Mott the Hoople — All The Young Dudes (1972)
(Source: rummuds)
Cathedral Service by Peter Kocan
I’m only here because I wandered in
Not knowing that a service would begin,
And had to slide into the nearest pew,
Pretending it was what I’d meant to do.
The tall candles cast their frail light
Upon the priest, the choir clad in white,
The carved and polished and embroidered scene,
The congregation numbers seventeen.
And awkwardly I follow as I’m led
To kneel or stand or sing or bow my head.
Though these specific rites are strange to me,
I know their larger meaning perfectly—
The heritage of twenty centuries
Is symbolised in rituals like these,
In special modes of beauty and of grace
Enacted in a certain kind of place.
This faith, although I lack it, is my own,
Inherent to the marrow of the bone.
To this even the unbelieving mind
Submits its unbelief to be defined.
Perhaps the meagre congregation shows
How all of that is drawing to a close,
And remnants only come here to entreat
These dying flickers of the obsolete.
Yet when did this religion ever rest
On weight of numbers as the final test?
Its founder said that it was all the same
When two or three were gathered in his name.
© Peter Kocan
(Source: andrewlansdown.com)
"Jimmy came afterwards to apologise for going against Tait’s wishes and when they really got talking they found they related easily to one another. They were both in their late twenties and found they liked many of the same things, like poetry and history and folk music and all that was quaint and outmoded. “Quaint and outmoded” became their key term of approval. Then they shortened it to “Q and O”, and finally to “QO”, which they pronounced as a word rhyming with “glow”. The QO stood for an entire value system, and when Jimmy did night duty they would sit and talk about it into the wee hours.
…
After about three years Jimmy had had enough of the place, or at least of that aspect of it that he and Tait called “the Regime”. Inmates consoling each other with a birthday song was a QO concept, while the spirit that turned it into derision was that of the Regime. They began to see the QO and the Regime as warring principles that were locked in bitter struggle in every sphere of life."
— Peter Kocan. The fable of all our lives. p. 3-4.
