His words I can give, but your own fancy must supply the advantages of an intelligent, expressive countenance, and, what is perhaps harder still, the harmony of his glorious brogue, that, like the melodies of our own dear country, will leave a burden of mirth or of sorrow with nearly equal propriety, tickling the diaphragm as easily as it plays with the heart-strings, and is in itself a national music that, I trust, may never, never — scouted and despised though it be — never cease, like the lost tones of our harp, to be heard in the fields of my country, in welcome or endearment, in fun or in sorrow, stirring the hearts of Irish men and Irish women.
Sheridan Le Fanu - The Purcell Papers (1880)
There is a kaleidoscope of poetic aspects to culture which cannot be lost without losing the culture too. Sheridan Le Fanu was of course Irish, but the lost tones of our metaphorical harp are no longer understood, played and adapted through successive generations.
To keep the notes audible and understood, there must be some common cultural soil in which the roots are secure. It is not a political aspect of culture but a poetic aspect, yet it can be trashed politically.
3 comments:
Yes, politics can trash it, as we have seen very graphically with Rishi's absence from the D Day ceremony. I can understand how an Indian bloke keen to help the country and appear as a true Brit might nevertheless misconstrue the public mood. But when all of his highly-paid advisors miss it, one has to wonder whether this might have been a carefully planned attempt to start putting one aspect of our national identity to bed. It's not good to have too many reminders of inter-national wars between members of the same trading alliance. Interesting how the old stone monuments here in Portsmouth refer to the "Germans", but in the recent services the favoured term is "Nazis", as if they were a random group who appeared everywhere in Europe, and just happened to be in a higher concentration on the north coast of France in 1944.
And nobody dare say National Socialism. Nazi was not used by anybody in Germany before or during the War. It suited Socialists of most nations outside of Germany in order to disassociate themselves from a form of government too similar to their own, and others used it because it sounds a bit like "nasty".
And there is certainly no anti-semitism in today's Socialist parties.
Today all nasty people and organisations, i.e. "not on our side" are Nazis.
Sam - yes, when all those smart advisors failed to warn the PM about nipping off early, it does look as if this is an aspect of our national identity being dumped. It feels remarkably unprofessional though, as if those advisors were not able to see that their own biases weren't the issue.
Doonhamer - yes so much faith in fiddling around with names. Socialists don't like to remember that Mussolini saw himself as a socialist and North Korea is a socialist state too.
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