The Rite of Spring as Reawakening - The Ballet Joffrey Reenact A Powerful 20th Century Pagan Ritual

Dance is perhaps the earliest and most potent form of magical ritual. The body has its own knowing and its own power; the highest spiritual power and wisdom are contained in the darkest and warmest depths of our physical form. In our very genes perhaps, or even deeper in physical forces as yet unknown to science and deriving life from the core of the Earth itself.

The first 3 minutes of the video above are famous introductory music, after which something revolutionary occurs. Do dip in, even if modern classical music or dance are not your 'thing'. It is worth it.

From 1911-1913 three of the world's greatest geniuses united to change culture and as it proved, modern society for ever. They were Russian: Russia has always had more than its fair share of geniuses. Commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, the composer Stravinsky, the choreographer Nijinsky and the artist Roerich collaborated on the ballet The Rite of Spring which caused a riot on its performance in May 1913.

As indicated by the title, this was a balletic presentation of a pagan ritual. There was great interest in ancient Russian paganism at this time - Roerich's paintings and ethnographic investigations had made him an expert in this field and the natural choice for stage and costume designer.

Stravinsky's score changed classical music for ever and indirectly affected all later music. In short, Stravinsky invented modern 'atonal' music; for the first time, music made deliberate, systematic use of discord, harshness and volume. But the real mystery of Stravinsky's score is that it is utterly rhythmic. The whole of Christian classical tradition had been based on harmony and melody, with rhythm taking a subsidiary and essentially 'polite' role. And while rhythm lived on in dance music like the Waltz, or in military bands, Stravinsky - seemingly out of nowhere - rediscovered the raw power of rhythm. His use of percussion and cross-rhythm and irregular metre brought classical music back to contact with the ancient shamanic powers preserved in African music. In fact whether Stravinsky knew this or not, the Russian or Mongolian term 'shaman' was to become a global signifier of the primal magic of the drum. Stravinsky restored the groin and legs to classical music.

So, Stravinsky's score was utterly shocking to the culture of 1913. Yet is was so influential - by far the most innovative piece in the history of classical music - that it merely sounds beautiful and classic 100 years later. Our ears have grown used to the balance of harmony and discord and to the power of cross rhythm. Stravinsky's sensibility was normalised through hundreds of lesser classical composers trying to be 'shocking', through Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, through film soundtracks, and a subtle influence on Jazz and avant-garde Rock.

The great dancer and choreographer Nijinksy did something even more extraordinary. Faced with the challenge of choreographing a pagan ritual, he had to throw away the pretty European ballet of the French schools and reinvent ritualistic dance. In doing this, he returned to primitive Russian forms of folk dance. These will have been just as shocking to audiences as Stravinsky's music. Instead of the fluid but etiolated ballerina, seemingly lifeless below the belly, Nijinsky had his dancers perform jerking violent movements and archaic circle dances emphasising contact with the earth and sky. The finale of the Rite where the maiden dances herself to death as a sacrifice is an extraordinary tour de force unlikely to be equalled.

Yet this vital aspect of the Rite was largely forgotten until 1987 when the Ballet Joffrey, having obtained access to reconstructions of Nijinsky's original choreography, performed the first true recreation of the Rite of Spring since its initial performances. Fortunately, a film of this production is available on YouTube and it is absolutely essential viewing for all musicians and magicians, and doubtless is fascinating if extraordinary for dancers.

The third contributor is probably the most overlooked. Nikolai Roerich is best known in esoteric circles. He toured the world painting a vast number of outstandingly beautiful canvasses, focusing on mountain-scapes and spiritual subjects, particularly of Tibet and India. His love of ancient spirituality and landscape inspired him to a comprehensive detailed stage design encompassing every detail. One of the joys of the Ballet Joffrey's reconstructions is the recreation of Roerich's original costumes - some of which can be seen represented in paintings like that above. Nikolai Roerich and his wife Helena were cocreators of a new form of Yoga - Agni Yoga - which they claimed was received from the Mahatma Morya. And primal spiritual power and beauty course through Roerich's paintings and the communications Helena receive.

Most religion of recent millennia, and most magic, has been overly 'polite'. Music and dance have been exiled to the low arts of the dance hall or the rites of the underprivileged. Yet that is where power and release lie.

Students or followers or pagan religions; those enthusiastic about the ancient mysteries of Atlantis or Lemuria; devotees of Green spirituality. Watch this: for this is where the powers of your movement were unleashed. Everything turns on whether these liberated forces destroy civilisation or, making peace with their younger successors like thought and individuality, join in wholeness and reconciliation.

Ruthlessness or Weakness - Which is Which?

True power never crucifies others. True strength would rather take a burden on itself than put one on another in moral weakness. But it is a hard road. Do not seek power if your contentment and flattering self-image is the most important thing in your life!

It is a cliche to say that bullies are cowards. It's not really true, though it may make a traumatised child feel better briefly, while mummy says it (along with other implausible slogans about 'words can never hurt me'), before they go back to school for another day's torment. But it is almost true from one perspective. Let's see:

There is no doubt that we live in a post-Christian era. For two thousand years, Christians were exhorted to 'turn the other cheek', love those that hate them, and generally allow themselves to be crucified and beaten up. True, the majority of people throughout history never followed this code, except for a few genuine saints or pious simpletons and a very small number of people so spiritually strong and superior that they had no need to retaliate. However, we were at least expected to feel guilty for our 'sins', our failure to keep the code. We had something to confess, not just to avoid legal reprisal, but through our conscience.

This was a huge potential advance - let's be honest - on the prior 'pagan' codes of Europe which enshrined concepts like vengeance and blood money and where the individual was entirely under tribal ethics. (It is amusing watching contemporary pagans trying to meld revivalist old-time religions with Christian Sunday School morals, but that is another story). But unfortunately the way Jesus' virtue was taught frequently made it a guilt-inducing mind game a true curse on the human spirit

From the 19th Century onwards, thinkers like Nietzche have both responded to and promoted a post-Christian ethos, glorifying strength, individuality and usually materialism. Despite Left-wing vanity, this is no preserve of capitalism or Thatcherism: indeed, the Left distinguished themselves by their ruthlessness perhaps even more than the Right in the 20th Century.

The playground victim finally realises that the fairy tales of meekness and niceness are lies - unless he gets 'teacher' or the 'system' on the bullies. Much of society is a matter of creating the biggest bully of all - the armed State. And after all, the peace loving monks of the Middle Ages could never have survived unless there were others who valued them and were willing to defend their lives with sword and spear. Gandhi's non-violent resistance could only have worked in a Christian imperialist context - imagine Gandhi in Tianaman Square or Soviet Russia!

For we live in the age of the torn out heart; we are all brains with robot bodies, fighting each other viciously yet meaninglessly and sometimes smiling and claiming that we love society! Or is that a bit cynical? No, because those who talk about love and freedom virtually always end up enforcing it either with social pressure or (internationally) with missiles.

As my readers will know, I take social temperatures from ordinary, banal events. For example, in politics, in commerce and personally, nobody apologises anymore. And why should they - nowadays apology is an admission of guilt. You may get sued; or in a relationship, you may get boxed in a corner as 'the offender', your sins endlessly paraded and used against you. So keep that ego good and hard. Call it an 'error of judgement' and don't apologise to the other creep!

BUT - I just can't live that way. I am the idiot who in past personal relationships, spoke better of my partners than they deserved, preserved their honour, while they did the opposite. The fool who gave endless chances; who will never cut someone dead or shut them out.

I can be ruthless with myself and unfliching in destroying parts of my life that are dead, leaving the burning remains of part of my past with nary a backwards glance. But never with people. Never say never is an ethic worth fighting for. To miss that final opportunity to put things straight, to finish on a note of harmony, to think how the other person feels. In short to forgive. To honour the days spent together - days that can never be taken back, the very fabric of your life and soul.

Is it just a musician thing, the need to move through discord to harmony? Or an inner knowledge that what is not resolved in this life must be paid for double in the next?

To return to the bully or sociopath. He can move quickly, seldom slowed down by qualms of conscience; when he is finished with you having either got what he wanted or having failed, he is finished. You no longer exist in his world. Like an impatient tourist asking for directions and then cutting off the person who stopped to help them, the sociopath only treats people as objects. Only his feelings matter and they are not so much feelings as willed intentions. He rises to the top of his profession amassing wealth and power...for a while...and to the detriment of everyone else.

We live in the age of the sociopath. Now that the sentimental falsehood of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' is believed only by the deeply naive and only taught by the simple or the cynical, we must learn to see patience, obedience, kindness, forgiveness and so on as what the Latin word virtue actually means - i.e. strength. Be gentle through great power, not weakness.

So I challenge you spiritual athletes: dare every day to risk losing face; be gratuitously vulnerable, but not in an attention seeking or egotistical way. Never avoid reconciliation out of cold hearted pride or cowardice. Think of those who have left your life, with kindness. Pick up the phone. Try again, for the hundredth time, to make peace a reality.

And you will realise that your soul is being built by this practice, memory and emotion unfrozen feeling by feeling. And you will realise that your self-image is a ropy pack of lies at best! This gives humour which in turn gives indomitable spiritual power and initiative.

Neither a masochistic saint nor a Nietzchean ubermensch, you will form the first fruits of the true Aquarian humanity, kind out of strength and character, not weakness and fear. 

Go on Go on Go on!

Killed by Attitude - Who Are You To Tell Me What To Do? said the angry fool

You see it in people's hostile, frozen faces. You see it in the way they walk and the way they shout into mobile phones as if they were arguing with their 'voices' in a lunatic asylum. Above all, you see it in a thousand Facebook memes. The endless psychotic aggression masking the paper-thin ego, that will not be told anything by anyone. "Who are YOU to tell ME what to do"? "What's it to YOU"? "You've got not right to judge me". It's a great trick that allows rage-filled people to vent and make others the problem. "What are you, some kind of Nazi"?

Next time you see an inspirational quote saying "just be who you are and f*** anyone who tells you differently" recycled in a thousand different forms, consider: what kind of society would we live in if everyone gave this attitude to everyone else all the time? Actually, it's not hard, because since the invention of the walkman in the 1980s and then the mobile phone, large numbers of people act as if they were disconnected from their fellow humans. The stance is "there is no such thing as a public place; you are in my music room, my office, my boudoir; if your meal in this restaurant is being spoiled by my kids running around, tough: I owe nothing to anyone, and if you've got a problem with that...f*** you"!!!

I travel on the London Underground every day. Frequently people sneeze and splutter. They can't be bothered to cover their mouths, because they are fiddling with an electronic device or reading a paper. London tubes are so crowded that if someone with Ebola ever boards a train, many thousands would probably be wiped out in short order, because...no one has the right to expect others to act in accordance with the germ theory of disease.

I'm writing with humour and a touch of anger, but I have to remember that all communication is 'viral'. If I rant into the void and I am doing exactly the same thing: venting, arguing with myself, displaying sociopathic lack of contact with my world. Electronic communication easily dehumanises people - the talk to voices in their head, which is why disgusting rudeness breaks out so quickly online. So greetings, sojourner, and welcome!

There was a recent news story about a shop assistant who refused to serve a customer who was talking away into their mobile phone. I always cringe when I see this common situation - the dehumanisation, the rude humiliation caused to a person serving a customer who obviously feels they are too important, in too much of a hurry to even look the assistant in the eye let alone share courteous exchange. "Just serve me and let me get on with my busy conversation and my busy life, like any other robot in my virtual life". In a cafe the other week I saw a couple on a date - the unprepossessing man was ignoring the pretty  girl while he fiddled with his phone for a good 15 minutes. I have seen a person with two mobile phones cut off a conversation with a person in front of them to start a long conversation on their phone, and then cut that person off when the second mobile rang. If someone can't see the insanity of this, I am not sure how I could explain it.

I have been in houses where the television is always on so that nobody can look at or speak with anyone else - the god of television rules all. Of course, fundamentally, we have all been programmed like lab rats to respond to stimuli. Flashing lights, bleeping phones, buzzing devices. You see people's muscles constantly twitching like malfunctioning robots, their hands hovering around their phones like some kind of addict. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

I blame religious education for this! What, my dwindling readership cries - surely that is a mad leap too far! Well, it all comes down to how Jesus was portrayed in 19th and 20th Century cheap 'Sunday school' theology. That Jesus is the ultimate petulant adolescent - criticising the Pharisees, calling everyone a hypocrite, telling people not to 'judge' and getting away with it! This image is inordinately attractive to angry preadolescents, especially boys - as youngsters we all know that all the adults are hypocrites and "who are they to judge me"! It goes down well with those who feel they have no power but would dearly love to wield power over others. The typical rebel or angry young man who one day will become the Pharisee to be hated by the next generation.

When Nonconformist Christiantity mutated into insipid liberalism and nanny Socialism so typical of the Guardian reading classes, this idea that you mustn't 'judge' anyone remained - though what it actually means is quite another matter and most people have never thought about it. What it usually means to those who snarl it is, 'I am going to do what I want and nobody is allowed to say anything against it, in fact the kind of people that might dare say something are thus proved automatically bad'. Because everyone being self-centred is virtuous, and the only real sin is asking others to limit their selfishness and show some consideration.

This developed apace in the 1960s with the Hippy emphasis on 'doing your own thing'. The unworkable but common idea that we should all think mainly of ourselves and let everyone else do the same, in the fantasy a compassionate society will come about by magic, can only lead to one kind of 'society' - a society that doesn't really exist.

But Jesus was no petulant Middle Class egotist playing at selling Socialist Worker (and I have met a few of that type over the years). His teachings about Justice and God's Law are tough medicine and one can't even begin to understand the power of his challenge to worldly authority unless one has tried a thousand times harder to live a moral and socially aware life than most of our angry toddlers ever have. We can't become as a little child until we have grown up; until then we are just - childish. And without enough adults around, the human race doesn't stand much of a chance.

So if you don't like what I've just said...f*** you!!
Only joking, my very best wishes. Learn from all things and know for yourselves. But above all, don't be too proud to hold out for courtesy.

Darling Kore - Or, Discovering Greek Myth In A Folk Song

Many of my favourite musicians were signed to Chris Blackwell's Island label. Among several I will mention the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake. Chris Blackwell was a visionary in promoting singer-songwriters at the time this musical movement was flourishing. The Beatles had popularised the idea that pop artists should write their own songs; Bob Dylan had shown that pop song could be a kind of lyrical poetry informed by folk tradition and pervaded with political and visionary meaning. Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and a thousand others then brought intimate acoustic music to a mass audience. One of the best of Island's acts in the early 1970s happens to have been my uncle Bryn Haworth, a fine guitarist and a slide guitar virtuoso who combined a solo career with a busy second strand as an in-demand session-man.

As a result I was lucky to hear some fine music as a young boy and also gained a lifelong love for the mandolin which Bryn occasionally played when not wailing the blues. One song I'm sure I liked at a young age was Bryn's countryish version of the traditional song Darling Cory, arranged in a gutsy country/folk stomp with low-strung guitars, banjo and Fairport Convention as the backing band! (Dave Mattacks' drums are particularly recognisable). Hearing this song again 30 years later I was struck by something I have observed over and over again with durable songs, particularly folk songs that stick in the imagination, as if one had always known them. As that wonderful information resource Wikipedia says, Darling Cory "is a well-known song about love, loss and moonshine". It exists in various versions. The final verse, in Bryn's version, goes

"Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow

Dig a hole down in the ground

Gonna take my darlin' Cory

Gonna lay her body down

Now she roams in the mountains

And the valley down below

The devil took my darlin' Cory

And he will not let her go

I hear him singing...singing

Students of Greek mythology will know why I almost fell over listening to this again. There is an ancient story, versions of which appear in many old tales, of a young girl who is abducted by the Lord of the Underworld. In other words, she dies. The story was already ancient by the time of ancient Greece, but in the most famous Greek version of the tale, Perspephone, the daughter of the Earth Mother Demeter, is abducted by Hades or Pluto who comes up into the meadow through a cleft in the ground and steals here away. Demeter grieves and thus the Earth stops producing food. Although Persephone was later rescued, she ate pomegranate in the Underworld which meant she had partaken of its substance. The result is that it was decreed she must spend half the year above ground and half the year below. This is why the Earth has seasons of growth and withering, birth and death.

Persephone's other name is Kore meaning Maiden. Kore is pronounced much like Cory, and attributes of Hades the Lord of the Underworld were transferred to the later Christian conception of the devil (which did not really exist in Judaism in the same way). Translating ancient Greek myth into country idiom, the Devil really did take Darling Kore away!

The story of a process of corruption which leads to a beautiful young girl being snatched away whether the Greek Kore or Darling Cory in the 20th Century folk song will not cease to haunt the imagination. Another famous example from Greek myth is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was the great musician of Ancient Greece, the original singer-songwriter guitarist, the lyre player whose music so enchanted listeners that stones moved and animals became mild. Orpheus' bride Eurydice danced through a meadow on their wedding day, but she died after stepping on a serpent. (You will remember that the serpent and the woman's foot are also linked in the Bible). Orpheus descended to the very Underworld, charmed and moved even its grim rulers and almost brought Eurydice back to life. There are multiple versions of the legend, but in the one made famous by Virgil, Orpheus made the mistake of looking back to check Eurydice was behind him, on the very brink of the return to the Underworld, and so she slipped away and this time forever.

Some early Christians were also devotees of Orpheus and there is iconography why shows the composite Orpheus-Christ motif, appropriate to the beautiful singer and mover of hearts who descended to the Underworld.

My uncle Bryn has been a born-again Christian for his entire solo career which doubtless has meant that people judge his music on these grounds. Being a Christian is not necessarily a 'career move' in the world of rock and roll! But music is a spiritual calling with its own laws. To judge the Spirit with the mind is folly, for 'the heart has reasons which the reason does not understand' - and this goes for all forms of prejudice which close the ears and the heart to the single letters of the Word revealed throughout the World. Song has its own logic which comes directly from the Spirit. Never trust an angry wordsman over one whose voice rings true. New truth comes to light with time but there are also stories that have always been told, will always be told. The journey through the Underworld through death and rebirth is one, and I will describe another song about this in a future blog, called The Cruel Mother.

The Song is Eternal and Everywhere. But do we know the Singer?

Things that make my blood boil: Anti-semitism

At the instigation of a friend this morning, I've been reflecting on the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen and, as sometimes happened, inspiration led to anger. In my professional life I work in politics. I am a public policy officer for a church, which means that I campaign on social justice issues. This never ceases to amaze me as I am an eccentric Christian with a deep distrust of the political system and of institutional religion, basically a kind of Green, New Age christian anarchist. With an anarchist's ingrained mistrust of party political rhetoric I find it hard to be self-righteous as it is so obvious that the more confident people are, the more likely they are to be wrong and the more agressively righteous and self-congratulatory, the more likely they are to be a danger to humanity. I know my feelings are very often *just* my feelings and I cannot prove I am right; I can only invite you into discussion with me.

I am not very politically-correct! One reason for this is that I notice that people who are always policing others' morals and accusing others of being 'racist' etc are very often horrible people personally, and those who go on about how much they hate 'fascists' are usually deeply supressive people who say derogatory things about the working classes in private and do not believe in democracy. I have observed this too often to believe it's a coincidence. Of course equality and social justice are infinitely worth fighting for, but just as it is often those with psychological flaws that end up ruling because of their desire to dominate, it is, ahem, not unknown for those working out their psychological problems through politics to end up as social justice campaigners. And to circulate political memes on Facebook. Legislating for 'good behaviour', policing people's thoughts and insisting that people are punished for not being nice are sad signs of a lack of faith in love and people's natural goodness. These are people who long for centralised power with which to control people's actions.

But in my line of work, not much is said about anti-semitism. One of the bizarre but often demonstrated reasons for this seems to be that not a few on the Left have a visceral dislike of Jewish people. This is covered over by the self-righteousness of 'I am a left liberal, no one is allowed to accuse *me* of racism. That is the weapon *I* use to attack *others* and silence them with'! Such people often attempt to court Muslim good-will while indulging their anti-semitic inclinations, without seeing that the problems faced by Muslims are those that have been faced by Jewish people. Often it doesn't take long for generalised discussion of 'Jews' to lead to disturbing comments about wealthy banking elites, international conspiracies, and before you know it you are listening to the (fake) Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other neo-medieval horrors.

Anti-semitism! To me it is the most inexplicable virus of the mind in human history. Left-wingers often misuse the word 'prejudice': for the grievances and dangerous grudges between different kinds of people are often not prejudice, but rather the raw anger of the unsophisticated, bad feeling, the desire for vengeance and redress that must eventually turn into reconciliation. But anti-semitism is - apart from its wrong-headed bigotry that has become genocide on a scale of millions and is never to be forgotten - a genuine prejudice. Europe has been served by Jewish people far more than it has served them. So this is a sign of a kind of madness beyond even malice as ordinarily understood.

The very religion of Europe's last 2000 years is a Jewish revelation - or heresy depending who you ask. And yet the history of Christianity is the history of marginalising the Jewish background to Christianity. Spiritual Christianity is incomprehensible without the Kabbalah and indeed the Talmud and Midrash. To get a genuine feeling for Jesus, listen to the Canadian Jewish (Buddhist!) poet Leonard Cohen, especially songs like Suzanne. Or read the mystical writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian Sufi combining Eastern and Semitic inspiration and remember the deep shared roots of Judaism and Islam. You will find more of the spirit of Jesus there than in the professed spiritual leadership of North Europe or America. Thus will the Abrahamic faiths find reconciliation to the blessing of the whole world.

So many of the world's greatest musicians, writers, philosophers, scientists and mystics have been Jewish. In fact for my money the most talented people in the Western world have been Russians and Jews, with Russian Jews absurdly over-represented!

I do not want to talk about Nazism. But I do want to reflect on why certain people project their own soul-failings onto Jewish people. Firstly Christians: there have always been a healthy proportion of guilt-mongering, self-righteous Christians. After Hitler's holocaust, Christendom was never again going to be complacent about its 'righteousness', its assumed privilege to make others wrong, or its unacknowleged anti-semitism. So campaigning against Israel and Zionism all too easily becomes a psychological mechanism - see, Jewish people are bad (or 'bad too'); I can get away with saying this and *they* can stop making me feel guilty for being a Christian. A classic example of self-important ego inflation and megalomania being at the roots of guilt. For all Israel's problems, Jewish people have observed that Christians are particularly quick to criticise Israel for things they tolerate in other countries or indeed in their own lands. This is true.


Then there are the conspiracy theorists - ironically this trope of far-right fundamentalist paranoia has been adopted by many the Left and again it is a guilt-compensation mechanism that obscures the truth. For the truth is that a wealthy elite does indeed run the world: but it is ludicrous to suggest this has anything to do with a 'Jewish' conspiracy. Rather, materialism and power run the show, with the implicit collusion of those who use unadmitted anti-semitism to avoid seeing that is people just like them who rule the world, with a rather similar psychology indeed. It is easier to speak of Jews or paranoid delusions of 'reptilian shape-shifters' than to admit that one is envious of the global elite that control the world. And also to admit that while moaning about the Bilderberg Group, they are personally the best off and most privileged genereration that has ever lived. How easy to revive conspiracy theory: much easier than helping the poor or putting oneself to any inconvenience, or admitting that one *likes* the status quo and feels guilty.

Various archetypes and images have been projected onto Jewish people throughout history. Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew is one - but then as Jesus said 'Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay hid head'. The Jewish people before, during and after Jesus life, have generally been denied a place to lay their head. The cliched insults hurled at Jewish people - words like cunning, avaricious, insular - are actually distinguishing marks of humanity, intelligence and culture misconstrued through envy and bad faith. Those in denial of humanity or filled with self-hatred insult Judaism to insult themselves. Those who love humanity will always give the Jews special recognition for what they have given humanity. Egypt, Babylon, Ancient Greece have fallen, but the Jewish people have preserved their culture, their wisdom within their own unique identity.

Yet of all archetypes we see in Jewish history, Job stands out. Afflicted, tested, tormented, abandoned, he never loses faith nor yet does he deny a jot of his reality. Humanity is Job. And we ache for our fallen brothers and sisters, those who have fallen before reaching the Promised Land. And we love our fellow humans with whom we rejoice and suffer, live and die in this corporeal world. This compassion is spiritual yet deeply somatic, of blood, bones and skin. Our heart faints within us in expectation.

"But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
and all the rain falls down amen
on the works of last year's man"
Leonard Cohen, Last Year's Man

Shalom.

A Concert That Changed My Life Forever - Carl Nielsen's Fifth Symphony

I have never really recovered from a concert I heard in my teenage years. I hope I never will. In a world where the media mostly report war, political lies or drivel about vacuous celebrities, I think it's important to remember that there is such a thing as excellence. There are emotions such as wonder, selflessness and bliss. There are scientists, artists, explorers and mystics who catch moments of greatness, luminous and evanescent like motes of dust in a sunbeam. Like dandelion seeds floating unseen in the void. Like stars floating in the radiant darkness, blown by the lips of the Unseen. There is music that is worth living for, even dying for.

Because I ended up playing the Double-Bass, which led to playing in youth orchestras, my mother (bless her) often took me to concerts at the Barbican music hall which had and has excellent acoustics. I was lucky that I didn't own many records, which meant I frequently heard great pieces of music for the first time played by world-class orchestras. This is a rare privilege in our over-saturated age of canned music.

One evening around 1987 my mum booked a concert  featuring two 20th Century composers I had never heard of. In the first half was a strange, unsettlingly modern piece by the Hungarian composer Ligeti. At that age, I had no knowledge of 'modern' classical music, i.e. atonal or challenging sounds without melody or Romanticism. The Ligeti was ok: I didn't really get it, but my ears felt refreshed by listening to something different from the normal cliched popular favourites. We decided to give Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) ago, never having heard of him.

45 minutes later, I staggered out of the concert hall not quite able to describe what had just happened. My mother noted that she saw grown men in tears, but that they looked like 'nice men'. A couple of days later I went and bought a book about Nielsen by the leading British composer Robert Simpson, which was deeply reflective and introduced me to the idea that one can write about music as a philosophy, a code and even a reason for living. Nielsen had had this effect on Simpson - and, as I later discovered, on Sir Simon Rattle as a young boy. He is just unclassifiable - modern music as it should have been.

The 14 year old boy felt the hush descend on the audience, then a wavering, oscillating violin line. Interesting. Mysterious wind chords twined around each other. Lower strings entered, and by now we were in a new sound world. Far from strident dissonance or manipulative effects, I was hearing pure sound, pure harmony. I was enthralled. The music flowed on, utterly gripping and full of tense drama. Suddenly the mood moved towards a change to a sinister war march. The music sounded Russian, gripping, as if the composer both hated war and felt its excitement and remorseless imperative. The intensity faded and then...the most exquisite and joyful polyphony, calm, invincible and mighty, as I later read in Robert Simpson, an impossible fusion of the perfect structure of Bach and the dramatic power of Beethoven. But it had a joy and conviction all of its own. Suddenly the tension builds as the dark and sinister tendrils of music re-entered.

And then something unimaginable. The snare drum, which had played military rolls before, suddenly started improvising, deafeningly loud over the joyous, glorious and sad music. An out and out war between the massed orchestra and the snare drum led to a chaos where the drum and the orchestra were destroying yet mysteriously enhancing each other. Finally the drum was carried along with the sun radiant melody as the music died away into a wistful, desolately victorious clarinet solo, full of warmth and loneliness. It sounded like one DNA strand of music had evolved into a beautiful tree of music, fractally showing the original shoot. 

Then the second movement - in a different and bright key, full of wildly free energy, moving somewhere, forward to more glorious melody (including - to my surprise the theme tune from Star Wars, which John Williams evidently pinched from Nielsen) leading through a chilly, arch and fiendishly virtuosic section of Bach like fugal writing. Once again the tension and excitement built to the final section where I realised that I and the entire audience were utterly transfixed, floating in an altered state and held to the music until the impossibly glorious happy-sad fanfares of brass finished this unique 2 movement symphony in a blaze of light.

Over the next few days, I experienced various emotions. One was a barely articulate realisation that this symphony was about something - that its triumph included pain, that life was beyond trivial feelings of pleasant and unpleasant. Another was that this was obviously the greatest symphony of the 20th Century and why was Nielsen not better known - my first education in the inadequacies of popular and critical judgement. Later it became obvious that this was a direct response to World War One and that the gunfire like snare drum evoked the senseless horror of that war, without the usual nafness of programmatic music. When I began to study Nielsen, I realised how he used emergent tonality - rather than sticking to one key, his later music developed from one tonal centre to others, giving his music a unique sense of dynamism. He was also vastly proficient in the older techniques of polyphony and counterpoint and by blending these with his own innovations he proved that there were other ways forward for classical music than the willful ugliness and posturing of much atonal music.

I was lucky that one of my school teachers happened to have a large collection of Classical vinyl and lent me what turns out to have been one of the great recordings of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony - Paavo Berglund's 1970s recording with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I have listened to this piece many times over the succeeding 25 years and every time I still have the same reaction. Most music has an element of self-consciousness - we get clicked out of the zone by a mannerism, a sense that the player or writer is 'doing' something. It is very rare for 40 minutes of music to grip the listener from start to finish. This isn't entertainment - it is the actual, raw force of life beyond sentiment. It is life which is, as Nielsen said, inextinguishable.

My other musical revelation of that year was discovering The Beatles. An old cassette of Abbey Road lying around the house - and like Nielsen, whether you liked their songs or not, the pure sound of their music was amazing. The Avatar light of Here Comes The Sun; the dark black hole inferno of I Want You / She's So Heavy. I later realised there is a direct line between the great Classical composers who reintroduced folk modes in the early 20th Century like Nielsen, Bartok and Vaughan Williams and the 1960s phenomenon of (particularly)  British folk-pop-rock. It revolves around the interval of the 7th. Come back to my blog at a later date to hear more about my discoveries and how they relate to Eastern music.

Classical Music or Death - on hearing Francis Poulenc

Last night I went to a wonderful concert of music by the French composer Poulenc at London's Southwark Cathedral. I'll come back to the concert later, but what I really want to talk about is the pervasive effect of music in modern society. And what has been lost.

Classical music is the best thing that Western civilisation has produced - above all, it is the finest flowering of Christianity, from medieval monastic plainchant to Bach to the astonishing Francis Poulenc. For real Christianity is less about theological dogmas than about sound - The Word made Flesh worshipped through ringing sound, the choir of voices united in worship, the ecstasy of soaring to heaven on transcendent tone. In fact this goes back to the roots of European civilisation in the mysteries of Apollo and Orpheus, which is why Christ was often compared with Orpheus, the sacred musician who can charm and move all things with the music of his lyre.

Yet in England music, like so many other things, has been made a subject of class war. I owe almost everything in my life to the lucky coincidence that led to me taking up a musical instrument and discovering classical music. I have played rock and pop in my musical past, but my favourite kinds of music are folk and classical (and jazz which in many ways is an African American form of classical music). My blood boils at the idea that privileged snobbery and militant class hatred often combine to deprive British people of this wonderful, life saving gift of music. Pop music has its place, but there is just no argument - classical music is better, more important.

Listening to harmonious music positively affects the brain, and not just the brain but the soul as a whole. Learning a genuine musical instrument that makes a real sound is one of the best things a person can do for their happiness and spiritual development. Not all children take to music lessons, and forcing piano lessons on children may do more harm than good, but parents give an incalculable gift in offering the opportunity of a musical education, especially if its based on joy rather than pushy ambition.

And here's the appalling truth. Everyday, we are soaked in disharmonious vibrations. You see people listening to angry music with jarring beats, which makes them angrier. Their bodies twitch, their heart rates race. Cars play music so loud that windows rattle. Commuters with headphones on listening to music that insulates them from the ugly city - yet they become disconnected and allow the city to become even uglier.

We underrate music. It gets 'under the skin', especially repetitious music; it changes your moods, the cycles of your nervous system, your hormonal secretions. Indian yoga uses Mantra, the repetition of sacred sounds that attune yogis to divine vibrations. Many traditional peoples use drumbeats to induce trance - and because so much of modern pop music is rooted in African American traditions, rhythmic, repetitive beats with an ancient link to trance and magic have become part of our global listening experience.

Repetition and devotion to spiritual beings through changing our neurology are natural parts of our human heritage. But they can be abused. From military music used to create the desire for war to jingles to worm into consumers' brains and make them buy things they don't need. And above all the endless message of pop music - be a materialist individual, saying 'fuck you' to anyone that challenges your selfishness.

Modern pop music is mostly either repetitive and moronically hypnotic, or it is jagged paranoid and expresses and furthers urban alienation; and of course bland love songs - which are really sex songs - abound. It is hardly surprising that large numbers of people have almost no attention span, no ability to concentrate and dwindling empathy. If more people learned a musical instrument and learned to listen, crime would decrease and people's happiness and even productivity would increase. More importantly, they would be free - we are either dancing to our own tune, or being moved like marionettes on strings by the covert forces that choose what vibrations our society will be flooded in.

As a generally miserable teenager, I was lucky to play some amazing classical music in youth orchestras. One piece that changed my life was Francis Poulenc's organ concerto. Poulenc (1899-1963) was a French composer of that generation that blended modern music of the French tradition with the new atonal tendencies, as well as jazz, which had a European centre in 1920s Paris. His mercurial temperament, wonderful gift for melody, sensibility affected by his homosexuality and his rediscovery of his Catholic faith combine to make his works endlessly surprising, satisfying and refreshing, full of an endearing humour. Sometimes, as with the organ concerto, there is also tragedy and an soul-filled elegeic mood that more boring and serious composers with heavy souls cannot approach.

The City of London Symphonia conducted by Stephen Layton, did a grand job. Opening with Poulenc's engaging Les Animaux Modeles, the organ concerto closed the first half, a thrilling ride despite the challenge posed by the acoustics of Southwark Cathedral. The second half was opened by Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte, played with stately elegance before closing with the astonishing Gloria and the astonishing and beautiful soprano Elizabeth Watts.

We have become too addicted to music that makes a statement or is a narcotic for the disintegrating contemporary psyche - usually the statement is full of ego, ambition and a kind of soulless concentration on form. Witness the ruthless perfection of the dance routines that accompany contemporary pop videos. Listening to Poulenc last night my heart ached for all that Europe has lost, destroyed by the combined forces of Fascism and Communism which in fact won World War 2 and from whose reign we struggle to escape. The roots of Europe are our folk tradition, our good paganism, our good Christianity and our commitment to a society which balances the needs of the individual with the good of the community.

It is time to clean out our ears, open our hearts and refresh our souls.

The Devil Drives - Sir Richard Burton and the meaning of greatness

No, not Richard Burton the film actor and husband of Elizabeth Taylor! Most people reading this have probably never heard of Sir Richard Burton. Yet he was one of the most colourful characters of 19th Century Britain. Actually, he would probably have resented that description, having spent his early years in France and much of his later life travelling in the East. Like many another vital and driven young Englishman, he felt less at home in England with the English than anywhere else.

Soldier; master linguist who spoke 29 languages; explorer; swordsman and spy, Burton risked death as a non-Muslim in making the Hajj to Mecca in Muslim disguise and journeyed with Speke to Lake Tanganykia in search of the source of the Nile. But he is probably best known as an early translator of the Arabian Knights and of the Kama Sutra. Indeed, erotic literature was one of Burton's great fascinations and his knowledge of erotic Eastern literature and poetry unrivalled at the time.

Although he was a disreputable figure who mischievously claimed to have broken all of the 10 Commandments, Burton was patently a great man and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886, largely for his feats as an explorer and geographer, particularly in the mysterious heartlands of Central Africa. It is not uncommon for outsiders and adventurers to achieve social recognition, but Burton seemingly remained wedded to his rebel status. Regarded as 'Satanic' for his intense and intimidating appearance, his un-English respect for foreigners, his interest in the cultures of the East and his contempt for petty moralism, Burton exemplified the hidden wishes of his times, doubtless without any desire to do so. He was a great man and one has to ask why our times are so petty by comparison.

The image of the rebel is burned deep in the Western psyche. The great irony, the grit in the sand of Western morals, is that our cultural conformity is built around a rebel, Jesus. All young men think they are Jesus - or rather the Jesus they see is the great, misunderstood critic of cant and hypocrisy, the outsider who ought to be king but is too great for the pharisees and rulers. The 19th Century version of this perennial adolescent inspiration was the Romantic movement which created the image of the 'artist': brilliant, misunderstood, sensitive, so much more interesting than the rational and prudent mediocrities that surrounded him - and it usually was a him! For men of course is the added attraction that the image of the 'rebel' is often sexually attractive, a way for young bucks to show their virility and challenge the old animals. One day, of course they grow old, become the establishment; they cut their hair, only to be challenged by the next generation.

Many of the Romantics of course could indulge this stereotype because they were rich children who could dabble in poetry, even experience temporary poverty, without any real risk, in great contrast to the art of previous centuries which was either produced for patrons and employers, or as a leisure activity. Ironically, the history of Western art has been that of the creator marketing him or herself. The image of the 'lone rebel genius' was successfully updated and still lives on in the impeccably coiffeured fake rebels of pop music.

Yet this masks the fact that individuality is being eroded at remarkable speed. In fact modern media and arts are a major cause of the loss of individuality, while pretending to represent and further it. When misled by our dying arts, we are a nation of fake rebels, conformist individuals, people who know their rights yet have nothing to say.

For Romanticism on its own is all image. Lord Byron re-created the idea of the 'Satanic' individual, shocking polite society while embodying its deepest wishes. And a comparable later figure like Aleistair Crowley showed a comparable range of activities - scholar, gentleman and acrobat! Yet while Byron had little originality of mind (for all his good qualities) and Crowley was a strange mixture of modern and reactionary, Burton still showed the vigorous influence of the 18th Century Enlightenment. He wanted to know, experience, understand. Burton was a skilled draftsman and used this skill in his botanical illustrations. He combined his wanderlust with his scientific mind in his anthropological studies. Where the 18th Century Europeans had looked at old ruined temples in Italy, Sicily and Greece, Burton observed ancient civilisations still thriving. He was more interested in life than in his ego. This is a classic sign of the 'daimon' - the inspiring genius that drives a person to live a life in the true sense.

I strongly encourage everyone to read Fawn Brodie's fascinating, gripping and often hilarious biography of Burton, The Devil Drives, which reveals his personal tragedies and struggles and his waggish sense of humour. For Burton was also one of the great raconteurs of his age.

It is a melancholy experience to read about the British Empire of the 19th Century. The British did terrible things as an Imperial power yet also magnificent things, yet we have little right to judge them because our world is smaller. Most British people today are far less cosmopolitan than the many thousands who lived in India through a military career or otherwise as part of the administrative structure of the Raj. We think we understand geopolitcs but we live in MacWorld; in the Internet age, it is too easy to carry ourselves around everywhere we go.

There were indeed arrogant racists among the British, as there were and are among all peoples. (Being conquered in war does not suddenly turn a people into saints of the church of liberalism, far from it). Yet there were many like Burton - honest people who took a deep interest in the languages, literature, religion and society of the people whom they temporarily 'ruled'. They were in many respects far more individual and far more 'multi-cultural' than the bland though impeccably politically correct clones which modern education and media produce, unless actively resisted.

Sir Richard Burton's tomb is in a churchyard in Mortlake in South West London. It is unique - a stone imitation of an Arab tent with the folds of canvas replicated in sculpture. As you climb up the ladder you can peer into the tomb through a window you can see interesting objects including a painting of Mary Magdalene. Another great Englishman, polymath and traveller, Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's astrologer and the original 007, lived in Mortlake and was buried not far from Burton's tomb.

Contemporary spirituality and religion, and contemporary science and pop culture both thrive on the generic and seek to turn us into a mass of faceless consumers in search of products, who get (temporarily) angry when our rights are infringed.

How do we learn to get our own face and our own accent back? Stage 1 - learn to look, really look at what is around you. Stage 2 - stop pretending you know what you don't know. Stage 3 - resist being told what to feel by the media. After that, personality is possible, it just takes a bit of risk and effort.

Don't Vote Tribal in 2015 - One Last Chance for England

England is probably the most class-ridden country in the world. It is like a mental illness or a soul illness that is the main cause for the cancer at the heart of our politics. Unless at least 20% of the electorate wake up and caste off their class prejudices before 2015, I think England is over. Finished. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool Tory - do not vote Conservative now: your party has betrayed all of its better values. If you are a tribal Labour voter because your grandfather was Old Labour - do not vote Labour now. Do not believe a word of the propaganda you read in the newspapers or online. Almost all of it is spin and lies, designed to appeal to your emotional prejudices for financial reasons, to keep politicians in their jobs. PLEASE wake up to this because after 2015 there won't be another chance. Above all do not vote Labour because you have heard there are unnecessary spending cuts and you like angry slogans like 'Tories are scum' or 'lower than vermin' - unless you transcend this mindset, we are finished. Because ALL major parties represent the moneyed Middle Classes fighting viciously amongst themselves, and ALL are committed to capitalism and Statism that is killing our planet. Yes there are some vicious and unnecessary spending cuts - but welfarist fantasies are no solution.

200 years ago, politics was simple. It was a battle between the Tories - the party of the aristocrats, the old social order, the Monarchy and tradition - and the Whigs, the party of the wealthy aspirational middle classes, often more powerful than the decaying aristocrats, who believed in 'progress'. It was a balance of two groups of people who between them had most of the money and power in Britain. The new industrial working classes did not yet have the vote or any political power; the Trade Unions were in their infancy.

At the end of the 19th Century, the Labour Party came into existence very largely informed by Nonconformist Christianity. Keir Hardie the first Labour MP was a Methodist minister. Labour in the UK has always been emotional and nursed a noble sense of solidarity with the downtrodden, alongside an ignoble tribal hatred of the moneyed classes. Which of course many of their grandchildren then became. The Whigs developed into Liberal Party which should have been the great unifying party with its values of individualism and moderation. Instead it gradually faded to nothing as the Labour Party grew and gradually became Middle Class and because Tories and Labour alike were and are obsessed with money and control and the Liberal party abdicated its duty to speak of freedom.

After the Second World War, there was a temporary cross-party consensus: the Welfare State was a good thing; the NHS was a good thing. Council Housing and a massive programme of home building were good things. Trade Unions grew powerful and notoriously took pleasure in screwing over the bosses, even to the detriment of the workers they represented. All this began to change in the 1970s when the combined effect of the Vietnam War, the rise of Eastern and Middle Eastern economies and the natural limits of the post World War 2 consensus meant 'growth' - that problematic entity - went into reverse. The dream was over. Margaret Thatcher won a historic victory in 1979 which she utterly squandered. Destructive economic neoliberalism instead of conservatism; funny money banking instead of industry; populist war instead of Great Britain. Her destruction of the post War consensus was enthusiastically continued by Tony Blair. As Thatcher destroyed all that was good about the Tory party, so did Blair destroy the Labour party.

And in voting terms he was right. How and why, you may ask? It's simple. There are three things that distinguish Left from the Right wing parties, globally. How do you like Government - Centralist and focused on power, or decentralised? How do you manage your economy - individualistically based on competition, or socially based on the quest for equality? What social values do you prefer - conservative or radical?

The first question identifies you on a continuum from Statist to Anarchist. The second, from capitalism to socialism. We will come to the third.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Labour Party favoured what might be called Left Libertarian views - as do I myself, with reservations. Closer to anarchism than Statism and closer to financial equality than yuppiedom. But after the New Labour revolution, all 3 British parties were virtually identical - they had accepted capitalism and Statist power. How then could Blair distinguish his brand?

Well, chances are many of us have all met students that have a poster of Bob Marley on their walls; that took a gap year to explore India; that are 'spiritual but not religious'; that think racist and sexist are the worst sins in history and thus useful words to use against each other in playgrounds and then in their journalism. They like safely revolutionary music; pictures of striking looking 'ethnics' without seeing their own racism in this; they think poor neighbourhoods are 'vibrant' and 'diverse' places to visit and score some dope, maybe even visit a squat! (Before squatting was made illegal). They may have had a Working Glass grandparent who was a union member, or their mothers may have been involved in feminism. They are among the most powerful people in Britain but they regard themselves as morally superior to 'the rich' because they disapprove of foxhunting. They are Blair's tribe. And they respond to the third distinguisher of politics - IDENTITY which is so easily commodified and sold.

Racism is real and despicable; so is sexism. However without an analysis of economics and the power relations that sustain inequality, trendy politics is worse than useless. It is easy to preach 'anti-racism' when you live in an all-white Upper Middle class part of London, safely insulated from the demeaning stuggle to work and live faced by working class people of many ethnicities. Now the problem about these communities is they are not quite as 'cool' as the trendoids might wish. They often make racist remarks themselves; do not like uncontrolled immigration even though their parents may have been immigrants; are more religious than the essentially atheist 'spiritual' types who govern them; may have traditional gender relations that may be called sexist. They are not progressives, because they have a culture they think is worth conserving. They don't regulate their lives by 'nannie'. They live the consequences of the social experiment that Right and Left wing centrist governments foist on all of us. 'Speaking nicely' and good behaviour; a duly reverential, cap doffing attitude to the Welfare State and the charities are not top of their priorities.

But 'Cool Britannia' won. While the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while the people of England, the Mother of Parliaments become more and more disenfranchised, where austerity is the new normal, the political classes continue to chatter. In fact many charities were delighted when Labour lost in 2010 because, with vast hypocrisy, they could start blaming cuts on the evil Tories - virtually the same cuts Labour said they would make, and substantially necessitated by the idiotic ideological fanaticism of Gordon Brown whose destructive work is being continued by the equally ideological insanity of George Osborne. They kept utterly silent when their friends and paymasters were spreading global capitalism at top speed and killing Iraqis and Afghanis.

It is time to stop policing people's thoughts and language, to drop the slogans and self-righteousness and to actually give the disadvantaged money and power. Everyone. No one is better of worse for the colour of their skins or what lies between their legs. Time to come into the present. David Cameron thinks we are in St Mary Mead in 1910; the Big Society jumblesale is raising funds on the village green. Meanwhile the worthy charity types are living in 1947 where Mr Beveridge is going to give milk and free medicine to us all. We must never even suggest the NHS isn't functioning perfectly as it is and there will be plenty of jobs for British workers...and err, for our Commonwealth immigrant neighbours, won't there?

Modern finance and multinational business is destroying our politics and our country - but we can't criticise unlimited economic migration, because that's racism isn't it? Even when it is what leads to a factory employing 5000 workers to be closed and operations relocated across the world. Even when it means that businesses have no incentive to pay workers even a minimum wage, let alone a living wage.

The only political party voicing any actual grassroots socialist policies that might help people is the Green party. If you don't think you need real socialism rather than Labour Middle Class tax the rich to keep people on the dole, you may like to consider where your children or younger siblings can afford to live and whether there will be any jobs for them. If you don't like the Greens, you have options: join the Labour Party and force it to return to Old Labour genuine socialism without comfy slogans and convenient hate - though you will have an uphill struggle. I see no hope at all for the Tories or Lib Dems.

You may not like the Greens but I strongly suggest that short of a massive wave of civil unrest which will probably be co-opted by the same old organised Leftist, you might wish to spoil your ballot paper or form a federation of protest parties. Do something creative. Realise how politics works. This is not a game.

The non-English must find it hard to understand English society and politics. But then so do the English. We are a people who have never liked thinking clearly about ourselves. Science: yes. Religion: sometimes. But we are basically a people of instinct, of (sometimes benign) prejudice, of drowsy adherence to slogans and mob mentalities. Now we have three major political parties in the UK. All of them represent sectors of the Middle Classes fighting with each other.

I look forward to Scottish independence. Then the English will lose their inferiority/superiority complex, establish actual relationships with Scotland, Ireland and Wales and regain their soul.

"There is no future in England's dreaming" as Johnny Rotten sang. In the Name of Christ and in the power of Arthur, Albion Awake. We have done it before and we can do it again.

Love, Sex and the New Aeon

Well I'm back again after a harrowing few days reading the appalling Bloodline of the Holy Grail by the late Laurence Gardner. The full review will appear in a future blog, but to restore my soul I'm talking about something much more interesting. Because even if you're currently jaded about love and bored of sex, it's fair to say we all love having opinions about them!

Ok, let's get started by pondering a basic difference between women and men. No this isn't 'Men are from Mars' and yes we have more in common than not, but let's talk straight. It comes more naturally to women to connect emotional feelings with sex; it often comes more naturally to men to separate them. Neither is wrong, yet we spend inordinate time in a battle of these two principles. Men know deep in their bones - and other bits - that there is nothing better than just...sex. The sheer physical rush of high energy. What Eastern teachings call prana or chi in its very yang phase. Potent, animal and clean. If they are honest, men often find that 'feelings' lessen their sex drive; dwelling on kindness, gentleness, consideration may be very attractive to a female partner but - ironically - lessens the libido. Women know deep down the other side of this. Yet often there's no easy synthesis; what works for one doesn't work for the other.

Yes, men can be 'trained out of'  their instincts, and who can blame women for thinking they have a duty to 'train' and 'civilise' the hairy brutes they share a world with! But, ladies - don't be surprised if something vital has gone from your man - and your sex life - if you succeed. I have known too many women that tamed and broke in a man, only to find they were bored! On the other hand, men soon discover that if they take the time to develop emotional honesty, it can only be good for their sex life...in part. To be right, you don't need to make the other person wrong. Both sexes - try not suppressing your partner. Yes, it's uncomfortable.

One of the funniest manifestations of the different wiring of the sexes is the well known fact that a supposedly unattractive man who gets on stage with a musical instrument and some confidence; or does anything unusually well; or attains power, suddenly becomes a fully fledged sex symbol. Yet when I see a beautiful woman lecturing about philosophy, the last thing I start thinking about is sex - I want to talk poststructuralism and Neo-Kantian philosophy with her!

It is one of the hilarious ironies - one of Mother Nature's little jokes - that the gender's sexual biases pull in opposite directions. There is a deep secret here: enter into it.

Well if you're still with me, you may be thinking - he's generalising massively! And shouldn't we just acknowledge the ladies got it right, as elsewhere? But Philalethes has a secret to share: it is really important for the long term happiness of a relationship, for sex and friendship, that the male perspective gets a look in. Why? I shall tell you...

If you get stuck in a rut, if you wait to make any change until your 'emotions' feel just right, you will be waiting a long time. You'll be locked in the stale pattern of your self-repeating psychodramas. Sometimes you just need to do it. Unspoken emotions can close down a couple's sex life. We have to get beyond this pseudo-Christian and basically Victorian idea that only when people are feeling 'loving' should they couple. Yes uncaring sex can be impersonal or at worst brutal. But unsentimental, vital sex can blow away a lot of those niggly little emotions. Go on - try it without trying to control it. And of course, joking aside, this isn't just true of sex but of the human social personality - which is why people use sex to break out of their rigid personalities. Those who cannot balance their instincts with their personalities are bound to have affairs or be serial monogamists...

There are many reasons why gender politics and sex are thorny issues in today's world. But I'd like to share the metaphysical basis. As many are becoming aware, the earlier phases of society were Matriarchal or at least thought of the Goddess as at least as important as the God. This was a biased view and characterisic of times when humans were closer to the animal state, lived more vitally in their bodies and in tune with nature. Ironically stereotypical male sexuality preserves more of the Matriarchal state than the stereotypical female equivalent. Then came the Patriarchal ages that emphasised reason and abstraction. These were also biased and created an artificial separation from the nature humans were moving away from. In this more mental age, stereotypical female sexuality is more culturally appropriate - hence the deeply ironic fact that Christianity is in many was the most effeminate and female friendly religion in recorded history, despite its misogynistic tendencies.

Crowleyites might say, after the ages of Isis and Osiris (Patriarchy and Matriarchy, approximately) must come the age of Horus. Yes, but really this should be bi-sexual. It is very obvious that women have been quicker on the uptake in grasping this, partly perhaps because women often understand bisexuality better than men who are generally frightened by it. Yet this will be scuppered if we try to return to a Matriarchy. All New Age cliches that say women=good, intuitive, sensitive, spiritual and man=bad, rational, insensitive, material are wrong and pernicious. Sugar and spice vs slugs and snails - nonsense and all ultimately deriving from the girly loser Jesus that Sunday schools taught us, a travesty of the Word made Flesh.

EMOTIONS AND SPIRITUALITY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. For Millennia, women express emotion and men express outward energy (prana) more, one expression of which is intellectuality. Neither reason nor emotions are Spirit. Spirit is bisexual.

Until men and women balance their yang and yin within themselves and then with their partners and wider society, the Spirit cannot function in reality.

Our way is the way of fire.

Book Review – Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green

Revisiting one's favourite childhood books can be nerve-wracking. Like other 8 year olds, I was fed on a diet of so-called children's books many of which would be classified as 'fantasy'. The fact that children like myths is sometimes used to support the view that myth, or fantasy, is childish. Of course the truth is that the mythic mind is natural and it takes considerable indoctrination to alienate a human being's mind from its natural state through a process sometimes called 'education'. I loved myth and science fiction, and the Tarot cards and astrological books I received around the same age fitted well with my reading; as did my Bible.

Besides obvious items like The Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis' works – which I never liked so much (now I understand why, but that's for another blog) my favourites were a series of re-tellings of global mythology by Roger Lancelyn Green. I knew nothing about him until recently discovering that he was one of the Inklings and knew C. S. Lewis well. Green also wrote The Tale of Troy, Tales of the Greek Heroes, Tales of Ancient Egypt and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I cannot imagine a better introduction to comparative religion and mythology than these works. Told in simple and gripping narrative style that holds the attention on the story, Green skillfully brings out the quality of the different myths. It is like an introduction to the folk-souls of the world. Just imagine what fun education could be if this was combined with food of the world, music of the world and so on!

It was quite an exciting discovery for an 8 year old that meditating (or day-dreaming as I then thought of it) on myths with a magical content can induce 'esoteric' experiences. Perhaps Christian fundamentalists are right that there is a subversive occult agenda behind fantasy literature – after all, many children's writers were either directly involved in the magical traditions like E.E. Nesbit, or highly sympathetic, or attuned to the mythopoeic element in religion and folk culture, like the Inklings. And of course one of the Inklings was Owen Barfield, a profound student of Rudolf Steiner's philosophy and C. S. Lewis' closest intellectual friend.

But to return to Myths of the Norsemen. What a captivating world! We are continents away from the sultry warmth, the dark earthiness of Egyptian myth, the playfulness and humanism of Greece. These are older mysteries, akin to the Celtic / Brythonic yet distinct. Perhaps due to the over influence of Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions on our culture, the Norse / Saxon myths which should be the closest to the British, are the most remote. We have been taught to sneer with politically-correct disdain at the term Anglo-Saxon; and yet, the Norse myths, preserved in works like the Eddas and the Volsung Saga and deriving from the Skalds (Bards) are full of magic and life.

The Tree of Yggdrasil; the city of Asgard in its very top; the Aesir and the Vanir; one-eyed Odin with his broad-brimmed hat and blue cloak; the ice giants; beautiful Baldur killed with the mistletoe and laid out with his wife in the longboat; the destructive Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent which encircles the world; Thor and his mighty hammer Miolnir; Andvari's cursed ring and Sigurd's tragic destiny; the Halls of Valhalla where warriors who die in battle feast and drink mead; treacherous Loki; and the final battle of Ragnarok. Anyone with a drop of the blood of the North aches with recognition at these images, as if they were part of our minds all along and have never been forgotten.

Scholars now understand how a group of tribes from the Caucasus region, horse lords with deities of the sky, lightning, wind and other primal forces, migrated passing down into India, across Europe and even to Ireland. They called themselves Aryan – nobles – and the peoples of Europe and India are largely descended from them. They left their name not just in India but in Iran, and Eire (Ireland). Their languages remain surprisingly similar – for example the names of the numbers 1 to 10 are virtually identical in all these languages and in particular German and Sanskrit retain some deep verbal similarities.

The emerging sciences of ethnology and comparative linguistics in the 19^th Century abused the dawning insights to create racist ideologies in some cases. The Aryan rather than Christian heritage common to the Indians and Germanic peoples, increasingly clear through the scholarship of Max Muller and the occult traditions collected by Madame Blatavsky, were distorted to become influences on the hate-filled ideology of Nazism. But it has yet to be appreciated that the suppression of the indigenous cultures of our lands by the religions of the East and the intellectuality of Greece and Rome – above all by books and languages of other lands – was a blow from which we are still recovering.

The Western Mysteries have done wonderful work in integrating Celtic / British themes with Magical Qabalah. Surely the Norse myths must one day attain their due role.

If they do, the key figure will surely be seen as J.R.R. Tolkein, who combined a deep knowledge of the Nordic Sagas with a true Christian spirit. His co-worker Roger Lancelyn Green will be remembered alongside him. Everyone should buy this little book to begin the quest. Now I am off to look for a good edition of the Eddas.

Cyril Scott - Great, Forgotten English Composer and Theosophist

Very few English people know of the "founder of British modern music" Cyril Scott (1879-1970). I suspect this is partly because the English have a deep inferiority complex about their abilities as 'high artists'. We are always prone to assume that a great painter is more likely to be Italian or French, a great composer to be German. When Europeans mock English art, we are often quick to join in with a touch of self-flagellation!

Scott was a virtuoso pianist and composer. Like many serious artists he wrote 'pot-boilers'. One of these is nonetheless an immortal work. Lotus Land (1905) was immensely popular in its time. A dreamy, somewhat Oriental piece for solo piano, it has the effect - like Satie - of putting the performer in a trance while playing it. The famous violinist Fritz Kreisler arranged it for violin and piano - a wonderful original recording of Kreisler playing Lotus Land may be heard here, if you can wait for 30 seconds of advertisement. It is an easy, delightful piece to play on piano especially if you have big hands.

Few have any idea how the great musical inspirations of that time pervade our music. Here is one example. Listen to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme - Resolution (live footage of the master himself) and you will hear the same mode, chords, even the same key as Lotus Land. This is not coincidental. The advanced harmony of French Impressionist music like Debussy, Ravel and Satie entered modern Jazz to pervade the 1950s and 1960s work of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Coltrane etc. And so did the deep spiritual influences within this music. 

Scott was very much a part of the turn of the century ferment of music, art and spirituality. Like many artists of his time, Cyril Scott was a Theosophist. And this is probably why the English establishment could not relate to him as to a national treasure like Ralph Vaughan Williams or an obviously 'important' composer in historical terms like Benjamin Britten. (RVW was a great composer, but he exemplified an 'Englishness' that tends to make him inaccessible to mainstream European sentiment. Britten, a prodigious genius, will be the subject of a later blog). 

Alongside his prolific musical career, Scott wrote books on occultism, nutritional theory and other subjects; he was also a poet. Some idea of his range can be gained from this website. Scott is best known for his trilogy of works beginning with The Initiate, written in 1920. I have just reread The Initiate and it is without doubt one of the best of all Theosophical books. The first half is a series of impressions of an advanced English yogi with deep knowledge of Yog Vidya, referred to under the pseudonym of Justin Moreward Haig. JMH operates as a kind of benevolent trickster in English high society, cajoling people into discovering the happiness that comes from acknowledging unity, identification with the soul within, and abandoning vanity and selfishness, which then leads naturally on to spiritual practice. Fascinatingly, one of his main targets was sexual jealousy and the rigid English fear of expressing love, at least in England circa 1910. The second half is a magical parable or fairytale called The Circuitous Journey. 

JMH comes across as a philosopher-sage, a very English Boddhisattva. To this day, rather like Castaneda's Don Juan, speculation rages as to whether there was any such person as JMH. But the proof of the pudding is that his personality rings true. This book, and its two successors The Initiate In the New World, and The Initiate In The Dark Cycle, were written when the Theosophical Society seemed to be going through a crisis. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater had announced that the young Indian boy Krishnamurti was the mouthpiece of the World Teacher. The Theosophists conflated this concept with the coming of the Maitreya and in a way with the reappearance of Christ, as so often using the name Christ word with a sneakily tweaked Theosophical meaning. Up to 250,000 people joined the Order of the Star of the East before Krishnamurti himself declared he was not who all these people thought he was and disbanded the order in 1929. 

Great western occultists like Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune ultimately left the Theosophical Society because of this unfortunate direction. To this day the New Age influenced by pop-Theosophy churns out all kinds of rubbish in the holy names of Christ and Maitreya. Yet there were those within Theosophy who tried to keep the Society to its original course. Scott and his circle were among the best.

The fate of the Theosophical Society and its relation to the substantially failed New Age movement is another story. Yet to return to the criminal neglect of Cyril Scott: it must be said, the English are barbarians. Lacking the brilliant intellectual culture of the Scots, the incomparable verbal dexterity and arch playfulness of the Irish, and the mysticism of those who self-identify as Celts, our culture is a mystery. The English can either be visionaries or total materialists; we are not thinkers, but we are inspired inventors. Without the Bible, poetry and some sense of connection to the stories of our land, we perish. I wish it were not so, but there it is. 

The English must return to William Blake and the 'mad' religious poets; to Shakespeare and then to the Romantics; and above all to its folk tradition. It must rediscover its Arthurian and Christian Mystic roots and thus, taking its place in Christendom, go forth to meet the East in fraternity. There is a finite time this can be accomplished. Albion, awake!

On Chivalry

Today I had a very remarkable 'unremarkable experience', which restored my faith in human beings, and healed something quite deep inside me. It was so very unusual that I have to share it.

Buying my lunch in Sainsbury's today, I obeyed the English way and queued obediently. Near the tills, a woman reached over to take an item off the shelves. In the ruthless cut and thrust of London, I could have gazumped her place, but why should I? Without thinking, I said 'after you'; she said 'thank you' and I said 'you're welcome'. Apart from the 'thank you', a very ordinary experience... Except that the lady turned to me and said 'that was very chivalrous'. To set the scene, she was probably in her late 20s or early 30s, with long blond hair and pretty to the point of being beautiful. Waiting to be called to the til, she told me that she didn't care what anyone said: she loved 'chivalry'. Men were the larger 'species' (her hilarious term) and despite all the media storm about women saying they hate doors being held open for them and so on, she thought it was natural and she loved it.

I could think of nothing to say that wasn't stupid so I merely smiled and said something inconsequential, but as she left the shop she turned to me again and said 'keep it up'! Five minutes before this, as I was getting off a bus, a young boy of about 10 had tried to push out of the bus before me. When I didn't flinch from the aggression, he made a show of waiting for me (implication: see I'm waiting, not pushing you out of the way, if that's what you want). I just waited, curious as to what this was all about. He then got off the bus and glowered at me.

Variations of this kind of experience happen most days to me in London. In London, people do not know how to behave with each other any more. Partly this is because, at any one time, the centre of town is full of people who do not speak a common language. You need a critical mass of people who agree on tools of etiquette like 'excuse me' and 'thank you'. Below this threshold, city life becomes a kind of war of all against all, in constant tension. A world of faceless resentment of inarticulate animals fighting for food and clothes. People do not speak or link to others: they 'vibe'.

I walked to the supermarket musing that I was brought up to certain standards of etiquette, yet I am increasingly the odd one out. I was, quite rightly, told as a boy that one naturally gives up a seat for certain kinds of people, holds doors open, apologises where appropriate and shows social grace. Apart from a period of about 7 years where in churlish pique I refrained from these things on principle and acted out my stored up resentments in often petty ways, I have usually done my best to be courteous. And never, in 40 years, can I recall having been thanked by a woman for any of these things. Nor expected to.

But was I a Victorian 'chivalrous gentleman'? Alas, dear reader, I was not! Brought up in the 1970s/80s my generation fell between the old fashioned gallants who may have been considered sexist but still have the confidence to be old charmers, and the younger men who came to maturity after the most vicious periods of the sex wars were over and are more relaxed with women. But I was of the generation for whom asking girls out was risky - you were aware you might be accused of harassment; for whom holding a door open might warrant an accusation of sexism or being patronising; who were urged to be sensitive 'new men' while it was obvious that 'old men' were still the men that got the girlfriends. I and others of my generation felt awkward about such gestures, worried I would be hated or scorned on political grounds. And I noticed on the occasions where I did it, the attitude in the glance was not infrequently 'you had no choice but to give that place for me, it's the rules', not 'thank you'.

How sad! How did we get to a place where we had to moderate our natural impulses in fear they would be misconstrued. It was a painful time for women and men alike, as we negotiated the aftermath of the original feminist movement to discover the new balance of the sexes. We learned to be friends, to be unisex, to be 'mates'. And it must be said there is still a long way to go until women are given a fair deal in the workplace and in wider social attitude. It was inevitable that my generation of men absorbed a lot of hate. I am a white middle class male. In the eyes of many politicised to identity politics I exemplify the 'oppressor class'. I personally oppressed women for 6,000 years and enslaved the peoples of the world!? Yet it was the only way.

Hate and resentment may seem to be useful fuel for social change, but ultimately it is love that makes the world go round. I am no 'knight in shining armour' yet there is an undeniable frisson in moments like mine today, a benign recognition that men are men and women are women. They should be utterly ordinary. This is much more natural in European countries, particularly Catholic ones where the cult of the Mary was not suppressed. Yes, it has its shadow side in silly machismo and the eternal triangle of mama, mama's boy and resentful wife who will turn into mama - but it is a joy. I have seen old men flirt with young girls in Latin countries - with no agenda but with the undeniable flow of that 'thing' that makes the world go round.

I was brought up almost exclusively by women, and I know all about the reasons why the old fashioned maleness had to change. But in honour of the anonymous blonde, and of my wife who would entirely agree, I intend to 'keep it up'.

Book Review – The Children of Men by P. D. James

For the first of my new series of book reviews I have chosen a curiosity. A futuristic, uncharacteristic sci-fi work by a well known crime writer. Now many have been trained to regard science fiction as for nerds, a clever way of keeping people reading about consumerist materialist values if ever I saw one. But P. D.  James' 1992 work The Children of Men is close to a masterpiece, definitely out of its time when written, and well due a revival of interest.

Like many children, I loved science fiction and fantasy. Most contemporary art concerns itself with the present, especially the banal present. Without penetrating into the depths of what makes life interesting and worth living, just regurgitates it. I'm not even having a go at Big Brother or other celebrity 'reality TV' fiascos. At least those can be entertaining, in a slow-motion car-crash kind of way. The self-referrential empty fiction of the Martin Amises of this world is far more poisonous. Give me pop culture over most 'high art' any day.

Our culture is dying through universal sterility, and The Children of Men, in a way is all about this. It is possible to test contemporary reality so deeply and so bravely that reality is transfigured. Then you have the great novelists, like Dickens or Dostoyevsky. But its a rare gift, and getting rarer. To get context on the present, humans love to trace current preoccupations to the past, or extrapolate to the future. We seek our cultural and spiritual origins in myth, and our future in technology and its social consequences. Some of the most interesting works blend the two – a trend most obvious in Star Trek and the associated TV and film genre of mythic sci-fi. A future blog will concern Ursula K Le Guin, who is one of the great masters of both genres.

The shocking premise of The Children of Men is a world in which, mysteriously, human beings become infertile. The last children were born in 1995 and all the nations of the world gradually realise there will be no more people, no future. James' portrayal of the effects of this universal sterility is shocking and believable: Britain becomes a dictorship run so that the last generation of humanity can live out its existence in meaningless comfort, with criminals exiled and menial work done by mistreated foreigners. The desire for sex gradually withers as people realise that, even if they did not want sex to produce offspring, knowing that it never could destroys the erotic impulse. People lose interest in politics, leaving power in Britian in the sole hands of the narrator's cousin.

Theo Faron, the self-centred and cold narrator, is a memorable creation. An Oxford History don who has never known love or intimacy, but held a privileged position through his relation to the dictator, or Warden, he is drawn into a surprising position of challenge to the State. It is typical of P. D. James' skill that the absurd and depressing scenario of the book becomes fascinating and we empathise with the unlikably protagonist caught in the Middle Class establishment world she draws so aptly in her crime fiction.

Of course, the reason the book is so haunting, and prophetic for 1992, is that we do indeed live in an age of sterility. The 'First World' ethos, which wants few children, lots of money and comfort, where all pleasures are available but meaningless, where we live in an endless war with mysterious nature, is what passes for reality, but it is life without a future. James digs deep into the roots of the religious image of the Virgin and Child. Although it is the men whose sperm is believed to be infertile, women respond psychotically by bringing up dolls, baptising them and taking them around in prams. 

There is much that could be said about the waning of science fiction and what it says about out loss of faith in the future. In 1980s Britain, at the same time that tradition was being destroyed with unprecedented speed, Television was filled with nostalgic portrayals of British life, the conservatism that Thatcher's Toryism, ironically, was busy abolishing. The Children of Men is a short read but I came away from it determined to keep my imagination fixed on the future, yet never forget we cannot control the simplest forces of our life, those of procreation, and without gratitude and awe there is only sterility and slow death. Read the book and the surprise ending will stay with you.