sheep may safely gaze

 

A superficially ordinary stone built end of terrace house. It has remained in my imagination since I first noticed its rather austere presence above the road, nearly sixty years ago. I have passed below many times across the decades, but have rarely stopped to look more closely.  It looks west towards nothing, I once believed. An outlook to oblivion echoing the ancients who believed the world ended at their horizon, for whom going into the sunset was a metaphor for death.  I now know better.  Indeed, on a map of the British and Irish isles, it is almost at the centre. It looks across Bae Ceredigion (Cardigan Bay) towards Ireland, separated from the sea by a 13th century church and cemetery.

I imagine the house’s occupants enjoying the life-affirming contrast between spectacular sunsets and driving downpours. They sit on the front terrace, sheltered from the prevailing wind by the symbolic security of a close-boarded fence which looks exactly as I remember it over the decades. The appeal lies partly in a dramatic counterpoint between edginess and cosiness, emblematic of the changed climate we seem to be experiencing these days.

Buildings along this coast seem to have sprouted spontaneously from the Cambrian rocks of the Harlech Dome. Over 500 million years old, they are among the oldest mountains in the world. I sensed this long before I knew anything of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose philosophy of “organic architecture” aimed for harmony between the built and natural environment. While American, Wright’s mother was of the Welsh diaspora, originally from Llandysul, and had in 1844 emigrated via Cei Newydd (New Quay), further south along Bae Ceredigion. Cymru echoed through his houses in Arizona and Wisconsin, and the later charitable foundation, all borrowing the name of early mediaeval bard Taliesin (Gwion Bach ap Gwreang, 534-599). 

Today I pass the house while Johann Sebastian Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg Concerto plays over the car radio. The interweaving contrapuntal lines of string instruments give each player equal prominence. All are soloists in what sounds like a busy conversation, figuratively and literally, between the parts. If I were to close my eyes, I would see synaesthetically  in the music, in the calls and responses, the canons and fugues, a network of primaeval connections between every dry stone wall, every blade of grass and every safely grazing sheep. I won’t close my eyes while driving, but can at least ponder the possibility that there is a simple interrelatedness that many commentators make needlessly overcomplicated from within their own territorial academic specialities.

Despite Bach’s profoundly moving work, some suggest he bowed less to any deity than to the power of the late Baroque church council or to his aristocratic employers, and was actually an atheist. The famous aria from his secular so-called “hunting cantata”, Sheep may safely graze, refers back to old Roman gods of animal husbandry. When I hear his music I prefer to think he was a panpsychist.
 
My late mother often told me, usually in relation to bodily ailments I thought at the time, “It’s all connected up you know”.  I bow to her wisdom. 

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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.

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