Meeting the M4 at the Jersey Marine junction, waving a hello in the direction of my Swansea friend who loves his Gower with an evangelical intensity. Fifteen miles in ten minutes, the end of the motorway, down the hill to Pont Abraham, sometimes stopping for petrol and a chat with the friendly woman who works here through the night. The final hour now, and the finest road of them all, darting into Pembrokeshire with the intent of a quivering arrow – Cwygwili, Llanddarog, Gelli-Uchaf. Crossing the Towy at Carmarthen, then left. Sarnau, Bancyfelin, St Clears, Zabulon, Whitland, Llandewi Velfrey (momentarily slowed by the 40 mph limit through this sleeping village), Narberth, Robeston Wathen, crossing the Eastern Cleddau, Slebech and soon coming down into Haverfordwest. I used to follow the signs that took you round the town in an unnecessary loop past Merlin’s Bridge (quite a name!) – but sadly no signs of mystics today, just a burger chain by a roundabout. These days I go straight up the hill, up through the town’s handsome main street. Still some taxis here, if a weekend night, some straggling teens making their way home. Just beyond the town I pull over for the final ritual. Twenty minutes to go. Everything now slowing down.
Very late now. I always pause at this lay-by, open the window to get the scent of the earth and the wind. Branches waving above, and the glow of distant refineries far off. The final music. The same piece now which has travelled with me for the last year, but each time I hear something new. So late coming to Beethoven (my absurd snobbery of avoiding so ‘popular’ a composer for years). Even more ridiculous thinking that this had never bothered me with Shakespeare. Number Seven. Bernstein, New York Philharmonic. I slide the disc in and then drive off, very, very slowly. The opening chord, urgent, sense of crisis. Concentrating on each breath. Tentative clarinets, then soothing. Utterly linked to the winding road, dipping now through tree tunnels and bends. Slowing to 25 mph at most here, down to 15 for the corners. Music rising again. The flutes playing off each other. Now they play that single, repeated note, gathering pace, then answered by the orchestra’s swelling response. The theme comes in, hesitantly at first, then repeated with more confidence. Suddenly a badger scuttles out from the hedge. I dip my lights, slow to a crawl, watching him scurry ahead, looking for a gap. The road clear again, rising, jabbing horns and strings, gathering pace now towards the end of the first movement, powerfully at first, and then even more wildly. Stabbing, urgent, vibrating crescendo turning your whole body into an instrument.
The second before the slow movement begins. Waiting. Surely it cannot be as astounding again. That single note fades. The strings so slow, barely able to move. As if all the suffering of the world has come together in one place, at one time. I slow down again, listening now with my heart. Exhausted music, pregnant pain, blocked, leaden. Deathly march, defeated souls. Repeated now, but even quieter, as if breath is leaving the body. At a higher pitch strings come in offering compassion, at this lowest point, utterly unexpected. Rising now, more and more instruments joining in. And two minutes, thirty-eight seconds in, the lifting that defies understanding. The most miraculous single moment in music.
Tonight, I’m thinking of the poet Yannis Ritsos, whom I’ve been reading recently, and about what it means to come through, despite everything. Bereaved, exiled, imprisoned, tortured. Suffering that didn’t take his humanity away but released it into the world. When he’s twelve years old, his older brother dies of tuberculosis, his mother dies five years later, his father goes mad and dies in an asylum, his sister breaks down and is on the verge of death as well. He writes this for her, at that moment:
I am a maimed ant that has lost its way in boundless night. Whatever I loved death and madness took from me. I remained alone beneath the ruins of the sky to count the dead. I have no more tears. I have no fear. I have nothing else for them to take from me. Poor, naked, and all alone – here are my riches that no one can take from me. I will not knock on any door. I will not beg. Without bread without a sack without a bond I take the road west with long and steady strides, naked and entire, worthy to touch God.
*
The year before, a moment I will never forget, speaking these words with a class of students in a college with peeling paint in Soho.
They were an advanced class, and we had been together for several months, so a level of trust had been established. People felt able to take more risks, reveal more of themselves, perhaps. Some of the students were refugees, several were politically active, and they had suggested a week where we looked at the question of resistance – how we are able to fight, how those who have gone before us have fought, with whatever they have, and sometimes using art, writing, music, films, poetry.
A young Somalian woman spoke passionately about the work of the educationalist Paolo Freire and his belief that language is the greatest weapon of change – that ‘to speak the true word is to transform the world.’ She told us that coming across Freire’s ideas had changed the direction of her life. Sparked by this, a Peruvian student read a piece he’d written – about how his parents had left school before they could learn to read or write, and so he and his sister had had to become the ‘interpreters’ between them and the world. Because of this their parents always revered the written word and would give them books whenever they could afford to – he said that books were like maps of a foreign country for his mother and father – a country that he and his sister could travel to, but they could only see from across the border. We then talked about how poetry and music have an unparalleled power to communicate emotion directly. We read the poem by Yannis Ritsos. I was suddenly aware of the stillness in the room, the heating ticking in the pipes. The silence was broken by a Russian student, a woman in her early forties who said she wanted to tell us about the poet Osip Mandelstam – like Ritsos, he’d had an indescribably difficult life, which ended in one of Stalin’s Gulags. His last poem from Siberia was short, only four lines – perhaps we could learn it together? So we stand in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, as she gives us the words, and we give them back, line by line, and then the whole poem. Spoken back in all the accents of the room until everyone has it in their hearts. Mandelstam living on beyond the Gulag. And when the last voice has spoken the last words – ‘You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence’ – the same Beethoven slow movement started to play. I look around the circle and see some brows furrowed in concentration, some smiles of recognition. Beyond language to our shared humanity.
The darkened road, moonless tonight. Not meeting a single car. The turn off to the village, precisely at the moment of the music’s lifting. As if never heard before, as if ambushed, I’m driving blinded by tears. Astonished again by how this can happen, the ability of these vibrated sounds to unlock something inside, and not become dulled by repetition. Extraordinarily rare, even with the most loved music. And then I realise that the music – these vibrations from sound waves in my inner ear – is only a part of this. That of course it is the accretion of memory and association that becomes indistinguishable from the music itself. Remembering the faces in that classroom, remembering Ritsos and Mandelstam, remembering what they endured and how they resisted. And feeling instinctively that Beethoven wanted his music to be with people in this way. To be connected to our struggles. Often failing, often deaf and numbed and despairing. But the astonishment of human solidarity too, of feeling an arm on your shoulder, of being lifted up. And sensing that he wanted his music to be more than music – he wanted it to be a living force.