Shakers

If you live in Swansea and you’re serious about paint, then Rabart in Gendros is the place for you.  Llanelli may be Tinopolis, but Rabart is the metropolis of paint tins.  It has thousands of them, stacked high with every type and colour of paint you might feel a desire for.  You don’t need to have a PhD in Paint, or even be in paint-buying mode, to gain pleasure from walking the endless aisles of tins.  As you wander your mind turns to all kinds of paint-related thoughts: for example, the ingenuity of those tasked with inventing names for new paint shades: lobster, roast macadamia, school house white, elephant’s breath, dead salmon, mole’s breath.

The reason we’re here, I have to admit, is to buy paint.  But not in any simple way.  We need to have paints mixed for us.  This is a relatively simple process, but it depends on the use of two expensive machines.  The first – I forget to ask its name – is used to inject the base paint with paint of a different shade in order to create a mixture, of a third, subtly different shade.  It’s a surgical operation, and the machine has a hospital air to it.

Then comes the exciting bit.  The tin with the two mixed paints is transferred to a second machine.  This time I do enquire what its name is.  Behind the counter the first paintman isn’t certain, but his colleague tells me they just refer to it as The Shaker.

In its belly The Shaker has a window, so that you can see exactly what happens.  The paintman inserts the tin of paint to be treated.  The powerful arms of the machine grasp it in a firm embrace.  Then the shaking starts.  The tin jerks up and down, in a violent and rhythmical spasm, like teenagers bopping on an Ibiza dance floor.  The two paints throb, romp, vibrate and bounce, until their molecules end up totally blended.  Finally, after a few minutes, the machine relents, and the paint, released from its Dionysian ecstasy, can relax in its new, intermingled state.

Watching this little scene of frenzy, you can’t help search for human equivalents to the excited paint.  The first, and most obvious parallel is mass religious enthusiasm.  The Shaker’s direct counterpart is the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, known by outsiders as the Shakers.  It was a millenarian sect founded in the north of England around the middle of the eighteenth century, as a splinter group from the Quakers.  Its members soon emigrated to the United States, a more hospitable home for their beliefs, which included pacifism, a communal and simple style of living, and equality between the sexes. They also favoured celibacy, which probably didn’t help their chances of survival (today there’s only one Shaker village left).  Shaker meetings featured marching, singing and dancing, and celebrants twitched, jerked and shouted. Early meetings were ‘loud, chaotic and emotional’.

Wales had its own religious Dionysiacs, the Jumpers.  They were the followers of Calvinistic Methodist preachers, particularly in Cardiganshire and north-west Wales, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – men like Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris.  John Wesley reported in 1763 that in Llan-y-crwys, Carmarthenshire,

Some of them leaped up many times, men and women, several feet from the ground. They clapped their hands with the utmost violence; they shook their heads; they distorted all their features; they threw their arms and legs to and fro in all variety of postures; they sang, roared, shouted, screamed with all their might to the no small terror of those that were near them.

Tourists visiting Wales also found the Jumpers worthy of mention.  Since most of them were ‘rational’ Anglicans, they disapproved of what they saw and heard, and bemoaned the ‘weak and vulgar minds’ of those who succumbed.  Welsh Anglicans, like Theophilus Jones, were equally critical.  Jones wrote in 1796:

Men and women, indiscriminately, cry and laugh, jump and sing, with the wildest extravagance. That their dress becomes deranged, or the hair dishevelled, is no longer an object of attention – and their raptures continue, till, spent with fatigue of mind and body, the women are frequently carried out in a state of apparent insensibility.

Of course there are many non-religious forms of shaking.  ‘The shakes’ often afflict those fighting a fever, or an addiction to alcohol or other drugs.  And there’s the age-old association with popular music.  Bill Haley’s ‘Shake, rattle and roll’ was just the latest in a long line of ‘shaking’ lyrics.  My own favourite is ‘Shake ’em on down’ by Bukka White, recorded in Chicago in 1937, just a couple of months before he was locked up in the notorious Parchman Farm penitentiary.  Shaking in such songs usually carried sexual connotations – except in songs that were bowdlerised, as Haley’s was.

But before I can think of more shaking connections, the mixed-up paint is payed for and handed over to us, and we say farewell to the paintmen.