Write it down, and it outlives you

Jimmy Carr tells a story about why we have all heard of Gregorian chants.

Pope Gregory goes round the local churches and hears every one singing the songs differently. He tells the bishops to write the music down. They say music cannot be written down. It is from another realm. He says: "Here's the thing. I'm the Pope. Write it down."

Carr tells it to make a point about comedy. His business has too much magical thinking, he says. People say a comic just has funny bones. No. They are jokes, and knowing how they work does not spoil them.

I loved the story, so I looked it up.

Gregory died in 604. The church had no way to write music down then. That came about two hundred years later. The story that he gathered the chants was first written about 270 years after he died. Then it grew. In the old pictures a dove, the Holy Spirit, sings the chants into his ear and a scribe takes them down.

So a story against magical thinking is itself magical thinking.

And it reached Jimmy Carr more than a thousand years later for one reason. Somebody wrote it down.