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Tag Archives: The Crusades

Pontius, POTUS & the inconvenient truth of ‘Rag Head’ Christianity

21 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Abrahamic Faiths, Aldi Spumante, Apple i-phone, Away In A Manger, Ayatollahs, Bethlehem, Carol Service, Christianity, Christmas, Dan Brown, David ben Gurion, Guantanamo, Herod, Iran, jerusalem, Jesus, Jews, keffiyeh, Mary & Joseph, Nokia N72, Pharisees, Pontius Pilate, Rag Head, Samaritan, Syria Palaestria, Terry Jones, The Crusades, The Pope

 

So there I am, perched on a slightly undersized plastic chair in a primary school hall in a  in East Sussex.

It’s the Christmas Carol service

The stage and floor are populated with a shifting mass of variously aged primary school children including my own sweet daughter at the upper end in Year 6.

The reception age children at the front fidget and paw at their own slightly chewed sleeves and faces and selves as if in the throes of climbing out of their baby skins with every word line and note they sing and squawk.

The Carol that captures my attention is one that refers to the cold manger and Mary and Joseph wrapped up against the chilly Bethlehem night. The animals and human’s shivering against the creeping desert cold.

And this is why it struck me.

I wonder whether he of the golden bird’s nest head, notionally in charge of one of the most powerful economies and militaries in the world, ever really considers the long thread that connects his uber-Christian, god-fearing heartland to the descendants of the characters in the nativity play?

I wonder whether, as he sets a geopolitical bomb under the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, it strikes him as absurd that the child of that Virgin Birth, if he turned up now, would probably find himself stripped and shipped to Guantanamo Bay sharpish.

Setting aside the claim and counter claim regarding POTUS’s purported IQ of 156 (rendering him a genius apparently) let’s just say that even placing  Trump’s intellect at a ‘respectable’ level, there are quite a few pointers to more than just an absence of emotional intelligence and cultural sensitivity at work here. (No Shit).

To say there is an incoherent, plastic and highly malleable politic and principle at play here is to understate a little.

But the bit I’m really interested in is this: which Christian myth is he playing in his head when he makes these gestures. That of the russet-haired Jesus of the Renaissance – pale skinned, wan, plying his flock with loaves and fishes? Or that of the reactionary, disruptive and contrarian sage – inviting both Jews and gentiles to convert to his way? Or is his the Christianity of Dan Brown, a lofty, East Coast Coffee Shop version cauterized from any whiff of the rocky, dusty, impoverished and unleavened truth of Palestine and its peoples in 33AD; Jew or otherwise?

I like the Renaissance version just for its aesthetic but the would require me to be able to picture Golden Spun Hair Man swooning over a Titian, which I can’t (though if, like St Augustine of Hippo, Jesus was perhaps of Berber stock, the russet-haired, blue-eyed Jesus could be a possibility) so I’m erring towards the Dan Brown model. I’ll go for Action Christian (I’m sure there is a play figure in this somewhere) with the odd scattering of a conspiracy cooked up by those in power (secret societies and the Papal Prelate) against the masses (God-Fearing Christians just trying to be Jimmy Stewart) for good measure.

Any other version requires him to observe that the source of spirituality in his heartland resides in the rocky hills of Bethlehem and its surrounds. Which means…yup, rag heads.

Disregarding the highly contentious, theologically and racially charged topic of the colour of Jesus’s skin (most likely black or of a distinctly dark tint: not a high point of conversation I sense in an all-white Alabama chapel) the one simple fact is that by all accounts Jesus was what might be called both a Jew and (to quote Action Movie Christian Guy) potentially a ‘rag head.’ And let’s not forget he was also an insurgent acting in some ways against the prevailing religion of Judaism and the prevailing rule of Roman Law to which Herod and his Religious leaders submitted themselves.

So as I sit transfixed by the soaring feats of one tousle-haired 6 year-old girl who is managing to chew her lip, twiddle with her hair, talk to herself AND mouth the words to Away In the Manger all at once, I wonder what it would require of Donald and his heartland to be truly Christian.

(And when I say Christian, I mean the ascetic 34-38AD out-of-Palestine version of Christian Past, freshest in the mind and closest to its turbulent chilly, dusty, poverty-racked beginnings.    I certainly do not mean the bloated, bearded ugliness of Christian Present, slumped in a piss-stained, vomit-flecked corner of the year between early October and New Year’s Day, the tyre tracks of the ‘holidays are coming’ lorry scarring up its arms, cheeks wet with Egg Nog and Aldi Spumante, new i-phone X clutched tight in its cold, dead hand, rictus thumb hovering over the Samaritan’s Festive Phone Number; an expanding pool of disappointment staining the floor beneath it.)

If the Christian Holy Scriptures are to be believed, to follow Jesus in his purest, imitative (meme-like) sense is to flout the prevailing Judaic hierarchy and its over lords. Put another way, to be Christian one must flout the prevailing ruling Judaic principal in Palestine – Herod & The Pharisees (Israel) and also that of its Master, Rome (The United States of America) with its iron-grip on Jerusalem. Confused? You will be.

So, if that is true, is that god-fearing U.S. Christian heartland supposed to be for Trump and his proclamation of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or against it?  Discuss.

And in the light of the destitute, marginalised, travelling tribes of Syria Palaestria, what’s that god-fearing heartland Christian meant to really think of that Immigration Ban?

A lot of those countries are within or teetering on the edge of The Cradle of both broader Civilisation and particularly the Abrahamic Faiths – and many are ‘one in faith’ with them. To dismiss them or close them out is to act against faith.

And anyway, regardless of whom those countries on the Banned List might sneak around US Homeland Security, aren’t we already dancing with the devil of fundamentalism? – buddied up with a close friend and ‘ally’ whom could fund and place more bombers and lorry crashers in the UK and US than everyone on the Immigration Ban combined?

Let’s set aside the slightly uncomfortable long-term alliance between the U.S of A. and the ever-charming House Of Saud (and its penchant for propagating its theological alliance with the teachings of Al Wahab – Wahhabism – and the violent conversion of those beliefs) and just bring it down to a ‘news’ and views level for the moment. What do we see? What informs our myths and beliefs. And let’s think about those in the light of a manger on the outskirts of Bethlehem populated with three people and a some livestock.

Let’s consider all those pictures we see on the news feeds, of ‘dodgy’ armed insurgents or ‘rag heads’ creeping around the likes of Mosul. (I am sure that I read somewhere that David Ben Gurion was branded a terrorist before he was lauded as a state builder but maybe I’m reading the wrong books.)

When we look at them what do we see?  They certainly look the part for their role in our darkest cautionary tales and propaganda.

Most particularly let’s start with the signature of the insurgent, peaceful or otherwise – lets start with that ‘Rag Head’ – the colloquial derogatory phrase for someone from the Middle East wearing local dress including the keffiyeh.

Now Mary and Joseph would have sported some form of head dress, especially in the long, hard trek to Bethlehem atop a donkey.

Anyone who has experienced the cold of a middle-eastern night will know that wrapping up is a must. And a ‘rag’ for wrapping the head is essential wear.

The Jewish Couple and their child that we worship, living in the Roman Province of Syria Paleastia, would have been, to the unseasoned eye, a couple of rag heads with a baby. Their look. Their baby. Theirs would be no different to the faces we see looking up and out of those boats that bump up on the sandy fringes the Mediterranean and Aegean seas.

Good job they don’t have to come begging for accommodation in Thurrock on a cold winter’s night. They’d probably get a good kicking and shoved in a skip for good measure.

Well mate, they all look the same don’t they! Come round here looking for a hand out!? So we gave them one. Oi!

(As Terry Jones pointed out in his series on the Crusades, our ‘they all look the same to me’ principle has been generously applied to our middle-eastern cousins since records of our ‘relationship’ with them began, leading in the First Crusade to the stalwart Christian Knights and their horde massacring the men, women and children of the largest Christian city in the Holy Land, mistaking them for Muslims. Whoops.)

And given the likely nature of Jesus’s dress and demeanour, if he turned up on a subway train or bus, many ‘god-fearing’ Christian people would be checking the look of his back-pack, suspiciously eyeing the old Nokia N72 in his hand, held together with 10 year old Christmas Reindeer tape – and wondering whether the straps in his sandals contained some form of explosive.

So, as we sing these carols, and these children chew their sleeves, scuff their feet and sing their hearts out, for whom are we singing in the global sense of Universal Human Suffrage? Everyone? Christians? White Western Christians? Jesus? Jesus’s Mum? Palestinians (Jewish & Arabic)? Rag heads? Western Jews? Eastern Jews? Repentant Romans? The Poor? Impoverished society? The disenfranchised? The subjugated? The lost children? The Insurgents? The Lovers? The Dreamers? (OK, I’m slipping into Kermit’s Rainbow Connection but you get my meaning hopefully.)

The madness – the cat’s cradle of power-play Geopolitics, militia funding, Homeland building, oil trading, border bartering, religious polemics, spurious ethnicities, brutal fundamentalism – should defy the simplistic Monopoly Board machinations of Trump. But no. The staggering, ill-informed, over simplification of highly complex issues followed by global ignominy are his forte. Not that he cares. That’s exactly why he applies it. With one proclamation, he dumbs the whole debacle into a Bumper Sticker. He patently feels he’s got a handle on this Middle Eastern stuff. So screw ‘em.

So I return to my wondering. About that myth.  I wonder who he thinks of when he sings lines like Lord. Prince of Peace. Redeemer. Who does he picture? The socio-psychopath in him might be thinking ‘Me’. But the Jerusalem proclaimer? Who does he see in his mind’s eye?

When he sings Little Donkey, does he see bodies scattered along the road to Damascus?The ragged in the refugee camps? Children un-swaddled against the Syrian winter? The people at the outer edge of the middle-eastern census?

Or does he see the muscular Christianity of the bearded, Brad-Pitt-like Jesus embodied in a ‘ripped;’ and luminescent white marble statue in the building of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints opposite the Science Museum in London.

When he makes a proclamation like that, which gallery is he playing to?

The uber-Christians who still believe that ‘Jews are satan ’cos the nailed up the Lawd!’

Or the white picket Christian ideals of It’s a wonderful Life?

Neither I sense.

Iran is the real recipient of this proclamation. POTUS throwing a sandal at the Ayatollahs.  Masterstroke.

Even more impressive that he can do that AND piss off the Pope, the EU, Saudi Arabia, The UN and the Russians and the Chinese all at once. This man may have small hands but he has big REACH.

At which point, as I hum ‘We saw three ships come sailing in’ I realise that in my head I just see a naval blockade. Christ.

Where’s Jimmy Stuart when you need him!

Disney, atoms, spinal tap & the power of the Melancholic hum

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Abrahamic peoples, Atomoles, Brian Cox, Bruch's Violin Concerto, Cradle of Civilisation, D Minor, Dissonence, Feed The Birds, Gnostic Chanting, Hebrew Spirituals, Kracow, Lydian Harmoniai, Mach Piece, Mary Poppins, melancholia, Mellin, Octaves, Rad-energy, Robinson Crusoe, Sentimentality, Sherman & Sherman, Spinal Tap, The Crusades, The Law of Harmonic Repulsion & Attraction, The Moors, Theory of Musical Equiliberation, Thermism, Travers, Walt Disney

thenewdaily_disney_290114_mary_poppins.jpg

Why do some pieces of music seem to overwhelm us with emotion?

There are some pieces of music that seem to tear down the defences of even the coolest cucumbers and the most rational beings – stirred to high emotion by the mellifluous cadence of the piece.

And there always seems to be a minor key mooching about in there somewhere with the more melancholic or sentimental pieces of music. Certainly in western cultures those Minor keys are right up there with best of them in the profoundly moving department.

How can we forget Nigel Tufnell and his unforgettable Mach Piece – in D Minor

“I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”

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BUT is ‘sadness’ really a universal minor key thing?

Melancholy in the western world may well reverberate through its minor chords. But such is not the case for many other cultures who can find joy and happiness in chords or harmonies that might have western ears sprinting for the Kleenex and a teary lie down.

The minor chord features heavily in both some African and Asian wedding music. Someone recently pointed out that in the Lydian Harmoniai of Ancient Greece which was designed specifically to evoke melancholy most closely resembles our major scale – and not a minor tear to be seen.

To be fair the ancient roots of our musical heritage have travelled a long and complex road – from music or harmony as one of the first human technologies – a way of expressing complex emotion, information and occasion – to their more recent shadings the result of its continental shifts out of the cradle of our current civilisations beliefs and influences.

Music or musical Harmony as we know it has bounced and bobbled around to a most staggering degree, spouting up from the rhythmic heart of Africa, thrown northwards to be strung high on the strings of the pre hellenic tribes to those deep in the Syrian basin; to roar out in the soaring song and melody of the Abrahamic peoples and faiths, via Palestine, through the Monastic Orders of the Crusades, up into the mellifluous discordant chanting of the orthodox churches into the throaty baritone of steppe Russian and Cossack singing and echoing amongst the walls of the ghettoes of Kracow; or carried on the warm, sandy  Gnostic breezes to turn up towards the Mediterranean, clipping the southern rim to meet the war-ish Moorish wails and chants: to vault the seaways into southern Spain and the monastic orders to collide with the Cantorial Melancholy of the Renaissance rendered dissonant by the long Asian shadow of the Venetian  merchant and underwritten by the colder airs and arias of the Middle and Northern European marches.

In a nutshell, harmony has been around a bit – and its been a little loose with its favours. Harmony has found itself sad and happy in so many different contexts that it doesn’t know its major arse from its minor elbow when it comes to the proving of what makes a sad or happy musical sound, note or chord.

You could say that for a broadly consensual idea of ‘sad’ (for that read minor) chords to have percolated to the top of that millennia-long journey shows their immutable and inherent power. But on the other you could say that every sequence of harmonies or notes, having travelled that road, would by now be laden with ‘context’ – the shaper and colourist of emotion in music.

This historic cultural criss-cross, the subsequent assimilation and blurring of musical cultures might explain why the chord sequence of ‘Lord, Hear my prayer’, the French Taize Christian spiritual has a decidedly Hebrew quality in the way in which its chord sequence descends and ascends, and whose chord succession has a remarkable similarity to some of the orchestrations from Disney’s Mary Poppins (more of which later).

In music particularly, there is much debate about how ‘melancholy’ or emotional characteristics are given to certain notes or chords – back to Nigel Tufnell and D Minor, the saddest of chords.

Specialists in this area point to the Theory of Musical Equilibration to explain the relationship between music and emotion. They see notes and chords as not inherently emotional but as a process of Will – a process which sets chords and notes in relation to particular cultural social and temporal contexts. The theory contests that it is these contexts that ’dye’ the notes chords or harmonies with emotion.

An example perhaps of this theory is the song ‘Feed The Birds’ featured in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. Written by Sherman & Sherman. There is enormous contextual substance and potency in this song for generations of western adults and their children (as the adults tend to pass down their cultural ‘mores and memes’ through sharing of the things they loved as children, and the children in turn love what their parents love as an act of belonging – emotional adhesion).

It is said that Travers, the lady who wrote the story of Mary Poppins, on hearing the suggested song Feed The Birds wished instead for Greensleeves (which Wikipedia notes as being in E Minor as is much of Feed The Birds) to be the soundtrack to Mary Poppins – as it was quintessentially English. The quintessence of Feed The Birds I would venture is of a very different tribe.

There is an underlying spirit in the music of Feed The Birds that for me is inextricably linked to the Hebrew spirituals and the eastern European musical traditions. The echo of the yiddisher musical culture of eastern Europe seems to rise up in so many of the composers of these ‘melancholia’ or nostalgia pieces. The Sherman brothers are but one example.

2eps001.jpg

The composer of another great and renowned melancholic piece, the theme tune to the 1960s TV serialisation of Robinson Crusoe, was originally from Kiev in the Ukraine. And though there are some parts of this score that sound more Bond theme than anything else, the core of it, is distinctly eastern European for me. There is a point about 3 minutes and 40 seconds in where it transfers from a bombast Bond-like orchestration to the most heart wrenching solo violin. The echo of the first 60 seconds of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor is not difficult to hear – and seemingly a similar wish in Robert Mellin to incorporate Jewish inspirations into his music, as Bruch did so many years before.

In much the same way as Feed The Birds, the soundtrack for Robinson Crusoe is quite extraordinary in its ability to overwhelm the listener with feelings of profound emotion – both joy and sadness in perfect harmony.

These both make very good exemplars of the Theory’s concept of how Context (yearning, simpler times, naivete, longing, loss, when the world was young, carefree, endless summer) ‘dyes’ the music with emotion

The yearning in these pieces does seem to reach beyond simple sentimentality though. There was a profound feeling present when I first heard them. This pre-sentimental, pre-nostalgic effect is played out in the numerous comments that can be found underneath their youtube listings – ‘as moving as the first time I heard it’ is a reoccurring refrain. The fact that these pieces of music have become sentimentalised and dyed with emotion is I would suggest a secondary effect: an outcome of their initial impact and the mesmeric effect they had on the viewer/listener.

I would like to venture that they vibrate with something far greater than simple ‘context’ and dyed emotion.

They seem to vibrate with the power of a far more timeless human ‘voice’.

I wonder whether there are certain harmonies that in their vibration come closer than anything else the millennia of musical story tellers could muster to capturing the vibration of life itself.

That vibration – the energetic shaking of atoms on which all animate existence or life is based – but perhaps its resonance, however fleetingly is captured in some of these pieces.

The Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion tells us that atoms shaking or vibrating at between 42 and 63 octaves per second produce a creative force – thermism – whose transmissive force – Rad-energy – creates association and cohesion – creates ‘stuff’ -the ethereal and material world we live in – Oh, and us. So we are in effect vibrating along with everything else. So why would we not recognise and respond to a fellow vibration in the world and feel drawn – to want to cohere with it – even if it is just a sound, note or harmony

It is a long stretch from the measuring of atomic octaves per second to the sweeping choir of the Sherman Brothers piece in Mary Poppins BUT I would venture that as we find out more and more about our existence and how we fit into the world we live in, especially at a sub atomic universal level, a distant and circuitous link between the octaves or vibration of life and those of musical harmony will eventually be laid out, only yo be met by an Uh Duh! response. ‘Of course they’re linked’ we’ll say.’Whoever was stupid enough to think they weren’t ?!’

There will be a quick populist ‘Brian Cox’ rewrite on the  infinite and unchangeable quantity of atomoles, the base of all matter and their state of constant vibratory motion, then the odd deft collision of both pop and high culture referencing:

What piece of work an atomole.  How infinite in extent, how unchangeable in quantity, how initial of all forms of energy; how express and admirable in action, how like a god!

Closely followed on stage by a rip roaring rendition of:

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations 

Perhaps a far more complex nature is at work in Nigel Tufnel’s saddest of all chords – one that reaches far beyond the influence of the cultures in which the listener was nurtured: in which they exist – one that reaches perhaps into the realm of our very life’s vibration.

Vibration as a signifier of the most profound life force is a reoccurring theme in many faiths and belief systems – not just in the physical, mathematical treatise of atomoles.

And I’ll bet you two finger cymbals, a Catholic Mass bell and a Buddhic gong that music is our way of reconnecting with the vibration of life.

And perhaps the melancholy we feel when we hear certain music is not only the residue of context and emotional dyeing but perhaps driven by a yearning rooted in its ability to remind us of a more profound connection with the vibration of life: one which we were once so closely aligned with; and to which we have now become strangers.

 

 

Tuppence a bag and a quick weep is a small price to pay for the key to cosmic connection

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