Lent 2026: day 33 –talent and intuition

Imagine a blank canvas in front of you, a range of paint brushes, and access to paints in any shade you want to reach for. GO! Don't think, just feel yourself slipping into a trance-like state. Don't think: "Oh, it could do with a contrasting colour here, a splodge of white, maybe," rather let your intuition take control of all decisions. You have no previous experience, no 10,000 hours of practice, no theoretical knowledge about paint drying times and combinations of hue. Just go for it. Let it out; don't intellectualise, don't think: "this is starting to look like a city at night in the rain, so I'll steer it that way,"

What do you will come out? More than likely, brown sludge, slop; nothing, a distant approximation of what could be taken for abstract impressionism but lacking any redeeming qualities. Get 300 people in front of easels, however, and give them the same task, and a jury will have something to go on. Some curious quirk that catches the eye, there unintentionally. But importantly, some folk are better able to tap into the flow.

The early abstract impressionists knew exactly what they were aiming at; but daubing blank canvases seemingly at random – can it result in anything of interest?

You don't know until you've tried it!

Same with automatic writing. Put yourself in front of a keyboard, get into the flow and see what comes out. Imagine a higher entity, a separate entity, a strand of non-local consciousness, taking over your fingers, and letting words come out as they may. What are you getting?

This is certainly not going to work with musical instruments. The untutored, the unpracticed, will never manage a euphonious run of notes. Forget intuition alone serving as a guide to musical creativity! The 10,000 hours rule here is the rule that cannot be broken (though Sid Vicious had a good try). Having said that, the phenomenon I've noticed (and recorded) for some time now – waking up with an original tune going around my head – is very real (I have a phone's-worth of recordings), but these are typically short, two or three bars of music, certainly no Moonlight Sonata.

Mindfulness, meditation, altered states designed to enhance creativity – but not the creativity that comes from a thought process, rather a case of letting your consciousness reach for new quality.

Lent 2024: day 33
Time and spirituality, Pt III

Lent 2023, day 33
Into the Afterlife (Pt I) 

Lent 2022: day 33
The Search for Understanding

Lent 2021: day 33
Connecting with the Metaphysical

Lent 2020: day 33
"On my planet there is no disease"

Lent 2026: day 20 – music, physics and metaphysics

One note, plucked on an acoustic guitar. A single chord, strummed. Three chords in quick succession. Another three. A bass guitar joins in, and percussion provides a beat. Add a piano, woodwind, density, variety... We have music, it resonates with us emotionally. 

There's something magical about music, isn't there? The ability to conjure up a mood, a feeling, a memory – qualia – with a run of notes, a succession of vibrations at different frequencies, is hard to pin down rationally. The rollercoaster of emotions experienced while listening to, for example, Bohemian Rhapsody, is impossible to quantify in a mathematical equation.

We all recognise a minor key in music (sad). And a major key (happy). Why do we  respond this way, rather than the other way around?

Science tells us that the way our brains process music is all about dopamine activated by the mesolimbic reward pathway, the activation of structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex, and our cultural expectations. 

I'd say this this physicalist explanation overlooks the metaphysical mystery at the heart of our emotional response to music.

Earlier this year, I posited the possibility that music operates on the same substrate as our consciousness. We experience music rather than think about it (unless we are trained musicians). The notion of music literally belonging to the ages is important. I would guess that the conscious response to a Mozart minuet in a human is the same today as it was when it was first played. (I might have to add 'to a European human', conditioned to Western tonalities.)

Familiarity is important; you may hear a piece for the first time and like it – this may be because it's derivative, sounding similar to another piece you know and love, or it may use familiar musical devices or tropes that work on you emotionally such as a crescendo, choir entry, shift from major into minor etc. (Somehow, this doesn't happen with AI-generated music.)  

But then there is that 'click' of instant familiarity when you 'know' a tune you've never heard before. Was it there in the background while you were in your earliest infancy? Do you associate it the tune with childhood? Or some vague time before you were born – how could that be? Two months ago, I had the insight that maybe music plays some role in assigning consciousness to its biological container.

Two and half thousand years ago, Pythagoras posited that the Cosmos is structured according to harmonic ratios analogous to musical intervals, and that the motion of heavenly bodies form a cosmic harmony, inaudible, yet fundamental to the structure of reality. Plato developed this idea further. He suggested that the World Soul is built from harmonic mathematics. according to musical ratios which structure the Cosmos. 

These ancient intuitions resonate with our current understanding of the physical substrate of reality.

Modern physics has uncovered parallels to the Pythagorean view of 'the music of the spheres': stable structures, from atoms all the way up to galaxies, emerge as resonant patterns in dynamic systems. In this profound sense, the universe does indeed behave like an enormous hierarchy of vibrating systems across countless frequencies. 

Vibration may be a fundamental organising principle of reality, maybe even bridging the divide between the realms of matter and consciousness. Maybe.  

Lent 2025: day 20
Why I keep blogging these Lenten posts

Lent 2024: day 20
Do we have Free Will? (Pt IV)

Lent 2023, day 20
Practical uses of intuition

Lent 2022: day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion 

Words, music, memories and other mind-altering drugs – Lent 2025: Day 25

Smash, rip, incinerate, crush, suffocate, destroy, annihilate, mourn, despair. [Now read again.]

Has reading this list of verbs changed your mood? Feeling a little more... anxious? Now, how about these –

Flourish, embrace, inspire, open, cherish, rejuvenate, love, marvel, celebrate, hope. [Now re-read.]

– Have these words returned you to a better place?

The simple act of casting your eyes over shapes on a screen – characters or graphemes – that we recognise as letters, placed together to form words, can cause either the levels of cortisol or of dopamine to rise within your body. When released into a living organism, chemical substances that produce a biological effect are, pharmacologically speaking, drugs. Hormones. Signalling molecules that affect the body, produced endogenously. We have been conditioned to respond accordingly. It's what makes great poets great; wringing emotion out of language.

With music, the effect is more powerful. Music plays a significant role in our emotions and moods. Uppers and downers. Specific sequences of notes, tempo, key (major/minor), volume, trance-inducing beat; music has a powerful array of tools at its disposal to alter our mindset.

And so it is for memories. Memories can be of events or of qualia. Events – embarrassing, awkward, painful memories tend to stick around. Summoning them can prompt cortisol release. But qualia memories – memories not of what you did, but what you felt – tend to be more likely to set off a dopamine release. Tiny quantities, but noticeable. Quick to dissipate, but very real.

Below: words, music, memories – pictured by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0

English romantic poet William Wordsworth describes in Daffodils (1804) this experience of a qualia memory flashback, prompted by his memories from a walk along the shore of Lake Ullswater in the Lake District, when he saw a long line of daffodils, "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." The last stanza runs thus:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

That is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Qualia memory events can have powerful pharmacological effects, like words and music.

Tonight the clocks go forward. For the next week I'll be getting through the day with a sense of guilt that an extra hour of daylight has passed and I've done nothing with it.

Lent 2025: Day 25
Dealing with Evil

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

Music as a vector of civilisation

 [On waking at half past one am with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' I'll Second That Emotion on my mind.]

– Civilisation came to an end a few centuries ago. Was it all-out nuclear war? Was it an asteroid strike? Various folk tales persist. The evil one, 'Shmumptin' was to blame. The rebirth of historiography as a profession is low on people's priorities as they struggle to survive...

If we are to look at those humans as they work hard to rebuild, based on little more than the myths and legends they tell one another, what feature of their future-primitive society would be most recognisable to us today?

It is music. 

Unamplified (electricity has not yet been reinvented), but played to an amazingly high degree of fidelity by competent musicians, who have had passed down to them tunes stored in the memories of survivors. Drums, wind- and string instruments, crafted with ever-greater care and precision, to make sounds that conjure up atavistic resurgences of emotion. Not only the tunes, but the lyrics. Passed down orally from generation to generation, sung to children, sung aloud, sung together. Language persists and evolves through song.

Men and women, young and old, gathering to make music, attract crowds of tired humans who have finished toiling to feed, clothe and heal the slowly growing population. They come to listen, to sing, to dance, to engage in the sense of shared culture and tradition.

Some anthropologists claim that singing predated speech, that songs encode information in a more memorable way that disseminates easier and deeper than spoken or even written instructions.

So, imagine the year 2175, a clearing in a post-apocalyptic glade; the harvest has just been brought in, flagons of fruit wine are passed around by people seated in a semicircle, and the musicians enter, taking their places on a raised platform with their hand-crafted instruments at the ready. To your early-21st century ear, the melody seems familiar – some of the lyrics even – could this be Bohemian Rhapsody evolved to fit post-apocalyptic social landscapes? [AI image by Grok – once again beating Google Gemini 1.5 Pro at the task.]

The first portent of civilisation's rebirth will be its music. The last will be streaming services to disseminate that music across humanity.

"Just be thankful for what you got."

{{ I dreamt of a German writer with the surname Ulitz, with connections to Poland, and wondered whether a street had been named after him, Ulica Ulitza. Turns out there was such a guy, though no street in either Katowice or Wrocław yet bears his name.  }}

This time five years ago:
The Inequality Paradox: a summing up

This time six years ago:
Familiarity, tradition and identity

This time seven years ago:
Black-hat merry-go-round 

This time eight years ago:
Skarżysko-Kamienna and Starachowice, by train

This time nine years ago:
The world mourns the loss of David Bowie

This time 11 years ago:
Where's the snow?

This time 13 years ago:
Two drink-free days a week, British MPs urge

This time 14 years ago:
Depopulating Polish cities?

This time 15 years ago:
Powiśle on a winter's morning

This time 16 years ago:
Sunny, snowy Jeziorki

Warsaw's progress to normality

It was on a Saturday night in August 1989 that we ventured into Warsaw's Old Town square. The place was almost deserted and dimly lit. Only one restaurant was open, U Fukiera. We ventured in. Most of the tables were taken. A surly waitress showed us one for the four of us; we sat down and were given menus. Several pages of onion-skin paper in a black leatherette binder. Typed out through sheets of carbon paper, the board of fare. Every single item except for just four had been crossed through. All that was left were the following: Coca-Cola (33cl); mineral water (33cl), black unfiltered coffee (no sugar), and some Georgian (or Armenian, can't recall) brandy. We ordered the mineral water; the cap was rusty. The coffee was 100% Robusta, cheap-tasting and filled with sediment. At least the brandy was somehow OK. This, you will understand, was the height of the tourist season in the capital city of a country of almost 40 million people. Communism was falling, and with it the Marxist notion of a planned economy. 

And yet within five years of the transformation to free-market democracy, life had returned to the Old Town. In the summer of 1994, the City of Warsaw had inaugurated Jazz na Starówce (Jazz in the Old Town). This year marks its thirtieth anniversary. Every Saturday in July and August, there's a free jazz concert in the square. 

As a tourist destination, Warsaw is no longer jaw-droppingly cheap. But nor is it rip-off expensive. Quality is good, prices are reasonable. The city is clean and safe. No signs of drunkenness or aggression; tourists from all over the world, young folk, old folk. A normal city in other words. 

Below: early evening, and the pavement cafes, bars and restaurants are filling up. The weather is optimal – dry, blue skies, not too hot. The corner of ulica Nowomiejska ('New-Town Street'), which connects the Old Town to the New Town, and ul. Mostowa ('Bridge Street') that leads down towards the Vistula. On the walls of the Barbakan to the right, the shadow of the tower of the Church of the Holy Ghost. 

Below: live on stage last night was Piotr Schmidt and his quartet. Quality jazz; reminded me mood-wise of Miles Davis in his Kind of Blue phase. The square was filled with people appreciating the music. An hour-long set, one encore – and that's it, but one has to remember that people live on all four sides of the square.

The concert over, the crowd drifts off, but the bars, cafes and restaurants remain full; a sense of contentment in the air as night falls over the city.

If anyone should suggest to me that communism is better than a democratically regulated market economy, I would respectively tell them that it absolutely isn't.

Left: the corner of the Old Town square. Time to drift back, remembering visits here in years gone by. Good-natured crowds mill around this way and that; I'm not (yet!) getting that over-touristed vibe that spoils cities like Kraków or Prague. Yes, there's a wide variety of places to sit down to eat and drink, but it's not over commercialised; Warsaw seems to be in that sweet spot between being attractive to tourists but not a tourist trap. 

On the way back to Chynów, my train is delayed by a full half-hour, in the end it was overtaken by the last timetabled train of the night, which terminates in Warka. Below: an interstitial view of W-wa Służewiec station, between the stairs and the lift. Proper electronic signboards have been promised for this station sometime soon, as well as for Piaseczno and Warka. Good. The more information about delays etc, the better.

This time three years ago:
Summer winding down

This time seven years ago:
My Mazovian roots

This time eight years ago:
My father revisits his battleground

This time ten years ago:
Over the hill at Harrow

This time 11 years ago:
Behold and See - the Miracle of Lublin - Pt 1.

This time 13 years ago:
Quiet afternoon in the bazaar

This time 14 years ago:
The politics of the symbol

Fifty Years with Virginia Plain

Somewhere in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, family holiday - hot summer's day, August 1972. I'm 14, and back from three weeks on Polish scout camp. We're in my father's company car (a metallic brown Ford Cortina 1.6 GL) my parents, my brother and me. The radio's on. Radio One. Suddenly - this: piano, wailing synth... sounds familiar - and yet unlike anything I've ever heard...

and my world is changed. Suddenly - a magical world has been created (or maybe recreated?) - the Past and the Future - merged. Fifty years ago today, Roxy Music's first single, Virginia Plain entered the UK charts. Hearing it for the first time, I recognised straight away, the sublime aesthetic. This was not one of those songs that grows on you. The effect was startling. I had to hear that record again! Fortunately, it was on high rotation and would be played over and over again, it would stay in the charts for 12 weeks, peaking at number four.

In a low-fi world of AM radio, the lyrics were never clear - half of them I wouldn't grasp until the advent of the CD - but the soundscape was spot on - the future as imagined in the past - the past as remembered in the future. Glamour, excitement, sophistication - intelligence - art. Stepping way outside the spirit of the age, as only David Bowie could back then. A song as unformulaic as can be - no verse/chorus verse/chorus middle eight verse/chorus  repeat-chorus-to-fade structure here - a song which ends with its title. "Far beyond the pale horizon/Some place near the desert strand, Where my Studebaker takes me/That's where I'll make my stand..." Instantly familiar - and yet... why? The imagery is Hollywood Americana, 1930s to 1950s (referencing Flying Down to Rio, made in 1933, and Last Picture Show, set in 1951). "What's real and make-believe" - indeed. What is real? What is make-believe?

On my return to London, back from the school holidays, a new term, starting the fourth year. I discover that Roxy Music has an album out, called simply, Roxy Music. The single Virginia Plain is not on the LP. A friend has it and tapes it for me - in mono. And that would really open the door to a new perception. Pop and rock had been an important and ever-present part of life since childhood, a shared soundtrack to growing up, but this was something I felt was uniquely personal.

But then looking at that week's charts, I can see that soul music made up one quarter of all the UK hits. And what classic slabs they were too - Al Green's I'm Still In Love With You; Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face; the Stylistics' Betcha By Golly Wow; Bill Withers' Lean on Me; Love Unlimited's Walking In The Rain With The One I Love; songs from Michael Jackson, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Bobby Hebb, Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, Chairmen of the Board; re-releases from Jackie Wilson and Mary Wells. Music that has stayed with me over the decades.

Which reminds me to remind my readers to tune in, as I do every week, to Yours Sinsoully on West Wilts Radio, live on Fridays (9-11pm UK time, 22:00-00:00 on the Continent), hosted by my classmate from Gunnersbury, MJDJ - two hours of classic soul/funk/R&B, with past shows available to listen to again.

This time last year:
The Curve (and one's place on it)

This time three years ago:
Fifty years on, my last kolonia

This time nine years ago:
Grodzisk Mazowiecki's pretty station

This time 10 years ago:
Exorcism outside the President's Palace

This time 11 years ago:
The raging footsoldier - a story about anger

This time 12 years ago:
Graffiti and street art 

Future, past

Forty five years ago; February 1976. A time of incipient change. Ahead of me, my A-Level exams (equivalent of Polish matura), summer holidays in Poland - then university.

But which one? It was this month 45 years ago that I set off on my own to see five universities around the UK - Lancaster, Warwick, Kent, Essex and East Anglia. These were my choices for the university admission process that would end with offers of grades needed at A-Level. I'd never travelled so intensively, or so far, on my own around England as I did that month. I came back from East Anglia, Norwich (or was it Essex, Colchester), with a dose of the flu, leaving me bed-ridden for a few days.

It was a specific time in my life. My father had just installed a new central heating system in the house - on his own - and I recall the smell of the paint of the new Potterton boiler, looking into the little window at the blue pilot light, watching it ignite the gas with a muted 'whoomph', the warmth, the copious hot water... At the time, I was making an Airfix kit of a North American P-51D Mustang, USAAF Eighth Air Force, England, 1944. The period appealed strongly to me; in the pop charts were Glenn Miller and his Orchestra and Manhattan Transfer with another Glenn Miller hit - Tuxedo Junction - 1944 was only as distant from 1976 as 1989 is from today.

And in the Radio Times for Saturday 21 February 1976, on BBC 2, an intriguing programme... 

"Introduced by Melvyn Bragg: So You Wanna be a Rock 'n' Roll Star. Tonight 2nd House looks at the reality behind the fantasies with a three-day slice in the life of the Kursaal Flyers, one of the bands most tipped for success in 1976. The film records their ups and downs, joys and anger, in dressing rooms and motels, and includes extracts from two concerts."

It really is worth seeing. If you haven't got a spare hour and 20 minutes, bookmark it and return - a slice of rock history, a snapshot of an era.

This I had to see. Turned out to be most influential - director Mark Kimel's documentary went on to inspire Comic Strip Presents Bad News Tour and of course This Is Spınal Tap, both parodic satires of rock bands on tour. Influential for me too. The 'Flyers' aspect (I didn't know at the time that the name referred to a funfair ride at Southend's Kursaal amusement park) appealed to me, as did the vintage Americana the band's music drew on, a heavily country-influenced sound. The cover art of the band's second album, The Great Artiste (1976), prompted me to buy it later that year.

Mama's boys indeed - the documentary shows that all but one of the band lived with their mums (like Colin out of Bad News).

Watching the Kursaal Flyers documentary influenced me greatly; I'd see them live, at the time (just before punk rock emerged), the pub rock genre was destined for success. Acts like Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and Dave Edmunds in the Stiff stable, from Southend and Canvey Island (the Kursaals' home) Dr Feelgood and Eddie and the Hot Rods. Of those five universities I visited 45 years ago, I ended up in my first choice, Warwick, to study America - a country my postwar generation obsessed about. 

This time last year:
New platforms, Sułkowice and Chynów

This time two years ago:
Birds return to frozen ponds

This time three years ago:
Bending the forces of physics with your will

This time five years ago:
Giving it up for Lent

This time seven years ago:
North-east of Warsaw West revisited

This time eight years ago:
Looking for answers

This time nine years ago:
Fresh powder in Warsaw's parks

This time 11 years ago:
Another Lent starts

This time 13 years ago:
Okęcie dusk

Divine inspiration

Lent 2020 - Day 31

True talent, talent that belongs to the ages, is rare. The precious gift to uplift, to communicate the deepest insights in whatever form - music, visual arts, drama, poetry - storytelling across the media - has been held in highest esteem across all cultures. Since the dawn of mankind, the gifted artist has had a special place in society.

I would posit that the greatest of those have been touched by something divine - a restless sixth sense of the Unrealised - of that destination to which we're heading. An essential element of a great work of art is that is has to speak to the truth of the human condition, to reach into the consciousness of the reader /listener/ viewer who says - "yes, this is how it is". It could be a new realisation, it could be an eternal truth retold in such a way that adds new insights, building on what we've hitherto understood - a flash of light through a facet of the diamond.

The ancients believed that lightning was a crack in the sky through which the glorious light of Heaven could be fleetingly seen. It is this light (in a metaphorical sense) that manifests itself in great art, in great music.

Like other divine powers, distributed across the entire population, talent is rare and weak. Mastery of the craft - musicianship or the technical side of painting is one thing. Quite another is to have one's own distinctive 'voice', having something profound to say and the wherewithal to do it originally. And to reach people's souls down the ages. It is that which separates the truly gifted from mere entertainers. The test of time is really the only test of art. Creating a great work of art is a like launching a satellite; it requires a great deal of energy to escape the clutches of gravity and enter earth's orbit; but once up there, it can stay in the firmaments for the ages.

Having willed myself to write daily throughout Lent (helped to some extent by the virus curfew), I can see the benefit of self-discipline in the creative process. It's about creating a body of work; not all of it resonates. Reading Shakespeare even, one can see a great many throw-away lines that bulk out the plays between those really memorable quotes. Most LPs will have duff tracks on them. Not every painting will be a masterpiece. But if the artist has the self-discipline and the focus to keep expanding a body of work, then the hit-rate will grow over time.

Even so, divine inspiration is called for. You don't know where it came from; 'automatic writing', consciously trying to channel, or just picking up snatches of melody that come to the mind while sleeping - and indeed, dream images. As you sleep, you may think you are lying still in a bed standing on a floor of a house or flat standing on a patch of land. But that building, that bed, is actually on a planet that's spinning (at the latitude of Warsaw or London) at 642 mph (1,033 km/h) while hurtling around the sun at a speed of 66,619 mph (107,230 km/h), and rushing through our galaxy at 515,000 mph (828,000 km/h). And as you travel in your bed at these improbable speeds, you sweep through oceans of invisible energy, particles, waves, fields... your consciousness swims through it, you are a part of an unfolding universe, on its way towards its destination.

Be open to it, open to the dreams that can form the basis of art, great or small, insights that drop into the mind unbidden. One must be receptive to that; be equipped with the means to record the significant thoughts (I'm never been without a notebook and pen since May 2010). Most of the content is work-related; one end of the notebook is to do with work, the other end (always the thinner, I must confess) is random jottings, ideas and thoughts captured after passing through my mind. Musicians and artists are rarely far from the means of getting that inspired melody or sketch idea onto paper (or electronic media). It's one thing having a phone, another to use it this way!

Talent is a genetic gift, made manifest through devoted hours of practice, the result of will. The divine spark cannot be negated. Most people have their favourite musicians, poets, novelists, film-makers, artists who have made their lives richer, bringing insights that have broadened horizons.

And as a final thought, it's worth remembering that great religious art reached its apogee in the Renaissance, which began in Italy as the Black Death abated in the middle of the 14th century. Will that happen again? 

This time last year:
SO?

This time two years ago:
A Brief History of Time reviewed

This time three years ago:
Eyes without a face

This time four years ago:
London blooms in yellow

This time five years ago:
London's Docklands: a case-study in urban regeneration

This time six years ago:
Scotland and its language 

This time seven years ago:
Death, our sister

This time nine years ago:
The iconic taste of Marmite

This time ten years ago:

My road bike, back in action

This time 11 years ago:

Spiritual highlight of Lent

The secret and the hidden

Lent 2020 - Day 28

Any discussion of building your own religion must touch upon the hermetic, the occult, the arcane, the esoteric - layers of deeply hidden secrets only to be revealed upon learning by those who seek. Hidden from the masses, the secret teachings of esotericism have sought a common denominator across all religions, a universal truth, though available only to properly-schooled initiates, who have braved ordeals in order to reach the next level.

From the Gnostics and Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Theosophical Society, through to various New Age movements, the idea of such ideas guarded down the ages from the uninitiated masses have had appeal. Symbols with hidden meanings, secret teachings, passwords, ritual, trance and transcendence inspire curiosity and a desire to discover; the more deeply hidden, the more one wants to find out. The success of books such as The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series of novels demonstrates how powerful the concept of hidden secrets in religions is, and how tightly guarded they are. We all love a good mystery!

Mainstream religions have their mystical traditions - Sufism in Islam, the Kabbalah in Judaism both draw on centuries of revelations reserved for those intent on deep immersion in hidden knowledge. Christianity, however, has tended to frown on esotericism as something difficult to control; something said to be associated with the dark arts - black magic - tainted with Satanism even.

Science too frowns upon esotericism, seeing little difference between mystical traditions and organised religions. In seeking a universal spiritual dimension of reality, esotericism rejects both the rationalist one based on physical laws, and the established religions based on institutions and dogma.

Here I find common ground with esotericism, but I also extend my hand to science for its monist view of the universe, and equally to religion for its belief in a divinity and afterlife (though I differ as to how those two are defined). In rejecting aspects of science and religion and simultaneously embracing aspects of both, I seek to bring the two closer together. By sifting that which divides from that which brings them together. And this unifying factor would be the awe and wonder that one feels when considering the universe.

What would be my religion's mystical secrets? Brought up on Roxy Music, I can see the influence of songwriter Bryan Ferry upon my aesthetic preferences; while the second side of their second album, For Your Pleasure, carries me off to different planes, it is the third track on the first side, Strictly Confidential, that touches on the esoteric: "Before I die I'll write this letter/Here are the secrets you must know/Until the cloak of evening shadow/Changes to mantle of the dawn." And then the dialogue between the narrator and the 'voices': "Haunting me always are the voices [Tell us are you ready now] Sometimes I wonder if they're real [We're ready to receive you now]". Powerful stuff for the 15-year-old's imagination. Give the song a listen, do...



Moments of joy, contemplating a starry night, gratitude for being alive, threads of metaphysical connection between the past and the present.


This time two years ago:
Afterlife - a myriad possibilities, after the Magic has returned
[By coincidence, this theme is continued, in a post from 2018!]

This time three years ago:
Warsaw photo catch-up (Rotunda going down)

This four years ago:
Conscious of being conscious

This time five years ago:
New road and retail

This time seven years ago:
Warsaw's Northern Bridge - its name and local democracy

This time nine years ago:
What's Polish for 'commuter'?

This time ten years ago:
Four weeks into Lent

Religion and feeling good

Lent 2020 - Day 17

I must have taken this photo (below) around 35 years ago; I was out and about with my camera near my childhood home in Hanwell one summer's Sunday when I met these two delightful ladies near the Salvation Army citadel (as their churches are called) on Leeland Road.

I was struck by the happiness and serenity in their faces and asked if I could take their photo; they obliged. As we got chatting, they told me that indeed, their religion had brought these qualities into their lives - although there was a note of moral smugness in their tone, as if their serenity had been paid for by good behaviour and charitable action.

A few Sundays later, while repeating my sentimental stroll down memory lane, I heard a brass band playing Onward, Christian Soldiers! from around the corner as I neared Grosvenor Road (not far from Leeland Road). This was the mid-1980s, but I remembered that in the 1960s the Salvation Army were similarly active on Sundays, bringing their particular brand of religion to the streets.

I daresay that many of the residents of West Ealing and neighbouring Hanwell, after a big night at the Grosvenor, the Old Hat, the Halfway House or the Green Man, were in no mood to have their lie-in terminated by a brass band with drums. But it was a tradition, I enjoyed coming across the Salvation Army on my strolls, and it's good to see they are still there at Leeland Road in anno domini 2020.

Ah yes - the Salvation Army even had a pop group that achieved chart success, the Joystrings.

Music is important to our samopoczucie (a great Polish word that had no direct translation in English - it's more that 'frame of mind' as it includes the body too). Some religions, some strands of Christianity - Puritanism, Calvinism, stress rejection of pleasure on the road to salvation. One must reach a balance (more on that soon).

A few days ago, I posited that religion offers some people certainty of eternal life after death (in the form of salvation), while for others, it was about peace of mind. I also mentioned that one can attribute good luck in one's life to religious beliefs. But there's also the notion of 'feel-good' religion, and anyone who has seen the film Blues Brothers will instantly remember the Triple Rock Baptist Church and our beloved the Reverend Cleophus James (played by James Brown), singing The Old Landmark. "When I woke up this morning/I heard a disturbin' sound..." "Don't be lost when the time comes/For the Day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night"

Hit it...



"Kneel an' pray in that ol' time way!"

Now, if that performance left you unmoved, left you sad, failed to bring a tear of joy to your eyes - then Jack, you dead.

"HAVE YOU SEEN THE LIGHT?"

"The band!"

"The band?"

"THE BAND!"

There is an elemental power at work here (as I mentioned in my post about music a few days ago, something entirely lacking in the Polish Catholic Church...)

DAMN. I just realised I have broken my Lenten resolution not to listen to any soul music!

This time two years ago:
Perivale Triptych

This time nine years ago:
Cycling and recycling

This time ten years ago:
Winter still holding out in the forest

This time 11 years ago:
Little car, huge price

This time 12 years ago:
Old school Łódź

Choose the music for your religion

Lent 2020 - Day 14

Music is an important part of any religion; ideally its purpose should be to raise the human consciousness to a higher state of awareness, touching Eternity.

Polish Catholicism does not place an important store on church music. Hymns are there to be sung by the entire congregation joining in, so the tunes are basic. Unless there's a choir, hymns are not sung in parts; there's one melody - and often sung at a dirge-like tempo. Even joyous Easter hymns are dreary. Larger churches, in particular monastic ones, abbeys, will have treat their flock to the marvels of polyphony. Mediaeval English church music - Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, still has the power to elevate the spirit in a way that Bądźże pozdrowiona just doesn't.



I also have much time for American-style revivalist Baptist music, both black (think the Rev. Cleophus James at the Triple Rock Baptist Church) and white (ol' timey material bringin' songs of salvation to salve the soul).

The effect that music plays upon our consciousness is partly the result of our experiences, coming of age, dancing, falling in love, musical memories that trigger when the right sequence of notes is played. But strip away memory - are there universal cues that work for you, me, them, everyone? Do specific successions of notes, musical intervals, major and minor keys, harmonies, tempo - do they have the same subjective effect on everyone's consciousness? Are there cultural differences? Is this something we've gotten used to over time? And is it just consciousness - is it biology too? Certainly musical beat and heartbeat have something in common. And why does a minor chord sound sadder, darker - than a major one? It's only sound, vibrations through air, after all...

Music has its place in the mystical experience. Church music should elevate the spirit and put one in the right state of consciousness. Music holds atmosphere, klimat. But not all music equally. Compare the Romantic composers to what came before. Johann Sebastian Bach to me sounds overly mathematical, his music doesn't carry in it an atmosphere that would take me to a time and a place. Fryderyk Chopin's music, however, immediately whisks me off to moonlit water meadows and coppiced willows alongside meandering riverbanks in Mazowsze - just as Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan-Williams transport me to Edwardian England. I have similar strong associations sparked by American popular music from the 1930s to the 1950s. The power of music over our conscious minds transcends the here-and-now.

Listening to T-Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music or Pink Floyd - takes me right back, totally, to the klimaty of the early 1970s. I am there in spirit. And yet I can feel that same momentary spatial-temporal congruence listening to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys' New San Antonio Rose (1940) or Lowell Fulson's Reconsider Baby (1954). And I'm there, I'm back.

Music and memory are inextricably linked and again linked to identity. From Christmas carols to national anthems to dance-floor anthems, we are bound together in communities by music. But is it just a matter of familiarity? Is there something that makes one piece of music intrinsically better than another? Or is it just a matter of taste? De gustibus non est disputandum - in matters of taste, there can be no disputes. Or can there? From any objective measure, a Chopin nocturne is far more sublime than a Disco Polo song.

Science is nearer to understanding how different aspects of music - timbre, tempo, musical interval, tone, beat - in particular, their complexity - is received by the human brain. Instinct will help you find the beat and move your feet. But how a piece of music is received by your consciousness, the nuance of mood, the pictures in your mind - the subjective experience - is a different matter. Today, we're assailed by music from every corner - mobile phone ringtones, adverts on the radio with a simple, whistled tune designed to be catchy; snatches of pop songs in shops.

But can you imagine the silence of the Middle Ages, where your communion with God each Sunday in the village church would bring hymns into your life that you'd hum and repeat over the week while working in the fields, or earlier still, in the African Savannah, literally inventing rhythm and song with the birth of humanity.

And if a tune has with it lyrics of profundity that touch on the essence of what it is to be human - then so much the better.

A handful of pop musicians make it to a higher plane. And usually it is only a handful of their works that makes the cut. Songs of mystical transcendence. Jimi Hendrix was one. His music transcended mere time and place, he is gone but that consciousness will be back again and again, each time at a higher level of awareness, on the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth that connects an evolving universe.

So - in building your own religion - what would be the music played within your temples? What songs would bring people together and take them up towards God?

In my playlist I would definitely include Gorecki's 3rd Symphony in its entirety. Takes me there.


This time last year:
Photo round-up of the week

This time two years ago:
Do the laws of nature govern or describe our universe?

This time seven years ago:
A selfless faith

This time eight years ago:
Ul. Profesorska after the remont

This time nine years ago:
Lent kicks off again, for the 20th year in a row for me

This time ten years ago:
Half way through Lent

This time 12 years ago:
Spring much closer

Familiarity, music and memory

Following up on my recent post about familiarity, tradition and identity, I'd like to focus on music.

Let me start with a quote from the Polish classic cult comedy film, Rejs.

Inżynier Mamoń: "Proszę pana, ja jestem umysł ścisły, mnie się podobają melodie, które już raz słyszałem... po prostu. No, to poprzez, no, reminiscencje. No jakże mi się możne podobać piosenka, którą pierwszy raz słyszę?"

[Rough translation... Engineer Mamoń: "I have a scientific mind, Sir; I simply like melodies that I've once already heard, Well, it's through - reminiscences. Well, how could I like a song that I'm hearing for the first time?"]

How indeed. Out of interest, I looked up the UK singles charts for this week 50 years ago. Of the Top 30, I knew pretty well every single song. Familiar songs, familiar singers, bands - from Marmalade's Oh-Bla-Di Oh-Bla-Da (a Paul McCartney composition), number 1 in mid-January 1969, through the theme music to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Canned Heat's Up the Country, Stevie Wonder's For Once In My Life or Blackberry Way by the Move. My final year at primary school, the beginning of my last (full) year living in Hanwell, this for me was the soundtrack of Class 4I at Oaklands Road Primary School.

From 40 years ago this week similar blast of familiarity - Ian Dury, Funkadelic, Chic, the Clash, Third World, Rod Stewart. Songs that remind me of where I was and how I felt (I associate many of these songs, still in the charts from the Christmas break when I was working at a Tesco warehouse in Coventry).

Over this Christmas break I asked my son Eddie, 23, to name one song that was in the charts at any time in 2018. He could not. (Neither could I, but that's not surprising). Pop today is pap, driven by algorithms that take the diversity and risk out of the music business. A tiny number of artists churn out similar sounding songs with hooks created to stick in the memory - the 'earworm' phenomenon. Gone is the rich aural texture of the 1970s. I am talking about the mainstream, about what would be on in the background, played on radios everywhere.

Inżynier Mamoń's immortal words came back to me after our Christmas drive from London to see my brother and his family. Moni had brought along her smartphone which she linked to our rented Mini's stereo system via wi-fi; we then played music streamed from the internet via Spotify. [A short aside - in my lifetime, we have progressed from in-car entertainment as being none, then AM radio the FM radio, then music cassettes, then CDs, then MP3s and now internet streaming.] Anyway, there were a few songs in Moni's playlist which I knew from the original and Moni from the cover. After hearing the cover, I suggested we listen to the original; unsurprisingly, I preferred the original, and Moni the cover - which she'd come across first, before hearing the original.

We prefer that which we hear first, that with which we are more familiar. "Some people won't dance if they don't know who's singing," sang Shirley Bassey in the Propellerheads' History Repeating. Quite. If the DJ's playing something unfamiliar to me, I won't tap a foot.

Music and memory are inextricably linked and again linked to identity. From national anthems to dance-floor anthems, we are bound together in communities by tunes and beats. But is it just a matter of familiarity? Is there something that makes one piece of music intrinsically better than another? Or is it just a matter of taste? De gustibus non est disputandum - in matters of taste, there can be no disputes. Or can there? From any objective measure, a Chopin nocturne is far more sublime than a piece of Disco Polo, played using two keys on a pocket calculator. But how to settle arguments as to whether Pink Floyd were better before or after Dark Side of the Moon? I'd say before. Much better. in fact. The Wall is crap compared to Atom Heart Mother. But why?

Science is nearer to understanding how different aspects of music - timbre, tempo, musical internal, tone, beat - in particular, their complexity - is received by the human brain. Instinct will help you find the beat and move your feet. But how a piece of music is received by your consciousness, the nuance of mood, the pictures in your mind - is a different matter. Bach's music is mathematical and precise, I find it sterile; it does not create a klimat in my consciousness other than a generic early-18th century feel. Chopin, on the other hand, is far more evocative - moonlit nights in Mazowsze.

How do you react to the unfamiliar? Do you seek connections to something that you can relate to, something you've heard before? Something you cannot recall, something you have no memory of, something that Inżynier Mamoń could not possibly like, having not heard it before?

Try this. My brother sent me a link to this - Ethiopian jazz from the late 1960s/early 1970s. Give it a try - familiar?



My brother likens this to "walking into a cloud of ground Lebanese cardamom coffee". What do you think? I'd welcome your comments!

Final thought... Looking at that Top Thirty from 50 years ago, I came across a Herman's Hermits song, which has been giving me earworm. As I reach the hook in the chorus, I get the distinct memory of the smell of plastic cement (Airfix glue). I wonder what plastic model I was sticking together on a winter's day in January 1969 as I listened to Something's Happening?

This time two years ago:
On taxation and (national) defamation

This time six years ago:
Where's Britain going to be in Europe?

This time eight years ago:
Jeziorki under water

This time nine years ago:
In a nutshell - the best science book I've ever read

This time ten years ago:
Flashback to communist times

This time 11 years ago:
Pre-dawn Ursynów

Summer's end

That's that. Friday afternoon in Warsaw, daytime high 28C. By Saturday morning, the temperature had plunged to 13C. Cloudless skies turned overcast, the odd spittle of rain. Sunday - colder. Next week, temperatures will struggle to get much above 10C. Summer's over, but what a summer it was. From early April onward, a long cavalcade of hot days with clear blue skies, over London (!) as well as Warsaw. A magnificent summer heady with the smell of ripening fruit - indeed, the smell of it was all-pervasive and those fruity aromas - volatile organic compounds like ethylene - everywhere I turned. Raspberries, cherries, blackberries, plums, grapes, mirabelles, pears, apples. I could even smell them in my coffee tin, full of fresh Lavazza.

Musically for me, as since adolescence, the music of summer is early Pink Floyd, pre-Dark Side of the Moon. Autumn and winter were the seasons for Roxy Music, but summer, those Floyd songs capture the atmosphere, kicking off with Grantchester Meadows, which I traditionally listen to whenever I hear the first fly of summer buzzing around my study. This year has reunited me with songs from the (less often played) B-side of Atom Heart Mother and the studio LP of Ummagumma; in particular Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast (Pts 1-3) and The Narrow Way (Pt 3). Old favourites - Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Echoes and the entire Atom Heart Mother suite were also frequently listened to - plus the very earliest Syd Barrett  compositions off The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. And many tunes from A Saucerful of Secrets. I still stand by my youthful assertion that Floyd went downhill after Dark Side of the Moon. For me, anyway. De gustibus non disputandum est.

Below: before summer ended - last week in Kraków. Early evening, temperatures still around 30C. The essence of European elegance. Rather than go my usual route from the station to Kazimierz, via Planty and Starowiślna, I took the direct route via back streets and discovered a whole new Kraków, but more on that next time I'm there. In the meanwhile, the splendour of ul. Lubicz at twilight.

Left: architecturally more Vienna than Warsaw; this bit of ul. Lubicz with its stone-lined underpass (over which runs the main railway line south), wrought-iron footbridge, decorative street lights and uplit facades create a magnificent atmosphere on a hot late-summer's evening. Below: the Hotel Europejski. When opened in 1884, only one of the three floors was for guests - the rest of the building was for their servants and hotel staff.

As the world tips through equinox, we here in the Northern Hemisphere move from summer to winter, the darkness and the cold await us - but then in six months' time, hopefully, another equinox and another balmy summer to look forward to, positive thoughts to keep us going through the dark months.

This time last year:
In which I lose a lot of data from my old laptop

This time two years ago:
Konin - town of aluminium, electricity and coal

This time five years ago:
Car-free day falls on a Sunday

This time six years ago:
Vistula at record low level

This time nine years ago:
Car-free day? Warsaw's roads busier than ever

This time ten years ago:
The shape of equinox

This time 11 years ago:
Potato harvest time in Jeziorki

Summer day at school, 50 years ago...

From my mother's school to my own primary school, on Oakland's Road in Hanwell, London W7. The dog-days of the summer term, June 1967. I was nine. Class 2P. Our class teacher, Miss Penn (originally from Waterlooville in Hampshire - gosh what a memory for trivia I have) was off sick for a while, so we had a supply teacher. A young man - but here, my memory fails me, as I can't remember his name or his face - he must have come in to teach us for a few days, may a week or two. before we broke up for the holidays. It was the first time I was ever taught by a male teacher.

And one day, he came into the classroom brandishing a copy of the Beatles' LP, released 50 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He played it, on the school record player, track by track, and he discussed the lyrics with us. It was an in-depth exposition of the songs' lyrics, explained so these nine year-olds from Hanwell could take something away from this didactic experience.

I had the distinct feeling back then that this was a revolutionary moment in my schooling. Newspaper taxis appeared on the shore waiting to take me awaaaay... The first time that we had been taken so far away from multiplication and Janet and John reading books and the nature table. I certainly felt a sense of excitement - listening to the entire album tonight (on YouTube) brings back rich memories of that summer day of 1967. Now, after the album was released, the BBC banned several of the tracks because of supposed drugs references - not something that Class 2P was aware of at the time, so this would have been my first and last exposure to this album for quite a while. (The trippy Strawberry Fields and the nostalgic Penny Lane, recorded at the same time as the album, were released as singles, and received much airplay on the BBC Light Programme.)

The idea of a teacher, like, trying to relate with the pupils through the medium of rock music, was, like, man, far out; something entirely novel, a tipping point, the decisive moment in which the British education was entering its liberal experimental phase that helped the Children but harmed the Kids.

The title track Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its the strong flavour of the Edwardian music hall act clicked me back some sixty years into the past from 1967. "You're such a lovely audience/We'd like to take you home with us/We'd love to take you home". Earwormed. With a Little Help from My Friends, did not work for me that day; the Joe Cocker cover became definitive. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - though I didn't catch the 'tea', the 'weed' and the 'Henry the Horse' references in the other songs, but here, the psychedelia was evident to me back then; what was going on was quite clearly not the workings of a normal mind. Our teacher put it down to 'imagination'. Getting Better passed over me, Fixing a Hole made its way into a dream I still remember, of a line of men on hands and knees progressing in line abreast along a dusty attic, tapping the wooden floor with hammers. She's Leaving Home Yes. Marvellous. Especially those three notes after the words "...for so many years", three notes of optimism in an otherwise sad story, like rays of sunlight falling into a dark Victorian kitchen. Yes, I remember my emotions. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! "And Mr. H. will demonstrate/Ten somersets he'll undertake on solid ground" - hilarity in class because (Ian) Henderson gets a namecheck in this song.

Turning the LP over, there was George Harrison's Within You Without You, years before my first visit to an Indian restaurant, bringing sounds of the Raj, dust, monsoon, cantonments... When I'm Sixty-Four, all clarinets and lower middle-class whimsy. Lovely Rita Paul McCartney's paean to a parking meter maid, nicely drawn;  Good Morning Good Morning weak and forgettable with a hook used as a Radio 1 breakfast show jingle - then after a short reprise of the title track the best track of them all, A Day in the Life... that was strong, stayed with me; memorable for its lyrics, composition and ending.

Above: I get on the Tube at Green Park, and what do I see?

Well, that summer's day at school worked for me. I got a lot out of that day's musical lesson courtesy of John, Paul George and Ringo. But for the other children... don't know. Did we ever discuss it afterward? Maybe not.

I was never a Beatles fan. Their music was part of the soundtrack of my childhood, rather than of my adolescent years. From their earliest appearances on TV to their rooftop concert playing Get Back, I'd only seen the Beatles in black and white. Revolver album cover was black and white, the White Album just white. But the vivid colours on the iconic cover of Sgt. Pepper were a harbinger of the transformation of my life changing from black and white to colour as the 1960s, and my grey jumper'd childhood came to an end, and the 1970s got under way.

Re-listening today, I'm convinced that the great musicians are Old Souls; they have Been Here Before and have deeper insights carried across the insights to share with us in our spiritual evolution.

This time three years ago:
Warsaw wealthier than most of UK shock!

This time five years ago:
Opening of the railway line to Warsaw's Okęcie airport