Musings on Music

The Home of Shehaios Posted on by

Folksongs don’t always get the facts right. In folksongs, the rain always falls softly and the rambling sailor goes whistling on his way without a care in the world.

The truth that music tells is an emotional one. The middle classes of the Victorian era created a Merrie England of maypoles and jolly ploughboys because that is the world they wanted to inhabit. The middle classes of today’s Britain have very similar ideas, using their money to ‘escape’ to the country, do a bit of hobby farming or ‘get involved in the community’. They too like children dancing round maypoles with pretty ribbons, and don’t have a clue that this version of maypole dancing is their own tradition, not that of the historic agricultural workers.

Does it matter?

Not really. We use music to express what we care about, what we are passionate about. Much popular music (traditionally the province of young folk) is concerned with young people falling in and out of love, and all the associated heartaches, thrills, drama and deceptions associated with that most basic of human passions.

Little surprise then that the popular music of the past – the songs sung in pubs, parlours, barns and foc’s’ls – covers the same territory. The abundance of songs about women ‘marrying for gold not for love’ – sometimes under duress – remind us how newly-won are the freedoms women have in Britain. Other cultures still strongly pressurize their young people to make “suitable” matches.

Likewise, songs about poverty, industrial accidents, and long separations due to work, show us how people felt about the lives they led. What mattered to them is pretty much what matters to us; we can see the motivation for the rise of the Labour movement in the angry polemics about mining disasters, young men pressed into the army and navy, and the grinding poverty of the disenfranchised. We can also see the roots of working class conservatism, in the songs of grateful and contented farm workers toasting the health of the “squire”. No need to upset the applecart, the lord of the manor will see us right.

Songs tend to be about people, but in the rural areas – where most people lived before the Industrial Revolution – they are laced with the images of the world in which those people lived. Images that show not only how much people who lived and worked on the land knew about the natural world but also how they felt about it. The poacher stealing the rich man’s game is a folk hero. Magpies may be the enemy of the gamekeeper, but in folklore they are messengers those in the know can commune with. The link between the peasant’s understanding of the natural world from which he wrestled a hard-won living and today’s environmental science is only just beginning to be explored.

I was into Trad. Arr. from my teenage years. Rock’n’roll just sounded like noise, and taking drugs seemed like a stupid thing to do. I never felt any great need to rebel against my parents – or anything, really. I was one of those middle class people dreaming of my own “escape to the country.” But I have recently been listening, for the first time, to a lot of what is actually the popular music of my youth – blues music and Americana, from my husband’s extensive collection of vinyl.

It would be stupid not to acknowledge that there are unquestionably some great songs in the American canon. Some of them in particular resonate with me, depicting as they do a gritty reality of 20th century American culture. The directionless quest for personal freedom expressed so well in songs like “Me and Bobby McGee” was one of the sentiments that did register at the time – I just love the lines:
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
Freedom ain’t worth nothin’ but its free’.

That, to me, is so quintessentially American.

Many songs from the blues stable are of course the usual fare of young lovers, tales of bliss and heartbreak with the emphasis on heartbreak, but I have to say that much of the later stuff, particularly the singer-songwriter genre, sounds to my ears incredibly self-indulgent. Perhaps its because there is just so much of it, navel-gazing lyrics which wallow in an emotional angst of impossibly unrealistic romantic expectations and implausible alliances. Its blues by people who really have no business having the blues – people who think the world revolves around them and their personal desires, and are plunged into despondency when reality smacks them in the face.

I guess all of us who have benefitted so much from the inexorable rise of capitalism in the 20th century are a bit guilty of such a complacent presumption of privilege. We’ve grown up in a world where we kind of could have everything we wanted, and with the increasing use of credit, we could have it now.

Its how we respond to adversity that is the acid test of post-war Western civilisation – and its not looking good. We are supposed to learn as children that life is not easy. You don’t get everything you want. Its not someone’s fault, it’s the way it is. You pick yourself up, dust yourself down and find another way. These are lessons so many of the generations between the baby boomers and the millenials have not had to learn. So many people with this privileged mindset have developed a habit of denying responsibility and looking for someone else to blame for what they perceive to be their misfortunes – whether that’s the guy or gal who “done them wrong”, or the man down the road who looks different and follows a different religion.

Sufficient numbers of people seem sufficiently immune to self-doubt and objective examination of the facts to vote in a President of the USA who agrees with them that all their problems are someone else’s fault. If they just “Make America Great Again” everything will be fine. Closer to home, millions of Britons have been persuaded that Europe is the source of all the ills besetting our country, and we have to leave the European Union to “Make Britain Great Again.”

These are all simple answers based on an immature emotional response to adversity. Simple answers mismatched with complex questions will set us on the road to oblivion. If ever we get out of this prickly bush, we must never get in it any more.

Faith, Hope and Charity

The Home of Shehaios Posted on by

“And the greatest of these is charity*” *aka love

I consider the novels I write to be political fantasy. I’m not going to get into the whole debate about what’s Science Fiction and what’s Science Fantasy (life is to short) – by ‘fantasy’, I simply mean novels that take a big (and generally unlikely, or ‘fantastic’) “what if” as the starting point for the world in which the story takes place.

My big “what if” is “what if a land where equality, fraternity and liberty actually did reign supreme really existed?”. I call it Shehaios. The Fair Land. The Whole Land. The Home of the Free.

Why do I call this political fantasy? Because for me politics is about the pursuit of an ideal. A belief, for instance, that we can make things better for our descendants, as our ancestors made things better for us. My novels explore the way various characters do – or don’t – seek to do that. The stories they tell themselves. The constructs they create. The legacies they leave. That is a political story.

Out here in the real world, we who believe in creating a better world for our descendants are at a crisis point right now. The path we all thought was going to take us whistling our cheery way to that better future has led us to the brink of hell. We are at a point where the decisions we make over the next few decades could determine whether or not our civilisation survives and evolves, or crashes into oblivion. We could ultimately be determining whether the planet remains a place human beings can inhabit. The UN has warned us how limited a time we have left to get a grip on climate change, before the planet itself takes control of our destiny. According to figures published by that well-known generator of fake news, the World Wide Fund for Nature, we have already exterminated 60% of the world’s animal population. We are choking the seas with our waste, squabbling over land, and our insatiable appetite for energy is rapidly compromising our supplies of air and water.

This is all big, scary stuff. Taken together with the breakneck speed of technological development, most of us just feel we want to get off the merry-go-round before we throw up.

But life is a complex adaptive system – change is a constant state. Trying to stop change doesn’t stop change happening, it just means you have no understanding, let alone control, of it. This ride is scary, but we have no choice but to stay with it. If you’re hurtling round a racetrack, the worst thing you can do is to let go of the steering wheel. Humans have been outstandingly good at adapting. We’ve learned to survive, even live, in the most hostile environments – in hot places, in cold places, under the oceans, even off-planet in outer space. We’ve learned to fly. We’ve learned to communicate, and now we can do that almost instantaneously from one side of the planet to another. We raise our voices together and create amazing sounds. We appreciate and are able to create beauty. Above all, we’ve learned to store and share knowledge, and understand what our species’ dominance of the world we live in is doing to that world.

If we don’t value these amazing human attributes, and use them to inspire us to work out how to survive on this planet, the ingenious adaptability of life will simply take another route. Unfortunately for humanity, Gaia doesn’t really care about our future. Mankind will be just an interesting layer of geology buried in the Earth’s crust.

This is a depressing prospect. Its so depressing, and so huge, we don’t know what to do with it. The temptation is just to give up, stick your head in the sand and hope you die before the worst happens. But although humanity as a real, amorphous mass of fearful, fallible, flawed people often drives me up the wall, I am rather fond of quite a number of human beings, and some of them are very young. I don’t want to bequeath them this vision of the future.

I want to believe in a land where equality, fraternity and liberty really do reign supreme. A land that actually stretches the length and breadth of the Earth’s habitable surface – because if it didn’t, how could it truly embody any of those qualities? If you have to live in a particular place, have a particular heritage or a particular store of resources to enjoy equality, justice and peace, that is not freedom. By definition, equality cannot be confined to an elite, however the elite defines itself.

These lofty ideals have informed great political changes in the past. Such revolutions are always conducted by people, and the people inevitably don’t adhere to the ideal that inspired the movement in the first place. They are, like all of us, fearful, fallible, and flawed. But we should not use the fallibility of human nature as a reason not to pursue the ideal.

Likewise, given human nature is what it is, the likelihood is that actually creating a global Fair Land is impossible. But that’s the nature of ideals. It should not be a reason not to try.

Politics in practice of course is the pursuit of power, and it’s corrupted by endemic self-interest – all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Narrow-minded self-interest has spread its tendrils of decay throughout the whole construct of power, from Presidents and Prime Ministers to the lowliest voter who sabotages themselves by believing they can make no difference so its easier not to try. Cynicism and defeatism are the enemy of idealism. Progress comes through faith, and hope. Which is why my novels also lead me to ponder the nature of religion.

It is my premise that human beings created god, rather than the other way round. I came to this conclusion by observing that my dog (whom I loved, and who responded with something that I interpreted as love) never saw the need to say her prayers, and was incapable of reading a holy text. If there was an omniscient, omnipotent Creator of all things, why did that Creator only endow humanity with the ability to communicate with Him? Having done so, why did He make that means of communication so appallingly bad that there were multiple different versions of how He wanted us to behave? Nah. That doesn’t sound like God to me. That sounds like people telling stories.

But stories are how we humans communicate. Ask any marketing professional. Stories are particularly how we communicate complex, abstract ideas. Having created a god, we and others can come to believe in that god, and by doing so we give that god agency. He/she/it can effect change.

Now, I grew up in a country very much shaped by the Christian religion – and Protestant Christianity at that. So my take on religion is very much shaped by that form of Christianity, as my take on history is very much shaped by the history of Britain and Europe – I am British, I am European. I write what I know. As an adolescent, I was very enamoured of the New Testament, of a prophet who preached about loving your neighbour, sharing your wealth, and pursuing truth. Who turned water into wine, fed the 5,000 and threw the moneylenders out of the temple – and in doing all this, claimed to be the Son of God. This is my kind of a god. I think this is the kind of god who inspired the Abolition of Slavery act, the campaign for universal suffrage, the rise of the Labour movement and the social changes that has brought about. So if you ask me now, ‘do I believe in God?’ my answer is that I believe in my god.

My god is the god of love. The Way, the Truth and the Light. I think believing in compassion, justice, fairness and a common humanity is powerful, and can bring about change.

Many of us alive today, particularly in Europe, enjoy a common public good we take for granted – public education systems, public health, pensions, employment rights, state support for the physically, mentally or socially disabled. With our short human memories, we think it could be no other way. Our complacency denies the suffering, heroism, and dogged determination of those who kept the faith in times when such priveleges would have seemed impossible for the vast majority of the population, and in denying that heritage we abdicate responsibility for stewarding the wealth we have inherited. For decades we have been working towards rolling out these privileges around the world – turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000. But we neglected to throw the money-lenders out of the temple.

In a world where basic resources and habitable land surfaces become increasingly scarce, we need to learn how to defend that public good and continue to establish it globally – because make no mistake, far from dismissing climate change, the rich and the powerful have already seen the writing on the wall, and they’re doing their damndest to make sure they grab as much of the pie as they can while we’re not looking. If we wait for the prince to give us a kiss before we wake up, we’ll be back to depending on his whims for the right to live on this planet.

We who live in established democracies have power and influence our ancestors, working the land of their feudal masters, could never have dreamed of. Their well-being – their very survival – depended entirely on the mindset of their overlord; whether he understood and appreciated his responsibilities for the people who depended on him, or not. Some did. Some were good rulers. Others weren’t. They lead their people to death and destruction. Their wars never had anything much to do with the safety, security or well-being of the people who fought them, they were conducted entirely to serve the ambitions of the warlords. Wars have no place in the creation of the Fair Land.

In a democracy, we choose our own leaders. We must start choosing ones who want to create the kind of world we believe in, the kind of world we want our children and grandchildren to live in. The others, the ones who choose the road to destruction, are incredibly good con-artists, but you can spot them in a moment, because everything they use to fire people up is a negative. They don’t inspire you. They don’t empower you. They get you feeling angry and discontented, ready to find someone to blame rather than engage with trying to make things better. They frighten you with phantoms to keep you from facing up to the big scary reality that actually, you are responsible for shaping the future of your people. And we’re human. We can’t not fall for it. I get angry. I want to blame people for not seeing what’s being done to them. I despair and I want to give up. But I know that I can’t, because that’s letting them win.

We have to keep the faith, and truly believe in creating a better world for our descendants. We are in charge of our own destiny – never more so. But none of us can do it alone. We have to join with others who share that ideal, and do it together. I’ve just taken part in my first fiddle rally, playing with Cowal Fiddle Workshop, and for much of the concert, I was miming – the bow was moving, but there was no contact with the strings, because I’d stumbled over a tricky bit and lost track of where I was in the music. A significant number of the orchestra was doing the same – but we weren’t missing out the same bits, so overall it sounded great. That’s how we do it. If you lose hope, you just let others take over, while you do whatever it takes to keep yourself sane and hold on to hope. Take a break, play music, re-connect with nature, re-connect with people you love. With joy. With hope.

When you are feeling bullish, and strong, you can take up the flame and be the strength for the down-hearted. You can give joy to others when they’re feeling disheartened, and comfort to the bereaved, the wounded, the destitute. This is the power of love, and we must believe in it. In the greatness and kindness that human beings can be capable of. People rise to greatness on the shoulders of others – we’re not all going to be Martin Luther King. But we can be in the congregation.

Look, I have to tell you something. Shehaios exists through magic. In the real world, there is no Magician, and there are no magic answers. All we can do is start asking the right questions, facing up to the truth no matter how scary it is. Then maybe we can start having a grown-up discussion about where we might find some answers. We might find that my little bit of knowledge and experience, put together with yours, uncovers a way of doing things that had never occurred to either of us before. That’s how human beings create things. That’s the magic. Some people actually call it science.

Writers Block

The Home of Shehaios Posted on by

When I published Spirit of Shehaios at the beginning of 2011, I confidently included news of the next books I intended to write in the Shaihen Heritage series.

The idea was to go back to my original scribblings, stories set in the same world but a couple of millenia after the events described in Cloak of Magic and its two sequels. Cloak of Magic is loosely informed by Britain at the time of the Romans. So 2000 years into the future takes us to the 19th/20th century.  In other words, the original unpublished Shaihen Heritage stories were set in a time and place not far distant from our own.

I wrote them in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a young woman, purely as a bit of fun. It was more a stream of consciousness than a coherent narrative, and the story was a tongue-in-cheek adventure yarn – think Pirates of the Caribbean. But it had ended up in Shehaios. It had taken me to depths and insight I didn’t expect, and that was why I wanted to reshape it into a structure and form that would be able to convey the real story, the story that underpinned the adventure yarn, to others.

When I revisited the manuscripts in my late 50s, I immediately struggled to know how to re-capture the sense of humour and optimism that underlies the original writing while adding the depth of experience I wanted to bring to it. I was quite a different person from the newly-married young woman scribbling in an exercise book on the commute up to London, and the world had moved on since 1978.

Then, in October 2011, my world crashed into a brick wall. My husband of 33 years, soul-mate,  father of my children, fellow-musician,  business partner and chief consultant for my writings, went away for a sailing weekend and never came back. His sudden death knocked me down and almost out. For the first time in my life, I had no words. They were totally inadequate. Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.  Only the strength and support of my friends and family – most of all my two amazingly wonderful daughters – got me through the next few years.

I finally got around to digging out the manuscript again around 2014. But writing was, and still is, a stop-start process. I do not think you ever ‘get over’ losing someone who has been so much a part of who you are. You learn to cope, to construct pathways around the gaping hole left by your loss. That’s what my daughters and I have been doing, and are still continuing to do. Sometimes, everything goes on hold while we pick one of us up again and bring her back from the abyss.

On top of all the personal reality, my fictional take on life, politics and religion became overtaken by an alarming roller-coaster of global reality which is still throwing us from one sickening plummet to another jarring curve, gathering speed all the way. None of us know where it will take us, where we will end up, whether we will survive the journey. The rift between human constructs – economics, trade, technology etc. – and the land which gave rise to our being (with or without the intervention of a divine being, depending on your point of view) has reached crisis point. Either we will reconnect and continue to seek the Fair Land, or we will carry on as we are and prove homo sapiens to have been a brief, ultimately self-destructive evolutionary experiment.

Once upon a time, I was confident that the myth of the Fair Land would prevail. Now, as I enter old age and people seem so disconnected with reality, so incapable of distinguishing the stories we tell ourselves from the laws of nature,  I’m not so sure. That doubt continually undermines my attempts to get the stories written.

I will plough onward, because I believe the insight the Children of the Spirit showed me is a valuable one to share. But I cannot guarantee this fairy-tale will deliver a happy ending.