What next?

Sometimes displacement activity is the only action in town; the only thing that keeps you sane. Marking used to drive me to hoover; to brush my teeth; to clean my shoes; too play the keyboard badly and, in extreme cases, in an example of reversal psychology – marking!

Writing is both a chore and a release; for it to be coherent it demands, of necessity, structure in the form of grammar; the rules; full stops and capital letters; agreement of cases, person and sense. On the other hand it offers release in the form of the universe that the very language creates, and you create by your input and your imagination.

So where now? What imaginative leap will this writing allow me, where will it go?Disappointment invariably follows. Let it go where it will!

During the snatch of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Beyond Belief’ that I listened to while driving to fetch Toni from work, it transpired that a selection of representatives from a selection of world religions were talking about the importance of music in their respective faiths.

In was while listening to this programme that it struck me how like communism was Islam. I do not mean that they are exactly synonymous; that would be a ridiculous statement, though I’m sure that it would be possible to talk about authoritarianism and faith and hierarchy and a number of other aspects and link them with some degree of convincingness. As I listened to the truly disturbing reasonableness of the Scottish Muslim and his description of his faith, I was struck by the difference between what he was saying and what you can see in the world of the Middle East. Appearance and reality. And that is what reminds me of the ideology of Communism in relation to Islam.

Having read the Koran (in English) there are many aspects which are easy to identify with from a Christian perspective as well as others which are much more problematical. But, in essence it seems to me that Islam is a very ‘reasonable’ religion which seems to be ‘reasonably’ egalitarian and encourages the development of male and female with a degree of equality.

But where do we see the religion operating according to the Book? How many democracies are Islamic? Where are women given true equality in the Middle East? Where are the human rights of citizens protected in Islamic states? How many Islamic states allow the promotion of Christianity? The so called halcyon days of the Caliphate of Spain where the faiths coexisted seems far in history. The great advances of Islamic scholarship are far in the past and we are more likely to hear of oppression and repression from those fundamentalist Islamic states which vaunt their orthodox allegiance.

The faith is in favour of equality and freedom of worship and all the other positive aspects of a liberal faith; it’s just that there isn’t an actual country in the world in which an Islamic faith is practiced in this way. Just like Communism: all the positive aspects, but, unfortunately, no actual, real country in the world, ever.

The Islamic contributor in the programme was explaining the Islamic approach to music: he rejected the use of music which might be inclined to deprave and corrupt; that the use of music which encouraged the worship of god was fine, but music which, in the worship of god tended towards entertainment and a sort of self indulgent pleasure was wrong. Although he seemed reasonable, there was a steely sort of Puritanism in what he said which, I thought, was self defeating and self contradictory.

Ii think that music underpins the whole of our existence. Janacek used to listen to the speech of his fellow countrymen and in the notebook which he carried around, he would sometimes write down the ‘music’ of their voices in musical notation. We do not speak in monotones, so when we communicate we communicate in music. We cannot and surely would not want to escape it. And all the mealy mouthed apologies for an emotional response to music in terms of twisted religion are truly repulsive.

Why did music raise itself into my consciousness? Roads.

Roads. And more particularly the noise a car makes when it travels over roads. And why the music is different.

When I went to New York on my one and only visit to escape the grovelling television coverage of the Prince of Wales and his first wife, I ‘enjoyed’ the rampant success of capitalism but I was astonished at the state of the roads. It was during a time when New York was described as ‘dying from the roots up’ as the sewers, roads and essential services were neglected. There were potholes and noxious wisps of steam oozing from ill fitting and noxious manhole covers.

The roads of Cardiff are a metaphor for the world. (Oh god, I’m beginning to sound like a vicar!) Driving a normal journey through the streets of Cardiff you pass through a range of ‘countries’ from the affluent first world smoothness of a certain part of the Newport Road, where the sound you make is a whisper of the normal noise that surface noise makes to the third world experience of Widdecombe Drive in Rumney where every service seems to have cut the surface and left an uneven patchwork of bumps which makes driving an eventful experience and the music of the tyres more experimental. Even on a seemingly smooth road there are always undulations which create their own series of asymmetrical rhythms.

The rhythms of the road and a constant music to confound narrow ideologies.