Spiritual musick

Laudate Dominum, and The Destruction of the Father

Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern - what a wonderful body of work. And still she's producing powerful pieces as she approaches her century - the recent work in the show was just as strong as ever. This picture, taken from the Tate Modern website, is "The Destruction of the Father", 1974.

And belatedly I want to mention London Concord Singers' pre-Christmas concert. I particularly enjoyed Martin Dalby's setting of Christopher Smart, with the powerful tenor solo of Margaret Jackson-Roberts:

For there is a mystery in numbers.
For One is perfect and good being at unity in himself.
For Two is the most imperfect of all numbers.
For everything infinitely perfect is Three.
For this was spiritual musick altogether, as the wind is a spirit.
For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale.
For the nightly visitor is at the window of the impenitent, while I sing a psalm of my own composing.

Edinburgh in December sunshine and snow

Mourning

Mourning a great man, Colin White (1932-2007) who I knew only through the reports of their father-figure from my now-orphaned friends, in whom he will live on.

Doves at Dawn
Memorial blog for Colin White

At the dentist

As I walk through Greenwich Park after the best part of an hour in the dentist's chair, I am thinking of the poem I always repeat to myself while my teeth are being drilled:

I never did belong to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the rest a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, comment
To cold oblivion, though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their homes among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

Is it Shelley? I no longer know whether I like the sentiment or not. But thinking of it now, I remember coming across these lines as a teenager in Forster's The Longest Journey, a book I then loved, though I doubt if I understood it. I recall lying in bed in my grandmother's house, insomniac, reading the novel and these lines to memory.

I haven't read Forster for years. And yet, every time I visit the dentist, I find myself using these lines as a distraction from the pain.