Winter solstice myths and legends

From left, Benedicte Maurseth (Hardanger fiddle, voice), Clare Salaman (nyckelharpa)      and Jean Kelly (clarsach).

Take three gifted musicians with strange and ancient instruments, put them into a medieval church illuminated by candlelight on a cold, frosty night and get them to play tunes and sing songs about myths and legends inspired by the winter solstice.
Mix all these potent ingredients together and you have a musical seasonal dish that lives long in the memory.
Jean Kelly (clarsach or Celtic harp), Benedicte Maurseth (Hardanger fiddle, voice) and Clare Salaman (nyckelharpa or Swedish keyed fiddle) presented a sublime concert at the National Centre For Early Music, York, last night as the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments.
The capacity audience were enchanted by the trio’s musical virtuosity and their Scandinavian stories about St Lucia, a third-century martyr who helped Christians hiding in dark catacombs, using a candle to light her way.
The trio also mentioned the dark side of the Lucia story: Lussi, a terrifying enchantress. Legend has it that on the longest night Lussi flies through the sky, amidst smoke and flame, hunting those who have failed to prepare properly for Christmas. She puts her long arms down the chimney, blows out the candles and hits the lazy and work-shy with her hand, causing immediate paralysis.
So the message from last night’s concert is crystal clear: don’t put off your Christmas preparations. You have been warned!

 

 

Bigotry and hypocrisy

The tumultuous story of Ireland’s recent social history is told through the eyes of a gay man in John Boyne’s latest novel.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies is narrated by Cyril Avery and his opening words set the tone: “Long before we discovered he had fathered two children by two different women… Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church Of Our Lady in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.”
Banished from her family and parish, “the whore” flees to Dublin where her son is born out of wedlock amidst the spilled blood of a brutal, vicious and violent attack.
Misfortune dogs Cyril throughout his melancholic life as a potent  brew of fear, shame, guilt and secrecy corrodes his relationships. His is a love that dare not speak its name; being gay was illegal in Ireland until the 1990s; furthermore, the country’s influential Roman Catholic Church regarded it as a mortal sin.
Boyne combines anger, comedy and poignancy to take a satirical swipe at bigotry and hypocrisy in this compelling novel.

An imaginative tour de force

Lincoln In The Bardo is an extraordinary debut novel by acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders. It was inspired by newspaper reports about a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln visiting a crypt alone one night in February 1862 to hold the corpse of his beloved son, Willie, who had died of typhoid fever, aged 11. The American President entered that dark, lonely place on the verge of a breakdown, barely able to cope with the incessant demands of leading a nation at war with itself. He leaves that crypt a changed man; charged with resolution and empathy, he is determined to win the bloody civil war and end slavery. This epiphany, according to the author, was down to the influence of lost souls lingering in a supernatural realm known, in Tibetan tradition, as the bardo. Saunders populates this realm with freakish characters that will live long in the memory. It’s is a remarkable feat of the imagination and, as a play for numerous voices, this novel will work brilliantly as an audio book.

Bishop’s move

Richard Holloway, the former head of the Anglican Church in Scotland who stopped believing in God, does not like being called an atheist because he “doesn’t do certainty”; if you must stick a label on him, he would suggest “expectant agnostic”.
He told a packed audience at York Explore Library last night (20/02/2017) he was fascinated by three questions that had taxed philosophers and theologians for centuries:

What are we?
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?

In promoting his latest book A Little History Of Religion, the former bishop argued there were four approaches those questions:

Strong Religion: Humankind’s encounter with God was all truthful, all actual, all real. This fundamentalist approach left no room for doubt.

Critical Realism: There was an encounter with God but, due to human fallibility, we must be modest about the claims we make. It adopted a fluid approach to history.

Post Religion: (non-realism): This approach was sympathetic to religion; it regarded it as a colossal work of the imagination that spoke to the human condition in the same way as great works of art, such as an opera, play or novel. You can be a religious belonger without being a religious believer; it can challenge you to be a better person.

No religion: These people don’t get religion. They ask the question: “Why waste your time with it?” Some in this camp were benign while others, such as Richard Dawkins, attacked religion with vigour and a certain amount of anger by adopting, ironically, a religious, evangelical approach.

Holloway ended his stimulating talk by referring to Yehudah Amichai’s poem:

The Ecology of Jerusalem

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams
like the air over cities with heavy industry.
It’s hard to breathe.

And from time to time a new shipment of history arrives.
Houses and towers serve as packing materials
later thrown away and piled in heaps.

Sometimes candles come in place of people.
Then it’s quiet.
Sometimes people come in place of candles.
Then there’s noise.

Amid enclosed gardens, among jasmine bushes
replete with balsam, foreign consulates,
like wicked brides who were thrust aside
lie in wait for their moment.