One of the resources we have in life to keep us entertained is the way our minds come up with ideas that we can, if we wish, take note of and kick around a bit to see what emerges. One such idea that popped up unbidden a good few years ago inside my brain had to do with listening to spiritual music – Christian chant, vespers, Masses, etc – when no longer sharing the belief that, most probably, inspired the composer. Am I allowed enjoy this music? What, to me, does it mean?
My immediate response to this uninvited voice was, don’t be daft. Why not just enjoy the music if you can? Admire the artistry? Listen to the notes. Still, it rankled, so that I might be listening to the wonderful Hilliard Ensemble singing liturgical works from a couple of hundred years ago, imagining superstitious monks inside some damp monastery room with high, vaulted ceilings, and have the idea intrude in a niggly, annoying way. How can you find this music engrossing, moving? You don’t believe in this stuff anymore. Your response is bogus.
The cultural arc of my life is one I’d say I share with a lot of people my age who’ve spent their lives on this island. A childhood and early adolescence where the church loomed large, visits to Mass and other religious ceremonies where, at times, there was music and candles and all that stuff. Then the shedding of belief like a snake producing a new skin. Pop music. British and North American singer-songwriters. Punk. New Wave. Then, alongside the discovery that you can no longer stay out all night dancing and still put in a good shift in the office the following day, the beginnings of an appreciation for classical music. Coming out of the HMV shop that use to be on the top of Grafton Street with a plastic bag that contained not an album from the top ten but a recording of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. Knowing you’re doomed.
I never had a problem enjoying Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, finding I could dig a gospel tune without paying heed to the accompanying warning of eternal damnation.
Keeping it lit – Frank McNally on attending the global premiere of Gloomsday
Pages from history – Felix M Larkin on the Freeman’s Journal
Remembering Robert Armstrong: Ronan McGreevy on a gardener whose life was disrupted by two world wars
Decayed Centenary - Frank McNally on the history of Irish brain rot
But the niggly independent voice that exists inside all of us insisted on troubling my private enjoyment of stuff like William Byrd’s Masses for three or four voices, or Arvo Part’s exploration of Russian Orthodox choral music. What are you doing listening to this stuff, it said. It’s not yours. And I’d find myself distracted, fretting about what exactly was going on.
But then, like Batman to the rescue, I came across a story recently that, if I remember correctly, dates back to Aristotle and his view on our appetites. A guy was walking through city centre Athens on his way somewhere when he noticed a crowd had gathered. He walked over to see what was going on and, when he did, discovered that people had gathered to watch a public execution. Instead of going on about his business – like the niggly voice told him he should do – he stayed and watched the unfortunate condemned man’s grisly end. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself, disgusted with himself. You, his niggly voice told him, are better than that.
This, Aristotle argued, is the spiritual aspect of our nature. It’s not a god thing, it is an appetite or facility we all have, like our so-called animal appetites, or capacity for reason. A restless standard setter that says, you can do better than this. You can be better than this. Or, when addressing a collective, says, we can do better than this. Life should be better than this.
I should have marked the page, and put aside the book, when I came across the story, but I didn’t and now I can’t remember any more than the above. Nevertheless, encountering it has improved my feelings towards the niggly voice inside my head and, I’m pretty sure, his or her feelings towards me. Something that had come between us has been resolved, and the relationship is all the better for having been through the difficult decades during which relations were strained by what constituted a tiny pebble inside the existential shoe. So that’s what that’s all about, we tell one another now, before lying out on the sofa to fully enjoy Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus.