The last two days I’ve been stuck indoors with a heavy cold and a raised temperature. Not even tasting the fresh air outside, and my head thickly congested, I’m unable to activate that part of the brain that’s a spokesman for the soul, but I thought I might just start anyhow, and see if in half an hour the Muse might be sufficiently invoked to lend a hand in publishing something.
O muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate;
o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi,
qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.
O Muses, O high genius, now assist me!
o memory, that didst write down what I saw,
here thy nobility shall be manifest! [Dante, Inferno, Canto II]
Reading and writing are important, especially writing because it is the window to our own soul—when not stuffed up with a cold of course. Wikipedia gives examples of poets invoking the Muse: Homer, Virgil, Catullus, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer. How many of them actually believed that their inspiration actually came from a feminine being named Clio, Melpomene or Calliope? Enough, we can leave out the names of the other six.
I’m not sure how to answer my own rhetorical question, for inspiration comes from somewhere that can only be referred to indirectly, with metaphor. It is brought up from a deep well, or it is forged from the heat in a furnace; or it is a Muse providing assistance.
It’s that word “belief” that causes the trouble; as if each one of us is prepared to enter the witness-box at any time, take the book in our right hand, and swear by Almighty God that the evidence we shall give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “so help me God”. For God helps us tell truth, as the Muse helps us with poetic inspiration, at any rate will help Marc now that he’s announced to the whole world: “I have started it.” For there is something sacred about this creative endeavour, and I wonder how many of the millions of born-again scribblers and bloggers and emailers and published authors give thanks to the parts of their brain which connect them to their Muse, and more especially to the Muse herself. And if they don’t glimpse their soul through writing, then give thanks to the guardian angel who fixes chance encounters.
I wrote in a recent post Beginnings about eavesdropping the conversation of two boys on a bus. The other day I arrived at the same bus stop for the same ride back into town and found there a young woman anxiously examining the timetable. I won’t bore you with the full details of our conversation—the selective exchange of life-stories that seem to happen when I bump into strangers—so suffice to say she was a committed Christian on her way to a retreat. So at some point I admitted to having been brought up in the Church of England, attending services twice on Sundays 
and yet never believing that Christ died for me, or that he was Lord. Despite this, I said, I find myself somewhat drawn to the C of E in my declining years, for it rounds off my life somehow, and since I don’t even care about belief any more, I can just go along for the ride, enjoying the hymns, the Book of Common Prayer, the ancient buildings, the fellowship (though I’ll always be a Steppenwolf, at the edge of the congregation, slinking out hoping to remain unnoticed). I was banking on the traditional notion that the C of E is a “broad church”: anyone can join!
My diatribe provoked an arousal of the poor girl’s evangelistic instincts, as if I were a lost sheep who had just happened to stray within her orbit; and she started to go about her Father’s business, invoking the Bible in admonishment to my waywardness. I told her I didn’t believe anything in the Bible and moreover, whilst solemnly respectful of the rituals and holy objects of religions, especially the Bible which I hold in superstitious regard as a magical object, I feel that beliefs are divisive and keep us in chains. She demurred at that of course, until I mentioned the Martyrs’ Memorial six miles away, where the names of seven Protestants are inscribed, who were burnt at the stake (by other Christians) for wanting to worship their way and interpret Holy Writ for themselves. As soon as I’d delivered this coup de grâce I repented, for it was too much force to use in a pleasant conversation between strangers on a bus. I need not have worried. It affected her like water on a duck’s back; and didn’t dissuade her from inviting me to her church one Sunday. We had reached town by this, and parted on good terms.
So I feel like making up a new slogan, a new motto hybridized from old ones:
Abandon belief, all ye who enter here!
You have nothing to lose but your chains.
9 thoughts on “evangelist”
YesNoMaybeSo
you are an amazing writer! i was just scanning through random blogs and came across yours. I hope you wouldn’t mind if I subscribed to yours? These posts are quite inspiring.
Vincent
Oh thank you Jenn! I shall be delighted if you visit regularly, provided you don’t mind me scrawling comments over at your place from time to time.
YesNoMaybeSo
i do not mind that at all!! I’d greatly appreciate it.
Ashok
Wishing you a quick recovery from the cold. A couple of tablets of vitamin C ( 500 mg each) hastens recovery. A large bowl of freshly prepared steaming chicken broth ( if one is into consuming poultry) produces immediate relief. Hard boiled eggs and toast are a neat diet with some freshly ground black pepper and salt sprinkled on the eggs. Taking things easy for a week after recovery is recommended for good health for the rest of the year.
Tim
A fantastic exchange with the evangelist—would it not be nice if all religious zealots were only so zealous as her? Proper, polite, and steadfast… as are you.Perhaps it’s the “bug” you’ve incubated, but I picked up a sort of depressed tone to this post… terms like “declining years.” Insomuch as we have discussed the religion and politics of “hope” as it were, I wonder if there is a converse to your skepticism regarding belief—as if the assertions are subconscious musings aimed at finding an actual good purpose in “beliefs.” Assuredly, your evangelist bus companion thinks so (though maybe not in such a psychological way), but I wonder if you’ve considered it.
Vincent
Aha, Tim, you picked up that “declining years” phrase. I don’t know that it was the phrase that I actually used, but I was scrupulous to convey to the young woman that I wasn’t “chatting her up” in the way that an older man may find a young woman charming; also it’s a fact that one thinks of death more often as one gets older, even if one may still have several decades left. The less inspired tone of post is explained within the post itself, at the beginning; but the encounter took place a week or more earlier. (I wish these pieces could be read as fiction, though the enquiries after one’s health are kindly intentioned.) But yes, there is a converse to my scepticism, as you point out; and I would have been glad to encounter a Christian who would have accepted my position without wanting to convert me to a different one.
Vincent
Ashok, thank you for suggestions. This morning the sunshine persuaded me to venture out for a long walk, but I didn’t get far and heeded your warning and came back.
MarcLord
You are quite an inspiration, Vincent, and provide things to “lift” as well, like the Dante quote. That is the challenge I face. Have a good start, though, and the insights and memories are spilling out faster than I get them down on page. Hope you’ve made a full recovery, your My Left Foot post is wonderful, and fully I understand why you were afraid to watch it.
Vincent
Marc, I discovered years ago that capturing the memories is just the beginning. Yes, you have to capture them and write them, and gain the insights. But the understanding: discovering the true and till-now hidden narrative is the bit that might take many years (or less of course).There are too many memoirs (excuse me while I pontificate) which assume that unusual experiences are in themselves worthy of the writer’s or reader’s attention. (I won’t even speak of the celebrity memoir: we are speaking here of literature I hope, and not the publisher’s obsession with easy sales.)Any autobiography worth its salt is the journey of a soul, which illuminates how the subject became what he is, and answers questions such as: “Was he always the same person deep down? How much did life-experiences change him?” Correction: it doesn’t answer the questions, it provides clues for the reader to answer the questions.But I strongly believe that the highest purpose of any book, fiction or otherwise, which describes the events in a person’s life, is to generate within the reader some sort of comparison and self-questioning. I’m also of the view that the protagonist must always be described in such a way that we as readers identify with him or her, no matter what obvious differences separate us, so that we may experience vicariously a life outside our own narrow circumstance. the way to do this is to leave as it were space around the characters: not to tell the whole story so tightly as to suppress the reader’s free flight of imagination. Looking at amateur writers’ manuscripts (for example in Harper Collins’ site Authonomy.com) I often get stifled by an excess of details, even in the first paragraph: details which make it impossible for me to identify with anything, because the author wants to particularise his vision so that I see through his eyes. But I want him to be stimulated enough by what he tells me that I can in my mind’s eye see a whole world – on my own, as it were.