Where, O Where, Shall Wisdom be Found?

For my parents, on their Diamond Wedding, July 2021

That photograph of us all in the back garden, during the party. Happy family, sitting together on the lawn. Only I stick out, reclining on my elbows while everyone else sits up, sensible. I must be eighteen, since we’re celebrating your Silver Wedding. There am I, embarrassing myself while everyone else watches the birdie, giving their best smiles. I can’t remember what I was saying or to whom I was mouthing some aside. With hand up to my mouth as if to broadcast this private joke, my face was frozen by the camera’s click in the unmistakable act of pronouncing a word beginning with “F”.

Parents like to take pride in their children, and I was the kind who had gifts to make you proud: a musical ear, a love of language, a baritone voice that suited your favourite style of classical music. Bach, Handel, Purcell, Boyce, even Haydn. I sang that solo aria in The Seasons, about “th’impatient husbandman” setting out with his plough, so many times; it got me through my Grade 8 and Music College audition successfully.

Yet when I came to perform it in a recital, I froze as the harpsichord struck the opening chord. The words left me, and I saw Mum dying of embarrassment in the front row.

Taking it in my stride, I went to check my accompanist’s copy and, with another aside I quipped, ‘Oh, but I know this piece so well!’ I returned to my centre-stage position, and resumed without error. One of our family friends said after, ‘That lad’ll go far.’ An optimistic prediction for a nineteen year old singer.

My first solo on a BBC broadcast was a live Evensong, in a verse-anthem by William Boyce, as part of a trio of soloists. In a rousing flourish, the bass sings ‘The depth says, “it is not with me;” and the sea says, “it is not with me”.’ Then the trio continues to discuss where and what “it” is not.

The “it” in question was Wisdom. I imagined you at home with fingers poised on the “play-and-record” buttons of the stereo tape-machine as the service began. Perhaps you didn’t appreciate, or listen too closely, after the boy treble (called “Bob” – remember?) sang the opening, ‘Oh, where shall wisdom be found?’ that I fluffed a note in the trio section, on the second iteration of ‘Where?’

It was just a slight mis-hit (my voice was still, as a young singer, finding its folds) but the infamously grumpy conductor gave a grimace as if I’d been sick on his shoe, looking down at his music and up again. It seemed Wisdom, according to the passage set by Dr Boyce, couldn’t be gotten for silver, nor gold – at least, not until after the event when I realised my mistake: it was C to Ab in the first section; C to G on the words, ‘Where is the place of understanding?’

This quest for knowledge, wisdom, understanding led me down some dark rabbit-holes, but at that time it took me towards achieving my other ambition which ran in tandem with music: writing.

While music was the chemistry of my being – and singing, the biological manifestation of it – words were the precious jewels; the physics of existence. They made sense, they helped me make sense, they became the sense of who I was – even though I know that I owe my physical presence to a simple, yet complex, act of love.

When writing became a compulsion, my life had something to celebrate. And when I met the person I wanted to share my life with in a similar union to that of voice and verse, the man who celebrated this in the eyes (and guise) of God married us, and then marred that which ‘God hath joined together.’

Let no man put asunder? I feel myself lifting my hand to my face and mouthing a word to that celebrant who now no longer presides over nuptial or eucharistic feasts. Nor do I believe any longer in the God that rent us asunder.

Ted Hughes said of Sylvia Plath, ‘But the jewel you lost was blue.’ The same wasn’t quite for me. It was rubies, which (as Job says) don’t match wisdom in price. As you celebrated your Ruby Wedding, the only prayer I heard was from my estranged beloved, for a decree that, in time, became absolute. My life fell apart in a fashion far-worse than hitting the wrong notes, forgetting the words, or mouthing obscenities at party guests.

We celebrated your 50th Anniversary nonetheless – a wise decision – for who knows how many more significant occasions there may be. As time goes on, it’s mostly funerals that punctuate the family diary. Many of those who came on that Golden Occasion have since passed away. I can hear Mum say ‘This isn’t a nice time to be alive,’ as she watches loved ones die. I, by then, was finally glad to be living.

You are both together still, very much in love and, in spite of last year, alive. You raised a glass to each other (and to us, your family) in 2020, to mark the day you first met, 60 years before – in case you didn’t make your Diamond Anniversary. ‘Ever the optimist, Mum’ said my sister!

But we are survivors, wiser than rubies, and built on a rock far harder than the diamond we celebrate this year. Let Job say that “the fear of the Lord is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding” – though there is some truth in this. The jewels of poetry I have twisted in my fingers remain, and the bedrock of love that you have kept for sixty years holds fast.

As Elaine Feinstein said, ‘Every day won from such darkness is a celebration.’

That is wisdom beyond understanding, more precious than silver or gold.