An Agitation of the Dust

So I arrive at the Willowbrook Centre to entertain the elderly patients there, listening on my android to Iain McGilchrist giving an interesting talk on spirituality and critiquing Dawkins’ atheism.
Sounds quite interesting and yet I find my inner sceptic wonders if people who write dozens of books about spirituality are a bit like people who hoard possessions - Citizen Kanes who fill up warehouses with art treasures or book shelves with ideas. And all because they had a desperate Rosebud bereavement in childhood.
He’s got a lot to say about the modern world being ruled by the materialistic Left Hemisphere of the Brain which can only understand Rhythm while the Right Hemisphere appreciates Melody and Harmony. Well, I can go along with that bit. A good song combines the holy trinity of rhythm, melody and harmony.
As I walk across the car park an intense fear of the ageing process grips me, the ground beneath opening up to a harrowing void of utter insignificance. I am such stuff as dreams are made of and expected to sing and dance my way to oblivion.
And then I play for half a dozen 90 year olds in their pyjamas and they light up at the good old songs from the Victorian age and the wartime era – times when songs were designed to cheer the soul and to be sung communally and needed a certain well designed inner structure to succeed in this purpose. African care workers dance around the wheel chairs and tables with that natural fluid grace those people often possess. For now I am back in the general flow of humanity. I bask with my eight foot rabbit in this golden moment.
As the songs flow outwards to the smiles on time-worn faces, my mind turns back to the current wave of Christian-oriented YouTube sages I spend too much time listening to. I like the mild-mannered McGilchrist - but then he likes Rupert Sheldrake who is also mild-mannered and into psychedelia. But then Sheldrake likes Jordan Peterson who inclines towards Anger and Trumpism, for all his ferocious intellect and psychoanalytical training. It’s weird how wrong powerful intellects can get it. Terry Eagleton is another modified Christian thinker but also a Marxist which makes him pretty unique. Probably a good egg from my left-wing perspective.
I distrust people like Jordan Peterson and that historian Starkey chap and other Brexity types with their aggressive “anti-wokeness” who rant on about the Decline of Western Civilization. I’m sure our society benefits from an influx of energising Africans, Asians, East Europeans and others. How dare people moan about these people when they are the very ones keeping our health service going and doing the jobs that the moaners wouldn’t fancy themselves?
When asked what he thought of Western Civilization, Ghandi replied “It would be a good idea.”
The latest migrants coming to this island tend to be into hard work, rather like the old folks I’m playing to were – people who grew up during rationing and made do with the unthinkable poverty of just three t.v. channels. But they had good songs to sing and had a great time around the pub piano on a Friday night, surely more fulfilling than people today drinking at home and binging on Netflix box sets.
Oh to be a YouTube Guru! To make your living writing about The Divine from your cottage on the Isle of Sky urging the masses to rediscover the Sacred in all things and succeed in selling cartloads of self-help books to miserable people. I could go for that gravy if I was smart enough.
So many of us are compelled to look for gurus, me included - I can’t help myself, I always fall for it.
As I play for these bright-eyed octogenarians and the dancing Africans I find myself doubting whether this audience ever needed gurus. The Africans seem happy in their bodies and the old folks grew up with good songs, a pig in the yard and a local pub to commune in. They have a sort of vitality for all the winters piled up on their heads.
Now the pubs are empty and the home-stuck boozers are heir to a thousand channels of distracting fantasy.
The song-writers of the early twentieth century learned their harmony well and had the high bench marks of Gilbert and Sullivan, Gershwin, Cole Porter etc to emulate. They wrote songs that could be played on a piano and sung by ordinary people. I know how this bit of me sounds – Mr. Disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells who likes Noel Coward. I sound like Roger Scruton, all primed to lecture the young on Good Taste.
But it’s not reactionary to want good art, to have aesthetic values and to love what is Beautiful and dislike the Ugly. It’s not all about conditioning and personal opinion.
Well, OK maybe it is all about conditioning and personal opinion. And best not to broadcast those opinions on Facebook!
Oh dear, suddenly my mood collapses - I’ve gone all existential while I’m supposed to be entertaining...Does anybody need the views of this human organism called Nick, this “agitation of the dust” as Omar Khayam has it or the “poor tale told by an idiot” as Shakespeare wrote. What use this Sound and Fury when all shall Dissolve and leave not a Wrack behind...
A rousing chorus of Que Sera Sera offers philosophical comfort in three-four time and the job is done. I return to my car and the Ian McGilchrist talk. It’s good stuff I guess, bridging the divide between science and spirituality. He sounds like he’d give you his last fruit gum, rather than telling you to go and tidy your room like Jordan Peterson would.
Perhaps we do need to rediscover the sacred – but I would suggest a good pub sing-along rather than heavenly choirs in church. But then again, these hugely intelligent thinkers are finding much marrow in what seemed to be the dry bones of a dead religion, building syntactical towers up into the realms of Unbelievable Truth.
Well, OK have the heavenly choirs as well, why not?
Nick Gill
December 24th 2024

Kafka once said: " I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea." I prefer to drown myself in the "heavenly church choirs" , others - in the good pub sing along and third are exploring the beach with the sea. To stay authentic, I prefer to edit my soul into the tune of holy music. It lifts up my spirit, intensifies the rhythm of my Right Hemisphere and my "understanding of life backwards, while living it forward" /the latter one is Kafka's plagiarism again/
Rhythm, melody and harmony - a very nice holy trinity;😊 which is One because it is Three. Merry Christmas, Nick!