The Student Prince

I might have been ten, perhaps younger, when I was swept off my feet by The Student Prince. For many years afterwards I believed that, once I had shed my cygnet’s drab feathers and become a swan, I would be spirited away to a magical place called Heidelberg where a prince with the handsome dark looks of Edmund Purdom and the powerful, passionate yet tender voice of Mario Lanza would see me and instantly fall in love. It was a successful, if not the only, attempt by the Spirit of Romantic Love to get me to do its bidding.

As a teenager I was attracted more to classical music than to pop. Music of all sorts, I am now convinced, powerfully links the physical and the spirit worlds. Performing music, listening to music not only arouses transient emotions but can alter the course of a life because it is spirit which motivates and energises. In thrall to the Spirit of Romantic Love, you can become blind to the charms of mere mortals. Even worse, you can convince yourself that a mere mortal is The Student Prince and burden him with unrealistic expectations.

Last week I was speaking to a young relative and was struck by how his life seems to be following a similar trajectory to the one mine followed for a couple of decades. As well as sharing genes, classical music, its performance and audition, played a part in both our lives.

We belong to a culture where we listen to music because we enjoy it. We are aware of emotions it may arouse, but our society is still blind to other, perhaps far-reaching consequences, it may have. It can affect our breathing rhythm and heart physiology. Because heart signals radiate some distance from our bodies they can be replicated in those around us causing entrainment which is driven, for better or worse, by the most powerful force in the system.

I am certain that knowledge of the effects of music exists in the human race. Perhaps the knowledge will be shared with the rest of us when the time is appropriate. At least this is my hope. 

In Other Orbits

I am sitting on our three-seater sofa with one cat energetically grooming himself on my right and the other carrying out an identical process on the left. Soon white fur will gleam, charcoal and tan parts will look sleek with mats removed and claws will be carefully bitten trim. I have even seen Sherpa engaged outdoors in what appeared to me to be a teeth cleaning exercise using fine twigs broken off shrubs as a toothbrush. Cat dignity depends on effort being put into personal grooming and to urination and defecation rituals which ensure that waste is hygienically disposed of. What is strange about cats is how little effort is put into cleaning bedding and resting places. When these start to look grubby the cat simply moves on finding somewhere more salubrious to lie while its human friend does the laundry. Cats could learn to flick debris and brush hairs off their sheets couldn’t they? And remove wrinkles to make their bed more comfortable if they really tried. They watch humans doing these things just as they watch everything we do, but no matter how much time they have shared with us, it doesn’t seem to occur to them to imitate us.

Sitting on the sofa, I imagine cat genes launching cats at appropriate times into permitted orbits of behaviour. Those first orbits allow feeding and movement, but soon kittens come under the influence of the Hunting Planet and the varied play, which so fascinates us, begins. The Star of Knowledge has many planets which reflect its light and, throughout their lives, cats slip effortlessly between them. The Warrior governs defence of territory. The Protector teaches them to avoid danger, food poisoning and parasites and seek therapy through eating grass. The Lust and Love Planet has as its domain friendship, courtship, mating and care of the young.

There are however things which the Star of Knowledge cannot teach a cat.

Sandwiches

What for me was an insight woke me in the middle of the night. Before I went to sleep I had read a short piece from Tahir Shah’s new book Travels With Myself. It was called The Magic of the Ordinary, where, in writing with the qualities of a recorded daydream, a scruffy stranger tells Tahir that to understand the extraordinary you must first learn to appreciate ordinariness.

At three or four in the morning I found myself thinking about sandwiches, bought from a bakery at the end of over five, sometimes wet and windswept, hours exploring the city of Derry with my friend Karole. The bakery was near the bus station and round the corner from a pub called Sandinos, which doesn’t sell food but very generously told us where we might find some to eat with a creamy half Guinness and a cup of coffee.

Through the darkness of my bedroom I saw rays from the past, present and future converge on the soft, fresh bread that enveloped the fillings. Some originated from the time when our human ancestors began to cultivate grain, others from when they learned to use fire to cook. Closer to the sandwich were the people who extracted and refined metals to build ovens. The rays anastomosed and rebranched like ivy climbing a tree. Connected to the bread were mills and power plants, ports, salt mines and tarred roads, water reservoirs, money and people picking cotton. I could have followed a ray where yeast, seen with the aid of a microscope, appeared as individual ovoid cells, budding while gas oozed out; or been taken on a tour where the details of anaerobic respiration were explained. It didn’t seem outrageous to imagine that the number of connections surrouning the sandwich might approach infinity. What was certain was that there was much more to ordinariness than meets the eye.

I heartily recommend Travels With Myself to anyone reading this blog. It entertains, but is much more than entertainment. As is written on the back cover, ‘all the pieces in this book are designed to spark the imagination and to act as a catalyst for thought.

Travels With Myself is available now from Lulu.com and can be bought through Amazon in about six weeks’ time.

Nomad

The night before last we watched on television an actor discovering the origin of his nomadic spirit in the grandfather who deserted his grandmother within days of his mother's birth. This maternal grandfather was a member of a well-known family of travelling showmen. I suspected that spirits ran in families. This programme lent support to the idea.

I haven't heard that spirits, like the hunting instinct or the one to protect territory, have been located in the human genome Perhaps there is a parallel form of inheritance which allows them to be passed down through generations, not only in humans but in other animals.

In our part of the world where land is considered the property of individuals and large mammals are constrained within human territories, any nomadic instinct our four-footed associates might have is well and truly crushed. It's different in parts of Africa through which wildebeest and elephants can freely migrate.

Instincts may, or may not, be passed on through the DNA, but it is interesting to use the gene metaphor and think of territorial and nomadic instincts as alleles. The territorial instinct is the dominant allele (at least in the developed world.) The recessive nomadic allele is most likely to survive when copies are inherited from both parents.

There is another possibility. Instincts, as fire spirits, when frustrated by conditions in the material world, can shape-shift into other forms. The travelling showman can become a wandering dervish.