I hope one or two readers might make it to the Chesterton conference on Saturday that I advertised the other day. Do come and say hello if you make it. I somehow doubt anyone will be coming to the conference I'm speaking at on Sunday. The conference, which is being held at St Mary's College, Twickenham, is already in full swing, and I have been scheduled to give a paper at 9am on Sunday morning. This means leaving the house before 6am to catch a series of taxis, trains and buses. Such activity is essentially called 'building a career' and, believe me, at this point it feels like it's overrated. Hopefully the paper will go well.
Saturday, however, will take me back to the company of the Seton Hall summer school which I led on a tour of the Thames Valley on Tuesday. I suppose one of the consequences of the Reformation was for Brits to lose touch a little with everything that went before. I'm not talking especially about the Middle Ages, though I'm including them. I'm thinking especially of what Whig history has taught us to call the Dark Ages. But then, the more you look at them, the lighter they become.
Dan Snow has a very interesting series on BBC4 this week called How the Celts Saved Britain. Snow cannot help himself giving the occasional sneer at Christianity, but the episode I saw last night had him wandering around monastic ruins in Ireland and marvelling at the extraordinary culture and technology of the monks.
Two things struck me at this point. Firstly, if I was Irish, I might take a little offense at Snow's rather English surprise at Celtic civilization; still, he is apparently reacting to the Anglo-centric view of the history of this period. Secondly, Snow appears unable to see culture and technology as integral parts of the Christian project, so he keeps calling the monasteries 'islands of modernity'. As I told the Americans from Seton Hall this week, such attitudes are what G.H. Bantock called 'the parochialism of the present'.
But I'm not disappointed with Snow. He is confirming some of the thoughts that passed through my own head as I led the Seton Hall gang through Dorchester, the Vale of the White Horse, Winchester and Reading abbey. All that history and deep, deep faith gathered under our feet, and usually we are not even conscious of it.
Perhaps the most interesting moment of the week was sitting below the Uffington White Horse while Fr Ian Boyd of Seton Hall spoke to us all about Chesterton's grand ballad. Chesterton was honouring King Alfred the Great who did a lot more than burn some poor woman's cakes! A judicial, educational, cultural and religious reformer, Alfred was also a military innovator, setting up complex networks of fortified towns, messenger lines, standing military units and Lord knows what else!
Perhaps the most poignant moment was finally standing beside the ruins of Reading abbey, just beside the infamous Reading Gaol, and wondering whether Oscar Wilde's window faced the ruins or not. Everything that was right and wrong in Oscar is somehow tied up in the crumbling ruins of the abbey: the decadence and the hope, the lying-in-a-gutter and the gazing-on-the-stars. Still, how often is it that we avoid the pitfalls of Whig-progress and of what I'm tempted to call Spenglerian decline-theory? If yesterday's feast in the old calendar (Ss John Fisher and Thomas More) tells us anything, I suppose it is that we should harden our hearts with hope.
Friday, 10 July 2009
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Chestertonian revelling
This coming Saturday there will be a conference from 1-6pm at St Benet's Hall, St Giles, Oxford, hosted by the Chesterton Insitutute and entitled 'A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis'. Here is the flyer for the occasion (click to enlarge):
I don't know much about the other speakers but Philippe Maxence is the editor of the paper L'Homme nouveau, which I've heard described as the organ of Ratzingerian orthodoxy in France. They are the French distributors for L'Osservatore Romano and Maxence has now published two books on Chesterton.
In any case, I hope to be there and I hope there's a big crowd. If you're interested in Chesterton and distributism, if you're going Oxford way on Saturday, if you're stuck for something to do, or if you just want an interesting afternoon, then the conference is for you.
I don't know much about the other speakers but Philippe Maxence is the editor of the paper L'Homme nouveau, which I've heard described as the organ of Ratzingerian orthodoxy in France. They are the French distributors for L'Osservatore Romano and Maxence has now published two books on Chesterton.
In any case, I hope to be there and I hope there's a big crowd. If you're interested in Chesterton and distributism, if you're going Oxford way on Saturday, if you're stuck for something to do, or if you just want an interesting afternoon, then the conference is for you.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Oh, say, can you see?
Well, this is 24 hours late, but if my American readers will pardon me, I wish them a belated happy Independence Day. We're surely within the Octave, aren't we? I can't say I hold with revolutions as a rule, but every now and again, I think we can let one pass. That's the sensible view on the subject, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, here's a little taste of America which I came across recently. I know it's fashionable for Europeans to look down their noses a little at the USA, and it's even fashionable for a certain kind of American to look down his nose at his own country. But really, we're all mongrels at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, here's a little taste of America which I came across recently. I know it's fashionable for Europeans to look down their noses a little at the USA, and it's even fashionable for a certain kind of American to look down his nose at his own country. But really, we're all mongrels at the end of the day.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Back in Middle Earth
I probably always seem to be grumbling about how busy I am but but this time of the year is especially merciless. I was in Liverpool last Friday where I gave a conference paper and in Oxford on Tuesday where I also gave another paper. I'm speaking in Oxford next week also for Seton Hall University's summer school and at the end of that week for the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in London. Add in a Chesterton conference this Saturday and next Saturday and you have just about got my diary for the next fortnight. I shall then, as I have told several friends, arrange my funeral and shuffle off this mortal coil. That or lie in bed for two days staring at my ceiling and wondering where it all went wrong!
One thing I have done in the last couple of days, however, is have a little idling time with the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. How amazing they are! I also managed to pick up the complete theatrical version for £10 in Manchester's HMV. I only hope I still like them after being spoilt with the longer editions.
I have to say that the Tolkien epic is something I have had to grow into. I always felt sympathetic to Tolkien readers becuse they were so non-mainstream (I'm thinking back in the 1980s here when selected, anorak-wearing acquaintances of mine raved over The Silmarillion). But the only Tolkien I could read was The Hobbit. And read it I did, again and again and again. I couldn't get past Chapter 3 of the LOTR but I must have read The Hobbit about fifty times. Why? Who can tell?
I'm of the opinion these days that one has to grow into certain art forms. I once ruined a blossoming romance - an action I am past-master at - by swearing blind that all Beethoven (and probably Mozart too) was rubbish in comparison with Lennox Berkeley, Stephen Dodgson and Richard Rodney Bennett. Yes, I know, only an 18 year old could say something like that; something that none of those gifted English gentlemen would have agreed with anyway!
But I had to grow into these things. Let me correct myself: I grew into Mozart. I've yet to grow into Beethoven, and I have the sneaking suspicion I never will, though I could be wrong. For some weird reason late Beethoven always brings to mind the smell of currant bread. Why? I have no diea. That is something to do with synesthesia. Oddly enough, currant bread does not remind me of Beethoven. Now that is weird.
I grew into Mozart, and I think I've now grown into the LOTR. It was a book I first read ten years ago for a bookclub which was going to host Joseph Pearce (who had not long since published his Tolkien book). It was 800 pages of sheer boredom, followed by 200 pages of transfixing, divinely-inspired wisdom. How can anything strike one in that way? I have no idea. It is like stumbling across the key to someting, but hardly knowing why, as the Fellowship does when it enters the mines of Moria. Maybe it's because the worries and themes of the book are now the worries and themes which preoccupy me; not Orcs, cheeky, but endurance, defeat and regrouping, small pleasures, eeking out a lot from a little ... all the habits of defeated youth.
'I wish none of this had ever happened,' says Frodo at one point. 'So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for you to decide. All you must decide is what to do with the time given you,' says Gandalf.
One thing I have done in the last couple of days, however, is have a little idling time with the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. How amazing they are! I also managed to pick up the complete theatrical version for £10 in Manchester's HMV. I only hope I still like them after being spoilt with the longer editions.
I have to say that the Tolkien epic is something I have had to grow into. I always felt sympathetic to Tolkien readers becuse they were so non-mainstream (I'm thinking back in the 1980s here when selected, anorak-wearing acquaintances of mine raved over The Silmarillion). But the only Tolkien I could read was The Hobbit. And read it I did, again and again and again. I couldn't get past Chapter 3 of the LOTR but I must have read The Hobbit about fifty times. Why? Who can tell?
I'm of the opinion these days that one has to grow into certain art forms. I once ruined a blossoming romance - an action I am past-master at - by swearing blind that all Beethoven (and probably Mozart too) was rubbish in comparison with Lennox Berkeley, Stephen Dodgson and Richard Rodney Bennett. Yes, I know, only an 18 year old could say something like that; something that none of those gifted English gentlemen would have agreed with anyway!
But I had to grow into these things. Let me correct myself: I grew into Mozart. I've yet to grow into Beethoven, and I have the sneaking suspicion I never will, though I could be wrong. For some weird reason late Beethoven always brings to mind the smell of currant bread. Why? I have no diea. That is something to do with synesthesia. Oddly enough, currant bread does not remind me of Beethoven. Now that is weird.
I grew into Mozart, and I think I've now grown into the LOTR. It was a book I first read ten years ago for a bookclub which was going to host Joseph Pearce (who had not long since published his Tolkien book). It was 800 pages of sheer boredom, followed by 200 pages of transfixing, divinely-inspired wisdom. How can anything strike one in that way? I have no idea. It is like stumbling across the key to someting, but hardly knowing why, as the Fellowship does when it enters the mines of Moria. Maybe it's because the worries and themes of the book are now the worries and themes which preoccupy me; not Orcs, cheeky, but endurance, defeat and regrouping, small pleasures, eeking out a lot from a little ... all the habits of defeated youth.
'I wish none of this had ever happened,' says Frodo at one point. 'So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for you to decide. All you must decide is what to do with the time given you,' says Gandalf.
Monday, 29 June 2009
The rest is silence
I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. What d'ya have a blog for if you're not going to blog, right? Tell that to Berenike who hasn't updated her blog since 18 May (come on, our B!)!
Truth to tell though, the last month has been unusually busy. Organ playing aside, we've had our exam period, marking duties, paper ferrying antics ('And they're playing the joker on this one'.), et alia. I spoke at a conference in Liverpool last week and will speak at one tomorrow in Oxford. I've driven my book project to the brink of a contract, and well, in all the rush, the blog has been neglected (though not as badly as my garden). Is this a case of butter spread over too much bread, as I think Bilbo says somewhere or other to Frodo? Yay, verily, so it is.
Some people will undoubtedly appreciate my silence. I appreciate my silence too to be honest. There is far too much blather on the comment gravy train (he said in a meta-commentary-sort of way). I suppose this is one of those paradoxes that is hard for a culture bent on quantification to fully embrace. Silence, it is thought, must mean inactivity since it is so hard to measure. Anyone for a spot of silent blogging?
On the other hand, I wonder whether silence isn't actually the verbal equivalent of physical space. Noise means mental atrophy in the same way as a man in a six-by-six cell goes into a decline. Even urban creatures know this. If a 'flâneur' - a city stroller - like Baudelaire loved the urbs, his activity still looks oddly like a man going for a brisk walk 'on t' moor'. There are any number of ways to blow the cobwebs off; it just depends what suits you.
I dare say that this is why silence in the liturgy is, rightly understood, much more powerful than verbalization. Verbalizing things is so prosaic, if you'll pardon the tautology. Noise is so left-hemisphere. Silence, on the other hand, is the space in which those other parts of our soul can catch the symbols without reaching for instant rationalization.
I suppose I mean that something of this (see below) is universally necessary.
********************************
Anyway, before I rob you of what little silence there is left here, let me tell those of you who might be interested that if you listen to Manchester Online Radio this evening after 7.15pm, you will hear my brother Paul being interviewed about his music and gigging around Manchester. Here's a taster.
Truth to tell though, the last month has been unusually busy. Organ playing aside, we've had our exam period, marking duties, paper ferrying antics ('And they're playing the joker on this one'.), et alia. I spoke at a conference in Liverpool last week and will speak at one tomorrow in Oxford. I've driven my book project to the brink of a contract, and well, in all the rush, the blog has been neglected (though not as badly as my garden). Is this a case of butter spread over too much bread, as I think Bilbo says somewhere or other to Frodo? Yay, verily, so it is.
Some people will undoubtedly appreciate my silence. I appreciate my silence too to be honest. There is far too much blather on the comment gravy train (he said in a meta-commentary-sort of way). I suppose this is one of those paradoxes that is hard for a culture bent on quantification to fully embrace. Silence, it is thought, must mean inactivity since it is so hard to measure. Anyone for a spot of silent blogging?
On the other hand, I wonder whether silence isn't actually the verbal equivalent of physical space. Noise means mental atrophy in the same way as a man in a six-by-six cell goes into a decline. Even urban creatures know this. If a 'flâneur' - a city stroller - like Baudelaire loved the urbs, his activity still looks oddly like a man going for a brisk walk 'on t' moor'. There are any number of ways to blow the cobwebs off; it just depends what suits you.
I dare say that this is why silence in the liturgy is, rightly understood, much more powerful than verbalization. Verbalizing things is so prosaic, if you'll pardon the tautology. Noise is so left-hemisphere. Silence, on the other hand, is the space in which those other parts of our soul can catch the symbols without reaching for instant rationalization.
I suppose I mean that something of this (see below) is universally necessary.
********************************
Anyway, before I rob you of what little silence there is left here, let me tell those of you who might be interested that if you listen to Manchester Online Radio this evening after 7.15pm, you will hear my brother Paul being interviewed about his music and gigging around Manchester. Here's a taster.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
O nuit!
A friend sent me this link some time ago though I bet they don't remember doing so. It says a lot about my mood this evening.
O nuit ! viens apporter à la terre Le calme enchantement de ton mystère ! L'ombre qui t'escorte est si douce Si doux est le concert de tes voix chantant l'espérance Si grand est ton pouvoir transformant tout en rêve heureux
O nuit ! ô laisse encore à la terre Le calme enchantement de ton mystère ! L'ombre qui t'escorte est si douce Est-il une beauté aussi belle que le rêve ? Est-il de vérité plus douce que l'espérance ?
[Oh night, come and bring to the earth the calm enchantment of your mystery! The shadow which comes with you is so sweet, And so sweet is the sound of your voices which sing together of hope, So great is your power, transforming everything into a happy dream,
Oh night, come and bring to the earth the calm enchantment of your mystery! The shadow which comes with you is so sweet, Is there a beauty to match the beauty of dreaming? Is there a truth sweeter than hope?]
O nuit ! viens apporter à la terre Le calme enchantement de ton mystère ! L'ombre qui t'escorte est si douce Si doux est le concert de tes voix chantant l'espérance Si grand est ton pouvoir transformant tout en rêve heureux
O nuit ! ô laisse encore à la terre Le calme enchantement de ton mystère ! L'ombre qui t'escorte est si douce Est-il une beauté aussi belle que le rêve ? Est-il de vérité plus douce que l'espérance ?
[Oh night, come and bring to the earth the calm enchantment of your mystery! The shadow which comes with you is so sweet, And so sweet is the sound of your voices which sing together of hope, So great is your power, transforming everything into a happy dream,
Oh night, come and bring to the earth the calm enchantment of your mystery! The shadow which comes with you is so sweet, Is there a beauty to match the beauty of dreaming? Is there a truth sweeter than hope?]
More fragments against my ruins
This time a year ago today I had not long since touched down at Detroit airport for what was supposed to be a two and a half month trip to the USA. In the end it lasted only a week. You never know what's waiting around the corner, though I have to say that in my experience it's normally something bad ;-)
Back in England I set off on a road trip which took me down into deepest Shropshire and Herefordshire, the only counties where dark secrets can be effectively pondered without the constant interruption of other human beings. Shropshire was a county I had longed to discover, not only because of Houseman's poetry or Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge but also because it has that golden, unfashionable glow emitted by Wodehouse's comic genius. Herefordshire disclosed its secrets in wilder ways, with eerie valleys along the Welsh border and dark furrows along its troubled skylines. Or perhaps that impression was just the work of my imagination, bordered with black like a Victorian death notice. I'll never know for sure until I go back.
The theme of that trip was 'the world belongs to risk', a principle I have often repeated to myself since I discovered it hidden in a page of Bernanos many years ago. Bernanos is like that, a generator of lapidary and incendiary phrases which illuminate the disconsolate and wound those they are hurled at. It isn't true, of course, or at least not in the way that non-risk takers would assume. The world doesn't belong to risk like a share portfolio belongs to a speculator; rather it belongs to risk in the same way a poor man standing over them owns the golden downs of Shropshire and the dark skylines of Herefordshire.
This kind of 'standing over' is the very opposite of superstition, though that too means 'standing over'. Neil Peart, whom I have mentioned before in my many musings, found another way of expressing what I'm trying to get at:
And if the music stops
There's only the sound of the rain
All the hope and glory
All the sacrifice in vain
[And] if love remains
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price,
But we will not count the cost
Superstition is to stand over in fear; risk-taking is to stand over in freedom.
That's the theory anyway. In practice, there are only so many times you can role a dice before you run out of chits. On the other hand, perhaps my image reveals me to be superstitious. But how does one not count the cost, at least if one is only human, as so many of my readers are (pace GKC)?
You see, these are the key questions. Never mind all the fuss going on in London today with the LMS general assembly. Who gets what chair and who gets what job - will it matter as much as whether the spirit of the LMS is the spirit of risk or the spirit of fear, the spirit of consolidation or the spirit of concelebration? I mean 'concelebration' in the sense of knowing how to celebrate with others, rather than being proprietorial about it all.
And there's the rub. Risk means the possibility of loss. I admire an organization like the LMS, but its future depends on it being proprietorial about what it stands for. I'm sure this is probably why I never join clubs and will never grasp fully how patronage trumps merit. As Leon Bloy so beautifully put it, 'I can be nobody's comrade, not even my best friend's'. But who understands that now?
Fear, clubs, control - Risk, liberty, loss
Somewhere along that scintillating spectrum lies a happy medium between the two. But where it is, I cannot tell. I'll just have to read some more Peart.
If the dream is won
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price,
But we will not count the cost
Back in England I set off on a road trip which took me down into deepest Shropshire and Herefordshire, the only counties where dark secrets can be effectively pondered without the constant interruption of other human beings. Shropshire was a county I had longed to discover, not only because of Houseman's poetry or Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge but also because it has that golden, unfashionable glow emitted by Wodehouse's comic genius. Herefordshire disclosed its secrets in wilder ways, with eerie valleys along the Welsh border and dark furrows along its troubled skylines. Or perhaps that impression was just the work of my imagination, bordered with black like a Victorian death notice. I'll never know for sure until I go back.
The theme of that trip was 'the world belongs to risk', a principle I have often repeated to myself since I discovered it hidden in a page of Bernanos many years ago. Bernanos is like that, a generator of lapidary and incendiary phrases which illuminate the disconsolate and wound those they are hurled at. It isn't true, of course, or at least not in the way that non-risk takers would assume. The world doesn't belong to risk like a share portfolio belongs to a speculator; rather it belongs to risk in the same way a poor man standing over them owns the golden downs of Shropshire and the dark skylines of Herefordshire.
This kind of 'standing over' is the very opposite of superstition, though that too means 'standing over'. Neil Peart, whom I have mentioned before in my many musings, found another way of expressing what I'm trying to get at:
And if the music stops
There's only the sound of the rain
All the hope and glory
All the sacrifice in vain
[And] if love remains
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price,
But we will not count the cost
Superstition is to stand over in fear; risk-taking is to stand over in freedom.
That's the theory anyway. In practice, there are only so many times you can role a dice before you run out of chits. On the other hand, perhaps my image reveals me to be superstitious. But how does one not count the cost, at least if one is only human, as so many of my readers are (pace GKC)?
You see, these are the key questions. Never mind all the fuss going on in London today with the LMS general assembly. Who gets what chair and who gets what job - will it matter as much as whether the spirit of the LMS is the spirit of risk or the spirit of fear, the spirit of consolidation or the spirit of concelebration? I mean 'concelebration' in the sense of knowing how to celebrate with others, rather than being proprietorial about it all.
And there's the rub. Risk means the possibility of loss. I admire an organization like the LMS, but its future depends on it being proprietorial about what it stands for. I'm sure this is probably why I never join clubs and will never grasp fully how patronage trumps merit. As Leon Bloy so beautifully put it, 'I can be nobody's comrade, not even my best friend's'. But who understands that now?
Fear, clubs, control - Risk, liberty, loss
Somewhere along that scintillating spectrum lies a happy medium between the two. But where it is, I cannot tell. I'll just have to read some more Peart.
If the dream is won
Though everything is lost
We will pay the price,
But we will not count the cost
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