CHAP. XXXV. The Parson's Condescending.

THE Countrey Parson is a Lover of old Customes, if they be good, and harmlesse; and the rather, because Countrey people are much addicted to them, so that to favour them therein is to win their hearts, and to oppose them therin is to deject them. If there be any ill in the custome, that may be severed from the good, he pares the apple, and gives them the clean to feed on.
Particularly, he loves Procession, and maintains it, because there are contained therein 4 manifest advantages.
First, a blessing of God for the fruits of the field:
Secondly, justice in the Preservation of bounds:
Thirdly, Charity in loving walking, and neighbourly accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if there be any:
Fourthly, Mercy in releeving the poor by a liberall distribution and largesse, which at that time is, or ought to be used.
Wherefore he exacts of all to bee present at the perambulation, and those that withdraw, and sever themselves from it, he mislikes, and reproves as uncharitable, and unneighbourly; and if they will not reforme, presents them. Nay, he is so farre from condemning such assemblies, that he rather procures them to be often, as knowing that absence breedes strangeness, but presence love.

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil.

                 There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

In travelling thro' England, a luxuriance of objects presents it self to our view: Where-ever we come, and which way soever we look, we see something new, something significant, something well worth the travellers stay, and the writer's care.

A F T E R W O R D

England is Rich

"The fate of things gives a new face to things ... "
Defoe travelled an island poised on the edge of Empire. I travelled an England hardly less stirringly in transition, an England leaving behind the Age of Steam which it had made its own and moving forward boldly into the new Age of Atomic Power. Defoe's England, under the drive of her new race of merchant-adventurers, was expanding across the oceans; ours, emerging from the cyclotrons and synchrotrons of the nuclear scientists and the test-tubes of the chemists, seems at times to be expanding beyond the confines of the material world. For the inhabitants of both Englands, Defoe's and our own, the change of scale is immense-but whereas Defoe's True-born Englishman could still advance masterfully across the enlarging scene, in this twentieth-century England of chemists' miracles, electronics, atomic power, and vast industrial organizations the ordinary man may well feel hopelessly dwarfed and out of his depth. When the Black Country smiths who hammered out their world red-hot upon their anvils exchange their sweat-rags for overalls and move over to the conveyor belts of Birmingham, much more than merely a change of techniques is at stake. Can the tenders of robots escape becoming robots themselves? Will the England of "automation" be an England we can recognize?

...having travelled the land, and made so small inventory of some of its riches, he need display hardly less cause for confidence in its future.

I wrote about what was around me; that was the whole point - to get down the experiences, scenes, people, etc. But some people are so daft they don't understand that writing about Prestwich is just as valid as Dante writing about his inferno.

There's nothing stranger than the things you know but don't quite realize. Pointing it out is the difficult thing. But you can bet that once they get it the world has changed in a weird little way; it's an altered state. But it works the other way as well. And it happens in a flash. It empties you a lot more than you think. I've been lucky in that respect. But I've known people who've returned from London after a week or two, or even just a night, and their entire creative mind-state has altered beyond recognition. All at once they're rootless. The London body-swap has skinned them.

Despite being criticized in recent years for ... having turned to 'effective' rather than 'aesthetic' football (especially at the 1994 World Cup in the US), it is probably still Brazil who keeps the popular image of the Latin American 'ball artists' alive - largely thanks to a few particularly gifted and charismatic players like Ronaldo or Ronaldhino. ...

[There] are historical differences in how to play the game. The Argentinian coach Cesar Luis Menotti even turned these differences into political ones when he offered his concept of a 'left-wing' vs. a 'right-wing' football. By the former, he meant football that "celebrated intelligence and creativity" and "wanted the game to be a festival"; by the latter, football in which "only the result counts and in which the players are degraded to mercenaries employed to gather victory and nothing but". In one of his most famous quotes he summed up his understanding of football as: "Football has to fulfill the functions of art - it has to be like a good movie, a good song, a good poem, a good painting: it has to prepare us for a better, more just, more humane life," Ironically, Menotti's notion of a left-wing football stands in sharp contrast to what was traditionally often hailed as the working class virtues of the sport: 'discipline', 'determination', 'strength'. A bohemian radical notion vs. a proletarian one?

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equally, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!

'There's a word in this poem I've never said in front of my mother before,' I say [pre-empting an expletive at a Poetry Society performance in London].

From within a cloud of pipe smoke, out of the side of his mouth but loud enough to be heard, my dad says, 'Is it thank you?'

BOY
Like all the rest, you weep at sunsets in the west.

GIRL
Like all the least, you sleep through sunrise in the east.

BOY
You're a daddy's girl, he buys you dresses and you twirl.

GIRL
You're mummy's boy, in snake-belt kecks and corduroy.

BOY
But like Humberside is Yorkshire still
and Lancashire is over the hill
and loneliness is Gaping Ghyll,
we never fought and we never will...

BOTH
'Cos you can do nothing wrong in my eyes.
You can do nothing wrong in my eyes.

I dreamed that love was a crime
I was alone, so lonely and blue
You know why? Because eight men and four women, Lord
They found me guilty of loving you

People say [I speak for the dead], but I don’t know what they mean. [laughs] I’ve felt dead enough in my own life. Not to glamorize it too much.
But I am not a Goth, I’m a Greek. Goth means German. Being a Greek is not a geographical reality, it’s a spiritual reality. I’ve heard it said you have to go through a wall, and you have to push very hard to go through it. So you have that amount of force to get through it. Also, Greek people are always talking loud, they’re screaming all the time, it’s part of the culture that came up with Greek tragedy. That’s why I love this psychotic art form. Every tragedy that comes out is the avenging of someone by revenge - the mother whose son has to be killed, who killed the daughter, who killed the father. It’s so close, these things, and blood is too close.
But a song is in a sense a point of being really alive, really very vitally alive. I find it interesting when I hear people say I’m doing dark subjects, because I think, well, maybe they’re thinking that because what I’m doing is the opposite of being dead, and maybe I have to be extremely energized, or I’m fighting to get away from something, just getting away from that depression, so I have to fight harder than other people, and maybe that struggle is evident.