7 A Final Distant Clarion Cry

Twilight of an Actor

Following on from Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-hander "Two", which I touched on in some detail in "The Trials of a Teetotaller", I performed in one last play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy "Lovelives". Written entirely by the cast, this ensemble piece consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure. A great success at the R&C, it could in my opinion have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show. Then later in the year at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square, I played two small roles in a production of Euripides' "Iphigeneia in Taurois", directed and translated by my longtime friend Adrian. These were Pylades, right hand man  of one of the main characters, Orestes, and the Messenger, a maniacal buffoon of a character which I interpreted with the kind of refined cockney accent once supposedly favoured by policemen and regimental sergeant majors.
 From January 1996 until the following summer, I served variously as actor, MC, script writer, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. A group of three consisting of myself, and two locals girls, 19 year old Esther, and married company leader Sally, we toured several shows around schools in various tough multicultural south London areas including Croydon itself, as well as Thornton Heath, Norwood, Crystal Palace and so on. One of these, "Choices", was almost entirely written by me, although it'd been based on an idea by Sally who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole the kids, most from relatively deprived backgrounds, were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with almost uniform enthusiasm and affection, which was a surprise and a delight to me at least, although Esther had told me before our very first show that they tended to be very easy to relate to. Whether she meant towards visitors I'm not sure, but I imagine she did. Towards the end of the summer, Sally asked me to write a large scale project for the group. She suggested a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic Christian allegory "The Pilgim's Progress". Once I'd completed it my enthusiasm for Street Level had begun to wane. This had nothing to do with the company itself which for a few brief months in 1996 was marked by frantic creativity leading to shows with a radical Christian message performed to great success for the benefit of some of the capital's least privileged young people. The fact is that the long and costly early morning train journeys to Croydon via Wimbledon or Clapham Junction were starting to exhaust me. In consequence I suddenly quit, which wasn't a very kind thing to do to Sally because I think she'd started to see me as her rock, and she'd a lot of responsibility on her plate with regard to forthcoming performances and the training of a fresh crew of young Christian actors. My decision was especially mean given that Esther had herself left some weeks earlier, but I had to consider my finances. What's more my spiritual health was poor at the time after weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic marked by scenes of the blackest humour. As things turned it was never produced, and I'm not surprised, because although artistically it had its merits, spiritually it was grossly immature. In Christian terms I was still only a little over three years old, and it showed. In time I destroyed all but a few pages of it.  By early 1997 I'd vanished into the sanctuary of office life. This included a happy and socially lively period as a panel recruiter for Surrey's Topflight Research which came to a close when I  started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare's infamous Scottish Play at Fulham's Lost Theatre in the spring of 1998. Despite my cameos as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man being praised by cast and audience members alike, I've not acted since other than a handful of auditions. As things stand, while I'm still open to the possibility of film or television work, the likelihood of my ever appearing onstage in a play again is virtually nonexistent. Quite simply put, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me for more than two decades has long been quieted.
 Some months after my final performance at the Lost Theatre I wrote the prose piece that eventually mutated into "Such a Short Space of Time". My parents were on vacation for a few weeks during the period of its creation, a glorious summer as I recall that was the last of the millenium. Therefore I was often at the house in which I'd spent my adolescence and young manhood, performing  a variety of tasks such as watering my mother's flowers, or just simply soaking up the atmosphere of a place I loved. Taking sneaky advantage of my parents' absence I transferred some of my old vinyl records onto cassette, something that my own ancient hi-fi was incapable of doing. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I'd not heard for ten or fiteen years, or more, and which evoked with a heartrending intensity a time in my life when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I'd first heard them, despite the colossal changes that'd taken place since then not just in my own life but those of my entire generation. And so I was confonted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the devastating effect the passage of time exerts on all human life.

Such a Short Space of Time

I love...not just those...
I knew back then,
But those...
Who were young
Back then,
But who've since
Come to grief, who...
Having soared so high,
Found the
Consequent descent
Too dreadful to bear,
With my past itself,
Which was only
Yesterday,
No...even less time...
A moment ago,
And when I play
Records from 1975,
Soul records,
Glam records,
Progressive records,
Twenty years melt away
Into nothingness...
What is a twenty-year period?
Little more than
A blink of an eye...
How could
Such a short space
Of time
Cause such devastation?
Dispersals and Beginnings

A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century ceded to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood. Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I'd latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. But once again the Lord blessed my family, and she made a full recovery. I found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, although I knew that as it went on, there was a strong chance that writing about contemporary Literary Theory would come increasingly to disturb me, and perhaps even compromise my integrity as a Christian. As things turned out, I did leave the course although only on a provisional basis.   This was a time in my life marked by what appear to me now as an extraordinary succession of sudden starts and endings, and subsequent to my quitting UCL I was appointed chief musician of a worship group for the church I was attending at the time, Liberty Christian Centre. Liberty was a satellite of London's famous Kensington Temple, and I'd been recommended for the post by my friend Marina, Russian wife of Pastor Louis, late of New York City. She went on to become worship leader, alternating as such with Martha, another close friend, originally from Peru. It was Louis who'd got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset.  Soon afterwards I also quit my position as a telecanvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thereby bringing a fairly lengthy period as an office worker to an end. Since then I’ve worked only casually in various fields of employment including telemarketing, leafleting and as a television extra.  Another beginning came towards the end of 2000 when I was made lead singer for a Swing-flavoured band which became known as "Nuages" after the famous instrumental by French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard, but soon afterwards this was counterbalanced by the heartbreaking dissolution of Liberty. And so, in early 2001 I returned to my first spiritual home of the Cornerstone Bible Church, a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. Before defecting to the Riverside Vineyard Christian Fellowship, I’d gone to Cornerstone for about two years from early 1993, in fact, had attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in ‘92. Drunk at the time as I recall, I'd sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner". Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who'd laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian encourager, if only very briefly. However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn't return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she'd moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I've never forgotten her.  I left Cornerstone yet again in late summer 2002 in consequence of a desire born of internet research to seek out places of worship existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic family of churches. Spiritually speaking, this'd been my whole world for nearly a decade, to the degree that I barely acknowledged any other church as worthy of the name Christian, although I had engaged on a similar search of short duration some years previously. My quest led me to churches known as Cessationist which is to say they don't believe in the continuance of the supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy. It also took me to the Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many online sermons there that my computer may have crashed as a result. And then there were the discernment ministries, some cessationist, others not, which I visited, pouring over church history ancient and recent for hours on end. I learned alot from them, but I've not returned much to them since. When all's said and done, there's nothing that can lure me from the pure Word of God which has ensured the survival of the Church of Christ for over two millenia. Some Fundamentals and Non-Essentials Among the churches I visited during the wandering year of 2003 were Bethel Baptist Church, Wimbledon, Christ Church, Teddington and Duke Street Church, Richmond, all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of south west London.   Bethel is what is known as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, and therefore KJV only, in other words using the King James Version of the Bible alone. I attended three services at Bethel and fully intended to return for a fourth and so witness the preaching there of David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, something I was looking forward to doing given that I was familiar with his sermons from the Sermon Audio website, but never did. I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my last Sunday at Bethel, and this experience may have put me off travelling by train to church. But the truth is I'd left too many churches in my time and was tiring of the position of new boy brought about by perpetual church-hopping. I now believe church-hopping indeed luke-warm fellowshiping in general to have the potential to be a serious danger to any professing Christian.  Christ Church is a Free Church of England fellowship, The Free Church of England having separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church Anglicanism of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. It's resolutely Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism, these being Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints. According to Calvinism, those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity.  Duke Street is also a Free Grace, or rather, Grace Baptist church, while Bethel is free-willist. In consequence, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. This isn't an entirely accurate description in my view given that true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are upholders of what is known as the eternal security of the Saints. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some believers. For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths. For example, while I'm an upholder of baptism by full immersion, I certainly don't believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics, at least not automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God urges us to keep his commandements. Also, while I believe that Christ will return prior to establishing his reign on earth for a literal thousand year period, which makes me a pre-millenialist, a person can maintain that Christ won't return until after the millenium, or that the millenium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. These are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation. Previous to my year of nonstop study, 2003, I knew next to nothing about the foundations of the faith, and yet still possessed a degree of discernment. What's more I had no clue as to the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism, Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism, Cessationism and Continuationism and so on. But I was still saved by the Grace of God; and I don't believe anyone is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions. That said, true saving faith must produce fruits, such as repentance, and adherence to sound doctrine. At the same time, I was fairly well versed in the subject of the prophetic interpretation of the Bible  thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace Nash, through various magazines and books, including "Prophecy Today". I emerged from that year of nonstop study at peace again with the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, and yet conscious as never before of the importance of adhering to the fundamentals of the faith once delivered unto the saints. But this didn't last. I recently had to make yet another return to the world of discernment through online research. No Christian has a perfect knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith irrespective of what church they choose to worship in. But this unity can never be at the expense of the uncompromised purity of the Word of God.
The Wilderness Decade I haven't been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a restlessness which may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ's sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals. In many ways though I've been my own worst enemy. One by one I've had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian for instance I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently I've had to address the matter of my dress. For close on a decade I've been effectively addicted to designer sportswear including identity-concealing baseball caps, sweat shirts with giant logos, gaudily striped track suit bottoms and elaborately wrought training shoes. What's more I've continued to sport a stud in my left earlobe since coming to Christ, earrings themselves being widely believed to be associated with ancient pagan idolatry by some Christians. If my image fails to reflect a changed life, then I may be cheating others of the opportunity of coming to Christ through me, and that is a wicked thing to do. I think it's high time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be. Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name Christian.  In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I  favoured were causing me to have mild breathing difficulties. At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to enjoy being my natural dark-haired self after years of androgynous affectation...for throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties I effectively remained in a state of extended adolescence. As a result I took no real responsibility as a man in the purest sense of the word, which is to say as leader, provider, protector, etc. Instead, I opted for a variety of marginalised male personas, including man about town and dandy, Punk agitator, hellraising libertine, self-destructive genius, shadowy man of learning and so on ad nauseum...I've ditched them all as so much pretentious nonsense. And I thank God for being offered the chance to repent of them and the unholy chaos I caused by attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion.  Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion, but perhaps not to the same degree as my own poor generation, who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties. Who can say effect it had on us, this music tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification and for whom the nowness of the hipster was everything. But a music that was far more than mere music...a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that...a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. And yet, the rites of the Rock religion such as the embracing of excess of every kind while more widespread than ever before in modern history in the 1960s were far from new. Indeed, they can be traced back to Man's initial attempts at attaining spiritual ecstasy beyond the will of God. However, with regard to the modern world, it could be said that the true ancestor of Rock culture was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism. The notion of the artist as tormented genius at the vanguard of social revolution and eternally defiant of middle class restraint and respectability is widely believed to have originated among the Romantics. Although how true this is, it's impossible to say. The March of the Modern It was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who may have been the first to give expression to the notion of an artistic avant garde by asserting that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal avant garde emerged. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of young Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Theophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a great debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies, such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the dying days of the Revolution. They were the Rock 'n' Roll bad boys of their day.
 The first Bohemian wave eventually produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being around 1880, notably in Paris, where the so-called Decadent Spirit was born, whose most infamous fruit could be said to have been the novel "Against the Grain", an account of the sensation-seeking existence of a reclusive aristocrat Jean des Esseintes by Joris Karl Huysmans. However, the spirit of the avant garde arguably triumphed as never before through the Modernist movement, which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such masterpieces of innovation as Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913), T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922), James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as Serialism in music, and the ascent of Jazz which together with the moving picture industry formed the bedrock of Popular Culture.  One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant garde removed from its true spiritual home of Paris (via Germany and England), and then transformed into an international movement of cataclysmic power and influence. When it comes to Modernism as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, some critics trace its roots to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it. Others go even further back into the depths of Western history for its origins, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity. What is certain is that the contemporary West has reached the very limits of the Modern Revolution, and one of the results of its having done so as I see it is the mass acceptance of revolutionary beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant garde; especially with regard to traditional Christian morality. This process could be said to have accelerated to breakneck speed around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further frenetic increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This coincided with the growth of the Hippie counterculture. The eclectic art of Rock went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions influenced variously by Classical music, Jazz, Folk, and other pre-Rock music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of. Much of this influence was rightly perceived by many who continued to value the Christian fabric of Western society to be wholly detrimental. From its inception in fact Rock became one of the supreme bete noirs of traditional Evangelicals, and it remains so today, although many of these would sooner be seen as Fundamentalists. I myself fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made me feel feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in my possession, even though I'd long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then, whether in the shape of Metal, Punk, Goth, Grunge or whatever.  However, by the summer of 2003 my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour's worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my father Pat for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend, but these were as far from Hard Rock as it's possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.  The songs, some new, some reworkings of old tunes of mine, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontined, and were generally well-received despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he's a trained musician who's been a professional since the age of 9, where I'm just a primitive with an ear for a pretty tune.    Then a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of a popular standards album featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes as well as his own London Swingtette as they became known. In the summer of 2007, the master was finally created with arrangements by John Smith, and the title "A Taste of Summer Wine" given it in honour of the much loved long-running situation comedy "Last of the Summer Wine". This was due to the fact that Jim's playing had long been featured on the programme, which'd been orchestrated by Ronnie Hazelhurst, who sadly died late last year, and Pat had served as leader for the show for some time. In Spring 2008, the CD finally came to fruition after three and a quarter years of gestation. A few months later, the writing project "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child" followed suit.  This experimental memoir "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child" is the first literary project of mine I'm pretty well 100% certain won't end up being dumped in some dustbin, or deleted. The truth is that soon after becoming a Christian I destroyed most of what I'd written up until that point. For a time I wrote quite contentedly in a new Christian spirit until it seems that the Lord put an end to my ability to do so without experiencing extreme spiritual difficulties, as if I was being suffused through with a terrible leaden sense of darkness which had a special effect on my eyes. In consequence I consistently ended up shredding or dumping anything I put to paper until finally in about 1998 I more or less abandoned creative writing altogether. Although there were periodic attempts to return to it. As I mentioned earlier, my writing throughout the '90s reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that'd held me spellbound prior to my conversion, and that's especially true of the occult. It's my belief that my early Christian writings glorified these phenomena despite a false warning tone which served as a cloak for my true motives. Furthermore, some of these mixed truth and fiction to produce a deceptive hybrid. God requires that all those who take the name of Christian adhere to absolute truth to the very best of their ability. Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear to me that I was sufficiently mature to be able to write again, and I tentatively started publishing pieces at the Blogster website with the first autobiographical one being written sometime around the spring of 2006. With his 53rd birthday now behind him, this Rock'n' Roll child as old as the music itself born on the day of the infamous Six Gallery reading in San Franciso and rescued in 1993, is putting the last touches to a labour of love which has taken him nearly three years to achieve. For anyone still reading...thank you for your patience with my work and its poor fool of a creator dear devoted friend, I salute you, you are a treasure indeed.                                                                                                                             Photos: 2001?-2006?                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The Final Links: http://writers-voice.com/ABCDE/C/Carl_Halling_a_spiritual_narrative_part_one.htm http://helium.com/user/show/21804 www.churchGuides.com/authors.asp?authorid=7574 http://hubpages.com/profile/Carl Halling http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Carl_Halling http://carlrhalling.blog.com/ http://storywrite.com/user/show/Carl%20Halling http://memberdirectory.aol.co.uk/aoluk/badge?sn=carlhalling http://greatwriting.co.uk http://abctales.com/user/carl-halling http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=154907 http://carlhalling.wordpress.com/ http://bebo.com/CarlH057 http://profiles.friendster.com/carlhalling http://bebo.com/carlhalling http://360.yahoo.com/my_profile-ZxWnk9MmeqpXrjCjJfsU8yw-;_ylt=Agcoz5ue8m9zC.DYt24IMlusAOJ3?cq=1 http://faithwriters.com/member-profile.php?id=21417 http://www.bebo.com/CarlH057 http://profiles.yahoo.com/wally70uk http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/user_id/carlhalling http://www.wayn.com/waynprofile.html?member_key=9909126 http://carlhalling.qassia.com/ http://showreelsuk.co.uk/networx/CarlRobertHalling http://etribes.com/carlhalling http://www.who-remembers-me.com/?page=viewprofile&popup=1&uid=1730563 http://hi5.com/friend/profile/displaySameProfile.do?userid=201192265 http://www.godlinked.com/profile/CarlHalling http://authonomy.com