The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

“I got poetry in me!”- McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Fuck’s sake.

Nostalgia-ridden though I am, I frequently find that there is not really all that much of my past to be nostalgic about, the things I liked being limited in number and variety, the ghost trains into my childhood few and quickly exhausted: a game of Wonder Boy, a Three Investigators book and a few episodes of Button Moon and, frankly, I’m reaching. And inevitably what I wind up reaching for are other peoples’ childhoods, hooking my umbrella onto the bright and passing ships as they float back up the river Lethe, stowing away in the bandwagon back of The Famous Five and Roy of the Rovers. But really, it never works. Reading a Biggles book by now is just like looking at someone else’s graduation photos, reminding you how bad and boring your infantile interests would actually seem if you were able to be objective about them.

So. As above. Fuck’s sake.

Narnia! I thought I’d hit on something there, boyo, make no mistake. Because, you see, for all the nostalgia shtick, what really matters is that so much of ourselves is built on the long-submerged stilts of childhood hokum, our instinctive ways of seeing things informed by associations of word and image long since forgotten; and if, here and there, I can help to shore up the dreck by pretending to myself to have read something worthy as a child, well, what harm can that do? So Narnia! Yes! An entire ready-made universe, like a living room by Ikea, waiting to be hastily substituted for the musty attic of rocking horse struts and Beano annuals which passes for my subconscious!

I read Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion recently. It is badly written, badly argued and badly in need of a touch of what might most ironically be called good Christian charity. But the timing was all wrong, as just the week before I’d been to a lecture on the creation myths of the Maori, including a particularly wonderful story about the battle between the mountains of Taranaki and Tongariro for the love of Pihanga, and how the Whanganui River flows in the scar of the earth left when the beaten Taranaki fled weeping towards the sea. What is the point in debating the literal truth of such a story? Dawkins’s pettish insistence on science as the only basis for fact misses the mark by so many miles that it’s almost painful; there is more useful truth in a Rodrigo concerto than in all the popular science section of Waterstone’s, and what is salvageable from religion is not its History but its Poetry. How wonderful it is to have any way of understanding the world! Let the Dome burn, let NASA raze to the ground before losing a single line of Pied Beauty.

Skip to the end. There is a truly miraculous paragraph in LWW in which Aslan sings the world into being. It is one of the few religious… well… things I have ever experienced which is rooted in a genuine desire to explain where the universe and its children might have come from, to describe rather than prescribe. The rest of the book is hectoring and insistent in that irritatingly avuncular way which tries to trammel us towards God by telling us how very clever we are for agreeing to believe in Him. So fuck that. If C.S. Lewis can’t even beat Richard Dawkins without needing someone else’s help, God help him.