How the arts bring together the physical and spiritual

… I spooned the chicken of Hell

in a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me

tasting it, croaked to white Jesus. And only pride drove me,

forkful by forkful, observed by hot mangosteen eyes,

by all the carnivorous castes and gurus from Cardiff

my brilliant tears washing the unbelief of the Welsh.

Oh it was a ride on Watneys plunging red barrel

through all the burning ghats of most carnal ambition

and never again will I want such illumination

for three days on end concerning my own mortal coil

but I signed my plate in the end with a licked knife and fork

and green-and-gold spotted, I sang for my pains like the free

before I passed out among all the stars of Cilfynydd.

But eating the hottest of curries makes more possible, more credible, more reliable, the same poet’s understanding of the spirit at work in “Poetry and Religion”:

… It is the same mirror:

mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,

and God is the poetry caught in any religion,

caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry

is in the poem, a law against its closure.

There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,

as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, Rosella parrot –

who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Ezra Pound once snarled that religion was just another failed attempt to make art popular. But Murray’s point is well taken. You cannot separate them entirely. The evidence is there across continents, across centuries. In the American tradition, the Transcendentalists, etherializing reality, were shocked by the bowels and entrails sung by Whitman, and Poe, with his Imp of the Perverse, reminds you that even the transparent eyeball is subject to vicious muscles in malevolent hands and fingers, and Melville sends Ahab over the side in language that literally takes your breath away.

In the end, it is the replenishment of language that we hope for in the metaphysics of spring, when spirit and matter are at one: a renewal of vitality so easily lost. Let Wole Soyinka have the judgement here. In his indispensable book, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), he says this: “The context is the cosmic totality,” including the Earth itself. “Persephone, Dionysos and Demeter were terrestrial deities. Pluto not merely ruled but inhabited the netherworld. Neptune was a very watery god who conducted his travels on water-spouts”. In antiquity, in Asia and Europe, as in Africa, all men and women lived “within a cosmic totality”, in possession of “a consciousness in which [our] own earth being, [our] gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon. A profound transformation has therefore taken place within the human psyche, if, to hypothesise, the same homo sapiens mythologises at one period that an adventurous deity has penetrated earth, rocks and underground streams with his phallus […] and, at another period, that a new god walks on water without getting his feet wet.”

The gauntlet comes down with a distinctly glittery clatter.

In his essay, “Child at the Frontier” collected in the book Imagined Commonwealths (1999), edited by TJ Cribb, Soyinka comes to the essence of the question. The journalist, the creative writer, the painter, composer, the artist of any kind, dwells and is at home on a particular kind of threshold: the frontier of communication. “We must dredge the marshlands of primordial being or instincts to recover lost clues to the act of creativity, in the motions of communication.” He goes on: “What, after all, is the artist – writer, painter, sculptor – but another member of the tribe of information-gatherers and disseminators, scavenging within the common pabulum of reality? If one truly moved the frontier a few yards inland from maturity, groping backwards into the interior and hinterland of primary consciousness…”

Well, if we did, what would we find?

When it comes to concluding or beginning, to looking both back and forward, across what has been lost and spent, and on, to what might come, the language is all we have to express both despair and hope.

Consider Shostakovich, looking back and saying farewell at the end of his last symphony, the 15th, finally finding the home key of A major, the right key to close on. And consider TS Eliot, in his poem “Marina” (1930), sensing his own memories fading as the new world buds and breaks into the being of a daughter who, he prays, will sail the new ships into new seas and new seasons. In the age of the vessel of his own mortality, we recognise the truth of decay, infirmity, the approach of death: “The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.” And yet in the image of a younger generation, a daughter who will go into the world of a future we cannot predict, there is not only hope, but prospect:

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

The lips part to speak the language of a new life, and the end of one dispensation offers us this promise

of the as-yet unspoken worlds to come.

The replenishment of language, poetry, song and music are among what I’d call the gifts of Prometheus. Spirit rises through matter. For this, the clay did grow tall. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (1791) has, for me, a capacity similar to only two or three other things in life: it makes me happy whenever I think about it. Just as Mozart himself comes from the classical world of enlightenment, measurement and grace, and leans forward into the Romantic world of symphonic self-expression, The Magic Flute combines a grandeur of vision with a popular and accessible immediacy of tone. And it’s funny. How humourless and dull you would be to deny the glorious absurdity and the actuality of love in the “Will you marry me?” duet of Papegeno and Papagena?

The story is simple: it’s a quest for love, and once the trials of water and fire have been passed through, the happy ending is assured. But the trials are testing moments and whenever I see the opera, there is always a pleasurable tension in understanding those passages of transition, from quest, through endurance, to achievement.

The story of Prometheus is simple too. Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to people. But that’s a metaphor, of course, and it can be interpreted in at least two ways.

The gift of fire is passion, the gift of all the arts, and it’s also the gift of love – and both love and the arts – the arts of music, song (and birdcatching), are central to The Magic Flute.

So in the end, perhaps the meaning of Easter, like the gift of Prometheus itself, is never an unmixed blessing. Fire might warm and sustain but two other possibilities threaten: that fire might die, diminish and go cold; or that fire might flare to conflagration, consuming the people who had received it as a gift. Prometheus himself paid dearly for his act of rebellious transgression, chained to a rock, doomed to have his liver torn and eaten by an eagle through eternity.

That means he’s still there. The fire is still with us.

We’ll be coming back to it.

From Child at the Frontier by Wole Soyinka

Think for a moment of the pathetic, even masochistic image of an infant attempting to speak. It is almost as if that infant came into the world with no other mission but this – to speak. Here is a barely formed tissue of consciousness; no sooner is it out in the open air than it takes a huge gulp of the polluted stuff and lets out a bellow. From then on, it is one continuous proto-language hurled indiscriminately at the ceiling and other still moving objects, sometimes at nothing in particular. Even alone in its crib, this activity never ceases. Nothing will do until it has succeeded, after titanic struggles, in fusing its own primitive womb syntax with that of the exterior landscape, abandoning the protective capsule of incomprehensibility with which it was blessed from the very beginning. The frustrations, the jerks and spasms, uncoordinated gladiatorial lunges in every direction, the weeping and gnashing of gums as it struggles to utter the first plosive! What, I have often asked myself, what is the hurry? Why all this compulsion? The desperation? Considering all the tribulations that await it once the adult world accepts that it can now be admitted into conversation, one can only agree with the experienced eye which takes one look at such an object, shakes its head sadly and pronounces, “That child, ’e no get sense!” I have come to near certainty that watching a baby committing such a crime against itself is justly described as watching it exhibit all the symptoms of a writer!