matters, for Burgess, is the quest for meaning and value, especially in an age, like our own perhaps, which seems often to militate against such concepts. The alternative is to disengage, to 'opt out of history,' to become a bland and lukewarm neutral:

'The neutrals' said Alan.' If we could get down to the real struggle we wouldn't need spies and cold wars and spheres of influence and the rest of the horrible nonsense. But the people who are engaged in these things are better than the filthy neutrals.'
'And yet everything's an imposture,' replied Hillier. 'The real war goes on in heaven.'