Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony


    RevisedI once read a book that I enjoyed so much I immediately read it again. On second reading I was no longer seeing trees walking, but realised I was learning to see into some of the depths of human experience, the glory and the anguish, the cosmic and the tragic. Except it wasn't so much seeing, as listening, and allowing remembered sound to ignite my imagination as I read words of explanation, suggestive and serious and transforming. With mind aflame, the ideas and visions took hold in the mind as I listened to this piece of music yet once again, but doing so having read an exposition of the piece by someone who had heard, and seen, and written, and whose words had opened windows, which opened vistas, and so I began to begin to understand.

    All of that reads as pretentious and contrived waffle, perhaps. It will sound even more so when I say that I don't remember the title of the book, nor the author, nor do I still have it. I don't know where it went, and it is one of the few lasting regrets I have in my life with books that I have been unable to recall the details that would let me revisit it. And 35 years later I do an Amazon search with no success.

    It was about Beethoven's nine symphonies. I had begun to listen seriously to Beethoven in my 20's, and I can even remember reading the book in my study, in Partick in Glasgow, on a sunny day, probably around 1978. The chapter that jolted me awake expounded the Fifth Symphony. That piece of music can cause problems with the other folk in our house because it has to be played with the volume appropriate to a work expressing in symphonic form controlled rage, looming tragedy, dignified lament, blazing triumph and fate defied rather than deified.

    The book was like an essay on psychological archaeology, a careful sifting through layers of social, cultural and personal experience, to discover clues to the complex potency and spiritual impetus which was released by Beethoven into the composition process that gave birth to his Fifth Symphony. That I lost the book, I regret, and still as I write this, I feel its absence, and puzzle at my carelessnes. But. All is not lost.


    BeethovenEvery time I play the Firth Symphony I listen for some of the clues which gave birth to ideas, emotions and inner visions those years ago. So I have just ordered a new book, The First Four Notes. Beethoven's Fifthy Symphony and the Human Imagination. No it won't be the same book, but maybe it will further enrich what for me is epiphanic music, eye-opening, life enhancing and mind expanding. It's a celebration of one of the most famous musical openings in Western Music, and a recpetion history of the influence of the Fifth across Europe and beyond. I'm not qualified as a musician, I don't play an instrument, but if these significant deficits can be overcome I'll write a review of this book when I've read it.

  • Best TV for Ages: Simon Schama: The Story of the Jews


    IndexSimon Schama is a genius. But that's not his greatest gift. There are few broadcasters whose erudition translates so beautifully into education by conversation, learning by contagious passion, and for once a creative balance between scepticism and faith, or to put it in other terms the complementarity of an hermeneutic of suspicion and an hermeneutic of trust. The new BBC1 series on the Story of the Jews began last Sunday evening and goes for a further 4 weeks. 

    I remember doing history of the Ancient Near East, the history and religion of Israel, and a wide ranging introduction to the Hebrew Bible as part of my Arts degree at Glasgow University – there I encountered an hermeneutic of supsicion, and little patience in the classroom with trust as faith commitment. I revisited some, but not much of that material in my theological education, this time in a College where trust and faith commitment were part of the hermeneutical process. Of course this was without ignoring or demeaning the gains from critical scholarship, with respectful practice of a disciplined critical and historical analysis of text, culture and context, and as part of a multi-disciplinary subject-field that was diverse and required an approach to learning we would now call integrated.


    Torah-scrollSo this first episode was a treat. From the sceptical reflections on the absence of hard histoirical, archaeological evidence for the Exodus, to the sequence of family scenes at Passover celebrated in Schama's own household, to the ecstatic and passionate love for Torah, for words and for reading and for the scrolls, that is utterly characteristic, essential, to Judaism – this was wonderfully captured in the scenes at the synagogue. This is superb television; more than that it is a first class education at an accessible level in what it means to be a people of faith, albeit a faith diverse, historically rooted in change and continuity, and that continuity despite repeated persecution measurable on a scale stretching from ridicule to the Holocaust. 

    I don't always agree with some of the premises, or conclusions of the programme, but that is only judging by the first episode. We will wait and see what is still to come. But I look forward to sitting down with time and attentiveness in what is a master class in contemporary education that aims at heigtened awareness of issues, balanced provision of information, posing of questions that compel reflection rather than make-do answers, and that brings a world different from mine alive, with sympathy, insider knowledge, humour and Schama's geuine greatness as a scholar whose learning elicits admiration, and invites engagement with his world of thought.

  • Three Signs of an Ungrateful Mindset – and a New Approach to Mission 🙂

    I've begun to notice unmistakable signs that the world is getting worser and worser.

    You go to park in the supermarket bay and someone has abandoned their trolley because it would be a life threatening inconvenience to take it to the trolley bay.

    A litter control executive at the roundabout is on a pair of steps using a litter grabber to reach into the high bushes and retrieve plastic carrier bags flapping like ripped sails or birdless synthetic wings.

    Jogging along my favourite path (where the yellowhammer sang for a few weeks during the summer), there are seagulls in the flowering currants – that's because someone left their half eaten fish supper, complete with polystyrene tray dumped into the bushes.

    All three of these actions betray a profound ingratitude, and therefore a deeply pervasive selfishness. No, I'm not a grumpy old man, nor a disillusioned moralist, nor an anachronistic Pharisee, nor someone whose primary research is into other people's bad habits. The connection between selfishness and ingratitude is confirmed if you consider: having had the money to fill the trolley with food, and the convenience of wheeling it out to the car, which is parked in a bay that wasn't obstructed by someone else's trolley – why? – tell me why – would you decant your food into the car and drive away and stuff the next person who needs the car bay? Sometimes I ask myself, "How can people do that?" or "What goes on in a mind that, if its lack of thought were universalised, would make the world unworkable, and community impossible?

    plastic bag litter

    How do carrier bags get snagged on trees in the middle of a roundabout? Somebody first took them from a supermarket. If you could follow the paper trail – in this case the plastic trail – all the way back from roundabout, to household or car, to shop – somebody somewhere was careless, or couldn't care less. Unsightly on a roundabout, carrier bags are deadly near animals, in rivers and especially the sea. These are all places from which we get food. So the trolley and the carrier bag are reasons to be grateful – glad and thankful that we have the money, the food the transport and the security not to be hungry. Would we be more careful if we were more grateful?

    Which brings me to the half eaten fish supper, the waste of food, the messing up of the countryside, and the thought once more – what actually goes through a mind at the point of jettisoning food and rubbish where someone else will have to clean it up? I know, it's a quaint slightly daft question, but, how easy woulod it be to throw food away if we had first said Grace and thanked God for it; or if we thought that the world is gift, responsibility, its beauty to be  nurtured, its life to be respected, its health to be protected?


    DSC00561Amongst the important practices of Christian witness is embodied demonstrable gratitude, a disposition of thankfulness, an evident awareness of life as blessing, a carefulness and carefreeness with food that both relishes its taste and respects its necessity – for us and for everyone else.And not only gratitude – because out of gratitude flows generosity, which is fatal to selfishness!

    Returning the trolley is an act of consideration for the community; abandoning it is one more act of community corrosion.

    High profile litter is really a waving of our carelessness in our faces, a symbol, perhaps even a sacrament, enacting the way we waste our world.

    The calories of a jumbo fish supper would be enough to keep two people alive for another day if they could somehow be transferred digitally to refugee camps and famine areas elsewhere in this rich but unequal world, and turned back into food.

    So here's a missional question – how do followers of Jesus demonstrate in a world of abandoned trolleys, high flying carrier bags, and half eaten fish suppers, a life of grateful generosity and careful responsibility and imaginative compassion? 

    By the way, a flower like the above is a reminder of how much in this beautiful world is gift – gratuitous, generous, gratifying gift.

  • “Sing yourself to where the singing comes from…” Malcolm Guite on Seamus Heaney.

    Amongst the many tributes and obituaries to Seamus Heaney, this one by Malcolm Guite is both personal and worthy of the stature of a man who claimed no stature other than a poet.

    ‘Sing yourself to where the singing comes from’: Remembering Seamus Heaney

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  • A Day at St Cyrus Nature Reserve Studying Natural Theology….

    The St Cyrus Nature reserve is one of the best places to walk beside the sea, cliffs at the side, sand dunes rich in flaura, and if the sun is shining it's one of the brightest places to need sunglasses! The combination of sea, sand and sunlight guaranteed to challenge those sometimes persistent inner shadows.

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    The walk from the Visitor Centre to the rocks at the far end takes just over an hour if it mixes mostly brisk with occasionally desultory as you take photographs. Anyone know what this is in the pic below?

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    The shaping of sand to landscape is often on a big scale. I liked the gentle lines of the sand around this muckle great rock half way up the beach.

     

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    And from big chunks of rock to flower heads the size of petite confetti – the grains of sand give some sense of the scale.

    One of those days when you're glad the earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. Indeed.

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    And at the visitor centre the new stone for the 50th birthday of the Nature Reserve.


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  • Every Riven Thing. The Poems of Christian Wiman. Review

    My God my bright abyss

    int which all my longing will not go

    once more I come to the edge of all I know

    and believing nothing believe in this:

     And there the poem ends. And this unfinished poem is the beginning of a remarkably moving, wise and luminous book. Christian Wiman is a poet critic and a poet whose writing sometimes sounds as if each word is melded onto metal like arc welding. The image is deliberate; in his latest collection, Every Riven Thing, Wiman's poetry flashes with quite remarkable intensity, urgency and honesty in the face of human mortality.

    Product Details

     

    This is Wiman's first published collection since he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and given a future with just enough hope to make each day a gift, and each tomorrow precariously uncertain. 

    There comes a time when time is not enough:
    a hand takes hold or a hand lets go; cells swarm,
    cease; high and cryless a white bird blazes beyond

    itself, to be itself, burning unconsumed.

    Poem after poem, Wiman looks straight into the ambiguity of things and the contingency and givenness of circumstance, the fragility and tenacity of our hold on life, and tells what is seen, or not seen. What gives these poems their unsettling potency, also ironically makes them vehicles of hope and future possibility. Wiman believes in God. But forget faith as panacea, or God as postulated rescuer. This is faith rooted in a willed agnosticism about the providence and purposes of God. God is not the answer, but the question; God is not the solution, neither the problem. God simply is, but is to be trusted. There is a 'though he slay me yet will I trust him' defiance in some of these poems that carries far more authentic currency than thick volumes of so called Christian poetry. Here's a sample:

    This Mind of Dying

    God let me give you now this mind of dying

    fevering me back

    into consciousness of all I lack

    and of that consciousness becoming proud:

    There are keener griefs than God.

    They come quietly, and in plain daylight,

    leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

    My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language

    to a fear that I can bear.

    Make of my anguish

    more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

    Rarely have I read 21st century poetry that comes so close to the best metaphysical poetry of the 17th Century. George Herbert would have been proud to write that, except I doubt there was an ounce of pride in that country parson. But here is a poem that is complaint and prayer, lament and petition, human voice and words seeking divine understanding and help. It is hard to imagine a more luminous darkness than is contained in those 11 lines of a heart's suffering, having had enough.

    I've always argued that the finest poetry takes us nearer the pastoral realities of Christian  ministry than most any other literature. Reading that poem we are allowed to look inside a heart afraid to trust and afraid not to, anguished at the thought of death and holding on to hope in the God who accompanies the grief – an d we rightly take of our shoes, and kneel. This is poetic truth distilled from a courageous soul. Another poem, 'Hammer is the Prayer', which begins, 'There is no consolation in the thought of God', then works towards precisely what consolation there kight yet be, and finishes with the couplet:

    peace came to the hinterlands of our minds,

    too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.

    If I were to attempt any summary of these diamond cut poems, these two lines would have to do. They are the poet's own words, and as he goes on living, writing, fighting and working, may he know 'peace nonetheless'.

    ( This book is not reviewed for the publisher or any Journal – it's reviewed here simply because I think his work deserves to be better known.)

  • The silence of sound

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    Will purest silence

    be found in the still, deep heart

    of the greatest sound?

    Michaela osc, A Little Book of Haiku (Community of St Clare).

  • A reflection on Seamus Heaney: “Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand….”

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    For most of my grown up life I've known of Seamus Heaney, and for years now have read him and considered him a poet sage. His view of the world was shaped by memory, sharply considered experience, and critical but compassionate attentiveness to human nature. He had a keen eye for beauty and an inner radar finely tuned to detect emotional movements such as longing, sorrow, joy in embryo, and exquisite sensitivity to the chronic human hunger for transcendence frustrated by transience and human finitude.

    The death of a poet is attended by its own poignancy; a distinctive voice silenced; visionary eyes closed in unwaking sleep; ripples of words and cadences which have emanated outwards for so long, slowing, finally, to stillness; a way of construing the world which opened the eyes of many to see that world differently, but from now onwards, dependent on the poetry which first gave form and expression to his vision. What we are grateful for, however, is the large ouevre Heaney has left us. And yet the more powerful impetus to gratitude is what we have known of the poet as we read him, his humanity, individuality, and just this; the fact that he lived and found his voice, and spoke to the world, and in doing so spoke into being a richer, more complex world in which the very fact of existence, and the pervasiveness of the ordinary, and the miracle of being, challenged and challenges our superficiality, carelessness and self-absorbtion.

    So when I think of Heaney, of course the poems are obvious. But in this post I want to mention Denis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Here the poet talks frankly and revealingly about his roots, his role as poet in Irish culture, the ethical and artistic challenges he faced during the nightmare years of the Troubles, his own development as a poet and celebrity representing the highest levels of artistic achievement. And in each of the interviews, chronologically structured around his most significant published collections, Heaney opens his mind and shares from deep places the things that matter to him, the energy sources of human thought and expression. I mark many of my books as I read them, in pencil, and with my own code for easy reference later. Reading this volume again, a kind of tribute and In Memoriam for a favourite poet and fine human being, the phrase from Hebrews is confirmed, 'he being dead yet speaketh.'

    Discussing his relationship with Czeslaw Milosz he alluded to the Troubles, and his own aesthetic ambivalence and ethical dilemma as a poet: "Deep down the question about obligation in relation to the Troubles persisted. The old Miloszian challenge was unavoidable: What is poetry that does not save/ Nations or people?"  Reading Heaney's prose there is a passionate exposition of poetry as a transformative gift which articulates human experience from anguish to zeal and all else in between, including love and hate, violence and peace, grief and joy, loneliness and community, despair and hope. Poetry is neither pastime nor aesthetic luxury, its true work lies outside the academy, more likely in pubs and public libraries, and intended to change attitudes, dispositions, worldview, moral perception. Poetry sensitises human beings, offers pardigm shifts in consciousness, says in oblique fashion truths we would otherwise refuse to hear.

    "Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand, it creates a pause in the action, a freeze-frame moment of concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves". I don't know a better explanation of why it's important to read poetry. In relation to the Troubles he goes on to say "a good poem holds as much of the truth as possible in one gaze", and the call to poets in Northern Ireland  was "to hold in a single thought reality and justice."

    And finally for this post, this, reminiscing about his time as Harvard Professor: "A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can't be administered  like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance".

    Of course there are many other strands in Heaney's work – but the moral seriousness with which he took his role as, Nobel Laureate, Ireland's foremost poet since Yeats, and as academic celebrity, meant that he wrote out of deep wells, water that is living and life-giving. 

  • Seamus Heaney 1939 – 2013.

    Just heard Seamus Heaney has died.

    A great human being, poet and humane
    opponent of violence.

    Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of
    lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the
    living past".

    'I've never stopped believing that something new
    can always happen.'(Heaney)

    We need makers of newness.

    Requiescat in pace.



  • White Water Discipleship

    One of the great blessings of reading is knowing where to find those writers who speak to our condition. And within the work of a favourite writer one or two lines which say more in few words than we could say in an entire volume. Mary Oliver is a good companion just now. And the poem below speaks of many things, but particularly the risk and cost of love; the temptation to play safe; the fear of commitment; and then the reckless rushing towards joy that may only come once in your life.

    And the command, for that's what it is, to row towards the waterfall, is one of the most telling metaphors I know for the precarious risks of life's ultimate commitments. Risk aversion is the way to loneliness and diminishment in human relationships; even risk assessment betrays a caution that avoids the white water rapids in favour of drifting with the safer currents. When it comes to following Jesus, I could well hear him say, when you hear the roar and rumble and taste the mist, "Row, row for your life towards it!"

    West Wind #2

    You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap

    into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me.

    Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without

    any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me.

    Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and

    your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to

    me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent

    penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a

    dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile

    away and still out of sight, the churn of the water

    as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the

    sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable

    pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth

    and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls

    plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life

    toward it.

    ~ Mary Oliver ~