by Tom Stacey
Even if I were to know, on what compass bearing would I now adjust my route?
Use your head, Simon Chance. Stop, think.
I have set off approximately southwards, seaward in the generality, intending to return within two hours by a broad self-navigating circle … The treacher circle has slipped its noose.
So now, I am to pick up clues to the route I have come by – the confluent and dividing boar-runs, that glade made by an umbrella pine, that dark waterless gully, that forest-buried man-abandoned breccia.
Surely these half-recollected clues are recoverable to guide me back.
North, therefore, declare yourself! The sun’s obscured by atmosphere gone fuzzy and its light already failing. What hope of vantage point in this tree-smothered maze of ravines, clefts, ascents and cwms … unless I chance upon my original objective: that pinnacle Maïté as a child had looked out from above the abandoned church?
Marigold, Marigold, you were present loss, there and not there in our midst, day upon day, month upon month, year upon year. Crumbling, fragmenting. Flaking.
‘Is it true we were in Africa?’
‘Yes, my darling. Fifteen years.’
‘Why?’
‘We were doing good. Bringing light. You brought your music. I brought the God of Love. We each taught them. To sing and praise.’
‘I had a son.’
I respond with an embrace, head tilted against yours. Eyes were no longer configured to meet.
‘I had a son,’ you have repeated.
‘You know we did, my darling.’
‘Jasper. Why did he die?’
‘It was meningitis, darling. You remember, how at Fort Portal … ’
‘Samueli said it was the evil eye.’
‘You remember Samueli! But it was meningitis that took Jasper from us. In an infant there is so little anyone can do.’
‘Samueli said it was the Evil Eye. Africa’s Evil Eye.’
‘We cannot believe in witchcraft. We cannot allow ourselves to.’
‘Samueli was one of your first converts.’
‘He hadn’t fully shed his old beliefs.’
‘He said it was the pygmies’ revenge for your going among them. And something I did wrong.’
‘You know quite well it was nothing but meningitis. My pygmies sought no vengeance, had nothing to avenge. Let’s not go over it.’
I clutch you: you pull away.
‘I just want to go home.’
You are for ever packing and re-packing to go home. To tell you we are at home only serves to rile you. This lost inner home of yours is never locatable. A uterine home, a foetal home. ‘One day soon,’ I have learned to respond.
There is no call to pack for the womb.
‘Is it true my parents are dead?’
‘I fear so, darling. Thirty and twenty years ago respectively – your Dad and your Mama. You forget. We all forget.’
‘Nobody told me. I have never belonged here. Ever since I have been here I have felt so ill.’
The dread litany.
Daemons had always circled you, your familiar Eumenides always kept you in their gyre. They were circling even when you and I clung man-and-wife in shared endeavour and intent, in the foothills of Ruwenzori and in the equatorial forest. As I let in the light of God’s love and you were at work ‘doing the humanity thing’, your demons circled.
Give love and love will do its work. This was my precept. God knows it’s in me still.
You could never forgive Africa for Jasper’s going. To you it was always the sacrifice of Jasper to Africa – to my very vocation in Africa. Like Isaac’s sacrifice, but un-aborted, no entangled ram is substituting my boy. So went our firstborn, our only son. The twins were never compensation, were they? – paired girls conceived unwittingly by grief.
What is cannot compete with what might have been. You resented the twins’ arrival for breaking in on your mourning. When, soon, you were serenading them with your inventive fiddle, the serenades were half-lament. I do not know if the quality of love is deepened by lamentation or clouded, or both of those. I caught my breath. In the forest they were to listen to your fiddle round-eyed, agape, half-circling you in wonder at the inwardness evocable from all men’s depths and flowering as melody.
For all this I could not but love you. Yet such a gift of music had its own dark double which swung you out of the light of your creative gift, out of levity and hope into depths where none could reach you. The gift and its black hole. Your Janus-genius was to conduct you by pathological descent into dementia. Entering there, my old love, stunned by fog, how you scurried in panic to my side! – to cling to whatever remained recognisable to you in me. So began my own bereavement, in the days before any coherence of your fragments was gone and nothing remained but fragments, in a void defined by one woman’s ability to munch, evacuate, and breathe.
Hark me now, Marigold, who’ve left me bereaved of grief. I invoke you as flit spirit. Dante Alighieri and I devise our beliefs like artists. Cross back, Marigold, out of purgatory or paradise or hell, cross back to hear me, how religion is our loftiest art, how we leap dimensions, populate infinity with finitude, making finitude holy, whole-ly. You did it with your fiddle, Marigold, improvising to our twins and Bantu villagers and supremely to our primal fellows in the primary forest of ancestral heritage. I fill my conjured heaven with the Company of Angels like the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire (would that there were birds here, just a few spared by the Var peasantry, by each season of massacre). You remember, Marigold, how I was an Angel at our first encounter, one of Newman’s angelicals in the chorus of Gerontius’ Dream and you minstrelling among the second fiddles in the Royal College band.
‘People don’t die like that,’ you comment, meaning Old Man Gerontius.
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s Christian make-believe,’ you retort, putting down your teacup. There is a 20-minute break in our rehearsal, at Holy Trinity, along the road from the Royal College.
‘This is the best of me, Elgar wrote on the score.’
‘The score’s marvellous,’ you concede.
‘Well then, let’s let go into it.’
‘I do, don’t worry. But nobody dies that way - compos mentis, faculties intact, all stations go for some other world. We don’t buy it, Simon. These days.’ From behind the pure exquisite forehead and the freckles peeps the atheistical socialist. You had been watching your father go, at 59, racked and disarranged, in terrible protest. Christians are to blame for being alone in not having to deny death. It irritates you.
‘If I seem to go along with your Christianity it’s for the music.’
‘For the music it inspires,’ I propose.
‘Inspires … provokes … ’
We had properly met only the previous week and, though attracted, wary. Willing nothing, I had seen in you a woman of unconscious allure scarcely awake to her body. A perversity drew you to me; the incongruity of a Christian toff with his own sense of musical adventure. Your response is aggression masking timidity.
‘Not,’ I put it to you, ‘for the deeper music they both draw upon? Both the holy gospel and Elgar’s or Pergolesi’s urge to compose at all cost?’
My church choir’s sopranos and altos are doing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater next, you among them.
I have pulled you up because you aren’t sure whether the ‘deeper music’ has validity in the Marxist rotes you’ve been reared in. Behind the freckles and an awaiting mouth you are in panicky alternation between defiance and deference. An iconic public school and Oxford are enough to stir rooted resentment. For my part, musical gifts like yours in one so feminine make me catch my breath. In these few days of acquaintance, you’ve not held tight to what your Dad would require of you, which is to class me as a spoilt Fauntleroy cushioned by a theistic credo long outdated. You’ve been snared by a gravitas in me. Now you’re questioning my question about the deeper music, and weighing up a notion as implausible as a coupled
origin for a will to make music and a will to worship God.
‘Music and divinity go arm in arm,’ I follow.
‘There’s no indication Jesus was musical.’
‘Contrary Mary.’
‘ – gold,’ you append, opening your eyes. They penetrate, those eyes. This is our first real encounter. ‘What made you a parson?’
‘I’m a curate, not parson. An inferior species.’
‘A parson in embryo … ’
‘To hatch in Africa.’
‘Really? So you’ve taken the pledge. Or should I say, plunge.’ Boldness bucking the shyness.
‘Plunge,’ I confirm.
‘Why?’ – with eyes challenging.
‘I had a summons.’
‘Just like that. Voices … ’
I am half-mocked.
‘Can a self-respecting woman sing the Stabat Mater believing nothing?’
‘I can sing a poignant story. Pergolesi believed; that’s hard to doubt. But he was dying.’
‘So if one’s dying one is liable to delusion? And what about the monk who wrote the words … ’
You make a moue.
‘It seems a peculiarly tenacious poignant story,’ I suggest.
‘And peculiarly improbable.’
‘It makes for faith.’ I let a little silence speak. ‘Like dying Pergolesi’s.’
At the Royal College up the road, intending to compose, you are effortlessly versatile, yet pull against the dissonance and serialism they have you students venerate if you’re to be performed.
Now the dark eyes gimlet me, with calculated pity for this Christ-obeisant son of privilege. Yet I perceive a plea for recognition. You have fallen for me. In a moment’s loneliness the plea has caught my heart.
‘What is there for you Christians to tell out, Simon Chance?’
You begin to list them. Praise and thanksgiving and adoration. Sorrow and contrition. Serenity and comfort. Ah – entreaty. Four modes and moods.
You have numbered them on your fingers. ‘The actual words scarcely matter. It can be done almost as well in vocalise. I grant you there are Masses which are masterpieces. But of music, not dogma. If there’s a Dies irae, as a rule it’s theatrical bombast.’
Faith, I remind, and you frown. ‘The compositions wouldn’t otherwise have happened.’
‘Not invariably. Janacek. Brahms … Agnostics.’
‘Gripped by the same relentless conundrum of Being. Being confronted by its opposite.’ You narrow at me. ‘Nullity,’ I add, ‘confronted no less by Brahms or Janacek than Bach or Pergolesi.’
You have softened into attentiveness.
At the Proms up the road we were soon to hear, first, Bruckner’s Third Symphony: I come out in stunned certainty of the transcendental majesty in all creation – as do you too. Next night we hear Berlioz’s Te Deum with a choir of 400 and the mighty organ and vast orchestra: you emerge more convinced than ever that Man has made up the whole religious thing.
Then one evening we are just down the road in my church on Prince Consort Road. I have you by myself in that exaggerated space, with its soaring windows and all the aristocracy of heaven flamboyant on a gilded reredos in full relief behind the altar. We are so small and momentary, I in my cassock with a Eucharist to conduct in ninety minutes and you in gingham but of blue like a gingham virgin. The church’s silence in the heart of the metropolis is overwhelming. You’ve let yourself love me despite yourself: that I recognise – despite what you’ve been brought up to suppose, that ours is the post-Christian era, religion irredeemably discredited, a fomenter of wars, disseminator of obscurantism, opium of the people. Obedience, Chastity, Poverty! Absurd injunctions for a modern-day unshackled socialist. For you to love such a thing as me is yet another dialectical fragment due for miraculous synthesis …
The church waits in utter silence, we two negligible parcels of live warmth side-by-side in the front row of fixed seats below the marble chancel.
At length I murmur, ‘Faith is encountered in the desert.’
You quote your recitative: ‘A voice crying in the wilderness … ’
‘John is meeting the silence … and listening again. Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, John.’
I let our own silence speak. Are you gazing up at the figure dead centre tortured on its cross … or frowning at it?
‘At the crux of that cross,’ I tell you, ‘there is nothing. That’s the significance of the cross. That crux is nullity.’
‘Nullity, Simon.’ The word becomes echo.
‘The still point of the turning world. But there’s a body on it which moments before was alive and in appalling pain. Now nothing. In a little while it will be alive again. The world will have changed.’
I come back out of our silence. ‘We people of Christianity work our own paradox. It is an even grander dialectic than that of Doctor Marx and Herr Engels.’
‘There’s a joker in your pack.’
‘Eternity, yes. Now and eternity. The fundamental polarities without dimension. All or Nothing. Having nothing, possessing All. We oscillate between the polarities. Jesus is our synthesis of a kind. He gives Now the substance of Eternity.’
‘The missing quark,’ you contribute.
‘Jesus is an historical figure. But his substance lives on as Love which itself has no substance. Marx didn’t deal in Love. Love plays no part in his ideology, in what he put value on, set store by. I would put it to you that none of the things men and women and children and you and I truly value has any part to play in the Marxist dialectic.’
‘Love, you say … ’
‘Love, and art, and worship. Loving. Creating. Praising and praying. What else do we live for in the context of our existence? Love, art and worship, merging, interchanging. You compose, I praise.’
Your eyes are fixed on the altar screen and its laden cross. I persist as gently as I know how. ‘They’re all economically meaningless, those three. A good Marxist will reduce Love to the reproductive imperative and the primal requirement to protect the young for the survival of the species, Music and Art to some pleasure principle – the entertainment industry. Worship is of course an opiate. Was it a pleasure principle that had Beethoven in all but total deafness wresting from himself his last quartets?’
‘Beethoven was compelled to keep on composing.’
‘Precisely. Compelled. So are you. What compels you?’
At Holy Trinity with our sublime acoustic we are soon to perform the Missa Solemnis, late Beethoven. I sense alarm in you. You want to answer but the question has you cornered. It is I who venture: ‘If I were to allow myself to love you, Marigold, it would be because you in your music are probing for the truth. Are inwardly compelled to. That’s what all art is about: probing for the truth. And all worship likewise. Letting self go into this truth. Losing the self. Think back to that Bruckner,’ I say. ‘You were lost in it.’
Your silence is affirmatory.
So I follow, ‘We are never so much ourselves as when we lose ourselves.’
My adage came to me in the sublimity of another’s arms those few years earlier. Since then I had only touched such self-loss in my vocation for the priesthood. Self-loss in God. Yet the discovery of that truth had been by the flesh: I acknowledge as much even at that moment. In another’s bed, at Oxford.
‘Losing oneself … ’ you echo.
‘That is the treasure. The paradoxical pearl. Of great price.’
We stay in silence.
‘In worship,’ I venture, ‘in music, in any art … ’
‘In love,’ you say. You have already confessed to loving me.
‘So I also think. These three.’
‘They are linked, then.’
‘For sure. But the custodian is always the creator, whether or not acknowledged. Janacek considered himself a non-believer. All right. Yet his most inspired work was a Mass.’
The alarm in you has flit. Into the ensuing quies enters a recognition one of another without boundaries: … as
in the exposition of fine music a long-expectant rest precedes recapitulation of all that has been opened up so far.
At length you ask: ‘Am I to love you in that custodianship? Like Janacek’s?’
You tilt a sandy head against the arm that has slipped round you. We are flagrant in that front pew in my lordly edifice, each of us with Martha tasks to be doing, the cassocked chaste seducer and his liberated virgin.
You sharply raise your head. I can tell what’s coming: ‘You can’t expect me to have faith in the divinity of Jesus.’
‘The word “divine” isn’t in your vocabulary, is it? In your music it’s unspoken.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean, Simon.’
‘The sense of wonder – that’s divine. Your music has it.’
‘Wonder,’ you whisper.
‘Which releases the spirit. What Christians call the Holy Spirit, it engages the whole. The spirit is movement that flits or swirls or scuttles between the polarities. And simultaneously, presence of Christlikeness.’
‘Are you talking sense?’ How hard and harsh.
How harsh. ‘Don’t blame words for their limitations.’
‘What do you mean, engage the polarities?’
‘Reconcile.’ Then a better word. ‘Marry,’ I say. ‘Life and death. Nothing and all. Now and eternity.’
‘The still point,’ you give me back.
How you yourself do swing.
‘The still point of our turning world. Crux of the illimitable figure-of-eight’ – I trace it in the air – ‘pivoted at the non-existent ego-point between the conscious and the unconscious. Both immeasurable open loops, the spirit at the gateway. As at Pentecost.’
‘And they spoke in tongues.’
‘As reported. You and I are talking prose. Peter and his friends at Pentecost had broken into poetry. In Luke’s record of Peter’s address to the assembled crowd were no fewer than six quotations from the Torah, all passages of poetry – the Psalms and Joel and Nehemiah and Samuel. The sheer sound of the recollected poetry was inspiring them. They were infused with how the inherited texts were authenticating their own astonishing news of the death and resurrection and what that must mean for mankind. They had been so long pent with what seemed inexpressible. Now they were literally inspired, and all those listeners from Cappadocia to Ethiopia who’d have had some acquaintance with the Semitic language group and its rhythms and inferences and colourations, picked up the meaning of what they were hearing. Some supposed they were drunk. Certainly they were drunk with their own exhilaration at what they had discovered, like those drunk with love. They had discovered indeed eternity in the now, all in the nothing, sanctity in the profanity of human love. They’d let go and were flying. Like a composer in full flood – Schubert, Wagner … that is the Holy Spirit, who spake by the prophets and the poets and the composers. Like you.’