‘You have to live.
‘You have to live. You have to find a way to live,’ a Japanese woman told the 15 elderly people who were trapped on the third floor of a concrete building in one of the small towns worst affected by the natural disaster in March. She had gathered them together after the earthquake, and in fear of a tsunami she kept urging them to struggle up the stairs to the third floor: ‘Move up. Move up.’ Then suddenly she saw that the telegraph poles were ‘popping’ out of the ground and a sea of black water was surging towards them. ‘Am I going to die now?’ she thought. But she didn’t, and it was her optimism, her human spirit, that allowed them all to survive as they waited for four long and terrifying days before rescue came.
Justin Webb was talking to Masako Shirade for the Today programme on Radio 4 last Friday in a series of reports from the earthquake-ravaged region. His visit has been timely, just as it appeared that Japan’s story of recovery from the terrible devastation in the north-east had slipped from the news agenda. Shirade’s story was unusual in its passion and its positive outcome. Most of the people Webb talked to were dissatisfied that the Japanese government has not been doing enough to help those worst affected and is stifling the will to clean up the mess because of its desire for control. In these be-Murdoched times, it was as if Webb (or his editors) were made to feel uncomfortable by those small acts of kindness upon which recovery depends, and sought out only the worst.
The problems faced by Japan are beyond our imagining, with its nuclear energy programme now in question. But whether or not it manages to maintain its position as the world’s third biggest economy will depend just as much on Shirade and her ‘divine spark’ as on the big decisions made by the government. People are as pawns in the affairs of state, but no country will prosper without the efforts of its people, without the resourceful energy and imaginative power of individuals.
‘In every human being, a divine spark’ wrote the Czech composer Janacek across the score of his opera From the House of the Dead. Even in that bleak tale of prison life in Tsarist Russia, Janacek insists there is hope, because although you cannot ‘wipe away the crimes’ of the prisoners, ‘equally you will not extinguish the spark of God’. Janacek tried as hard as he could to give up on God, but he could not resist the idea of faith, belief, that divine essence. A few years earlier he had taken on the challenge of composing the Glagolitic Mass to celebrate the creation of the first written Slavic language by the Christian missionaries St Cyril and St Methodius, setting the words of the Catholic mass in Old Church Slavonic.
What, then, were Janacek’s beliefs? asked Paul Allen in his 20-minute interval-filler, aptly chosen for Friday night’s First Night of the Proms on Radio 3. It was a bonus for listeners who were not in the Royal Albert Hall, as just minutes after hearing what Janacek had written in letters about his reasons for composing the mass we heard its first triumphant trumpet chords. Twenty minutes is the perfect length for a talk, with just enough time for something memorable to be said, but not enough time for that message, that meaning to be obscured by too much detail, too many facts. That ‘divine spark’ is worth clinging on to during the current incessant outpouring of murky, spark-denying revelations about power, politics and the police.
On Tuesday night Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was given the once-over by a Russian expert and a dance history professor in another Twenty Minutes before its performance at the Prom concert a few minutes later. Why was its debut in Paris in May 1913 greeted with such hysteria, one woman bending down from her box to clap the ears of a gentleman in the pit who was applauding the dancers?
Dr Philip Bullock and Professor Ramsay Burt led us to an unexpected connection — a month later Emily Davison, the suffragette, died after throwing herself in front of the King’s horse during the Derby. She was asserting her right to protest, and to use her body to make a point, just as in Stravinsky’s ballet the heroine chooses to sacrifice herself in the hope that this will appease the gods, bring the rains and save the community. Both women were part of that radical assertion of political and aesthetic values which greeted the new century. Intriguingly, though, what is usually remembered about The Rite of Spring is the hostility of its reception, the shock it once caused, not the sacrifice of its heroine. Now, 100 years later, the shock value of The Rite has long gone — which gives us the chance to assess its real significance.
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