Today, Saturday, we went to Greenfield, one of the Saddleworth villages. Our friends there are married and both come from the villages and we visited them on the occasion of the Saddleworth Rushcart. I won’t go into that suffice to say that a large group of Morris men process and dance around the various villages and on the Sunday lay rushes at one of the local Churches.
Afterwards we walked to Uppermill, Continue reading “Saddleworth, Brass, Morris and Rushes”
Darwin’s theory of evolution developed the first unifying theory offering to explain all aspects of human life with no attention paid to cultural or other social differences. Darwin’s theory allowed us from the West who understood it (perhaps) to suggest that there was an evolutionary route that took us back to shared ancestry perhaps that’s the least. The conceit of the Western man, just man?, As we all share the same evolutionary rate we can also empathise with those others. This evolutionary conceit allows us to feel that we own the heritage of others.
So heritage shows emerged as a property transaction. And it remains effectively a property transaction today. Heritage is mapped by ‘heritopography’, the sets of lines of communication or cultural understanding which allow the outsider to feel in place where ever they are provided they have a guidebook all mobile device. The British tourist standing on top of Machu Picchu and looking at a guidebook is sensing and experiencing a right to be present. That’s right to be present gives the tourist a sense of looking not at just somebody else’s heritage but at “their” heritage as well.
We have all obsession with history in the Western world from whence I emerge. A compulsive interest in the past and an ability to produce that past as historical record and to consume such records. There are psycho analytical events taking place. This fascination with the past and is perhaps linked into the continual need of Christianity to return to some earlier historical period. Here I am imagining a return to the Gospels and/or a return to the old Testament itself. So there has long been a profoundly historical aspect of Christian history. Maybe it is always been an historical religion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
