Elgar: Dream of Gerontius

Appologies if this post comes across religious on yo' asses, and it will. It's late; I'm feeling tired and sad and ruminative, and my mind is buzzing. It's fucking hot. I have all the windows open. The hot weather always seems to do odd things to me. There is nothing that lifts the spirits like waking to a pure blue morning, and nothing that deadens them like its closing in sultriness and dust and the city's shrouding pollution haze. As a result every day of the heat wave is like a minor essay in manic depression, and I spend a lot of nights sitting in my attic, looking out towards canary wharf, watching the lights in the tower blocks blink out. I have always loved high places and high windows. As a child, growing up in a tall house surrounded by moorland, I would spend hours, amongst the horror and the train wreck of my parent's relationship and my father's abuse, curled up on a window seat watching cloud shadows move across the hills, marking the passiing of time with the colour of the heather and the varying bleakness of the sky. There is something ineffably comforting in the feeling of being so small, so insignficant, all pain eased by the simple fact of space. "...and immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: the sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless". There is peace in distance, and sadness, and I'll take the latter if I can find the former there.

Christianity has had a hold over my mind this last week which seems to have been emphasised by events. I've been learning the part of the Angel in the Dream of Gerontius. There is nothing more evocative than music if, as I do, you have a tendency to listen obsessively to one thing through any particular period of your life. The Dream is one of the only things I have listened to consistently over the last ten years or so, and as a reult it seems to bring with it some buggered palimpsest of the whole period, so that if I let my mind drift I can reach out and touch the summer I discovered fun and boys and drink and drugs, the first time I fell in love, teenage angst and alienation, living alone for the first time at sixteen, my A-levels, my first days at Cambridge, my last days at Cambridge with all the dissillusion and dissolution that accompanied them, caring for my mother and her funeral, and all the darkness of the year that followed. A potted history of me in one great Catholic monument. There's a thing. Learning it, reaching the sort of familiarity with text and music which you can only gaiin by pouring over the score for hours at a motherfucking time, I have begun to wonder if the reason I have come back to it so often is that it deals so capably with the theme of redemption.

On thursday I went to see the beating of the retreat at hourseguards parade with my grandfather (and, as a side note, I got to flirt with an actual red-coated member of the household cavalry, which I think largely completed me as a person) and while squinting at men doing complicatedthings with horses and trombones found myself talking about this with him. He made the point that a lot is said in these (hem hem) times about forgiveness being the central tennet of Christianity, but that this is a misnomer. It isn't forgiveness which is important, but the darker, more complex theme of redemption. It's not an easy thing to get your head round. Mozart, for example, for all his adeptness at dealing with forgiveness, only really touches on it in Don Giovanni where the Don, who fails to repent, is consequently denyed redemption- redempton being characterised in Mozart, tacitly, as getting it on with whoever has the name which sounds most like yours- and is dragged down to hell by the statue of the father of the girl he has, um, wronged. Or tried to wrong, anyway. Gerontius, conversely, barely features forgiveness at all. It deals solely in redemption- in a man, sinned against and sinning, facing the moment of his redemption and being afraid. Elgar said (and it is true he was a better composer than writer) "Look here: I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life, & now brought to book... It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one's self away from a well to do world than from a cloister..." Gerontius is saved, but he is saved not through the forgiveness of others or of God, but by himself going through the process, both painful and strange, of redemption. Forgiveness is easy; forgiveness is a movement in the mind, of you or another, but redemption is something you suffer, something you do and something you live. In this way, to my mind, redemption has more in common with love than does forgiveness. To forgive someone you need only think and feel. Love is an action, a thing you do, a way of behaving, a way of living. And is consequently by far the harder half of the equation. It is true that redemption requires forgiveness, but forgiveness is only the start. You seek it so that you can begin, not so that you can end. Forgiveness is important because it gives you the chance to atone, to make amends, to seek redemption. And so, when Gerontius asks if he will see the face of God, the angel replies:
"There was a mortal, who is now above
In the mid-glory: he, when near to die,
Was given communion with the Crucified, -
Such that the Masters very wounds were stamped
Upon his flesh; and from the agony
Which thrilled through body and soul in that embrace,
Learn that the flame of the Everlasting Love
Doth burn ere it transform. . ."
And so the soul of Gerontius, sinned against and sinning, goes not to heaven but to purgatory, because redemption is achieved not through forgiveness but through living. As much as a, you know, shade of a person can be said to live.

I find myself living this process now, and so returning to Gerontius again. I have, to all intents and purposes, given up self-harm. That, it seems, was the easy bit. In my mind, I have forgiven myself- for the wrongs I have done, real or imagined, for all the pain I have inflicted on people who, however strange their ways of showing it, loved me. For not saving my father from alcoholism or my mother from cancer or myself from everything, for doing what I ought not to have done and leaving undone that which I ought to have done. I have stopped punishing myself. But that is only the beginning. It is worse now, in many ways, than it has ever been. With forgiveness comes the realisation that there isn't any simple solution. I can't just pick up a razor and make it go away; I have to live with guilt and shame, whether deserved or not. When actively self-harming I didn't, oddly, think about it msuch. The thought came, and then the action, and then peace, of a sort. Now, I can think of nothing else. My mind is filled constantly with images of injury, with the soft thock sound of a razor on skin, with images of blood and bleeding, with the absolute comfort of cuddling a lacerated arm to my chest. I've taken up smoking again, for something to do, for a more subtle means of self-destruction. No, scrap that. I haven't taken it up for self-destruction but just for something to entertain my fingers, for a way of marking the moment and passing the time. I don't really think of acting on the urges now, but that doesn't make them go away; rather, it makes them intensify in some sort of baroque fantasy of wounding. With forgiveness comes the acceptance of my right to feel and so my feeling run amok, making up for lost time, spilling out across the canvas in reds and browns and the blues.

Forgiveness gave me the chance at hope. Now comes my own personal purgatory. Redemption is something you live. It is easy to talk about being redeemed from your past, of starting a new life, but you don't get a clean slate just by saying that you no longer hate. You have to try and live each new pathway, each alternative. You have to recant, repent. Repentance, too, isn't easy. It's not a thing you say, but a thing you do each time you are given the choice. Every time I see clearly that the only way to end this is to hurt myself, I have to take the other way. So I see that redemption isn't a momentary salvation but a thng you live, every moment of your life. There was my past, and the chemical makeup of my brain, and if I am to redeem these things then I can't just do it now, but also every other now. Am I ranting? Am I making myself clear? I don't know how to say that which I am searching for. After every action comes a reaction and the same is true of the act of forgiveness. Live through the reaction, and you might just be redeemed. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of living your life free of the thoughts of injury, and free of the burden of guilt. To quote another, yes, another, bit of scripture: "I never said it would be easy, I said it would be worth it". I know it isn't easy. I'll let you know if it's worth it. And there endeth the lesson for the day.