The Spirit of Holy Week

During Holy Week many Spanish towns and cities are filled with processions remembering various bits of the story of the Passion, and parading figures of Our Lady, Christ or representations of some of the mysteries through the streets. In Seville, Murcia, Málaga and a few other places the Holy Week processions are a religion, as it were. Here in my small city they aren’t quite in that league, but they are of great cultural and social importance.

There were twenty-six different societies which went out this week, the majority between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. There is considerably variety: some date from the 15thC, though most were formed less than a hundred years ago. Most of the figures are carried on great platforms, beautifully dressed and ornately decorated, surrounded by candles in silver sticks and protected by exquisitely embroidered awnings. All of this weighs about a ton (very roughly, I haven’t heard any accurate figures, but the things are HEAVY) and is borne on the shoulders or backs of 40-50 big strong types who train all year for it. They nearly all bring a band with them. A few have their own, but they mostly hire a band to accompany their procession.

 

Some of these societies have hundreds of members, although not all will process, some being old, infirm, lazy or otherwise engaged, but those who do, the visible ones, will accompany the image in long lines, wearing a long cape and tunic in the colours of the particular society, with a long pointy hat covering their head and face, and carrying a large candle. These, like the ‘costaleros’, are penitents, and they do their penance anonymously.

The religious significance is clear, but there is far more to it than that. People who have no particular residue of devotion, or none at all, often belong to one or more societies and carry or accompany their Virgins and Christs each Easter because something moves them to do so. Families, groups of friends, the members of trades and professions, often belong to the same society and it is a part of their identity. Thousands of people, a significant proportion of the population here, belong to these societies and are involved in some way in the processions.

But many thousands more watch them. Those who don’t understand what motivates people to do this, practical atheists or those who haven’t been inside a church in years, recent immigrants from China or Morocco, line the streets or crowd the balconies to watch the processions go past. They are a public spectacle, treated as such, but also with great and instinctive respect. Each time an image is raised in the air to continue walking (they have to rest a lot and the coordination to lift it all together without it falling sideways- it happens occasionally- is not easy to achieve) the public applauds. When the image is stopped by someone moved to sing a ‘saeta’ to the statue, the image is raised and danced by the bearers, and there is complete silence until the song has ended.

El Cristo del Cachorro

Mrs Hickory belongs to a society which goes out on Good Friday evening, and has as its patron a Virgin of the Sorrows, a beautiful image kept in the Cathedral during the year. They’ve been unlucky with the rain in recent years, but this year they were able to parade her proudly through most of the older part of town, and bring her back safely. Mrs Hickory is one of the pointy hats and candles. I am her cornerman, following with water, carbohydrates, aspirin, tobacco, camera, lighter and anything else she might require.

The image was brought out of the Cathedral at 9 PMish, to the sound of the National Anthem. The bearers bring Her out on their knees because, with the fixed canopy above Her, She is too tall to get through the doors otherwise. Then the whole procession, a couple of hundred people I would say, makes its way through the streets for five hours, observed by the crowds on the pavements. They take Her to visit the other two historic churches, and She passes through the Main Square where she is greeted by a figure of Christ who’s also out and about at that time.

The whole procession lasts about five hours until, at about 2 o’clock in the morning, they reach the Cathedral again and, to the accompaniment of music which changes from cheerful over the last few hundred yards to atmospheric and dramatic as She reaches home again. Then the exhausted bearers turn Her around so she can salute the crowd once more, and take her into the Cathedral, backwards, on their knees. Despite the cold and the lateness of the hour there are always a few hundred people waiting to see the Virgin, and a Christ which also lives in the Cathedral, and in most cases I don’t think it is faith that took them there or the spectacle that attracted them, but mostly the sense of being present at something which is part of their lives, part of the place they belong to.

Rousseau

I have recently been reading the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From the beginning it is clear that the world needs a lot more people like him. Not for the political philosophy which, as I recall, is a bit authoritarian and statist for my taste (I’ll take another look), but as a model of how to live life, and how to write about the life he lived. When our young wonder how they should live their lives so as to get the very most out of them, a good answer would be that they should read Rousseau and, I would not say act like him in every way, but they should think like him, become like him, and act in consequence.

He cared nothing for anyone else’s judgement of his actions, but he had his own morality by which he judged himself, often rather harshly. Not for Jean-Jacques the fear of what people might think, the cringing with shame as he goes against fashionable morality, the kowtowing to other people’s prejudice. He sets out to live, and he does so, on his own terms, in a very successful and wonderfully free and refreshing manner. At least, that’s the way he tells it.

The book is full of instructive anecdotes. While at Venice as secretary to an incompetent ambassador he considers the question of women. After a couple of prostitutes leave him with a horror of syphilis, and his deep regard for his friends leads him to stop sleeping with their mistresses, he decides he’ll just have to get one of his own. Lovers, however, being expensive and inconvenient, he finally arranges to share one with a close friend. Thus, they shop around a bit and finally invest in a 12-year-old girl whose mother was a bit short of cash just at that moment.

Lovely and charming was this child. She sang well and they provided her with a clavichord and a singing master, she entertained them and they were all happy. Theirs was a happy household while they waited for her to be of an age when they could seduce her (nothing suggests that seduction would have meant rape or any other form of coercion, they would have expected to win her by the usual means). They both came to love her, as one does a lovely, charming and talented child, in a way that quite excluded the purpose they had originally formed. They determined that their child would be found a good husband, and a portion settled on her, as good fathers, surrogate or otherwise, do so determine. Rousseau left Venice before she reached puberty, but he gives us to understand that his friend did what they had both considered to be right.

I wouldn’t recommend the purchase of a prepubescent mistress, it just doesn’t feel right, but if you do find yourself in that position, the actions of Jean-Jacques, as he describes them, anyway, are an excellent guide to what your subsequent behaviour should be.

I haven’t finished the book yet. I look forward to being further instructed.

Whose Hand on the Trigger?

A man in France decided to murder seven innocent people in cold blood. Three of them were soldiers and two were children. It is widely reported that he shot an eight-year-old girl in the head at close range. A thoroughly evil bastard.

He had reasons for making these choices. What they were we can only speculate, but unless his mind was not under his control there was a process of thoughts that led to doing what he did.

What he did, let us remember, was not to express anger, or to attack symbols, but to murder children. Once that is glossed over the importance of the event is lost, and the truth is forgotten. It is possible that he murdered those children and adults as a manifestation of a diffuse hatred that he refused to address within himself.

His reasons for choosing those specific people may not have been personal, it seems more likely that they represented to him something he had chosen to hate, rather than being, themselves, the object of that hate. It’s probably similar to the motivations of the components of mobs who, when finding an excuse to rampage together, identify members of certain outgroups as legitimate targets for violence

Many commentators are too grand to get close enough to the action to see what is really happening, and so they waffle about contexts they don’t understand and attribute motivation and final responsibility to whoever it is they always attack. This is good politics, but it isn’t truth.

His choices were, naturally, influenced by those around him, by his upbringing, by the company he frequented and the people whose moral authority he gave weight to. It is perfectly possible that he was taught to hate, and that his murderous violence was irresponsibly cultivated by others. All of which places an important part of the blame, not on events and circumstances a long way off and outside his direct experience, but on the people close to him who persuaded him that he could affect those events and circumstances by murdering children.

His actions may well have been another example of belief in the magic of symbolism. Aware of but not wanting to recognise his inability to change anything real by his own actions,  he convinced himself that murdering children was such a big thing that in some way it MUST bring about the change he wanted.

The murderer is beyond answering for his actions. Some of those around him might still have to do so.

Lucia di Lammermoor

Your blogging hedgehog likes the Opera.  I'm not a buff, not having had the opportunity to watch much over the years, but I go when I have the chance and I always  enjoy it. I listen to the live performances from the Met and watch on the TV on the rare occasions there is any. Recordings almost invariably lack something, and compilations of arias are like watching highlights of old cricket matches. Not the same thing. The Three Tenors are not for me. Opera is a spectacle, a show, and admiring the technical ability of Plácido Domingo as he sings a nice song out of context is a cold, abstract pleasure, lightyears away from watching him perform Siegmund at Covent Garden.

We don't even have a proper theatre here, so the cultural offerings are minimal. There is an old cinema which is often used as a theatre, a stage was added years ago, but it's small, the sound quality is poor and there is no orchestra pit. A reduced orchestra sits literally under the stage. There is an outdoor space which is good for performers with powerful voices or microphones, music and opera, say, though not theatre as such, and in any case it's rarely used. And a new theatre is allegedly being built, but I'll believe it when I see it.

This is just my reaction to a performance I experienced. It's 'what I did last night', not a review for the New York Times. And it's as I wrote it, not adapted for consumption by the reader.

Lucia di Lammermoor. The whole thing is coloured for tragedy, except the chorus which a couple of times thinks it has something to celebrate. The production was cheap but with some imagination. The directing was poor, lots of walking very slowly across the stage for no apparent reason, people standing in the wrong place and moving in the wrong ways. And some of the acting was terrible.

Dolores Lahuerta was Lucia and she was very good indeed. She seemed a bit shrill in the first act and I wondered how she would handle Il Dolce Suono, but, although she cheated a bit on the highest, most difficult part, (and I'm not going to blame her for not being Joan Sutherland) she gave a brilliant performance in which she took control of the stage, the cast and the entire theatre and sang lke a woman mad with love. It's not easy to do that. Not easy at all. It was wondeful to listen to and to watch. I didn't want it to end. For nearly 15 minutes (I think) she had the entire theatre scared to breathe in case it provoked her. Terrific stuff it was.

The brother Enrico had a poor voice and was a terrible actor, almost embarassed about being on the stage. Not a tyrannical figure at all. The lover Edgardo had a nice voice but was a wimpy type, not one to dedicate his life and death to a woman, and not someone a woman like Lucia would die for.

The first scene of act three between Enrico and Edgardo should be dripping with tension and menace. They are two brave and powerful men who hate each other and don't kill each other only because they each have an idea of honour that stops them short for different reasons. Instead they looked like a couple of nerds playing at being hard. The whole show failed because of that.

And Edgardo's final death scene, coming after Lucia's, is likely to be anti-climactic and struck me as too long, but with this chap playing the role it almost became ridiculous. A pity, really. Presumably Donizetti knew what he was doing and placed it here for a reason.

The orchestra, a local one,  was good, and I liked the conductor. The choir was also local, experienced and competent. The flautist, a young blonde woman, who was on the rostrum for the mad scene also did a good job. So a varied evening, cuarte's eggish, but when it's all you've got you learn to enjoy it.

Free Speech

(Inspired by a link at England Expects)

I believe in free speech, but…

Many people say this who do not believe in free speech, they believe only in the freedom to say the things they want to hear, and in nothing else.

But others have difficult articulating what they presumably mean, which is simply that they disagree with what has been said. We have become so used to the idea that what is considered offensive must not exist, that it becomes difficult to say that you dislike or disapprove of something without there being an implication (you hear it yourself in your own words) that it should be banned. We are so used to imagining that the state will use its power against anything which is held to be ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unacceptable’ that even many who do understand freedom and believe in it are moved almost by instinct to clarify that by criticising someone’s words they are not trying to ban them. They often seem to be so clumsy at making this clarification that it appears they are doing the opposite.

Is it not possible to take issue, to address, to criticise, to dissect, to despise, the ideas of others, without wanting to call on the law to shut them up? And without even appearing to do so? It is surely not beyond the wit of the average man or woman to disagree, vehemently, viscerally even, with someone else's ideas, without demanding that they be prevented from having those ideas.

Spring, Whither Hast Thou Sprung?

A few days ago I wrote that spring started here weeks ago, and we were looking forward to it merging with the summer. I wasn't trying to crow or in any other way lay claim to some form of vicarious superiority over those who are still wearing scarves and gloves to go out, I was just explaining how things are different here, and how we experience them. Apparently I didn't make this clear enough to the Fates, because yesterday, on the traditional first day of spring, I had the following conversation with a class of 12-year-olds:

Boy (Excitedly, looking out of window in a manner suggesting he found the novels of Walter Scott rather dull): "Mr Hickory, sir, it's snowing!"
Self (With professional scorn honed over many years): "Be quiet, you stupid boy; of course, it isn't."
Chorus of boys and girls: "Er, yes, it is, sir."

And indeed it was. Briefly, turning quickly to rain, but yesterday was as cold and miserable as mid-December in Dundee. Spring felt a long way away, and still does.

The Things we Believe

God is not the only thing created within us that we need to believe in as something real, outside us. Truth, morality, good and evil, beauty, the English language, the universal supremacy of Accrington Stanley FC even though they haven't won anything for 100 years...

All of these things spring from the interplay of various aspects of the things that make us human, and there is no particular reason to believe that they respond to anything external at all. But we need them to exist. Even if we have to invent them for ourselves.

We believe in the existence of simple solutions to the problems that blight our lives. We invent courses of action and decide that they must achieve a given effect. We replace ignorance with knowledge, doubt with certainty, by making stuff up. It’s a very human thing to do.

I mentioned the strike called by the far left over here. The leaders have their own- pretty transparent- reasons for doing so, but the activists and members who follow them will be doing so because they are unhappy with the economic and labour situation in Spain and want to do something. That it will not solve anything doesn’t matter. Something must be done, and this is something. It is symbolic, but symbolic solutions are psychologically very important.

Fat people believe that if they follow the instructions their friend, a book, a website or some out of work actor has endorsed they will become thin. The actual mechanism doesn’t seem to matter, whether there is one and how it works. The important thing is to perform the symbolic, ritual act of eating the lettuce leaf or whatever it is.

Ritual magic should not surprise us at all. We still do it, and we always will, while we have imperfect reason and self-consciousness. Much of our life is based on it. We need to believe in the reality of the things we create. Some of them probably are real. Others are not. In a way it doesn’t matter. Only our belief in them matters.