A note on doggerel and nonsense, inspired by Charles Wesley
Responding to a recent article in which I mentioned that my late
mother used to sing hymns, a friend of mine very kindly wrote a note
about hymns. I am a Buddhist and not at all conversant with things
associated with the Christian faith. I was grateful for the information.
This is what was written:
“Do you know that the RC church was not really ‘hymn’ prone. They had
chants and liturgies. Their hymns were a mixture of praise not only of
God but of the Holy Mother of God-Mary. The Vatican occasionally equates
her with Jesus himself. The Protestants broke away from that-we revere
Mary, the Holy Mother, but don’t worship her. Hymn writing really came
into its own with the advent of the Methodist church - you can say that
Methodism was born in song. And the most prolific writer of hymns was
Charles Wesley the co-founder of the Methodist Church, in 1779. His
preface to his collection of hymns is delightful.
I loved this bit- ‘Many gentlemen have done my brother and me (though
not mentioning our names!) the honour of reprinting many of our hymns.
They are welcome to do so as long as they print them just as they are. I
desire that they do not try to mend them; because they cannot. Let them
stand just as they are, take them for better or worse. So that we may
not be held accountable for the nonsense or doggerel of other men!’”
Lyric-tinkering
The hymn-history fascinated me. Church history, on the other hand, is
like any other ‘history’ prone to multiple interpretations in accordance
with faith and ideological predilection. What really struck me was
Wesley’s request about keeping lyrics intact. These days such things
don’t come as requests but with warnings that are pregnant in copyright
assertion. Wesley’s request was to my mind both innocent as well as
philosophical. Lyric-tinkering can be both good and bad. T. S. Eliot
dedicated his much celebrated poem The Wasteland to Ezra Pound. Eliot
called him ‘the better craftsman’. That’s ‘with permission’ of course.
There are people who can add value to a lyric or anything else, with
or without the permission of whoever came up with the original
articulation. It is a delicate thing and utterly subjective too. One
might strive for enhancement and believe to have achieved the same when
in fact what results could be perversion and rob something of the
original. Time passes and people die. The dead cannot make claims. They
might ‘will’ authority on friend of family but time is long and the
longer the time, the weaker the strength of ‘rights’ and greater the
possibility of ‘loopholing’. The Wesleys are now out of the picture and
lyric-purity can only be pleaded, not obtained as right and protected by
law.
Legal cover
The Wesley Principle, if I may call it that, is something that all
human beings have to deal with. Our words don’t belong to us and that’s
the hardest thing to acknowledge and live with. We deal with it
temporarily by seeking legal cover against plagiarism, quite forgetting
that we’ve all had our fill from other people’s wells, and in the end
find them reconfigured and even thrown back at us like so many grenades.
It’s not just words of course. Everything upon which we inscribe
‘MINE’ is appropriated one way or another. This is not surprising since
‘I’ is such an untenable proposition. The water that makes such a big
proportion of who we are, did not belong to us a few days ago and will
not be with us a few days from now. Our thoughts are not ours. Our cells
die. We came from dust and to dust we go. In the long span of time, our
lives are finger-snap moments, destined to be forgotten. The other
pertinent thought that the Wesleyan comment provoked was about
interpretive authority. Teachers are very (too?) often held accountable
to the nonsense and doggerel of their followers, especially (sadly) when
they choose to interpret without any caveat-insertion regarding frailty
the ‘word’ of the ‘Master’. I doubt if teacher would mind, if they are
around to see where their words have gone and what levels of frill and
‘unclothedness’ they’ve been made to acquire. What is worrisome is that
interpreter often (sadly) will use the name of the teacher to justify
project.
Symbolic allegiance
The problem is that even if words are printed ‘as they are’, there
are no bounds to interpretive freedom. The same words can be taken to
mean a range of different things. This is why people who worship the
same god or pledge allegiance to the same teacher find that apart from
teacher-commonality, they are very different sets of individuals. This
is why we speak of ‘denomination’. This is true of all faiths, whether
they are religious or otherwise.
In the end, it comes down to the particular individual. At some point
faith-assertion, symbolic allegiance and congregation (for all their
obvious wholesome benefits to collectives) gives way to a
within-struggle. We have to come to terms with the word and how we read
it. In the end it is not about what the word is or who said it first,
but what we make of it. Some may say ‘defer to faith’ and I have no
doubt this can give peace, but that decision itself is a product of a
consideration of an information compound, coloured by culture and habit
perhaps.
We return, again and again, to the compelling, overwhelming and yet
empowering realization that what we know is of miniscule dimensions
compared with the sum total of human knowledge, which in turn is a grain
of sand compared to the infinite nature of collective human ignorance.
Theoretically, one can argue that someday we will know all there is to
know, by incremental gathering, collation, analysis and extrapolation.
Perhaps. That does not help the individual of here and now though.
I don’t know where to go, but I do find solace in the Charter on Free
Inquiry as expounded to the Kalamas by Siddhartha Gauthama. In the very
least it helps protect me from the pitfalls of my own interpretive
tendencies. This morning I would like to end with one thought, inspired
(even in its ‘nonsensicality’ and ‘doggerality’) by the words of my
friend: perhaps we should worry more about the nonsense and doggerel
that we produce than about being made accountable for the nonsense and
doggerel of others who wear the words we weave.
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