In the beginning

I was very moved at Hugo Young's choice of a Gospel reading for his funeral Mass. It came from the opening verses of Saint John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . "

It was apt for a journalist's Requiem and I hope it will be read at mine when my time comes. 'Word' here translates logos, Greek for speech and reason. I don't mean to be profane in linking the text with lines from TS Eliot's Burnt Norton (from his Four Quartets).

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.

I find I increasingly fuse The Word and The Dance together. A third quote (morning for quotes and I might make something of this later). When I was a teenager, I won a prize of some book tokens in a schools' TV quiz programme in Ireland. I used one of them to buy a copy of Dag Hammarskjold's Markings, with a translation by Auden. Perfect for an angst-ridden 17 year old. It didn't matter that Hammarskjold's angst had a depth I couldn't have known: I made it my own. And I still remember one phrase:

Body my playmate
Do not flinch nor fail me
When the time comes to do the impossible.

I do think of my body as 'my playmate'. In class I argue with it, coax and seduce it into delivering just that little bit more than it really wants. There's a little ambiguity about the notion of 'my playmate' - my body is both me and not me. But it is my material - and the dance I make with it has its own validity as logos. Perhaps this is in my mind having seen Balanchine's Apollon Musagète when we were in Berlin. While Terpsichore would have claimed me too, it might have been a more close-run thing. Calliope would have come close.

The problem about a posting like this is that it really is a notepad for me and might look really silly if anyone saw it. Yet I would not feel so motivated if I were keeping all this on a Word document and saving it to my hard drive. It quickens the blood to publish it and to run the risk that someone might actually read it. A bit like dancing really - maybe there is no dance until someone else sees it. Or maybe there is. Maybe it's like the Word. "In the beginning was the Word.....in the beginning was the Dance."


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