Experience and Language

I have thought extensively over the subject of 'Co-incidences' and have examples in all sorts of contexts and variations. They range from the instance when travelling from Trinidad to Barbados and sitting next to a lady from Trinidad we were given landing forms to complete - and on doing so noticed that we shared the exact same birth date; more complex and perhaps not quite so coincidental (or actually in a greater depth) concerns a current project I have in hand: I am marking my late father's hundredth birthday this year with a concert at St. Leonard's, Shoreditch in June (part of the Spitalfields Festival - so the venue is their arrangement). Part of the background to the work I have commissioned is my father (and grandfather's) involvement as wood turners with the furniture trade of Shoreditch; in later life my father wrote a history of immigrant furniture makers in Britain and installed a bench in his father's name in the garden of the Geffrye Museum. The brief to the composer, Nicola LeFanu, included a suggestion that she take a walk down Shoreditch High Street and out to Kingsland Road to see the Museum. The Church is within sight of the premises at 45 Hackney Road where in 1905 my grandfather Hyman Massil, newly settled in London, was employed at the bench by the firm of Franklin and Goldberg before at some interval he was able to set up his own workshop in Hoxton Street. My father moved the family business out to Hatfield after 1946 and the furniture trade has long left Shoreditch. Nonetheless the sole surviving wood turner still operates there: at 45, Hackney Road in the person of Maurice Franklin at age 92, last scion of the firm of Franklin and Goldberg. This firm is mentioned in my father's book of course, and Maurice appears to have been interviewed by my father some twenty years ago when he was researching his book. The concert and this commission also carries other strands of 'coincidence' in that the work also reflects my father's musical interests taking for instance the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s he arranged recitals at our home in Cockfosters and amongst our neighbours inviting students at the music colleges to perform in these homes I am not a musician or a furniture maker, I am a librarian and for my first post went to Birmingham in 1966 and was there for several years. Early on I made friends with the daughter of a famous artist and met her husband, a violinist at the Music department, Louis. Louis mentioned a couple of times that he remembered playing at a house somewhere in North London, around Highgate he thought. In 1969 I wanted to buy a house and found one just along the road where Louis and his family lived. My father came for the day to vet this potential purchase and to check the property. After the viewing I suggested we might go along to have tea with Louis and his wife ... Of course, Louis had misremembered Highgate for Cockfosters but they fell into each other's arms as long lost friends. Also, and Louis again: I arranged for a young singer to sing at my 70th birthday last September at a nice venue in London and I engaged (through another connection) a recent graduate of one of the London music colleges and that was all I knew of her background - but in fact she had previously studied music at Birmingham and so was known to Louis and his wife, not least because also the singer was the daughter of the physician who had attended the brother of Louis wife at his death only a little while before These are the rings of Saturn, and experience, arrangements, connections compel 'coincidences'. It is like language itself: quite often on a bus or in a cafe or where people are conversing in pairs one speaker in that pair will come to use a word which another in a second pair uses almost simultaneously and this is a situation at work in a mind like Shakepeare's labouring to bring forth, it is in the language itself to generate the apposite word or phrase that the factors at work in the poet's mind require or are prompted to express. Shakespeare is in command of the language, but the language itself carries a muscle that works for itself as well and I take that power to be at work in experience in general If you like any of that I can offer you more With thanks Stephen M