Frank Cottrell-Boyce wonders at our recognising voices.
What an extraordinary thing it is that we recognise individual human voices. That I can make the atoms in the air vibrate so precisely that they make your ear drum vibrate in such a way as to tell your brain not only what I’m saying, not only how I’m saying it, but who I am. And this is true not just of people we know. I can walk into the kitchen, hear a voice on the radio and know immediately it’s, let’s say, Grant Shapps. Why do I have this ability? What’s the evolutionary advantage of being able to recognise that – 200 miles away – Grant Shapps is talking?
Voices – like music – come freighted with memory. There are voices I heard on Jackanory 50 years ago that are so embedded that I cannot re-read the stories they told without bending my own voice to the cadences of Bernard Cribbins or Kenneth Williams. Once I took my mother back to the convent in Wales to which she’d been evacuated as a child. As we walked into the dining room she stopped and said, “Oh! This was our dormitory. The night before my first Communion I heard my dad’s voice in the other room and jumped out of bed.” It would have felt like a miracle. He was away at sea, serving in the Atlantic convoys. I never met either of my grandads. They were lost at sea long before I was born. But standing next to her I could see she was hearing again her father’s voice in the night.
My tutor at university was an authority on the rise of punctuation. You don’t need much punctuation in Latin because it’s an inflected language. But there’s plenty of punctuation in the great manuscripts that began to emerge from Ireland in the sixth century. It’s not grammatical punctuation. It’s musical notation. “This dot,” he used to say, “is where the reader took a breath. And here. And here. If you listen you can hear them breathe.”
Luther called the letter of St James “an epistle of straw”. He couldn’t exactly cancel it but he did shove it away at the back of the Bible. He was troubled by the way it seemed to prioritise works over faith. If you’ve ever said, “thoughts are prayers to … whoever” and not meant it, then this is a cuff around the ear…
If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?
It’s always been the most controversial of all the letters. Apart from Luther’s discomfort, there’s a scholarly debate about which James wrote it, the New Testament being fairly jammed with Jameses. It’s the most Jewish of all the epistles, packed with proverbs and practical advice. So it comes out of the world where Christ’s followers were arguing about whether they were still Jews or something new. Its tone is irascible, a bit scattergun, sometimes ranty. One of my favourite passages is about the power of the voice – but not in a good way. The tongue, he says, “is a volatile menace, replete with fatal venom … Out of the same mouth come both blessing and cursing.” It’s a letter from someone brilliant, passionate and massively frustrated, trying to manage a wayward flock, sometimes through beautiful imagery – I’m haunted by the image of the man who examines his own reflection then walks away, leaving his wisdom behind in the mirror. But just as often through simple fury. It has a prophet’s disregard for polite society. The clothes of the rich will be moth-eaten. The judges will be judged. Vengeance will rain down on those who try to defraud workers of their wages.
Read it and you’ll see that the early Church was not populated by saints walking round dazed with their own holy simplicity. But this is also the letter that has the most lines that reappear in the Gospels. It’s impossible to read it and not feel that its quotations from Jesus come from someone who heard them, first hand. That this writer had heard that voice. I read it and find myself thinking – oh, this is how they spoke to each other. It forces me to remember that abrasive, sudden side of Christ – the blaster of fig trees, the turner-over of tables – who is so often obscured by gentle Jesus meek and mild.
You can read this letter for its social teaching, or its poetry. You will be charmed by its frustration and fury. But most of all you should read it for its closeness to the person of Christ. That sense that the writer – like my mother that day – is remembering a voice he used to hear in the Temple.
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