A cabaret of souls
Bill McMellon muses on heat, music and words
The rhythm is cool and the weather is hot, hot, hot
So sings Rastamouse as we drive with our little granddaughters through the Sussex heatwave. It is hot, hot, hot indeed. Sleepless nights under a sheet. I have a headache as I type. There have been wonderful afternoons on the beach, or at the lido, but I have been finding it all something of a struggle.
Into all this, through the post, comes a CD: Richard Thompson’s Cabaret of Souls. The conceit is that we are in a ‘reception for the freshly deceased’. The master of ceremonies is the Keeper and, with his assistants Grympale and Malpensio, he forces his recently mortal clients to perform. So, there is a series of songs by a (hopefully unrepresentative) cross section of humanity. We hear, for instance, from a glutton, from a conceited art critic and a jealous suitor. After each of his songs Richard Thompson helpfully provides a commentary from the Keeper and his assistants. The worst villain of all is Auldie Riggs, a serial killer.
Do you recognize my face? The picture ran for a week or more
When I left her lifeless body on the floor…
Usually the Keeper treats the various offerings with contempt, but not this one.
Sir, Friend, your hand,
I truly, truly understand.
No remorse seems to linger
Not even in the tippet tip tip of your finger
A charming hint of bi-polarity
Which sits so well with your morality (or lack therof)
I know we’re going to get along just fine.
For the past week I have been reading Rebecca West’s accounts of the trials of William Joyce (known as lord Haw Haw) and John Amery, who both broadcast for the Nazis during the second world war. This, too, is something of a nightmare. Rebecca West writes brilliantly about these flawed, tragic, personalities. William Joyce had a bitter and rasping voice and ‘it seemed as if one had better hearken and take warning when he suggested that the destiny of the people he had left in England was death, and the destiny of his new masters in Germany life and conquest…’
However, for all that, William Joyce ended his life on the gallows. Rebecca West, in The Meaning of Treason, relentlessly describes his progress towards that horrible place. Lord Haw Haw has fascinated me since, when I was a child, my mother talked about his broadcasts. There is a fascination, too, in the book. I came across a copy of it when helping sort out the belongings of my wife’s cousin, who has moved into a residential home. It is a strange and difficult thing to go through the possessions of someone I know and love well and, though encouraged as I was to take anything I chose, one cannot help feel like a vulture.
Hot, hot, hot.
We Quakers believe that there is something of God within us all. We try to be good people. But we are human and we have failings and weaknesses. To me, in the extremes of this summer, those failings have loomed large. I have not mentioned climate change, Donald Trump, or the political turmoil that seems to have enveloped this country since we decided to turn our backs on our nearest neighbours by leaving the European Union. But there is always hope.
I have, for reasons which escape me, been encouraged by a poem from Rumi that I recently discovered, which goes something like this:
Life is a Series of tests.
If you have passed a few
Do not be too proud.
