Wednesday 30 March 2011

Send for the bard!

An earlier thought scribbled before 'Write the songs':

We need bards, in every generation. Singer-songwriters, poets, those who write novels for children: those who give voice to history so give the present identity. We need the kind of ballads a whole family can rip through on a long car journey, and the anthems a rugby crowd can bawl during a match. We need the stories which can be myths of identity: those which give a deeper, older, more communal sense of being than that of an individual composition of organic matter.

We don't have to see these stories as fact. But it seems a sad loss to me, that while I grew up with Odin, Zeus, Prosperine, Hercules, Mount Olympus, Valhalla, Sigfried, Odydius, the Minotaur, Icarus, Helen, Midas, and all of C.S.Lewis' more recent explorations of gods, myth and mediaeval cosmology, most children now will have lost those. I don't think they were true; they did represent that we live in a meaning-drenched universe.

[Inspired by: Bob Dylan, Martyn Joseph, a rawkous and fast family rendition of 'The Rattlin' Bog' en route to Aberdeen, the strength of The Fields o Athenry during the Eng-Ire game in Dublin, Chronicles of Narnia, the Cosmic Trilogy, & 'Til We Have Faces.]

Developed more in 'Write the songs'.

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