I love Linder. She is always interesting. As was this. Would be more than happy to read the whole piece.
Your wish is my etcetera...
{Contrary to the story on the front page the article is a piece by Linder about Linder. Apologies for not making that clear in my original post. I should have written '
auto-biographical essay' instead of biographical; that's what you get for not holding every syllable up to the light and studying it
}
" ‘But we may break out from all of these various prisons with the help of other peoples’ myths, which, coming from outside our own closed system, may provide an external influence, an anti-inertial force, to move us off our own treadmill, our own track, onto an entirely new path.’ ~ Wendy Doniger, Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes(1988)
I’ve recently found solace in Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical writings from the late 1930s when he was trying to reconcile his affiliation with Swami Prabhavananda with driving fast cars with Greta Garbo through Hollywood. Exchange Garbo for Morrissey and Hollywood for Heysham, and you get close to my life at present. Heysham, in north west of England, is, as the vicar here once remarked, ‘a thin place’ – the veils between its worlds are fine. Only the local watercolourists and I are doing anything resembling formal creative activity; everyone else works at the local power station, or won a beauty competition in 1964 then got married and divorced and now runs a tearoom.
I grew up in Liverpool. My family were, at best, disinterested in religion and, at worst, suspicious. My mother was born in 1931; her family hid behind the settee when the priest called because they were terrified of not being able to give him any money. She told me, ‘they’d take your last penny, even if you were starving’. Catholics beat us up on the way home from our Protestant school. Religion was a tangle of hymns and prayers with little relevance to my small frame, although I loved my Bible. Its illustrations were very Woman’s Own – full colour, broad brushstrokes, the Queen of Sheba looking like Elizabeth Taylor and Jesus like Elvis in a sulk. It was as if a fashion illustrator had been given the brief by the publishers in the absence of anyone better suited. I found it all very inspirational.
Around the age of 15, I decided that I wanted to go to church. I assumed that my attendance would involve dressing up, singing and praying. I only had one friend who went to church, the local Methodist, so I tagged along; I had unwittingly adopted Quentin Crisp’s admonishment to ‘shop around’ for religions. I don’t quite know what I was expecting – perhaps I was unconsciously longing for incense, Latin and ceremony – but the service was impoverished and severe. Nonetheless, I kept going for about a year. I also went to the Methodist youth club, until a boy there threw a dart in my best friend’s eye and that was the end of that.
Last year, with the guitarist Stuart McCallum, I recorded a series of musical improvisations in a Methodist church in Morecambe, where I now live. The congregation is tiny. The actress Thora Hird was married there and everyone knows the chair she sat in. The brother of industrialist and film producer, J. Arthur Rank, donated the chairs to the church; they have red velvet cushions (the glamour of mass entertainment offering comfort for prayer). The new Minister wants to sell the chairs for a pound each, to raise funds in order to convert the church into a ‘cafe style’, so the congregation can eat and drink whilst they listen to sermons. I felt irrationally perturbed when he was explaining it all to me. Before one of our sessions, we had to wait for the Methodist Women’s Group to finish their meeting. They sang their hymns very beautifully, their voices fragile with age; one woman was christened in 1910 in the same church. I complemented them afterwards and one of them laughed and said, ‘God loves crows as well as nightingales’. I don’t know what will happen to the churches when these women go. They clean the church, arrange flowers and make tea – and then a new Minister arrives and wants it all to change. But who is the change for, I wonder? The kids, he replied, but I don’t see any coming through the doors.
At the Methodist youth club of my teenage years, we used to dance to the Jackson Five (‘a buh buh buh buh, you’re all I want!’); Norman Greenbaum (‘I’m going up to the spirit in the sky’); Desmond Dekker (‘Poor me, the Israelite. Aah’) and endless Motown; we prayed under the shadow of Wigan Casino. At school, we surreptitiously listened to Je T’aime (Moi, Non Plus) (I love you; me neither) (1969) by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg – not that any of us had any idea what they were saying. Our French teacher said that her cat could speak better French than we could (oh, the curse of the Northern accent!) which, if true, meant that our teacher must have been a witch. Our Latin teacher used to spend our lessons giving herself a manicure as we dutifully recited ‘amo, amas, amat’. Her hands were immaculate and our Latin stunted. As everyone I knew had only one record player in pride of place in the lounge, it was impossible to listen to loud music. Pop and the Methodists changed that; something formative took place in me in those pews. My memories of the prayers and sermons are non-existent, nor do I remember school prayer having any impact upon me. It was only when I was much older, attending classes in Buddhist meditation and now, practicing elements of Sikhism, that I realize that my notions of the soul, God, sin, heaven and hell were all neatly and firmly put in place in a Protestant school in Liverpool in 1959, and reinforced in a church hall near Wigan in 1969.
I grew up with pop; it was born when I was born and it will die as I die. This is not an arrogant statement. I think that the form will go on forever, like Gregorian chants and sea shanties. I never liked the Beatles but the appearance of Yoko Ono in John Lennon’s life did create some fascination. In 1969, John and Yoko released Live Peace in Toronto. On the last track, ‘John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace)’, Yoko screams over feedback guitar. I’d never heard a sound like that before and I knew it was the sort of sound I would like to make one day: pure, with the inadequacies of language falling away as the decibels rose. I began to wake up.
I’ve always been fascinated by female mystics. When I was young, I used to see lots of nuns in Liverpool. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film Black Narcissus (1947) increased my fascination even more. It’s set in a convent in the Himalayas, although it was filmed in London at Pinewood studios. ‘There’s something in the atmosphere which makes everything seem exaggerated’, says a British agent. At times, the colours of the film are hallucinogenic and the scene in which Sister Ruth, at the end of her tether, defiantly applies red lipstick in front of Sister Clodagh, who prays for her soul, neatly illustrates the split in my psyche that has held fast ever since. Whether at early Women’s Liberation meetings in Manchester in the 1970s, or now in my studies of the intricacies of the science of Nád Yoga, I’m always the cuckoo in the nest, betrayed by non-covert use of lipstick. ‘They renounced the world of men but found that the world was not to be denied’, declares the voice-over in the trailer for Black Narcissus; it aptly describes British feminism in Britain in the early 1970s. Watching the film now, it’s farcical the way the white British actors are made-up to play Indian characters. For my performance The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME (2010) I used an all-white cast to look at the sins of my tribe – sexism and racism, slaves and slavishness; it lasted 13 hours with ‘all sense of being in a hurry gone’, as Philip Larkin would say. We used shaving foam and spray cream to enhance the whiteness of our skin; the putrid smell of chemical soap and sour cream still lingers in the costumes. In 1982, I dressed in raw meat at the Hacienda club in Manchester and the ferric odour under stage lights also created a stench. I used half a bottle of Dioressence to try to mask it but it just made it worse."
more soon...
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