Intermezzo – Timeless Love & Joyful Sex

It was at the very end of 1972 that Harvey met Carol and fell in love. It began at Bevendean Hospital, Brighton, while singing Christmas carols on the wards with Dorset Gardens Methodist Church young people – and I should know, as Harvey had taken me along!

From now on, through courtship, marriage, pro-creating, giving birth, losing children, the timeless aesthetic mystery and beauty of love began to dramatically affect Harvey’s body, resonating with my body’s collected experiences, beginning from the time I was first crafted by Thomas Kennedy for Lord Burghersch’s young bride way back in 1810 (see my first instalment – ‘Where do we come from?).

(Lady Burghersch, c.1830)

There’s no mistaking the fact that my body has a distinctly female form and shape (back, belly, neck, ribs, breast-plate, strings like vocal chords, etc), with my waistline and my solid foundation tapering in my upper half to gentler proportions. In strictly functional terms, a violin is only an enclosed volume of air awaiting to be resonated by the bow for the purpose of producing sound.

When I consider the tension of my four strings and the necessary tautness in the many hairs of my bow, from point to heel, is not the beauty of sound made possible only through the contact between ‘male’ bow and ‘female’ body?  Whilst the bow evokes, the strings respond.

In Harvey and Carol’s shared love, as it now began to grow and blossom over the coming years, it seemed as though the creative tension in my body and my bow was beginning to resonate in the joining of their male and female bodies. ‘And the two shall become one’ (Gospel of Mark 10:7)

Harvey had made a new discovery, that sexual relationships have potential for great beauty, wonder, mystery and timeless qualities of joy and love.

But Oh! how easily and willingly do both Music-making and ‘God talk’ (theology) misuse, corrupt and (frequently) abuse this precious sexual relationship, and all approaches to sexuality.  I’m thinking especially of Richard Wagner’s sexualized dramas (e.g. Tristan und Isolde) and St Augustine of Hippo’s highly influential negativity towards the sex act.

At this crucial moment in time, when grief was never far away, Harvey’s new-found love, with its timeless and joyful realities, began to blossom and grow. He was sensing that his vocation as a prospective preacher and Christian minister, should be a joyful and beautiful creative act – not a duty or an aspiration or a way of gaining approval.

Throughout all my experiences over the years, so far remembered, I know that music of great beauty, mystery and profundity CAN emerge when my player relates to me with joyful creative tension – not through duty or striving for perfection.

So, during the next years after theological training, I will try to determine how well or badly this resonated with Harvey’s vocation as Preacher and minister in the Church.