The Nights of Grief and Mystery come to Portsmouth - let the ceremony begin... | Interview

What would you call such a thing?

They called it Nights of Grief & Mystery.

But to describe the event like that doesn’t even begin to describe the depth or intent of its creators’ ambitions.

The two Canadians first crossed paths back in 2015 when Hoskins contacted Jenkinson out of the blue to discuss songwriting. The latter had no experience of songwriting, but Hoskins had seen something in his writing. Several serendipitous moments later, the pair found themselves starting a US tour.

‘We did our first show to a sold out house in New York city, where we improvised for two and a half hours.

‘I think we looked at each other 10 minutes in with that knowing look that says, there's something beyond what we intended, or beyond our nervousness – it behooves us as men of our age to obey this thing.

‘Rather than initiating the thing, I was kind of dragged by the scruff into it.’

Jenkinson’s biography describes him as ‘a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house and learning house for the skills of deep living and making human culture.’ He has two masters degrees, in theology from Harvard and social work from Toronto, and (among others) wrote the book Die Wise – A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, after his experiences working in palliative care.

In conversation with The Guide, the teacher often comes through, but so too does the poet and the thinker.

Stephen and Gregory’s working relationship

Describing his relationship with Hoskins, who has his own lengthy and acclaimed career in music, he says: ‘It is a partnership – it's an unequal and lumpy partnership – a skew of a partnership really. Seven years and we're not really any more authoritative on the matter than we were going in.

‘But we do have a sense of where the monsters are, which we didn't have going in. We've been at the crossroads in every sense of that term, and we also found out what we're capable of, so we're in that sense no longer apologetic or shy on the matter - there's a certain charge, or certain vocational assignment that has gathered around this thing, and that has employed the very best of what Gregory knows how to do, and what he's learned over his decades, and what I've learned in mine. As long as it lasts, I would go beyond saying it’s a brotherhood, I would say that "vocation” really describes it.’

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He also describes what they do as going beyond gig or genre: ‘It's ceremonial – that's what it's become. We didn't know that at the time, and it sounds very self-important to use a word like that, but there's no sense in hiding your lamp under a bushel. There's no honour in that, that's not humility, that's something else.

‘I think we both realised it we're old enough now, that it behooves us to assume our positions on the ramparts.’

Breaking down walls

The experience is not your typical ‘gig’, so how do audiences typically react to it?

‘First of all there's no apparent standard etiquette that would apply to the event. For one thing, people are very uncertain whether clapping belongs. How do you get behind, in terms of accolades, heartbreak?

‘Heartbrokenness is the response to heartbreak, not really clapping. And yet, there's a kind of rhythm-and-blues sensibility to the evening as well.

‘The best way I can illustrate it is that I do a lot of book signings in the lobby afterwards, it turns into a meet and greet, so people are fresh from the house.

‘Suddenly they're standing right across from me, who they've been listening to for two hours, so it's kind of a jarring moment. They'll go: “I didn't come here of my own accord, I was dragged here by...”, and they'll point to whoever they're with. “I had no idea what to expect. Now I've watched the thing, I have no idea what it is.”

‘It's not that the event was lost on them, it's that the instinct to fit your experience into a genre where it becomes somehow manageable and digestible, and you can organise it and give it a place, and you don't have to be upheaved by it. Those instincts are all frustrated by what we do. And that's very deliberate.

‘The Greeks gave us our contemporary understanding of what constitutes theatre and things dramatic. They took the kernel of ceremony and added two things to it to desacrilise it – the first one was the advent of the audience and the second was the advent of the script.

‘When you take ceremonial participants and turn them into an audience, you no longer have participants, you have people sitting there with their arms folded, exercising their right to adjudicate on the proceedings – caesar-style. So your ceremonial undertaking is immediately undermined by people with no apparent vested interest in the outcome – the so-called fourth wall in theatre.

‘And the script, scripting an event that should be properly ceremonial. You obviate recourse to the gods, or to the other world, or to mystery. It's dissolved by virtue of a reasonably assured conclusion – that's what the script gives you. You know where you're headed. How you get there is the only thing that's up for grabs, but you know it's going to end, and you're counting on it.

‘We dissolve the notion of the audience. We have a piece very early on which goes: “Welcome friends, for friends we may soon be, friends are forged on the dark road, the one that's heading out of town and you know it now – we're headed there, so how shall we be? And what shall we say, now that the call and the summons and the plea? You know it is a better thing we make, as if many a thing hangs there in the rafters above, or hangs in the balance below, as if how we are with each other, that's how the lords of chance will be with us. As if what we say this very evening will bring in the saints and the ancients of days, or bring down the darkness and those rough gods."

‘If that doesn't sound ceremonial to you, you've never been to one!

‘It's an invocation. I'm drawing a boundary – we this evening, together, shall appear and register our appearance for active duty in a troubled time, that's what we're here to do. I don't care what brought you here, the fact that you're here grants me this moment, and I will proceed in your name, for your sake, in that regard. You try to put that in a genre – you can't do it!’

Of his two masters degrees, which has had the greatest impact on his life?

‘One of them is more fruitful in the marketplace than the other! The social work one translated more readily into a job at certain times. No one's lining up to hire theologians, really’, he laughs, ‘so my responsibility as it turns out was to find a way to translate the devotional and hortatory instinct that is clearly part of my architecture and do so in a way that was responsible to the times. That's probably the social work aspect of things.

‘I wouldn't say I'm a dyed in the wool social work-type person, I was persuaded to do it as a way of translating my theology degree for the market place – that's how it happened.’

Our deathphobic culture

His social work led him to palliative care, which shaped his views on how our ‘deathphobic culture’ warps our whole approach to the end of life. This led to his book Die Wise.

‘It is a grim and dismal undertaking in the literal sense of those terms. It would be one thing, if the work of caring for dying people was undertaken in a place that was death-literate and grief-literate – that would be a whole other enterprise. But in my corner of the world, that's simply not the condition, so you're undertaking something that has a deep kind of advocacy to it, and a deep investment. And at the same time you basically have no takers...

‘You're in this insane position of obliging dying people to die – to undertake the work of dying. You could say: “But they're dying anyway, what's the point?” And the answer is: no, they would expire, that's a given, but let's reserve the word die for something that's undertaken and something that's achieved.

‘Much in the same way that we'd use the word poetry, not to characterise idle chatter, but something that’s achieved with the language. I see dying in a very similar fashion. I was asking people, pleading with people, and finally obliging the dying I was working with to die more responsibly with a greater sense of responsibility for those who would outlive them. This where both you and I have learned our chops when it comes to dying – it's the deaths we’ve been exposed to before our own – that's our real tuition. That immediately becomes a grim prospect when you realise most of the tuition available when it comes to dying is of the aversive kinds.

‘Here's the best example I could give you. I've worked with dying kids quite a bit, and that's a thing unto itself as you can imagine. Oftentimes, I would have well-intentioned parents come to me with the following dilemma for them: “My father's dying, and I don't know whether I should bring my kid to the hospital or the funeral home, or the cemetery?” My response was always the same: “Why wouldn't you?” Instead of making the case why you should, make the case why you shouldn't? And they could readily, because this was where their question was coming from. They would say something like: “I don't want my child to be traumatised.”

‘“Indeed”, I would say, “and what would traumatise them?” They automatically think a vision of grandpa toothless and drooling in the bed is by definition traumatic. It's not traumatic by definition. The trauma comes from the kid taking their cues from how the adults are behaving around the deathbed.

‘If there's too great a gap, or cognitive dissonance, between what's happening in the bed and what the adults around the bed are doing, the trauma can ensue simply from the dissonance.

‘And then the great PS on the matter was: “I would rather that my son or daughter remembers their grandfather as he was”. Oh I see, so the official memory, the revised official memory of grandpa does not include what's happening now? So it's the perfect cleansing and bleaching of the memory, so it's grandpa in the park, a benign old fella – ultimately enjoyable, and then he just vanishes. If he just vanishes on you as a child, you tell me what you think your tuition is about dying when you come into your own adulthood? Does it not somehow haunt you, that dying is no more than “here one minute, then gone the next”. You become a denizen of the past tense.’

With a dry chuckle, he adds: ‘I won't run out of material for the Nights of Grief and Mystery!’

They are performing at Treadgolds on Bishop Street, Portsea on Thursday, August 25. Tickets available here: eventbrite.ca/e/nights-of-grief-mystery-2022-uk-tour-portsmouth-tickets-364024927357.