As some of you know, I used to be a candidate for ordination in the Scottish Episcopal Church. Sometime around 1979, I shifted my ground and completed my first degree (Divinity) as an academic subject. Since then have put quite some distance between the church and me. I retain an interest in what you might broadly call spiritual and religious matters, but do not profess any faith. I have at times called myself an atheist but that isn’t something that I do any more, not because of any belief but because I distrust dogmatism in all its forms.
Religious themes run through the fiction that I write in one way or another, from the protagonist of The Raven and the Hart who is a priest questioning her vocation, to Ba Ren the Buddhist monk alone in a wasteland in Soft Sings the River, a story in Coyote in the Corner.)
Last weekend, I dropped into Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Edinburgh for a short time. This was partly because it crops up as a location in a draft novel that I’ve been working on for too long and I wanted to check some details, but also because I remember it from long ago as a space I enjoyed being in. Walking in, I was immediately embraced by the heavy scent of that morning’s incense and the quietness of the church even though it is in the heart of Edinburgh; I was happy to sit for a while and take it in.
South window, Old St Paul’s
I’ve done this before. When researching elements of Raven I spent some time sitting in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral on Palmerston Place, a Victorian edifice that dominates the west of the city. Long ago, I went up as far as you can get in the bell tower where I should have had a fine view of the city, although in my memory it was raining. That visit gave me some elements of the setting for Canty’s final sermon, but it was also evocative of a sense of scale and something implicit in places given over to devotions. I felt something similar in some Buddhist temples in China.
Unsurprisingly, my short time in Old St Paul’s led me to reflect on why I liked being there and the possibilities of returning, albeit to enjoy the atmosphere rather than as a member of the congregation. I came away with a certainty that, should I ever return to the church, unlikely as that might be, it is to the High Anglican tradition that I would turn.
In another story in Coyote – Lighten Our Darkness – the vampire Margaret muses on her liking for High Church Anglicanism, musings that, if not exactly autobiographical, do represent something of my own instincts. She says,
I’m attracted to the High Church – none of that primacy of the Word nonsense beloved by those dour Reformers with their endless exegesis of minutiae. There is a splendour in ritual, in the old liturgical soft-shoe shuffle, a splendour that transports. I think it’s to do with the use of all five primary senses to produce something greater than the sum of the parts, that ineffable sixth sense of apprehension of the numinous, of the immanent, the encounter with the divine.
Does it surprise you that I speak of the divine? I don’t know why it should. We have been on this earth a long time and have long memories. We have seen many things that are difficult to explain without invoking the idea of other realms, other realities. That’s another reason I like ritual, treading the boards to play my walk-on part in the Divine comedy. It’s why I like the flummeries and fripperies of the high churches, the scripted choreography of the costumed pierrots in their sanctuaries, chasing the spectrum of the liturgical seasons, mining silver at the rainbow’s end for their chalices and patens, and gold for the embroidery on their chasubles.
I took this a bit further in Raven and again had Canty say something that is close to my own view both as a matter of principle but also as a matter of inclination. Canty comments in passing on the difference between ritual as participation and ritual as performance.
My liking for High Church ritual at its best (and it was the tradition in which I was brought up) is precisely because of the participatory element, of interacting with symbol and myth and community. I decline to participate now because I am not a believer in the core myths of Christianity or any other religion, but it’s where I would find a home if my views changed.
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UK Hardback 1st edition
In the late 1970s/ early 1980s, Doris Lessing wrote five science fiction novels – or at least they were marketed as such – under the overarching title of Canopus in Argos: Archives. This drew murmurings from the literary establishment about why she had lowered herself into genre, and mutterings from the SF crowd about this literary interloper. Ursula K LeGuin wrote a snippy review of the first of the novels, Shikasta.
I read all of the novels as they came out in paperback and rather enjoyed them, albeit that my clear favourites were the fifth in the series (Documents Relating to The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983) which is very funny, and the second – The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980). The latter was by far the best of the series, in my opinion, but in the 40 years since I first read it I have never revisited it. Until now.
I’m delighted to say that it holds up wonderfully and I’m more than happy to be immersed in its charms again. I won’t try to retell the plot as it makes no sense outside the context of the book (and for goodness sake don’t rely on the po-faced nonsenses of Wikipedia to get a head start.)
I have a huge to be read pile by my bed and do not need any more, but a reread of the rest of the Canopus in Argos sequence is now on my list.
Three years ago, more or less, I went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker at the cinema, back in the days when I went to the cinema (a bit more on that below). I wasn’t greatly impressed with the film at the time for the reasons I wrote about here.
I watch a lot of Star Wars stuff on TV and have been known to read the novels as well, continually searching for a really good Star Wars book, but the one thing I haven’t done is go back and rewatch The Rise of Skywalker. In the past few days I’ve watched it twice, albeit that I hit fast forward a lot during the first viewing. And … I’ve warmed towards the film somewhat.
I watched it because for ages I’ve had a notion of a Star Wars story sketched in a notebook. I probably won’t write the story because I can’t do the technobabble, but every so often it creeps out of my subconscious. I rewatched The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker with an eye on one particular character who would be the protagonist of the putative story.
I still think that the film has significant flaws – the side-lining of significant characters such as Rose and, to a lesser degree, Finn, the fan-service of the denouement in particular, and the general cheesiness of the narrative. More importantly, it ran away scared from the opportunities that The Last Jedi opened up and reverted to a boilerplate Star Wars story. I agree with younger me that there is probably a much better movie in there waiting to get out, but, I concede, The Rise of Skywalker isn’t as bad as my memory told me it was.
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I haven’t been to the cinema since before the pandemic. This isn’t entirely due to the pandemic itself. I mentioned here in passing 5 years ago (here) that I have some high-frequency hearing loss. I had an updated hearing test yesterday and the loss has spread to the fringes of mid-frequencies. It is not enough to justify hearing aids because the effect of the loss is only obvious in some situations, but it’s also why I have avoided the cinema. Generally speaking, the sound presentation in a cinema is such that I sometimes have a hard time working out what is being said. It is much easier to watch films at home with headphones on (and sometimes subtitles).
I got a recommendation that I should now be getting my hearing tested annually, which I’m happy to do (the tests are free.)
A couple of films held me rapt this week, both of them documentaries. One was In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50, by Toby Amies, the second Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, by Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt. I’ve put the trailers for each of them at the foot of this post.
The King Crimson documentary shares a quality with the two great Grateful Dead Documentaries, Anthem to Beauty and Long Strange Trip in that you don’t actually have to like the band in question to enjoy the film, though liking them obviously brings an added dimension. Amies’s film began as an attempt to do the impossible – to explain what King Crimson is as an entity and an aesthetic. It does not achieve that in a definitional way, that would be too didactic, but a sense of what it means to be part of the band emerges from the mix of live and rehearsal footage and interviews.
Naturally, the whole thing revolves around the singular vision of the cirkus-master, Robert Fripp, a man you may love or hate but, personally, I rather like.
Some further thoughts provoked by the film underlie this recent post on writing:
Dreaming Walls is an elegiac look at the spectres – living and dead – haunting the Chelsea Hotel in New York. It’s a gentle film that refuses to deliver the resolution that some watchers seem to crave. Most of the critical reviews I’ve seen focus on what the film does not do rather than engage with it on its own terms. An honourable exception is the review in Den of Geek. A better approach would be to do what Robert Fripp invites the listener to do – to abandon expectation and simply be present
The film’s portraits of the remaining long-term residents are evocative of not only a bohemian past, but also a defiantly idiosyncratic present that rages against the dying of the light. And for all it’s apparent lack of form, the film is made with the emotional precision that is the hallmark of love. There are ghosts here, and beauty.
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Ernst Haas, 1980
Anything evocative of old New York will always prompt me to look again at the pioneering photographers who shaped our mental images of the city. Of the colour photographers of American cities and psychogeographies, Ernst Haas commented that, the [make of] camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.
In a sense Haas was obviously correct; it is the artist not the equipment that creates the image. In another sense, he was wrong because equipment and art are intimately intertwined. A polaroid image is not the same as that from 35mm film, and to use one or the other is a deliberate choice on the part of the photographer just as much as an artist chooses between charcoal and pastels.
In that context, it struck me that a lot of the aesthetic of classic photography comes from the characteristics of glass – Leitz and Zeiss lenses particularly and also, later, Nikon lenses – but also from film emulsions, particularly the many forms of Kodachrome. Important too were professional reproduction techniques for galleries and magazines, whether it’s Eggleston using dye-transfer or Nan Goldin’s use of Cibachrome. I like film cameras, and the classic cameras and lenses survive, but the emulsions do not. Unfortunately.
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