a little game I play

Here’s a little game I play when I’m dabbling the uncertain waters of numerology and looking back on some of the significant years of my life.  You might like to join in.

I was born in the London Borough of St Marylebone :: 1927 december 05

I take each individual digit of my date of birth and add them together :-

1+9+2+7+1+2+0+5 = 27

2+7 = 9

Now let’s see how significant for me have been each of the years ending in ‘9’.

1939. I am 11 years old when I hear on the wireless the voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain telling us we are once more at war with Germany.  So I shall remain here in Caerphilly with Uncle Harry and Auntie Lilla instead of returning to London. The countryside, the boys’ grammar school, the scouts, the people I meet are all so famously new and different.

1949. I am 21 years old when I come up to University College Oxford to read for an Honours Degree in Music. I have just finished two years of compulsory National Service in the army. Many of the men in college are older than me.  They have been through real war. I am now an adult in an adult world.

1959. I spent so long in intensive thought and study. Now, at the age of 31, I am newly converted to the Roman Catholic Church, ‘Master of Music’ at Westminster Cathedral, and a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

1969. This is my first full year as Assistant Director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. A year-and-a-half ago I was doing rather well as a professional musician with a practice centered around my teaching at the RAM and, as I told myself, I could easily go on doing the same sort of thing for the next 25 or 30 years. But that would be it. There were no obvious prospects for advancement. Then, in the March of 1968, there were those ads in the best of the Sunday newspapers. And here I am. We celebrated my 41st birthday on the ship coming over.

1979. December 31st. Afternoon. Tea time. I am sitting on a QANTAS plane waiting for take-off. This decade in Australia has radically changed my life in ways I could never have foreseen. Now my work here is ended. I am 52 years old. I am going back to England.

1989. November 9th. I am 61 years old. I am in Berlin. It is the Annual General Meeting and conference of our European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. I am here to present a paper at one of the formal sessions and to write up the proceedings for publication. Much more importantly, we are all joining the champagne and celebrations marking the opening of borders and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. This may even be the end of the Cold War.

1999. Oxford. As the year draws to its close I am safely past my 72nd birthday. I recall a particular Christmas at Nana Cameron’s when I was seven or eight years old. The elders were talking about their pasts and their futures and I sat and wondered whether I could possibly live long enough to see the 21st century. It seemed so incredibly far away. And by then I would have passed my allotted three score years and ten.

επί-λογος

I am not going to pretend that 1999 or 2009 were earth-shattering years for me. They were not. In 1996 I gave my ultimate organ recital ending with a thumpingly good magnificent performance of Franz Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on BACH. Some weeks later, and for the last time, I played the organ for a Sunday evening service. I turned off the wind. Closed the console. Made farewells to the choir. Folded my tent .. and quietly went on my way. For the better part of sixty years my weekends had been devoted to providing music for the church :: Nonconformist. Spiritualist. Low Church Anglican. High Church Anglican. Roman Catholic High Mass - and  Solemn Vespers with Benediction. Now all that was ended. I was free. 

Free to spend weekends under canvas with friends of multivariant Pagan persuasions. Free to drive many a fruitful mile to speak at their moots, to feature in their annual conferences, to remind them of Helen Duncan, the Repeal of the 18th century Witchcraft Act, and of ‘Dafo’ - but for whom the Wicca might still be one of the arcane hidden mysteries.

I have meandered the rocky track from MS-DOS to Windows 8 (ugh!) and on to the glorious summit of Apple and the iMac. I have been part of the University’s teams teaching Word Perfect, dBase-II, MS Word, Excel, the C programming language, C++, Visual Basic, MS Access, and others now forgotten.

When I came back this time I chose my parents well. My mother and my father both were active accomplished Christian Spiritualists. My mother gave me my first piano lessons. Together in public concert, we played a 4-handed duet when I was 4 years old. My father inspired me, sang, and guided the circles. So has my Web of Wyrd been spun with twin strands striving for the ultimate in music and in religion.

As a good Sagittarian I have travelled far and wide. Physically. Intellectually. Spiritually. The path ahead has a far horizon. My revels now are - not yet - ended.

δαιμόνιον

Once again my book at bedtime is “A Discovery of Witches”.  Diana Bishop is aware of daemons wandering the Bodleian Library. For her, these are ‘creative, artistic creatures who walk a tightrope between madness and genius’. Yet I suspect they are tangible only to the sensitives. 

And then this morning, in my daily portion of NT Greek, is the episode of Jesus ‘casting out’ a daemónion. (I like the ‘casting out’ bit. The Greek ekbállo conjures up all sorts of weird and wonderful images. Chucking out is good. But hissing off the stage is better.) Yes. But. What about that daemónion? My old friends Liddell & Scott offer an overflow of suggestions ranging from the Divinity, with a capital D, to a minuscule inferior race of divine beings. And then, in the NT, to an evil spirit.

And I begin to understand. To comprehend. To take it in. We are in Jewish Monotheistic Territory overlain with the inheritance of Alexander the Great and now occupied by the Romans with their own pantheon of gods, goddesses, and lesser spirits. The Jews, like so many of their contemporaries, engage in an us-and-them culture. Insiders and Outsiders. Greeks and Barbarians. Jew and Gentile. The frum, the goy and goyim. There is but One God. The God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Ergo, it follows that all other extra-physical manifestations are - cannot be else but - demoniac. Evil spirits. quod erat demonstrandum. dun’n’dusted!

nota bene, per piacere : the presence of these extra-physical manifestations is not denied. More to the point, their presence is affirmed. The proponents of the Church of the One Right Answer first change the names and then besmirch the image.

Hmm ..  sometimes, when Empire building, the reverse takes place. I see the image of Isis suckling the infant Horus. And, on a distant eikonostasis,The Blessed Mother with the Infant at her breast.

We’ve wandered a bit this morning. Haven’t we? It’s been good to step away from the strait and narrow.

early memories

My earliest memories are of home and school. Home was 23 Harcourt Street, London W.1. School was a short walk along York Street. School was St Mary’s (Church of England) Infants. It was a comfortable small world. 

My world grew larger in 1935. I was 7 years old. We stood in Hyde Park to cheer the Silver Jubilee procession of King George V and Queen Mary. School was now St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary. In Miss Carpenter’s class we sang “What is the meaning of Empire Day? Why do the cannons roar? Why does the cry ‘God Save the King’ echo from shore to shore?” And Major Collins unfurled the great wall map of Africa and thrilled us with the story of Cecil Rhodes whose ambition it was to paint the map of Africa ‘red from the Cape to Cairo’. Red was the colour of Great Britain and the British Empire on the political maps in our atlases. The geat British Empire ‘on which the sun never set’.

It was the beginning of our mesmerisation into a world that existed only in the fireside dreams of our elders - who ought to have known better. 

Early in January 1938, just a few weeks after my 10th birthday, I moved to the Mercers’ School, a medieval foundation in the City of London. And once again our elders - who apparently did not know any better - filled our heads with ideas and ambitions which might, just ‘might’, have been valid in the confident glory days of Edward VII but which had been trampled underfoot in the mud of the Western Front in the Great War that began in 1914.

And so it came about that when, in the wartorn London of the early 1940s, I read John Gunter’s ‘Inside Europe’ I could hardly give credit to his findings. They were too different from our schoolbooks.

I had passed my 40th birthday and living briefly among Melanesians on a small island in the South Pacific when the moment of truth arrived. My schooldays had led me astray. The ethos they implanted carelessly ignored realities too harsh to be contemplated. 

I look around me and remember the Shelley I discovered at Univ. 

A traveller regards the shattered remnants of a vast statue part buried in the desert sand and there on the pedestal “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

two new books

I have two new books on the go.  

On Friday I bought Peter Frankopan : The Silk Roads, a new history of the world.  And yesterday I bought Tim Marshall : Prisoners of Geography, ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics. They are both ‘big picture’ demonstrations. They complement each other. 

The implications of the Silk Road captured my attention when I bought Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road some five years ago. This told me so much I did not already know about the great forces that came and went along the main routes linking east and west across Central Eurasia. 

Peter Frankopan begins with the Creation of the Silk Road and adds two dozen more roads including The Road of Cold Warfare, and The American Silk Road. I find myself so much drawn into those chapters which cover the decades I have lived through. Inevitably I find myself most affected by what we were not told at the time and how much my own world view has changed since then.

Tim Marshall’s title tells us exactly what the book is about : how the possibilities and the restrictions of land and sea have affected and will go on affecting the dreams and desires of warlords, traders, and others of that ilk in the past, the present and the future. For the first time I feel I have been informed about the full horror of Sykes-Picot and the almost remoteness of the built-in attitudes which were responsible. I wish I could say :  now we know better. But I can’t. I look back over what to me has been the recent past and recognise that it takes only one or two exercisers of power to make catastrophic decisions based on their having only one very limited view of reality. 

Where and in what kind of a world might I enjoy a future life?