"I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or catholics."
Woody Allen
The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh". He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in love", but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes "one flesh". You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of "being in love" what were in fact plain decriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally endured or eternally enjoyed.
C.S Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters
A great many people think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I would be very angry if the Mohammedans [sic] tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.
C.S Lewis -- Mere Christianity
But now look at pages pp 26, 30 and 31 [of Mere Christianity]. There you will observe that you are really committed (with the Christian church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage -- monogamous, permenant, rigidly "faithful" -- is in fact the truth about sexual behaviour for all humanity: this is the only road of of total health (including sex in its proper place) for all men and women...Do I not then say truly that your bringing in of Mohammedans [sic] on p 34 is a most stinking red herring? I do not think that you can possibly support your 'policy' [of a two-tier marriage system] by this argument, for by it you are giving away the very foundation of Christian marriage. The foundation is that this is "the correct way of running the human machine". Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps) getting an extra mileage out of a few selected machines.
Letter from J.R.R Tolkien to C.S. Lewis (not posted).
I say we shall have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all save one shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery - go!
When I arrived at the little upstairs
room in the Exmouth Arms, Leon Rosselson was already sitting in
the front row reading the Guardian, which is what you would have imagined him doing before a concert. The compère introduced him as the
greatest living English political songwriter; an assessement with
which it would be very hard to argue. Like a lot of people, I knew his songs long before I had heard of him. I just kept noticing that my favourite performers -- Martin Simpson, Martin Carthy,
Billy Bragg, Dick Gaughan and Chumbawamba had all covered Leon Rosselson songs. (Come to think of it, they all covered
the same Leon Rosselson song....)
If you'd only heard Billy Bragg belting out "in 1649
to St Georges Hill...." you might be taken aback by the little man with
the squeaky voice (I almost wrote “nerdy”) chatting away about
1970s environmental protests and an arts project he was involved in which used an old
London bus as a performance space. He steers clear of the famous, well-covered songs: no
Stand Up For Judas, no Palaces of Gold...the man sitting behind me
shouts out for The World Turned Upside Down but he doesn't sing that, either. (I think it was the man sitting behind me who took the above footage on his phone: thank you, man sitting behind me.) He does sing "raise a loving cup to Abiezer / he's a dancing, drunken,
roaring, ranter" as an encore, though. Winstanley's Diggers broke away from Abiezer
Coppe's Ranters: I expect you knew that.
Several of the songs have
that kind of anthemic, sing-a-long chorus. He spends some time
teaching us ("Pete Seeger style") the words and tune of a newish, English
take on the big rock candy mountains ("I'm going where the suits all shine my shoes...") But what he does best are patter songs
and story songs and thesis songs. He's almost like Jake Thackray with
the sex and catholicism replaced with left wing politics. (The ghost
of George Brassens -- Jake's hero too -- appears to him in one song to tell him to carry on
writing regardless of what everyone thinks.) Over and over
again, he tells us about little men confused by a world in which
everything is commoditized. There's the old tale about the man who
finds that a motorway is going to be built through his back garden,
and the newer one about the man who achieves celebrity by committing
suicide on live TV; and the familiar story of poor Barney, forced
to work in the factory when all he really wants is to make junk
sculptures in his garden (suggested by a Marxist book about the
condition of workers in communist Hungary, apparently.) Production lines keep turning up as symbol for everything which is wrong with capitalism:
It was press, turn, screw, lift,
early shift and late shift,
every day the same routine
Turning little piggies into plastic
packet sausages
to sell in the heliport canteen
Some of the political points may be a
little bit obvious: his response to teh riotz is to say that the rioters are only doing the kind of thing that made England what it is today –
Francis Drake, now there's a looter
Plundering the Spanish main...
Was rewarded with a knighthood
Looters deserve nothing less
But more often, he
takes us off into complex slabs of poetical political theory that you really have to concentrate on:
What do you feel said the land to the
farmer?
"Sweat on my brow" the farmer replied
"Sun on my skin" said the spring time
lover
"Ball at my feet" the young boy cried
And the man whose eyes were made to
measure
Said “Proud to invest in a high-yield
area
Concrete and glass and stake in the
future...”
The club isn't amplified and the
language and argument require close attention; which makes for a
pretty demanding evening. But it's clear that everyone in the room
respects and reveres him as a song writer; the phrase "hanging on
his every word" just about covers it.
As before, the club itself was the star
of the evening, with a stream of talented performers getting up to
take floor spots. Resident singers Bob Wakely and Ellie Hill did cheerful renditions of Clyde
Water (drowned lovers), Sheath and Knife (brother-sister incest) and an, er, homage to the Carthy / Swarbs Sovay. Tom Paley did an
American song about – I'm not sure what it was about. There was a
skunk involved, and everybody said “whack diddle eye day” a great
deal. It dripped authenticity. Someone whose name I didn't get
did a killingly camp version of an old music hall song taking the mickey out of Scottish people. But the highlight was the fellow who sang a song of his own in praise of the National Health Service. I don't know
if the roof was raised for the song itself or for the sentiments behind it, but raised it most certainly was. It's a very brave man who sings protest songs in front
of Leon Rosselson.
"I learned that I was right and everyone else was wrong when I was nine. Buck Rogers arrived on the scene that year, and it was instant love. I collected the daily strips, and I was madness maddened by them. Friends criticized. Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I bust into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone and life simply wasn't worth living. The next thought that came to me was: these are not my friends, the ones who made me tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; these are my enemies. I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since."
