Wednesday 28 August 2013

A Massive Human Heart

Song of the Sea God

by Chris Hill


 Jill realised that she had been longing for something like this all her life.

C.S Lewis, The Last Battle


 

The figure of Antichrist, in Christian apocalyptic literature, is based on the idea of a parody or simulacra - a fake or ersatz Christ, rather than some crude and blatant advocate of old-school evil. The 'beast' of the Book of Revelation, for example, cuts a semi-stylish figure, performing miracles and dazzling the kings of the world. You could definitely imagine the media crafting plausible arguments for his rule.

The most difficult art to master, it often seems, is that of discernment. How do we learn to differentiate between true and false saviours - between good and evil, and right and wrong? We live in a complex, rapidly changing, highly mediatised world, where the lines between appearance and reality are becoming increasingly blurred. 'Fair is foul and foul is fair', as the Weird Sisters chant to Macbeth, shortly before his own spiral into tyranny and embrace of old-fashioned evil.


 


Whether John Love, the chief protagonist of Chris Hill's novel, Song of the Sea God (Skylight Press, 2012) is good or evil is something the author skilfully leaves in the balance. We are shown both sides of this charismatic visionary and healer - the inspirational and the destructive - but we are not told what to to think or how to make up our minds. The writer knows it is not as simple as that - not as clear cut. Human beings are creatures of the deep in so many respects - many-sided, multi-layered and, when it comes to it, fundamentally and inexplicably mysterious. This is a book very much at home with that mystery. 

John Love - like the Irish sea god, Mananaan - arrives from the ocean. He comes in a storm and brings a storm in his wake. The dour, unimaginative, but safe and familiar routine of the novel's island setting is spectacularly shattered. No-one can quite piece together an understanding of what his ultimate goal might be - why he expends so much time and energy in such a wind-strewn, rain-lashed, God forsaken milieu - or what he hopes to gain by healing the sick, smashing statues and storming civic buildings.

John Love fills a gap. That's the key. That's how he gains a following. He speaks directly, without mediation, to the buried, half-forgotten, archetypal core within Hill's characters and also, by extension, within ourselves, the readers."He made me think about gods," says Ken Naylor. "The possibility, I mean. I hadn't thought about that in years." That's how Love wins a foothold in our minds. He reminds us of who we used to be - our lost potential and the hopes and dreams we invested in life and the world when we were young - the future stretching out like a magic carpet or the parade of kings that drives Macbeth mad.




"How full we are of watchfulness and need," meditates the narrator. "How desperate for something to fill the emptiness which has no name, which cannot be expressed. That longing."

Song of the Sea God unfolds in this gap, this emptiness. What recurs over 213 pages is the beating of a massive human heart - a sustained, compassionate and humourous meditation on what it feels like to be human, how we let our lives lose their shape and tautness, but how also - deep down where it matters - we never surrender or let go of the hope for redemption and a new beginning:

"We all need miracles I know, and even a little shabby one will do if it serves us. We drift through our lost lives, shoeless and alone, looking for something, as if hunting was, in itself, enough."

All that remains for us readers, perhaps, is to learn to channel and direct that hope and longing in a harmonious rather than a destructive fashion. In the words of the old song - it doesn't have to be this way:

"It brought wonder, it brought strangeness. There can be things you don't realise you need until you get them. Then you find out you have been yearning for them all along."


 




Wednesday 7 August 2013

Trouble at the Top?

Pope Francis and Mikhail Gorbachev

 Odin descended to the Underworld, seeking counsel from the Norns - those wise and ancient seers - regarding the last day, the great battle and the twilight of the gods.

Roger Lancelyn Green: Tales of the Norsemen

  


Watching Pope Francis give his impromptu press conference on the plane last week, I found myself thinking; "haven't we been here before?"The parallels, after all, are striking: a charismatic leader taking the reins after a long period of perceived 'stagnation', a new openness (Glasnost) in terms of communications and relations with the media, a re-structuring (Perestroika), and 'cleansing of stables'. We also have a reaching out towards constituents possibly disaffected by the former 'regime', rapturous welcomes overseas, plus a small but powerful cadre of irritated conservatives (see comments below various Catholic Herald blog posts).




The chief difference I can see between the Pope and Mikhial Gorbachev is that Francis enjoys  substantial grass-roots support within his own 'nation', a popularity which the final General Secretary of the Soviet Union' always lacked. The potential downside for the Pontiff is that his previous 'General Secreatary' did not die (unlike Konstantin Chernenko before Gorbachev), but only retired. Benedict XVI is alive and in situ, available as a theoretical, if unlikely, rallying point for disgruntled traditionalists.


 


When the conservative coup to oust Gorbachev failed in August 1991, pretty much all of us thought, "Great, thank goodness we're not going back to the Cold War and the days of Brezhnev and Andropov." But by Christmas Day, the Soviet Union (of which Gorbachev was supposed to be the steward) had gone - a ghost state fit only for the history books. How exactly that happened, and why, remains one of the greatest, and most mysterious, questions of our time.






Thursday 1 August 2013

The Burning Torch

William Golding's The Spire


My theatre comes out of obsession. Obsessions are always dangerous. If I wasn't obsessive about the theatre, I could be obsessive about bombs or killing people.

Steven Berkoff




This book can be read and enjoyed by everyone, but if you are an artist of any kind you will particularly relate to the themes Golding develops across twelve complex, challenging, imagistic chapters. This is a story of obsession, of single-pointed focus, and the determination, bordering on madness, to make the vision real - to render it in flesh and blood - no matter what the cost to yourself or those around you.

Fortunately, most of us involved in creative activity don't go to the extremes Dean Jocelin does with regards to his spire. But then again, no-one I know (certainly not myself) has yet felt called to erect a four-hundred foot tower and spire on top of a building without foundations. Very few, surely would possess the imaginative flair to conceive of such a thing, let alone the chutzpah and the daimonic intensity to push ever upwards, higher and higher - projecting our will into the sky - when lives are lost and our very sanity is called into question.




There are, of course, several explanations we could posit to account for Jocelin's creative mania: sexual, psychological, etc. Plausible on their own levels, none of them - together or singly - engage with the real heart of the matter - the ongoing miracle of the spire's continued existence.

Golding was, for many years, a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury Cathedral Close. The Spire is believed to be based on the actual construction of the Cathedral tower and spire in the early fourteenth-century. At that time no-one knew that the Cathedral was situated above a rare geological formation, allowing the building to bear the extra weight despite its lack of deep foundations, This, perhaps, is the most convincing rationalisation of all, yet how was Jocelin to know of it? Where did his sheer, bloody-minded, uneducated faith that the building would hold both tower and spire come from?





Golding, throughout, refuses to spare us from the appalling human cost exacted by the spire's construction. But despite, or maybe because of all this, Jocelin's inspiration still stands today:

Has it fallen yet?
Not yet, my son.

This is where we begin to engage with the questions that really matter. Where, in our lives, do we locate meaning, reality and truth? In grand imaginative visions or in our daily interactions with the men and women around us? Does one rule out the other or can there be room for both?

When Jacob wrestled with that mysterious figure at the Jabbok (Genesis: 32.22) and asked the name of his adversary, he was given his own new name instead - Israel - and with it a blessing. Through all the machinations of his ego and all the horrors his vision engenders, Jocelin learns to see at last - to see reality as it truly is - not the shadows and simulacra of his own projections. One might say that he has earned the right to it. So, all being well, will we all. In the words of Berkoff again, that bullish contemporary theatrical obsessive:

I want to keep the fire going. I haven't done anything yet - I'm still scratching the surface. The more you do, the more fire you have. Keep the torch burning. That's the obsession.