Evensong
A Thousand Dimensions
Volume 1 2022
These dimensions are simply reflections, akin to jottings, in those moments when both meaning and purpose are sought.
I often talk of being a Christian who has an intense dislike of any form of religion, but who also has faith and is, thus, outside the box. The Bible is a central plank to my upbringing. But these days I’m more likely to write of it in lowercase, and so too any deity.
Last evening, reading Dust Diaries ~ An African Story by Owen Sheers, I found I had marked a paragraph on page 66. I must have done this in either 2011 or 2018 according to my annotated note which reads:
Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers
I must have marked this in either 2011 or 2018. But only now, on October 4, 2021, on finding it fresh just two hours after I've revamped Dimension 27 Fables – do I fully understand this. In Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucester Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral and Worcester Cathedral did I find this in Evensong, but it is Oliver Sheers who has given me the beatific description.
Owen Sheers writes into the Dust Diaries a most wonderful description into the mind of the character … one of his ancestors, an ordained missionary in the Anglican Church in the newly developing British colony of Rhodesia that we, of course, rightly know as Zimbabwe. Sheers writes thus …
“I don’t think I will ever have a relationship with a god in the way you did. Perhaps the modern imagination will not allow such a thing, or perhaps I know of too much harm done in the name of gods. As I sat there, however, with that singing uncoiling into the air, something happened: a tuning in of the mind, a spiritual awareness, a consequence of sound and place – call it what you will, but there, in that evensong, I felt a connection with a presence larger and greater than the present and the self. Perhaps it was the clarity of the notes clearing my consciousness, but I was aware of it, whatever it was, out there, beyond the thick stone walls, past Epstein’s pale Lazarus, outside the hushed cloisters. History, the collective soul, I still have no name for it, and I didn’t then either. I just knew I wanted to be part of it, always pitched at a higher note, and I knew that would be impossible, and that is why I wanted it.”
And as I continue reading the Dust Diaries, I learn a great deal about the mindset of British colonial rule, the attitude of the Church within that rule, and indeed the role, even, that it is happy to engage in. It is an extraordinary and uplifting study, a balancing of the scales whereby Sheers enables me to examine the reality of colonial rule.
This, for the moment, is a pen note; my chief concern is to highlight the crucial importance of descriptive writing.
The Dust Diaries is teaching me so, so much. I’m very thankful that one of our greatest contemporary poets and playwrights has given us all this Gem.
24 November 2022
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
