The Voice That Thunders, page 4
Thus ends Ramayana, revered by Brahma and made by Valmiki. He that hath no sons shall attain a son by reading even a single verse of Rama’s lay. All sin is washed from those who read or hear it read. He who recites Ramayana should have rich gifts of cows and gold. Long shall he live who reads Ramayana, and shall be honoured, with his sons and grandsons, in this world and in Heaven.
So that’s how he’d done it. William Jackson had read Ramayana. I could live to be ninety-three. But I had to look to myself. Sons and grandsons were cared for. No mention of great-grandsons. I’d better get going. “All sin is washed from those who read or hear it read.” I could save the world. At least I could save Tamworth. I ran upstairs, opened the front bedroom window onto the street, sat on the sill, and, like some Hindu muezzin, summoned the people of Tamworth to hear Rama’s lay. I went on till my voice cracked. And my grandmother, wise and wonderful woman, said nothing throughout my daily sustenance of me, Tamworth, world, and cosmos. For it was not time wasted. By repetition, I began to see patterns more than of gods with blue faces, flying monkeys, and many-headed demons. I saw, emotionally, more than one way to market. So, in our multiracial society, ought you.
The second aspect of creativity, which is the opposite of the first, is that you should be prepared for the effect of the education you offer on the background of the child. An immigrant family is an obvious area for circumspection, but just as explosive, and maybe more, is the middle-class English, when the child outgrows the family. How many books does the worldly man of affairs have in his house, and what is their tendency; and how is the child to convey to that parent that the universe may not be simply the sum of its material reserves, and success may not lie only in their exploitation for financial gain?
Thirdly, be on the look-out for overt, perhaps disruptive, creativity, and adapt yourselves to its needs rather than expect it to be moulded to fit existing preconceptions. There is your creativity, and it is your right: the bringing into being, new as a book, of the child’s own spiritual nature, not the replication of others. Originality and individuality, in a trained mind, not corporate compliance will be essential to spiritual survival as Homo sapiens sapiens. For we are drifting, or being seduced, into another species: Homo inanis materialis.
Despite our daily observation to the contrary, I assure you that children are, by nature, spiritual beings, until we destroy through our example. In my own field of language I remember, and still can see, there being no problem here. A child knows, whether it be in the traditional structure of fairy tale, or the special use of an archaism, when the Mystery is engaged. “Once upon a time,” or “Hear what comfortable words Our Saviour Christ saith,” the child notes the cue and enters in. It is a truth that the Church itself seems to have lost sight of, along with much else.
I assert and would argue that we, child or adult, retain what comfortable words Our Saviour Christ saith, where our betters think we shall not.
And He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
Compare this.
He began to address them. And this is the teaching He gave. “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. How blest are the sorrowful; they shall find consolation. How blest are those of gentle spirit; they shall have the earth for their possession.”
The former is literature written and translated by poets. The latter is tin-eared jargon by committee. The Beatitudes have been rendered bêtise.
In every language, literature, culture, of every time and place that I have met, the spiritual is set apart from the secular in some way, as a sign that we are entering a sacred space, a sacred time. It is done by one, or both, of two means: by ritual introduction and by a change of style, which is usually slightly out of date in grammar and syntax. And, at the finish, we are formally released into secular time and space. It can be a mere signal: “Once upon a time . . .” and “They lived happily ever after, until the Soviets came to power.”
It can be epic. Vergil’s Aeneid: “I sing of arms and a man . . .”, closing with, “. . . but coldly droop the limbs, and, with a sigh, the soul, stripped of worth, slips out under shadow.” Homer’s Iliad begins with the invocation: “Sing, goddess, of the accursed rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles . . .”, and ends, twenty-four books later: “Thus they performed the funeral rites of Hector. There came an Amazon.”
The Odyssey: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wanderings . . .” and finishes: “Pallas Athene, daughter of goat-skinned Zeus, appeared in the shape and voice of Mentor, and made peace again between the two sides.”
The folkloric technique of entry and exit into and out of sacred time is used in the Bible, often to the delusion of commentators, especially those more inclined to fundamentalism.
St John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
“In the beginning” is, in New Testament Greek, “en archē”, which is more the equivalent of “Once upon a time”, not “At the Big Bang”. And the Gospel ends with the traditional release: “If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”
It is not a Mediterranean ornament. In thirteenth-century Iceland, the one hundred and fifty-nine chapters of Njal’s Saga begin: “There was man called Mord Fiddle, son of Sighvat the Red” and they reach their stark, formal close with: “And there I end the saga of the Burning of Njal.” The sense of myth, even in history, is shown to be a special truth.
Often, especially in the preliterate societies, where every act tends to be linked to the spiritual, the whole structure changes at times of high ceremony. Among the Batak of north-east Sumatra, the men use a language that has no semantic links with their tribal, domestic speech, when they go out to fell camphor trees, which have a religious significance.
It is an example of what we appear to be losing: awareness of the risks inherent in the spiritual by its linking of timelessness with Time. It is a task for poets. Unless you know something of what others believe, it is not possible to appreciate the harmonics of your own belief.
For professional purposes, and out of an appalled fascination, I collect specimens of outstanding vacuity that try to replace the simple and the true. I rest my case on this, which I saw in a headmistress’ study, in beautiful calligraphy, framed, and hanging on the wall beneath a crucifix.
The Lord is my Pace setter, I shall not rush.
He makes me to stop for quiet intervals.
He provides me with images of stillness which restore my serenity.
He leads me in ways of efficiency through calmness of mind,
And His guidance is peace.
Even though I have a great many things to accomplish each day, I will not fret.
For His presence is here,
His timelessness. His all-importance will keep me in balance.
He prepares refreshment and renewal in the midst of my activity;
By anointing my mind with His oils of tranquillity.
My cup of joyous energy overflows.
Truly harmony and effectiveness shall be the fruits of my hours,
For I shall walk in the Pace of my Lord
And dwell in His House for ever.
There, in one clear example, is your spiritual obligation to literature: root out the reductive; seek excellence; pursue the numinous. And, along with a disciplined intellect (for one is no use without the other) give to the children their imaginations, their unique imaginations, of which they are being robbed with totalitarian intensity by the trash around them. I do not want to have sat on that cold tree stump in vain.
But the threat to the spiritual is not insular. It is global.
I first became aware of it twenty-five years ago, when my Japanese translator, Chozaburo Ashikawa, said to me that the Japanese world of business, men he called the new samurai, was intent on removing Japanese culture, and that the ethos was being built into the state system, so that in two generations the criterion would be success in trade. The Arts and non-applied Sciences were to disappear. Money and power were to be the goals. I could not accept the objectivity of his claim, until that Judas euphemism “vocational education” oozed into the language.
Now schools have begun to send me, instead of an enthusiastic or a questioning response to their reading, dour critiques of my novels couched in grotesque language, exercises designed to give the children practice in the writing of commercial English. The children are put up to this by teachers, themselves victims of traumatised ideologues of the Sixties and Seventies, and therefore not guaranteed to be coherent, to punctuate or to spell correctly, as their accompanying letters show. Truly, who will guard the guardians?
Should it not be a matter for gladness, for consolidation, rather than for criticism by the likes of cultural vandals and political levellers, that I, who grew up speaking the dialect of the Gawain poet, drinking beer in a smithy at the age of six, in a community that has a living Arthurian oral tradition, should also be able to save the good people of Tamworth, and, “while following with zeal his humble trade”, to find out ‘How-Mary-Gets-the-Eggs’, to be able to come within an ace of demolishing my Officers’ Mess, to draw on the wisdom of Racine, and Heine, and Pushkin, and Sappho, and Catullus, and Tacitus, and Thucydides, and Plato, and Wittgenstein, and Darwin and Jung; and to have read all Homer and Vergil; and to be able to set those wonders beside the wonders of quasars and quarks; and so to encompass the spectrum of our social and cultural diversities and to hand them on to the future not only as a spectrum, but as a rainbow and a religious, a creative, act?
Furthermore it is hard to find anyone who can understand the necessity for Latin in a Western society that has pretensions to civilised learning. There is a fine irony here. I spend time in Russia, where Latin has become a prized item of the syllabus.
Could it be that Russians have long realised that the way to understand a people and its culture is through its literature, which is why they are the world’s best linguists? I know, from conversations, that they see our recent educational theories as barbarism, when it is considered more “relevant” to be able to order a gin and tonic in Frankfurt than to look into the heart of Goethe.
I am not immune. In my ninth year of a novel, my publisher and my agent suggested to me that I should abandon it, having spent enough to no purpose, and forsake “literature”, and become instead a “popular” writer, cashing in on my established name by producing sequels to, and making series of, the earlier books on which that name was built. It is not “quality” now, but “commodity”, that is in demand, the immaculate rubbish that we produce so well. No matter that it would render sterile the existing work, the life that produced it, and bring about my artistic and spiritual death. Houghites, R.I.P. Instead, I jettisoned publisher and agent.
The novel was finished in a little under twelve years. My grandfather would have found such statistics perhaps interesting, but irrelevant; as I do. The book exists. That is enough. From being a chaotic dance of the synapses, now it cannot be lost.
The novel is based on the true story of a Cheshire bricklayer of the eighteenth century, William Buckley, whom we should now call a Gifted Child, but who was transported for life to New Holland because of his precocity. He set off to walk home; met, and was received by, the oldest culture of the world, and one of the most sophisticated; adapted to it, and became a spiritual leader and healer, and then, after thirty-two years, he prevented a massacre of opportunistic, entrepreneurial Europeans that his People met, the contact with whom led to the People’s physical extinction. But William could not express his wisdom except in a language that no Englishman considered worthy of learning.
Of the language of William Buckley’s People, ninety words were recorded; yet they tell us much. Seventeen were the names of animals; seventeen the names of weapons; thirty-four, parts of the body; twenty, natural phenomena; two adverbial sentence modifiers: yes, no; three adjectives: good, bad, plenty; four verbs: eat, sleep, drink, walk; one imperative: hurry; one complete sentence: where are the niggers? And one answer: dead.
The single point of communication of this mix of philosopher, archbishop and Fellow of All Souls with the whites was the dialect of a twenty-year-old bricklayer. Is it the truth within such imagery, the myth, that attracted me, autobiographically, in the first place, that is now causing interest in the book, subconsciously, and the spiritual concern? Would Elidor II, Owl Service III, which the accountant-ridden publisher and agent were urging upon me, even if I would, or could, have written them, have caused so much as a flicker of an intelligent eyelid?
I find myself wondering whether my unschooled bricklayer is saying something of a more universal concern, which I was protected from seeing while writing his story. For the man was creative, was spiritual; and is now disturbing. He exemplifies what is beyond the reach of the swords of the new world samurai, that shifts and twists and dodges every fatal thrust: the mercurial Trickster of creativity. There are no stratagems, no guard against the illogic of the innovative leap. Creation is not in the Philistine accountant’s vocabulary. He is the other feller, and he cannot do it. It confounds him. For creativity is risk. As the determination to walk home from New Holland was risk; and its reward a theophany.
I am not decrying the profession of accountancy, only its appropriation of competence in every field. And if, as it looms, we are entering on a period biased towards materialism at the expense of progress, then we are in the hands of the accountant, a spiritual Ice Age, where all will be frozen and there will be no risk, and, without risk, no movement, and, without movement, no seeking, and, without seeking, no future. Darkness will be upon the face of the deep. We must get aback of this.
Through creativity, spirituality, we shall; but it must be promoted, and given its head; which is the reason for my coming here today.
From my differing awareness, I sense something that you may not yet. Especially amongst artists (which is why, quite prudently, the Russians have always had the tendency to shoot us), resistance is growing. Consciousness is on the move. Something is at work in the world: a general recognition of a crisis of the spirit, of the banal and the shoddy, in human affairs. It is universal, and it must be met. Recently, an Australian Aboriginal shaman warned me: “The Great Serpent has woken. Jarapiri stirs. The earth shakes. And the warriors are gathering.”
And that’s about the top and the bottom of it. The whole beggaring cheese. I’ve given you a story, not too long and not too short, just the length same as from you to me. I’d tell you more, gladly; but that’s as much as I know.
* * *
1 This lecture was first delivered at the the Annual Conference of The Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, at Breadsall Priory, 6 March 1996 (an extended version of the address given to the Headmasters’ Conference, Cambridge, 1991).
2 Solution p. 232.
3 He was also an Equalized Independent Druid, but that’s another story.
3
Achilles in Altjira
I AM HERE as the conscious result of events set in motion one day in October, 1950, by a remarkable man. Eric James, Lord James of Rusholme, was High Master of Manchester Grammar School throughout the seven years of my time there: a remarkable man; and a remarkable school, which instils the concept of excellence, in the absolute and for its own sake, within the individual, not the group; fitting the school to the boy, rather than making the boy conform to the school. In military terms: let a Winchester, or an Eton, be the Brigade of Guards. Then Manchester Grammar School is the SAS. Its planning of its mission (fulfilment of the boy’s potential) is meticulous and humane: its execution ruthless. I have not yet reached excellence, but I was equipped by that school to seek it out.1
This may sound too close to a production line, and many of the school’s detractors, who have not themselves been pupils there, disparage it as “Manchester Cramming Shop”. But I have experienced what can happen.
One boy, gifted, articulate, acted at all times as if he were a steam-locomotive. He would chuff along the road and the school corridors, feet shuffling, cheeks puffing, arms working as pistons. When he reached the room where his next lesson would be taught, the door was held open for him, imaginary points were changed to get him into the room and to his desk, and an imaginary turntable would turn him to be seated. Then the lesson began. At the end the process was reversed. No one mocked, showed impatience or criticised. He was accepted for the integrated totality of what he was. When, in his own time, that self-image changed, no comment was made, by staff or boys. Simply, the need for an aspect of being had passed.
That anecdote epitomised for me the greatness of the teaching at Manchester Grammar School: the ability to be perceptive, and the confidence to be eccentric. To this day, I am delighted to report, I know no member of the Common Room who is not a seeming loon. For therein lies the quality that sets the school apart. If the quest for excellence can be presumed, there is the freedom to be free. It is the most precious gift: a possession for ever. But what to make of that possession?
Eric James’ contribution was that he, a Physical chemist, impressed on me, a Classical linguist, that without him Science might continue, but without me and my companions Western culture and the context and justification for his skills would be lost.
I remember the room, the window, the desk, the swirl of his gown as he turned and said to me (I was the boy in his line of sight, no more) that for each generation, the Iliad must be told anew. The moment is so clear because it was the first realisation that privilege is service before it is power; that humility is the requirement of pride. Without that realisation I should not have found the temerity proper to the will to write.
