Past and Future Ancestors
Bathing in Sound
I am lying on the floor, my head on a pillow with loose clothing and warm socks for comfort. Around me lie my sisters, my cousins and some of their partners. At one end of the room stands my cousin John, a Gong Master. Near the door reclines my ninety-one-year-old Uncle Moore who has agreed to join in the adventure.
Moore’s parents were James and Maria Chestnutt who set up home in the townland of Ballymagarry, not far from Whiterocks Beach. They had ten children - seven sons and three daughters. Moore is the last man standing - the seventh son. The gathered today are his family - sons, nephews and nieces - a Chestnutt reunion. The ten had twenty-seven children between them and here we lie - a smattering of that remnant.
Sadly, cousins Robert and Jim have left us and we mourn their passing. What would they have made of this carry-on?
We have come from far and wide and we chat over a cup of tea while John sets up for the gong bath. Some ‘cavemen’ are suspicious of anything that requires you to lie down and remove your shoes - they opt to watch the rugby. The rest of us are not sure what to expect.
The venue is New Earswick Quaker House in York. A place where people meet to worship and find meaning and purpose in silence.
When we enter the room the curtains are closed against the half light of a bleak winter afternoon, and the ceiling is bathed with pinprick green lights fading in and out. Mystery and magic charge the atmosphere. The air is redolent with burning palo santo - ‘holy wood’ designed to purify the space and dispel negative energy. Chestnutts can talk, but our chatter abates and we instinctively fall quiet and find a space on the floor. A communal stillness.
John has arranged his gongs and bowls with loving reverence at one end of the room. We are grounded on the floor - on the earth. The scene is set. He reads a poem which calls us back to the home farm of our forbearers.
James and Maria
Silver tones in the evening glow,
Soft vibrations start to flow.
James and Maria hand in hand,
Like the footsteps of long ago
Through the fields of Ballymagarry they used to know.
The past and the present, side by side
Ancestors whisper, hearts open wide.
Feel the melody, soft and strong.
We are the notes in their endless song.
We settle into the experience. The only thing we’re not allowed to do is sing. That privilege belongs to the crystal bowls. As John works his magic - caressing and curling his hands and rods to expertly call them to life - they emit a clear, cleansing siren song. We are indeed ‘the notes’ as melody and then harmony surround and wash over us, enticing us deeper and deeper into the music.
Despite the unanimity, I imagine we are all hearing something different as the sounds resonate with our souls. I hear whales and weeping mammals - I am mourning the hundreds of dead seal pups I once discovered on a beach in Fish Hoek, South Africa, wrenched from their mothers by a storm. I am listening to the cry of the fish eagle and the screams of wild cats caught in a thicket at Kiltonga Bird Sanctuary. One aunt has written about the squeals emanating from the shed when the pigs were being slaughtered. She was haunted by this aural childhood memory for years. I think of her now - the one who held the family together - gathered to her ancestors on Christmas Day.
The sounds swoop and swirl until we are one with them. I hear the trilling of birdsong and recall GM Hopkins’s portrait of Spring:
‘…thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and ring the ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.’
My ears are rinsed. It’s time for rhythm. The gorgeous polished bronze gongs are suspended, reflecting the glittering light - Sun and her ‘naughty’ sister, Nibiru. John turns to them gently, coaxing them with increased urgency to give up their secrets. They breathe and sigh and bring the melodrama, like in a horror movie. There are squeals and harmonics as well as whispers and wailing.
John is wielding a goat skin drum which he strokes in steady time. Some of the cousins live on the mainland, but we are plantation Presbyterians. Our ancestors marched to beats of religious certitude and shame. I hear the banging of the bodhran and the lambeg - not so different if you close your eyes.
Suddenly, ice is falling into a glass, water is tumbling over the Devil’s Cataract at Victoria Falls and rain is drumming on the corrugated iron barn roof at Ballmagarry. John is fondling Koshi wind chimes - a delicate tinkling beauty - and waving a fistful of dried grass over us. He is a priest, moving among us swinging sound in benison, like a censer.
Then silence. ‘Where the healing happens.’
I gaze up at the ceiling and recite Wendell Berry in my head:
‘I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’
(The Peace of Wild Things)
‘Next time in the caves at Whiterocks,’ suggests John.
I find myself wondering. What exactly did Adela Quested hear in the Marabar Cave, in EM Forster’s A Passage to India? It was published the year of my father’s birth. The inner chamber is described as circular and polished. Adela scratches the wall with a fingernail and is immediately unnerved by a ‘terrifying echo’. This resonates with her own emotional distress about love, marriage and racial prejudice. She is undone by the sounds of India and the fallout is terrible, creating waves of disruption in the community.
Perhaps that is the lesson of this afternoon lying on the floor. To pay greater attention to echoes and their effects. To allow sound to interrupt our lethargy and incite us to action. To listen to the past in order to better discern the present and prepare for the future.
Back at the hotel - a surprise. Uncle Moore has published a book of poems and reflections. Lest we forget, he describes the sounds of our fathers: the traction engine, stackyard rats, the turnip shredder, the field fiddler, the plunger churn and the barn thresher. There is delight, laughter and happy rememberings. His siblings would have been proud.
On Sunday morning before we leave, we enter the cavernous York Minster for the choral Eucharist. The music rises and reverberates. More echoes which lead us into reverence, awe and worship. ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise…’ Again I am mindful of Someone beyond, above and around, and I feel my heart gladden with gratitude - for family, faith and farming foundations. (How’s that for alliteration!)
This is such a beautiful sound journey into the past, mum. I felt like I was there with you!