MIDWINTER


To my surprise, as I was looking at a copy of the Chinese Tao Te Ching in the school bookshop, the headmaster, who taught French and collected ceramics, came up and told me that it was a wonderful book.  I knew little about it then, but my interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality was already beginning to take shape. A year or two later I recognised some of its verses in George Harrison’s The Inner Light, which was released in 1968 as the B-side of The Beatles' single, Lady Madonna. In the 1970s I gave my brother the book, and he has since told me, more than once, how important it is to him. Last Christmas he returned the gesture and sent me a new translation as a present, and I enjoyed reacquainting myself with this ancient, beautiful, and mysterious text, which is full of poetic and resonant thoughts. This, for instance, is a rendering of the verses that inspired Harrison’s song:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window 
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act. 

The basic idea of the Tao is not difficult to grasp, although the Tao Te Ching declares that it is ‘nameless’ and can never adequately be described or intellectually understood. The word is usually translated as ‘Way’, and while it does not have definite characteristics, the Tao is commonly characterised as strong, gentle, and fluid. Historically, Taoists were often hermits and recluses; they kept their light hidden and didn’t identify themselves.

In the recent past, perhaps because of its apparent simplicity and exotic appeal, Taoism has spread widely and thinly, to the point where it has lost something of its original depth and savour. An example of this popularisation was the 1982 publication of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, in which the characters from A.A.Milne’s Winnie the Pooh are used to explain the fundamentals of Taoist philosophy, and although it is overly cute, the book does have charm and interest. Pooh is the Taoist, uncomplicated and flexible, never worrying about how life will turn out; he embodies ‘wu wei’, which is often translated as ‘non-action’ or, in vernacular terms, ‘going with the flow’. His friends and companions, in contrast, tend to over-think and create bother, for themselves and other people. As Piglet says, ‘Pooh hasn’t much Brain, but he never comes to any harm’.

Hoff’s approach to Taoism reflects the manifestations of 1960s counterculture that valued childlike qualities of innocence, fantasy, and imagination. This whimsical attitude to life now seems willfully naive, but at the time, and in relation to a society that emphasised materialistic progress above all else, it made some sense. William Blake, who was also much admired by the counterculture, saw both sides of the issue. In Songs of Innocence and Experience he suggested that childhood, while pure and protected, is not immune to the fallen world, whose frailties and corruptions sometimes impose themselves. This is ‘experience’, which is usually suffused by fear and inhibition. The Songs of Experience reveal ways in which adult life destroys much of what is good in innocence, but they also articulate some of the weaknesses of a predominantly childlike way of living.

At Christmas I also took the opportunity to read Tove Jansson’s letters, which have just been published in a handsome and substantial volume. I’ve become fond of her writing, and The Summer Book, which I discovered some years ago, is now a firm favourite. It tells the story of an old woman and her grandchild who spend the summer in the Finnish archipelago. Nothing much happens, but they wander around the small island looking at life with wonder, holding vividly candid conversations. The Summer Book combines innocence and experience, and Jansson’s simple narrative, which seems to have no purpose other than the graceful illumination of everyday life and its unremarkable problems, has something of a Taoist spirit. Given the season, however, I turned instead to Moominland Midwinter, one of her children’s books, after browsing through the letters.

I have been slow in catching up with Jansson’s Moomins, those strange and  benevolent creatures whose meditative nonchalance and adaptable tolerance are also lessons in the Taoist way of life, but I’m gradually working my way through the series. Living in an archetypal Scandinavian setting of mountains, forests, seas, and valleys, the Moomins can be both joyful and melancholy, and their extended family is agreeable, inclusive, and composed of motley outsiders, both tranquil and anarchic. Their stories relate how the Moomins overcome dramas and upheavals through genial and affectionate compliance, and Moominland Midwinter is no exception. It is a tale about what happens when Moomintroll, who wakes up early during hibernation and can’t get back to sleep, decides to stay awake through the rest of the harsh winter. Normally placid, he is angered by the absence of the sun and the fierce blizzards, soon becoming resentful of those of his companions who are able to enjoy the snow and ice. Moomintroll is convinced that winter is playing an unkind trick on him. One day, however, he stops fighting the storm and notices that the wind isn't cold and that it makes him feel light, almost as though he is flying. ‘I’m nothing but air and wind, I’m part of the blizzard’, Moomintroll says to himself, and he begins to let go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAsGD9YLT50

 COUNTLESS BRANCHES

Seymour, the eldest of the precocious Glass family children who are the subject of most of J.D.Salinger’s short novels and stories, is clever, strange, and benign. According to one of his brothers, he was a ‘mukta’, a God-knower, an enlightened man. Seymour’s sensibility, like those of the siblings he so deeply influenced, was much influenced by his study of spiritual texts, and there are constant references throughout the Glass stories to Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, classical Taoism, and Christianity. Nevertheless, Seymour was a troubled soul. After a brief period of marriage to a much younger wife, he took his own life.

Years after I first read them as a young adult, the Glass stories remain important to me because they were entertaining, helpful and instructive at a particular time in my life, and I recall them with affection. But as Seymour points out in ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, ‘we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it’, and I concede that my feelings towards the Salinger stories may be too sympathetic, coloured by fond nostalgia. It is not coincidental that Salinger’s writing has itself been accused of sentimentality; although sharp and funny, particularly in their dialogue, his stories are unusually soft-hearted and benevolent. His style and way of thinking, which had detractors when the stories were published, are perhaps even less liked today. Salinger’s books are often considered earnest, self-conscious, and pretentious; like Hermann Hesse’s, they're dismissed as the kind of novels that mainly appeal to over-sensitive young people. 

Seymour’s definition of sentimentality, which I have often found useful to remember, came to mind as I listened to Bill Fay’s new record, ‘Countless Branches’. Fay is an intriguing musician and something of an outsider. In the early 1970s he made two albums for Deram, Decca’s label for its more experimental releases; the first, ‘Bill Fay’, was personal, fragile, and lavishly orchestrated, while the second, ‘Time of the Last Persecution’, was troubled and stark. Neither was successful, and he was soon dropped by the record company. Relatively unambitious as well as temperamentally inclined towards privacy (his absence from the music world coincidentally caused him to be called ‘Britain’s musical Salinger’), Fay took up other jobs but continued to write and record music on his own. He felt deeply out of place in the contemporary world, coming to believe that spiritual values, prominent in the counterculture of the 1960s and subsequently forgotten or ignored, were all that mattered. He also found meaning and solace in nature, which remains a deep source of inspiration.

Bill Fay’s music has been intermittently championed in the intervening years - by David Tibet, Jim O’Rourke, Jeff Tweedy, and Nick Cave, among others - but it was about a decade ago that his career unexpectedly flourished. The music producer Joshua Henry, whose late father had ‘Time of the Last Persecution’ in his collection, sought him out, attracted by the record’s mix of apocalyptic despondency and resolute hopefulness. The outcome of their eventual collaboration was a new album, ‘Life is People’, which was released in 2012 and followed three years later by another, ‘Who is the Sender’. Both sold well enough to justify the third and current release.    

Although musically unexceptional and blatantly out of step with fashionable taste, ‘Countless Branches’ has been surprisingly well received. Fay’s simple lyrics are heartfelt and most of his melodies are memorable; together they resonate with emotional authenticity, and this appears to be at the core of the record’s warm reception. One reviewer said that the songs seem to be the fruit of a lifetime overcoming despair; another remarked that the record is infused by melancholy, but ‘the knowing sadness of a long life, not youthful depression’, while a third  described it as ‘tender, forgiving, and wonderstruck’. ‘Countless Branches’ is  a moving record, in some respects reminiscent of the lived-in profundity of Johnny Cash’s last work and the vulnerability of Gil Scott-Heron’s final albums, but lacking their darkness and gloom.  Fay’s music is close to being sentimental, at least in Salinger’s sense of the word. Unashamedly, its aim is to gladden and uplift.

I recently described and praised ‘Countless Branches’ to a musician friend who is somewhat younger than me, and after a moment’s thought he wondered if it might be a record that especially appeals to an older generation. This may be so, just as it is probably true of Leonard Cohen’s last albums. Fay’s feelings are those of a person who, like Seymour Glass, has found living in materialistic contemporary culture unusually difficult and disenchanting. More profoundly, it is clear that he has also been touched by suffering and pain, both his own and that of the world around him. Nonetheless, he seems to have risen above it. Fay's music suggests that life may not be an inevitable descent into gloom or despair but an ongoing process of creation and rebirth in which our capacity for love can grow and strengthen. In that respect - and sometimes musically, as in the band version of 'How Long, How Long' - it recalls George Harrison's solo work.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvKnwrVSQE
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-fay-countless-branches/
https://www.allmusic.com/album/countless-branches-mw0003335569
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_astp3BjM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWnUItw1ElU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckXmRkPQqw&list=OLAK5uy_mCLUlJks2QLwyWZnmXU17_p9tojvoqg5c&index=4