January 31 2019
Bowthorpe Cemetery April 12 2019, on the fortieth anniversary of the event described on below (p.13 of the book). Despite a prolonged search down memory lane, on this occasion, very much older and infinitesimally wiser - and unlike previous revisits - I couldn't find the gravestone; but I was given this vision of new life (pictured above) instead.
The day we metI stepped inside your door
To say goodbye forever, so hell bent
On every kind of unemployment,
Schoolboy-giggling at work so heaven-sure
But you knocked me senseless to the floor,
Saying heaven on earth was what you meant
Which rang an old school bell and testament
To the word on the street I was searching for.
Gaining heart, I crossed my city of the dead
To Easter Thursday chancing on a grave
Dated the day I was born and lay down.
‘What’s lost in the wasteland is found there,’ it said
‘Who loses himself for love will be saved,’
‘Who dies lives’ and my heart, lost to you, was found.
And the long love-longing to get from one to the other.
All the poems in the book are written for singing or some kind of musical performance.
"If God did not love music, the world could never have come into being;
And if men did not love music they would never get to God." (Francis Brabazon)
Part A - The Calling
Leila and Majnun; Lancelot and Guinevere
One of my more avid readers once declared that she prefers love stories of married people to tales of, in whatever sense, extra-marital or courtly love. Part A certainly beats a heart drum for explicitly married love poetry but my belief is that Leila and Majnun (and the Western, less obviously spiritual versions Lancelot and Guinevere) represent the longing for the unattainable 'other' half that marriage channels. Just because we spend every day with a person does not make them any less of quest to achieve: 'knowing' in the (ironically termed) Biblical sense is only a small part of really knowing. The historical place of courtly love for the nobility (ie love achieved outside of a marriage primarily a land transaction) gave way around the time of the Reformation to a culture interested in love stories of married people and in practical terms women's long journey in the West from sex/love objects to equals and business partners began about then. But if you're looking for passionate and mystical love in Milton's married (and pre-Fall 'knowing') Adam and Eve, good luck. "He for God only; she for the God in him." Give me Dante's transcendent Beatrice every time.
