On my first day at secondary school, I met a Buddhist. Her parents were part of a community that practised in the tradition of Soka Gakkai: Shrines, chanting and silence. It blew my mind. Our school was Quaker, so we became quite familiar with silence as a practice. But Quakerism was, in the eyes of a suburban eleven year old, ruddy and austere. Buddhism, by contrast, was vibrant - glamourous, even. Her family kindly took me along to a ceremony somewhere in Taplow, where I got to learn a little about chanting. When I asked my 11 year old friend for an example of what chanting was for, she told me that her dad had chanted for the car he wanted and that he had got it. Oh, I thought, random. Of course there was a lot more to it than that - but how on earth would an eleven year old be able to explain it. I left it there for a good few years.
Aged 7 or 8, I asked my parents whether they believed in God and was shocked to find out they didn’t. I had at the time developed a little penchant for religion, electing to be taken to church on Sundays by our anglican neighbours, whose son was my age. I liked Sunday school crafts and stories with vivid imagery about camels fitting through eyes of needles. My aunt and uncle who were hardcore Church of England, had led a gentle campaign to make my sisters and I aware of God by giving us bible stories, prayer books and christian rock tapes for kids as Christmas presents, which I loved. One of my sisters was baptised at fourteen in a swimming pool. It was incredible, watching her autonomy in action. The film Mermaids, with Cher and Winona Ryder was a favourite among my sisters and I - if you know, you know.
Around the time my parents outed themselves as atheists, I developed an obsession with dripping taps. The bathroom in our house had squeaky and imprecise faucets that, no matter how many turns you gave them, never seemed to fulfill their duty. Fearing the wrath of God for wasting water, I would wait and watch for several minutes after brushing my teeth to make sure the drips had stopped, at which time I could go to bed without being haunted by the image of a flood. One time on holiday, stopping off at a motorway services in France, I couldn’t get the automatic tap in the bathroom to stop running. Eventually one of my sisters had to drag me away but I spent the entire holiday convinced that we were going to see on the news that northern France had been flooded. I begged my parents to take me back so I could shut it off.
In my early adulthood I flitted between various structures of faith, looking for a home. I count kundalini yoga, psychedelics and psychoanalysis among them. I’ve had two intensely religious boyfriends, one christian, the other who had recently given up living as a monk in an all-male Buddhist community. In both cases I found elements of their belief truly inspiring, even enviable, but also limiting in their respective heady adherence to doctrines which seemed to me to interrupt the inherent adaptability of one’s own moral instincts. I later found that academia, a religious structure to many, suffered from the same limitations, at least in my view. At some point between the two of them I read David Hume’s ‘An Enquiry Concerning The Principle of Morals’, from which my reductive takeaway was - if you see an old person on the tube, you inherently know that they need your seat more than you do. That’s instinct, not reason.
The authority of ‘god’ has been called upon in various forms throughout my songwriting. This is, I suppose, my own private god. The most appropriate description for this that I have found is in the Lacanian distinction of The Big Other. It is the authority to which I speak, though no one is listening - the imaginary structure within which is held my understanding of the way the world is ordered. My grasp on Lacan, generally and like most people, is thin - but I understand just enough to appreciate why he figures so prominently in the field of the humanities. His attempt to give form to the incomprehensible is enticing to those with an egoic predisposition toward frivolous thought. But this idea of a voice spoken to nothing, chimes at the heart of songwriting. In its purest form, who are you writing for? It’s hard to bring up Lacan without seeming pretentious - there’s a great line from a Laurie Moore short story (which I of course can’t find) in which she says something to the effect of “Lacan? Oh fuck off” - but a thousand times more eloquently.
My Aquarian nature gives me a propensity for quite fixed notions of morality - I seem to have picked up a very strictly delineated code of ethics about how one should conduct oneself as a citizen of the world, to which only I know the rules. But after my daughter was born, those sharp edges softened dramatically when suddenly I began to see everyone as people who were born to mothers who would have loved them, under the right circumstances. And I was struck with the realisation that to be human is to be at the mercy of all manner of unnatural circumstances that can affect your life in innumerably brutal ways. Whatever the unnatural taints - first, there was love.
In those first evenings spent anxiously gazing at the miracle laying beside me - I felt an overwhelming urge to call upon angels to protect her. When my eyes closed I would summon a golden light and draw it across us all - then try and expand it as far as I could imagine. I realised later, reading through an old journal, that I learnt this from drummer/legend Jim Keltner, who played on a record that I had to abandon before Short Movie. He had told me a story in the studio about visualising angels as golden light to protect someone, that moved me deeply.
I wouldn’t call myself religious, I’ve always felt like an outsider to it all, though I am somehow always searching for a home, a structure, a way to understand it all - and I hope to find it. I attribute this sense of homelessness with my compulsion to write, which reminds me of the a quote from the great Quentin Crisp:
“In an expanding universe time is on the side of the outcast”
This is the spirit of The Hierophant, in my understanding.
Can I say, Laura, how much I enjoy reading your thoughts and explanations. I enjoy the depth and subtlety of your music. For sometimes less is more and it seems to me that you are an exponent of the profound via the apparently simple. So, thank you.
So so lovely. And amazing the transformations we undergo as we move through life, have children, and experience the cruelty and beauty of this place in its fullness.