eyelift

 

St Olaf's Church, Wasdale

I raise my eyes to the hills through a stained glass window. That’s as close as I come to anything explicitly religious. And no disrespect to those who are. My panpsychism (not pantheism) helps me appreciate the diversity of their faiths. 

My father often said, on many topics, “It’s all part of the great kidology son”. In his final years he frequented a noted “Italianate” church in Wiltshire - as a volunteer tour guide. He regularly raised his eyes to the ceiling, as urged by the printed crib sheet, to explain to visitors that “there are twelve roof trusses, representing the twelve Apostles”. One day he counted them and found one truss too many [no political innuendo intended]. He crossed out the “12” on the sheet and wrote “13” in the margin. The following week his amendment had been erased. Raising his eyebrows this time, he wrote “I told you before, there are thirteen”. On his next visit the sheet had been reprinted and laminated. It now stated “There are thirteen roof trusses, representing Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles”. All was well with Wilton.

I never understood religion’s mysteries, whether the meaning of ministry, the duties of dharma, the purpose of prayer or the wonders of witnessing. It’s all just jargon to me, and seems to be used in that “knowing” way that excludes the uninitiated. Despite my ignorance, I’m awed by many old hymns in the Anglican tradition of my school days. Nullifidian just as my father had been, but cultural memories persist.

From oceans to mountains, I still sense the power in “For those in peril on the sea” and “Hills of the North rejoice”. The melodies match the words onomatopoeically and synaesthetically. In the first, rising semitones evoke a majestic but ominous sea swell when we sing “Oh hear us when we cry to thee”. In the second, “hills” and “north”  are evoked by a rising minor arpeggio, followed by downward movement through “valley” and “lowland”.  The music and the imagined vistas had a lasting impact. At school I even learned to play church organ to Grade VII. That instrument was dismantled following the school’s demise decades ago, but it's comforting to learn that the largest pipes I played have recently been repurposed in a Nairobi church.

This paragraph contains some unashamed name-dropping; mostly at “two degrees of separation”; with the exception of Eric Jones, whose recent illustrated lecture in a local hall partially inspired this blog. I never rubbed shoulders with other noted mountain legends, but somehow came within hailing distance. At the inauguration of a Lake District “brew-pub” in 1988, we added our signatures to that of local resident Chris Bonington, telexed through from Kathmandu. Years later, in Bhutan, our tour rep “Ned” Kelly had been the film producer on Bonington’s 1975 climb of the southwest face of Everest/Sagarmatha/Qomolangma. And In Darjeeling we visited the Tenzing Norgay memorial. His renowned first ascent with Hillary is still celebrated in a mountain hotel near where we now live. In our Cymraeg lessons, and then in the pub, we met Twm Morys, poet and singer. He is the son of late journalist/author Jan Morris, who at Base Camp in 1953 had announced the news, by telegram, that Everest had been climbed.

Such connections are increasingly mundane, even inevitable, with passing years, but truly mind-boggling is the observation that the sedimentary rock at the top of the mountain comprises countless microscopic corpses from the sea bed of 500 million years ago. The immensity is humbling. Always an “armchair climber”, I visited the “Everest wall of fame” at the Rum Doodle Bar in Kathmandu. Signatures of the summitters adorn beer-mats in the shape of yeti footprints.  I meanwhile bought a souvenir tee-shirt from Yeti Airlines carrying the slogan “I didn’t climb Everest, but I touched it with my soul”. 

LINKS

5 of the world’s most sacred mountains | Times of India Travel 

Ph23-06.pdf [pdf about the Compton extension organ]

1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition - Wikipedia

Pen-Y-Gwryd Hotel, Snowdonia, North Wales

Jan Morris in conversation with Twm Morys | Culture Colony

Eric Jones (climber) - Wikipedia

Hesket Newmarket Brewery

Rum Doodle Bar & Restaurant

Proof! Just six degrees of separation between us | Technology | The Guardian

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