I didn’t manage to catch the aurora that has graced our skies over the last two or three nights, thanks to all the unusual solar activity. I did take a stroll around my village on Saturday evening at about 10.30. The skies were clear following a very beautiful day when the temperatures had reached 25 degrees Celsius. But it was still too light, and I decided not to set the alarm for 2 am. Actually, on occasions such as these, I am reminded of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, in which, if memory serves me right, virtually the entire population of the world goes blind having been exposed to a spectacular cosmic light show. I know it’s absurd, but Wyndham’s brand of Sci-Fi made such an impression on me when I was a child, that I’ve tended to avoid gazing at auroras. Following Triffids (1951), John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903- 1969) went on to write such memorable tomes as The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, Trouble with Lichen, and The Seeds of Time. They seem to capture the spirit of an age, with an atmosphere not dissimilar to that encountered in the novels of Wyndham’s contemporary Nevil Shute (1899 – 1960). Shute, an aeronautical engineer, was also interested in science. The English scientific world in the 1950s has a peculiar atmosphere, captured by C. P. Snow – whatever F. R. Leavis might have to say – and also by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass and the Pit fame. I call it “The Jodrell Bank effect”. A sense of oppression, threat, and paranoia, doubtless attributable to the Cold War, and the ever-present, never-absent Bomb, hanging over us like the manifestation of “Hob”, the devil, overhanging an apocalyptic vision of a London on fire, whose population goes on the rampage in “the hunt”, the search for “the other”; a depiction of what the Germans call „Völker-Mord“, or ethnic cleansing. Like Wyndham, Kneale was not so much interested in science fiction, or even fiction, as in ethical codes.
Quatermass is a bit like Macbeth, an exploration of the way in which humanity can be overtaken by a malevolent external force. Last week the BBC unearthed a radio play version of Macbeth from the 70s, which was thought to have been lost. Ever since I saw the horrific Roman Polanski film, I have shied away from the Scottish Play. But I did manage to listen to a few passages, with their exalted verse. Actually Macbeth works very well as a radio play. The language is distilled; the on-stage gore is left to the imagination. I have always admired G. Wilson Knight’s critique of Macbeth in The Wheel of Fire, Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil. Prior to Knight’s essay, critics thought of Shakespearian tragedy in terms of great heroes with an hamartia or fatal flaw, in Macbeth’s case, “vaulting ambition”. His lust for the crown led him to murder. I was taught this at school, just as I was taught about “the causes of the First World War” in terms of “the cockpit of Europe”, the balance of power, and failed diplomacy. Even at the time it crossed my mind that all of that did little to explain the collective insanity that led to the trenches and the horrors of the Western Front. A medieval outlook, the notion that we had become possessed by evil spirits, seemed more accurate, and that still pertains today. Ukraine. Gaza.
What can you do? Well, as St Paul said, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” So yesterday afternoon I played in the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra’s spring concert. Mozart’s Symphonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon; Faure’s Pavane, and Mozart again, the fortieth symphony. Just before the concert started, an orchestra committee member, and fellow viola player, asked me, “What do we do in the event that somebody in the audience collapses?”
I suggested, “Make an announcement. Is there a doctor in the house? But do you realise, you’ve just put the hex on the concert. Now, something will happen.”
Sure enough, half-way through the third movement of Mozart 40, there was an almighty crash from the rear of the hall. Well, I’m retired. Things move on in medicine very quickly. I’d only be a liability. So I kept playing Mozart. At the close of the movement, the conductor, all credit to him, turned to the audience and asked if everything was all right. Apparently it was. So we went on to the last movement, and finished the concert.
Then everybody left by the south door, because the north door was inaccessible, part of the ceiling having collapsed. As a friend subsequently remarked to me, as we dined in the Lion & Unicorn, “You brought the house down.” At least nobody was hurt.
Mozart 40 is extraordinary. Very syncopated; very chromatic. The second half of the finale commences with a reiteration of the main theme that is so distorted that the audience in 1791 must have been completely nonplussed. In fact it’s a tone row, incorporating every note in the twelve note chromatic scale, except that of the home key of G. Mozart anticipated Schoenberg by well over a century. It really is enough to make an edifice collapse.
jamescalumcampbell 