There's UFO's over New York...

 ...and I ain't too surprised.

I happened to be listening to John Lennon's song "Nobody Told Me" just now, and I couldn't help being struck by the topicality of this line, given recent headlines.

(I'm surprised to be writing a second Beatles-related post in a row.)

I've long harboured a dislike of John Lennon, based on a few different factors: the lyrics of "Imagine", the way he treated his first son, and his general cynicism. I think of Paul McCartney as the good Beatle and the John as the bad one.

But of course, that's completely daft. John Lennon was a young guy with a troubled background who experienced unprecedented, unimaginable success. It's impossible to guess how that would affect any one of us.

In more recent years, I've come to really like some of his solo tracks that I didn't know about before. Most especially, "Watching the Wheels", but also "Gimme Some Truth" and "Working-Class Hero."

And "Nobody Told Me", which is a wonderfully bouncy and upbeat anthem to life's quirkiness.

More than that, though: it evokes a mood or aesthetic that I particularly relish, one best captured by Louis MacNeice in his immortal phrase "the drunkenness of things being various".

Other things that awaken this mood, or aesthetic:

The Trivial Pursuit board.

Books of quotations.

Reading old diaries, bound periodicals, or even the newspaper.

Compilation TV shows such as the Irish "Reeling in the Years" series.

I also like the "collage" style of the lyrics. It reminds me of other songs such as "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze or "The Mero" by the Dubliners.

There's something miraculous about music (and every other form of art) that awakens in us a particular mood or view of the world. It's almost the opposite of the Matthew Arnold line I posted a view days ago: "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole." That's a wonderful line, and a wonderful gift. But not to see life steadily, or see it whole, also seems important: the ability to see the world as now comic, now tragic, now mysterious, now exciting, now sentimental, etc. etc. And the fact that life can correctly be described in all these different ways!

Life is a shimmering thing.

Favourite Album Covers: Back to the Egg

This is a new regular feature which I will probably forget about immediately.

Anyway, I've long been of this album cover, Back to the Egg by Wings (1979) which is an example of what I call "everyday surrealism". And so seventies!

Favourite Poems: "To a Friend" by Matthew Arnold.

This sonnet is about Sophocles, of whom I know little. Well, it's about Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. The opening is a bit shaky and awkward, although that also gives it a sort of halting dignity. But the sestet, the last six lines, are the kicker. "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" is, in my view, one of the greatest lines in English poetry. "Business could not make dull, nor passion wild" is another wonderful line; the sort of classical antithesis native to the age of Samuel Johnson, here lit by the afterglow of Romanticism. "Mellow glory" is also a wonderful paradox, or at least, a surprising combination of ideas.

It's the sort of poem that makes me regret being so little of a classicist!

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

Poetry and Music is "All or Nothing" For Me

Just a quick observation on my own artistic sensibilities, which may or may not chime with anybody else's.

I've noticed a big cleavage between my own attitude towards poetry and music on the one hand, and pretty much all the other arts on the other.

I'm much more tolerant towards all the other arts. I could watch a film and think: "Yeah, that was OK. It was unoriginal and corny and a bit dull, but it was enjoyable enough to watch-- though I wouldn't watch it again, most likely."

The same applies to books, the visual arts, architecture, and so on. These arts are graded on a continuum.

When it comes to music and poetry, though, I'm looking for something very specific. In those two art-forms, a miss is as good as a mile. It either happens or it doesn't happen.

Now, I don't think this necessarily has anything to do with good taste. In my own mind, I have excellent taste in poetry, but pretty awful taste in music-- for the most part.

The response that I'm looking for, when it comes music and poetry, is something like genuine laughter-- it's an involuntary response. Or it might be compared to a physical shudder, or physical attraction, or (perhaps more than else) the awakening of the sense of wonder.

This is a minimum requirement, of course. It's not to say that every poem, or piece of music, that provokes this response does so to an equal degree-- in the same way that not every laugh is equally intense.

Reading new poetry, and listening to new music, always feels like prospecting to me. Will it happen, or won't it? If it doesn't, all the critical plaudits and hype in the world, all the evident virtuosity at work, mean nothing at all to me.

The Face in the Wallpaper

My aunt and uncle, both of them now gone to their reward, lived on a farm a little bit outside Limerick City. I would visit them every summer and stay in their spare room.

One year they told me that people had seen a face in the wallpaper of that bedroom if they looked at it too long.

On the surface, it sounds like they were just trying to put the wind up me, but I don't think so. Although I can't remember exactly how I was told this, I had the strong impression it was a "true" story-- that is, it at least wasn't made up for my benefit.

I've pondered it ever since, intermittently-- what did it actually mean?

At the time, I assumed it meant the pattern of the wallpaper would somehow "resolve" itself into a face if you looked at it long enough-- like an autostereogram.

Only much later did another interpretation occur to me, one that seems rather more obvious-- that, if you stared at the wallpaper long enough, a ghostly face would superimpose itself over it. 

The funny thing is that, although the first alternative sounds less scary and even naturalistic, it scared me plenty back then.

This is the sort of "chill" I like the most-- a subtle and understated one, with no necessary hint of danger.

I had plenty of scares on that farm, perhaps because it was so far from Dublin and home.

One night I lay awake reading my aunt's magazines, one of which contained an article about the Third Secret of Fatima that suggested it would happen in 1992-- and I was reading it in 1992. I literally lay awake waiting for the bombs to fall. I was my last night in Limerick that summer. Somehow I felt convinced that, if I got back to Dublin, I'd be safe. I think, deep down, I knew it would seem less convincing in Dublin.

In another magazine (she had glossy celebrity magazines as well as religious magazines), I read an account of Michael Jackson filming the "Thriller" video, which hyped up the possibility that he had opened himself up to dark forces.

I can distinctly remember walking out into the sunlight and feeling a sense of "daylight horror"-- that the chill of the story still hung over me despite the summer sun.

I also remember reading a tabloid news story there, which suggested cancer had been mixed with a virus, and this terrified me, for all of ten minutes.

On another occasion, my uncle was telling ghost stories in the "good room", or the parlour, and all the lights went off. That was spooky.

And once I was shown a stone in the vicinity which supposedly had the devil's hoofprints on it. 

I'm very grateful for all these experiences now.

The Life of Brian Debate, Again

I'm rather fascinated by the famous debate on The Life of Brian between John Cleese and Michael Palin (on one side) and Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood on the other.

I know I've written about it before, but I come back to it for several reasons:

1) It's interesting to me that the Monty Python team have completely won in the court of popular opinion, all these years later. You can read the comments on any YouTube upload of this debate and none of them are sympathetic to Muggeridge and Stockwood. Even Christians turn on them. I find this depressing.

2) I feel a strange sort of love for Malcolm Muggeridge. He was well-known in his time, a national figure, and now he's completely forgotten. But he was astonishingly right about many things, including the evils of activism and the prophetic wisdom of Humane Vitae. And there's just something endearing about him, right down to the way he pronounces graffiti "GRA-fitti", with a stressed first syllable. 

(I've noticed that this is a marked phenomenon among crotchety old men-- they choose a particular word, or several words, to pronounce in an idiosyncratic way. I knew an old man who always pronounced "immediate" so the second syllable rhymed with "head". My own father insisted Latvia was pronounced Lat-ria.)

3) The most moving part of the programme is this contribution from Muggeridge, where he reproves the Pythons for cheapening the story of Christ: "Remember that story of the Incarnation was what our whole civilization began with...remember that it has inspired every great artist, every great writer, every great builder, every great architect, to celebrate that marvellous thing.."

(At this point John Cleese makes the cheap shot that it also inspired the Thirty Years War and the Inquisition, and gets a round of applause from the audience, who are clearly on the side of the Pythons.) 

Muggeridge resumes: "But nothing can alter the fact that if you were to make a list of all the greatest works of art in all fields, and all the greatest contributors to those works of art, you will find that this scene of the Incarnation, the story of the Incarnation, has played the largest part. Now, in our twentieth century, this film produces a sort of graffiti version of it, and I don't think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place..."

On that last point, Muggeridge has been proven wrong, at least so far. But there is something inexpressibly beautiful and graceful about the way he makes his point. He speaks slowly and sadly, pointing his finger (presumably at a screen where clips from it were played), with all the gravity of an eyewitness to much of the twentieth century's insanity.

I'm particularly impressed that Muggeridge bypasses any of the tiresome arguments about artistic or intellectual freedom, or respect for religious sensibilities. I very much doubt he would have been in favour of censoring the film. He is, in fact, saying: "Shame on you. Shame on you for trampling something beautiful and lofty." An argument that conservatives have more or less stopped making. We are too frightened of ridicule.

4) This debate is interesting to me, also, because of its relevance to current debates about political correctness and woke and freedom of speech and all the rest of it. Both John Cleese and Michael Palin have become outspoken critics of political correctness. I admire them for that.

I'm sure they would say-- and doubtless they have said-- "We were opposed to the moral guardians when they were Christian conservatives, and now we're opposed to them when they're woke leftists." The idea is that Mary Whitehouse morphed into Owen Jones.

I'm not at all convinced of this. In fact, I don't believe it for a moment. I think political correctness is part of the same wave as Life of Brian. I don't have time to make this argument right now, and I'll admit it's more an intuition than anything else. 

5) I do think both the bishop and Malcolm Muggeridge were at fault for attacking the film as "tenth-rate". It is indeed a funny and accomplished film. What's wrong with saying that something is both funny and tawdry?

An Excellent Debate on the Resurrection

Yesterday and this morning, I watched this excellent debate on whether the Resurrection occurred, between Trent Horn and Alex O'Connor.

Alex O'Connor is the best example of a new breed of post-New Atheism atheists who are interested in having serious, respectful conversations with believers, and who mostly avoid cheap point-scoring in the Dawkins-Hitchens tradition. (I say "mostly" because one or two of his arguments in this video do fall into that category, or at least incline that way.)

Along with his Catholic Answers colleague Jimmy Akin, Trent Horn is my favourite Catholic apologist. He also avoids cheap point-scoring and concentrates on the essence of each question.

Until I listened to this video, I'd never heard about the supposed transfiguration of Brigham Young, despite having an interest in Mormonism that goes back to my early twenties. It's fascinating.