Symphony for the forgotten children

My wife and I not so recently now attended a Queensland Symphony Orchestra concert called The Romantics. European Romantic music developed during the 19th century partly as a counter movement to the scientific rationalism of the time, and with a rising sense of nationalism. Romantic music depicts a story, mythical or historic heroic acts, always with strong emotional themes. It grew into big orchestral music through the technical disruption of the time. In the symphonic form there are usually four movements: an introduction, two bits in the middle developing the story, and then a summary and conclusion, sometimes a climax, sometimes not with a bang but a whimper, always dramatic

I soon found myself thinking of designing a piece of music that tells the story of the abuse and protection of children. I don’t know why. Perhaps there was something already in the music we heard that resonated, who knows. I’m not a composer so I will eventually need someone to put the ideas to music.

I cast around for a god I could use who was specifically designated for the protection of children. For this piece of music I excluded the Jewish/Christian/ Muslim god because of the multi-tasking nature of their conceptualisations and therefore the absence of a specific role in the protection of children, perhaps also because of the conspicuous failures recently as revealed though the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In any event the second obvious choice of Jesus’ mother Mary seems more associated with the care and protection of infants rather than of the older children of which I was thinking.

My Google search for deities specifically tasked with the protection of children did not reveal much useful material. Google and Wikipedia may not be the ultimate references for scholarly research into such matters and not much turned up. There was reference to an obscure Buddhist nun who fed her multitude of children on other peoples babied until the Buddha hid one of her children to show her how it felt, whereupon she transformed herself into the protector of children. She is perhaps not a great role model. Perhaps there is a scholar out there who can throw some light on how religious mythologies conceptualise the protection of children from physical and sexual abuse and neglect. Please feel free to contribute.

Anyway, I still had this urge to design a story to be set to music. I thought of who in mythology might substitute and eventually came up with three candidates. The first was of Nike. Nike; the Greek goddess of victory.  Nike sometimes has a spear but more usually a torch (a low tech flaming one) and a laurel leave garland. We all know her better from her sandshoes.  Discovered by the Greeks she was later adopted by the Romans but following their Christianisation could not continue in her role as a god, there being only one god. Fortunately for her she had been depicted with wings from early Greek origins and was thus easily transformed in to an angel.

Candidate number two was Veritas the Greek then Roman goddess of truth often depicted nude, holding a hand mirror. Verity (Veritas) as depicted by Damien Hirst at Ilfracrombe in North Devon England (not to be confused with the one in North Queensland) in his magnificent huge sculpture, “Verity” is a female figure with the scales of justice held behind her back and a sword held above her head. She is pregnant. On her right side she is clothed, on the left naked and dissected revealing her foetus. She has cast the scales of justice (balance and objectivity) behind her and is ferociously protecting her unborn child. There is no mirror. Verity looks for all the world like the character depicted in out law courts, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice aloft with a sword in her hand by her side. But she is Themis, a totally different goddess, candidate number three.

So the back story of my symphony has the three of them out of uniform having morning coffee at Cafe Bliss downstairs. They have parked their Rav 4’s under the shade cloth and are indistinguishable from the men and women who have descended from the nursing homes up the mountain with their care workers for their monthly outing. Weaving in and out of the crowded tables, shopping trolleys, wheelchairs and walking frames they take their coffee and cake back to one of the booths.

The trio compare their recent work over the recent past 500 years or so. Veritas bemoans the descent of truth into an optional extra for society and Themis adds that with her blindfold removed balance and objectivity no longer looks as clear cut. “Justice” and “the law” do not seem to be the same thing anymore. Basically after 3,000 years of banging their heads against walls, Veritas and Themis have had enough.  Nike unloads her compassion fatigue after countless pointless victory ceremonies. “All I have ever done is fly around the world putting silly leaves on people’s heads”. They are getting old but Nike wants to have one last go at doing something important. So Nike is the hero in our symphony.

Movement one

The opening movement begins. So it is 1945 and Nike is fully booked with appointment to celebrate the conquest of one half of the world against the other. She has grand appearances in France, Great Britain, Russia and the USA, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The grand events are mixed with rumblings of dissatisfaction and revolt in India and China..  It is all very straight forward and simple – only it isn’t of course. End of the first movement.

Movement two

The second movement begins to see the dark side of “victory”. To her keen eye and long history of experience the victories begin to look anything but victories and the scale of impact on children begins to emerge. Everywhere there are dead and abandoned children:  in concentration camps, in towns and villages of the vanquished and victors, starving, shockingly physically and mentally injured. Children crammed into institutions and factories. She saw children evacuated away from their families or indiscriminately shipped off to the other side of the world on the promise of sunshine and oranges only to be further traumatised by their “saviours”. Children preyed upon by twisted and cruel carers and guards. Children preyed upon by scum that freely took advantage of the psychologically and physically vulnerable to beat, brutalise and sexually abuse them. Don’t tell, don’t tell or worse will happen to you.

The music captures the barely audible small voices of armies of children driven underground by pillars of church and state, teachers, nurses, entertainers, youth group leaders. Separate the vulnerable from the heard and use them for whatever depraved purpose you want.  No one is going to believe children when they try to explain what is happening to them. They don’t have the vocabulary or the moral or conceptual frameworks to describe what is happening.

The small voices of protest are scoffed off with an undercurrent of bad jokes about scout masters and double meanings. 

Movement three

Movement three follows the process of the gradual consolidation of a generation of twisted adult war survivors and others for whom the exploitation of vulnerable children became possible because they could, and no one really cared or wanted to acknowledge that there was a problem, or turned the other way, into powerful networks of perpetrators. If follows the insidious emergence of networks of powerful, respected people who preyed systematically on vulnerable children.  Perhaps these predators have always existed. There is an undercurrent in late 19th /early 20th century literature at least. Freud had some interesting observations following a visit to morgues with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in the early 1880’s.  Yeats writes “The Stolen Child” in 1889 and what of the lost boys in J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (1904)? However, the process moved into another industrial gear with the 20th century acceleration of change.

For the music there are two intertwining themes. The first is the context of the abused becoming the abusers. A disgraceful neglect and abuse of children billows onto an industrial scale. The second theme twisted in together is the worldwide blindness or denial to what had happened. The world was now focused on the post war economic boom, new wealth, new products, new music, new babies and reasons to forget about the past. Of course these powerful and respected people just didn’t run institutions like churches and schools, sports clubs and scout groups. They were mothers and fathers and the old lady next door and her decorated adult son as well. They live and work alongside decent and honest and honourable people; people who are blind to the evil being perpetrated by their family members, friends, next door neighbours, trusted voices, respected leaders.

Nike sees all this and little by little her capacity to celebrate victory withers away. Victory has been disgraced. She becomes depressed and mechanically goes about her work all the time agonising about the fate of children and that there is no one to care or to champion their plight. ANZAC Day becomes a commemoration of adult sacrifice in an effort to bring peace in a chaotic and ugly world, no longer a celebration of victory in battle.  There are no laurel leaves for victory in glorious battle. She is redundant. It is now celebrated as the resurrection of physically and mentally broken men and women, not victory.  Nike sees the abuse of children perpetuated generation after generation, changing form and context but always surviving and breeding and multiplying, and breaking out aging somewhere else. The victims beget victims.

Movement four

In the final movement Nike makes one last heroic sacrifice.  She raises herself for one last mighty effort to make things right, wielding her mighty torch in one hand and her laurel leaves in the other and lashes out at the networks of evil she sees everywhere, the people who have disgraced her victory’s. Nike is driven mad by the avalanche of reaction she brings about: personal attacks and insults, and lies about her previous work. It as if she is being bitten by swarms of miniscule individual insect like creatures in the form of the evil she is trying to strike down and she is being stung as if by 1,000,000 angry bees. 

The second theme of the music is the reaction of the forces of righteousness and order, good people who want to see an ordered world. Gods and/or angels are not supposed to act like this. Gods and angels are supposed to act the way they always have – for the past 3,000 years. It says so in the holy books of several religions. The world is out of balance. Let’s get angry and demand that balance is restored (pun re sandshoes intended). Science and rationality rage against the idea that a god/angel could have an influence in the affairs of men and women. 

The forces of evil strike back undercover of the righteous uproar. In a crescendo of physical and emotional agony she predictably explodes into millions upon millions of tiny pieces that are thrown up into the outer atmosphere. They begin to fall back to earth, lighting up like millions of meteorites as they re-enter the atmosphere. They wink out as they return to earth forming into tiny replicas of Nike. Each tiny replica alights on men and women of good will to become absorbed into each heart; a bishop here, a teacher there, a High Court judge, a politician, a kid in a school yard, a broken soldier, an accountant, a single mum, a grieving dad, a family on a beach, a football team, a stadium crowd. The nature of care and justice permeates the fibre of every man and woman. They turn to each other and smile in the knowledge that something fundamental inside them has changed and that they can see it in each other.

A huge army of champions of the weak, vulnerable, and the oppressed band together and stand arm in arm with each other to protect each and every child and adult against people who would treat them with disrespect and of the systems that protect such people. The balance of power has begun to swing from evil towards fairness and justice. The tone of the music is that of cold, hard, sharp steel, the steel of resolve. There is no emotion just the unflinching commitment to the fact that unacceptable behaviour is not an option.

End. Audience stands and applauds.

So there is the story. It is fiction of course and so is free to leave our distracting facts about people and systems already working towards “better outcomes for children” as modern terminology would put it. And I still need someone to write the music, perhaps a rock opera? I give you the story.

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