Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
July/August 2008

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Communication through the ages

by Anne Law

Storytelling was one of our first means of communication. It goes back to the mists of time. Over thousands of years storytelling developed a range of techniques to engage, involve and inspire people: the best known of these being music, singing and dancing.

The Old Testament emerged as the story of the Hebrew people, and the psalms set their trials and tribulations to music and dance. Then along came the written word with its mysterious symbols. For a while only the rich and privileged had access to its wonders but over time it opened new worlds even to the poorest people. The New Testament, in essence, is a collection of letters and it was the humblest of people who responded the most.

Letter writing has given us priceless historical glimpses of life in former days and has given us insight into social history, expressing as it does the concerns and desires in the lives of ordinary people.

Good letter writing is, of course, an art and how nice it is to receive a hand written letter, something to keep, to treasure perhaps, for a lifetime, a memento of a person after they have died, an eternal imprint of the writer reaching towards the reader.

Perhaps more than any other conflict the First World War inspired writers of all generations and classes. When we think of the exchange of letters between soldiers serving in the first world war and their loved ones we are struck by how little we would know of “that mad world of blood, death and fire” without them. A photograph of “a soldier enclosed and forever behind a glass frame” turns, through his letters, into a living being with hopes, fears, anguish and despondency. The “War Poets” such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon, to name but a few of the better known ones, have left us a beautiful legacy. But it wasn’t only the officer classes who wrote poetry. The Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge, who died at Ypres in 1917, left school at 14, and among his collection of poems are some of the most beautiful. One of his poems which he wrote on active service “A Soldier‘s Grave” reads:

Then in the lull of midnight, gentle arms
Lifted him slowly down the slopes of death,
Lest he should hear again the mad alarms
Of battle, dying moans and painful breath.

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made
A grave for him that he might better rest.
So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed,
And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest

The written word started a very slow decline from the 1950s onwards when the telephone entered people’s homes and how nice it is to hear the voice of a loved one, particularly from afar. But a conversation is fleeting and leaves no record.

At the dawn of the 21st century when the decline in letter writing has accelerated further and it is becoming easy to forget the heartfelt handwritten letter or card, sadly, it is difficult to see letter writing being sufficiently valued to survive as a means of communication. Mobile phone texting and e-mails are all about speed and convenience. They convey information in seconds but they are seldom about description or personal records. The simple communication of facts, however, is neither the only, nor, indeed, the main purpose of communication.

A simple and amusing poem by W.B. Yeats seems to suggest that communication by music can even be a passport to heaven!

The Fiddler of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance;

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With “Here is the Fiddler of Dooney!”
And dance like a wave of the sea.

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