"This is moon musick
In the light of the moon"

Rumours of ANGELS and capitals of culture..

“Now, [Liverpool’s] culture seems to be about shopping. The new, £75m Metquarter mall, with its Armani and Hugo Boss and Café Rouge, is spoken of with the same civic pride as the Tate. The Albert Dock is all about heritage, recreation and culture: the oxymoronic “leisure industry”..

“The Capital of Culture is also a culture of capital. There is a lot of money talk around. This year is forecast by optimists to bring in £2 billion of investment and 14,000 jobs. A dissenting voice is that of Professor David Robertson, of John Moores University, who points out that £7-£12 billion worth of central government and European funding is due to come to an end soon, and the city’s use of that windfall has been ‘very frothy, focusing on tourism, and shopping’. Meanwhile, two care homes are due for closure and the council promises ‘service reviews’.

“The McCartney concert at Anfield was a long way from the manicured and bogus New Liverpool. Hugely good-tempered and atrociously organised, it made you think, Liverpool: the Naples of the North. The air was thick with smells of cigarette smoke, chips and rain; and, at the food stand, you could get chicken balti pie and a mug of Bovril. You’re wary of becoming the kind of tourist who doesn’t want his Liverpool smart and prosperous, preferring it deprived and shabby and picturesque. It’s just that this felt alive, where the New Liverpool feels dead.

“McCartney was superb. He fumbled the opening to Penny Lane, apologised, started again. He played Something on a ukulele given him by George Harrison, showed us a bit of Bach they used to play on their guitars to show off, and how he stole it for the opening of Blackbird, and you realised that this really was living history in front of you. By the time he got to Hey Jude, and Yesterday and Let It Be, and Anfield filled with the sound of 35,000 voices singing along in perfect harmony, dull would you be of soul not to feel moved. All that sentimental guff about Liverpool being somehow “special”, and having “a great heart” and “the people” – my God, I was beginning to think – it’s all true.

“The next morning, I went to Toxteth: pubs vandalised, half burnt-out and boarded up; street after street seemingly deserted, the occasional newsagent with the cashier huddled in a booth of thick security glass; scraps of municipal land, neglected. “This is only a mile from the bars and boutiques of Albert Dock – but then Tower Hamlets is only a mile from the City of London. Either way, it’s a long mile. I found a pub still open. Was a year of culture going to help Toxteth? ‘Oh, yeah,’ said the barman with confidence. ‘Just as soon as Ian Paisley becomes Pope.’

“Nearby was a once proud Grade II-listed building in the last stages of decay: the Florence Institute for Boys, known affectionately to the locals as “the Florrie”. It had a library and a gymnasium, and organised regular trips to the Lake District. Now it’s no more than a roofless, burnt-out pigeon roost. If there is a sadder symbol of Liverpool’s decline, I didn’t find it.

“Liverpool today is a Potemkin village. And for all the froth and gush about creativity and culture, investment isn’t getting to where it hurts. Alexei Sayle, in his excellent television series, says that it exhibits optimism, sure, but “the psychotic optimism of man with broken leg who insists he can run the marathon”. It’s a battered and bleeding heavyweight of a city. But it has an astonishing charisma - and I can still hear the sound of 35,000 voices ringing in my ears, singing ‘take a sad song and make it better’.”

Thirty years ago, Rowan Williams had a formative experience in Liverpool that would help define his approach as a churchman and an archbishop. "When I first went to train in a parish in the 1970s, I went to one of the worst council estates in Liverpool for a bit as part of my student experience, and the vicar said to me something I've never forgotten: 'The people here have doors slammed in their face every day of the week. I want to make sure they don't have another one slammed on the seventh.' That's a very central vision for me and that's what I try to work with."

In our time we had been able to found great kingdoms of mountains, ice and snow in our cowsheds. In Peter [Firmin]'s big barn we commanded infinities of Outer Space, starred it with heavenly bodies made from old Christmas decorations and made a moon for the Clangers.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.

Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

we left it oh so long ago the garden"

It's a revolutionary act to remain in one place in the metropolis.
Letterbox, you project the colours of an activist and a militant.

Yet your dissidence is Gandhian, nonviolent. In the modern anthill of hyperactivity you're a smallish postbox with steel rimmed spectacles and a loincloth.

The world's motion sick. Who stands still in the city, a receptacle for messages? Out in the rain, a lonely man and a letterbox could be mistaken for one another.

The most common object in the modern world is potentially the most sacred because its restoration to sanctity is totally unexpected. The poet has traditionally helped to keep the sacred alive by associating the world's great symbols - a tree, the ocean, the sky - with simple feelings of compassion, humanity, love, non-violence, noble resonance. Big ideas have most often been expressed in straightforward language (naturally I mean the direct intensity of Shakespeare, not the gibberish of a lawyer or a government). But as oceans, trees and skies die in front of us, and the world and all its strange wonders are desanctified, our exercise is to seek out the overfamiliar and disregarded, the rejected, marginalized and faceless even, and to load these obscure players in life with larger significance. Here is a work of unification and of 'invisible legislation', to paraphrase Shelley.