What Sends Shivers Down Your Spine?

I don’t mean literally, what makes you shiver? I use the expression ‘that sends shivers down my spine’ quite frequently, but I am usually referring to a work of art, a snatch of poetry or prose or music, that speaks almost painfully directly to me. It is as if it is reaching down inside me, touching something vital which responds with the speed of a snake striking its prey. You will all have your own examples, what moves one person may leave another cold, but anyway, here are some of mine.

Strangely, although I am not a believer, two of the prime examples are of a religious nature. I have already mentioned in a previous blog how in a television production of Arnold Wesker’s play, Chips with Everything, an aircraftman recites the Lyke-Wake Dirge, as I recall in a Scottish accent, and with none of the stylised Yorkshire-speak:

This aye night, this aye night.

Every night and all.

Fire and fleet and candlelight,

And Christ receive thy soul.

The first time I heard it, and every time I have heard it or read it since, it has exerted such power over my psyche.

The second example is the Gloria from the Misa Criolla. Have a listen to this (stick with it to the end):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zirOg97lY

The Misa Criolla is a mass, composed in the style of traditional South American roots music, by the Argentinian musician Ariel Ramirez. I say composed, but I suspect he got some of the melodies from existing South American folk music. The Misa was dedicated to two German women who had regularly smuggled food into a concentration camp at night.

Incongruously, where I first heard this was at a very funny Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in 1980, Circus Lumiere. This was a sort of circus in a tent on The Meadows, but all the acts were clowns. The programme included a magician who pulled a hat out of a rabbit, and a hilariously amateurish mind-reader who was blindfolded and then identified objects produced by members of the audience, from very obvious verbal clues supplied by his assistants. He had a bit of trouble when someone volunteered a dead herring-gull and someone else a plant pot with a set of false teeth sticking out of it.

At one point there was a music and dance interlude with this Gloria being the music. Even then, as a young philistine, this nearly pulled my heart out of my chest. Isn’t it moving? La paz a nos hombres.

Another piece of music which speaks to what I can only describe as my soul is Timgad, by Moishe’s Bagel.

https://soundcloud.com/moishesbagel/2-timgad

It’s a terrific tune, and isn’t Gregory Lawson an amazing violinist!

Other examples that I might talk about in a later blog include that scene at the end of the movie The Third Man, the very long single take in the cemetery when the woman with whom the Joseph Cotten character is in love walks towards him and then straight past him without a glance. Another is the 1980’s pop song Rodeo, by the Swinging Laurels. These will have to wait.

I am sure there are many passages of poetry and prose which have a similar pull, but let me give one which is appropriate to the season. In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, there is a point where the Ghost of Christmas Present, flings back at Scrooge his words to the charity collectors on Christmas Eve, ‘if they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population’. The ghost continues, ‘Oh God! To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life of his hungry brothers in the dust!’

Apologies for repeating a previous blog, but I reread A Christmas Carol each year in December, and that passage knocks me base over apex every time.

                                                          *****************************

As my dad would have said, from the sublime to the gorblimey. If you read my last couple of blogs, you will have had an inkling of my recent medical adventures, including the colonoscopy. Having failed to get my colon, the medical world has now set its sights on my prostate. I won’t bore you with the background, but I have had yet more intimate examinations, I had an MRI scan last week and I have a telephone appointment with the prostate triage clinic on the 27th. Two good things about this are:

(1)    No more unpleasant news until after Christmas; and

(2)    At a telephone consultation, they can’t shove anything up your backside.

In the meantime, I am having some fun. Last week, I met up with my old pal Kevin Connelly for a big dim sum lunch and some liquid refreshment. This coming Tuesday, I am meeting another old friend, David Walker for a curry and a beer or two, and on Wednesday, Linda and I are going to see Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. I am really looking forward to Godot’s entrance.

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I’ve done a bit of repeating myself above. I am about to do so again. In these deeply troubled times, A HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU ALL.

 


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