Varieties of Unreligious Experience

Enigma of the Hour

2009-11-17T23:32:00.008-05:00

Never underestimate London's ability to surprise you. It only takes a little trick of the autumn light to transform, say, Stroudley Walk, E3, into, say, pre-War Turin, on a Sunday evening, or perhaps a Monday morning.

Oh, my dear readers, the light of London will astonish you: subfusc overhead, golden on the ground, with the raking beam of the sun askance. There are a million such metamorphoses on offer in the city. Presently it is almost five in the morning; there is no light outside, only the heavy winds, making the casements chatter. Still, a long shadow is cast before me on the piazza: a metaphysical entity. On the third of December, that is, in a little over two weeks, my son is going to be hacked out of my wife, and into my life. This sort of fact tends to stick in the mind when you'd rather be writing, or sleeping.

My sister brought over her son's cot, no longer needed. It has been put together, and sits at the end of the bed, with garish toys, a cage, waiting. I am reminded of my childhood, when we were to embark on a holiday, en famille, perhaps to Italy, say, to Turin: the plane would be leaving at nine in the morning, and I would have packed the night before, leaving only the toothbrush out for my early ablution. I would sleep unsoundly, or not at all, for I'd be imagining the trip to come, and the bedroom would be in a state of disarray, all undone in anticipation: reordered and unfinished, suspended. To leave my bed, my house, my street, where I'd grown up, even for a week in the sun, seemed an enormous displacement, and already in the dawn taxi to Heathrow, shooting west through the strange wastes of Hounslow on the M4, long shadows before us, I would be seized with the desire to be home again. Do you remember these emotions? This melancholy of limbo, this bating of the breath?

Rothschild

2009-07-31T16:50:00.005-04:00

Mrs Roth, it seems, has been harbouring a boy. We saw it there on the screen, between his legs, sticking nonchalantly out, not a care in the world: horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. We can't be certain, said the woman; it could be a large clitoris. But there was no mistaking that member. His name, come four months, will be Owen. Owen Roth, 'tis a handsome name, is it not?

Alexandra Park, crépuscule

2009-07-21T17:38:00.013-04:00

I had been cooped all day at the Library. When I got home, against the night, I was restless, walkative. To see a place in the dark. Alas, so few places will be dark in the city, what with all the sodium lampadaires. Nothing is handsome in dun orange, nothing promissory. One has to find a natural darkness to obtain the possibility of promise. This can be achieved even in daylight. I had found it in the blank corridors and walkways in the weekend shadow of Tower 42; in the hard cavern under the Westway as it crosses Wood Lane, the sun overhead making the dark more spectral and unreal, a gasmasked youth spraying a wall—I had not courage enough to take a picture—and also beside Old Billingsgate, under a rickety jetty beneath Water Lane, at low tide, beyond the comfort of tourists, where the shingle gave way to debris, sand, quick and fungal underfoot, and the river lapped insouciantly at my shoes.

But at night, a natural darkness is found only in the city's parks. Someday after midnight, jump a gate at Regent's Park, cross the boating lake, walk out onto the broad grasses to the north, where we played cricket at school, walk until the trees around the lake are black masses far behind, and the trees edging the Zoo are black masses far ahead. There is no comparable space in London, locked alone in the Park, the sky and the earth differentiated only in shade.

I did not have the benefit of Regent's Park within walking distance. So I made for Alexandra Park, only ten minutes from my door—a space dominated by the palace at the top of the hill, but concealing a reasonable variety within its borders. It was not yet twilight. My path is always through the development, the New River Village. This is, of course, not a village. It is not even like a village. It is a series of contemporary apartment blocks in the young professional style: featureless surfaces, glass, lots of white, a few stilts, empty mock-modernist sculpture, awkward angles, sad stretches of grass, plastic windows and balconies in lime green and purple. They've added a gym and a minuscule art gallery, and built a restaurant into the old canal pumphouse, but still the place has no life. The whole very much resembles an architect's drawing, the sort you see on billboards outside construction-sites. There are a lot of these in the city. I am glad to have one here, at the edge of the park, to cleanse the palate. Walk five minutes into the Village, alongside the canal if you like, or on the tricky pavement shingle, and you are no longer in the redbrick Edwardian wastes of North London. You curve around the back of the Village, and find the old council houses of the Campsbourne Estate, and facing them the reservoir, a dilapidated playground, and then, the entrance to the park.

The reservoir, in fact, is one of the park's secret attractions. Along the eastern edge of the slope down from the palace, hidden by trees. There are three openings to it, from the path (above) that leads up to Bedford Road on the hill.

Each of these latent ways leads to a viewpoint onto the reservoir. I stopped at each, methodically. A man was walking his collies, allowing each off the leash in turn, to yap and frolic, each returning, conscientiously, in a few moments, to restraint, as would I, soon enough. I had a decent shot of a giant slug, the light was still enough, just.

When I first came walking here, I was delighted to find these viewpoints furnished, behind the railings, with wooden frames, against which one can rest to look at the reservoir, and luxuriant with quisquilian foliage. I have long felt an affection for reservoirs, as against ponds and lakes, say those of the Heath. Man finds the basic forms of nature and recreates them; in the process those forms are made meaningful. Pyramids and temples gave purpose and meaning to the mountain, houses gave meaning to the cave, canals to the river, and so reservoirs to the lake. The reservoir is not as grand or impressive as the lake, but it is more significant. It refuses to be beautiful or pretty; rather, its beauty springs from the possibility of meaning.

The other great aesthetic appeal of a reservoir is its privacy. As part of the industrial landscape, you can only ever approach a reservoir, observe it through a fence or other barrier. You can never grasp the meaning of the water, and so never exhaust it. In this taste I find a reflex in myself of the ancient love of order, of hierarchy: the devout kept from the tabernacle. Better to have mystery, the awe of the invisible—subterranean, mechanical, hieratic—than to be left with an open society, bright surfaces, transparency. In such a city, nobody could experience a pleasure like this, a sublime profanation.

The new reservoir buildings, above, completed this year, are a great disappointment. The ideal reservoir architecture is castellar, like the Edwardian turrets around Lockwood, or the brute concrete hulk (1955) on Siward's Howe, north of York. These are dismal, plastic barns, with bathetic curving roofs, which might have housed a furniture superstore out on the M1. I remember these structures still as skeletons, incomplete. Then they were terrific. Now they dilute and spoil the oppressive intimacy of the landscape.

The sun finally set for good, 8.46 pm, behind another wall of trees ringing the pitches. Let the trees be dull, let the grass be dull, let the barn and stands be dull. Let us seek an aesthetic equipollence in the twilight. I find this an underrated mood. It is a shame, for the city, all cities, excel particularly in it. I hurry up the hill, approaching the palace from the east, through the rose garden—prim and clipped, as you would expect, so as to balance out the lower slopes. In the gloom I can see the inglory of North London spread out into the distance. 7.8 miles away, One Canada Square, the tallest building in the city, but soon to be usurped from this throne, winks sadly at me, as if in acknowledgement of impending senescence. The bus passes, empty, a lit cell passing up to Muswell Hill, through the unsung park. The dusk allows the palace none of the sham magnificence it enjoys during the day, leaving it shabby, ungainly, not sure what to do with itself, and so melancholy, magnificent. It is not beautiful, not like the other Victorian follies, and this cannot be disguised by pointing a camera cleverly. And so it has the park it deserves; or the park has the palace it deserves. The authenticity is commendable.

Returning to Hornsey, down the western slopes, this was as close as I could come to the cricket fields of Regent's Park. The camera would not serve the scene, but you have the idea. The far lights of Wood Green add and detract in equal measure. It is a fair walk, not cold, and there is food on the table, and work still to be done. I do not count the two hours in my log of strolls; I saw nothing new, but only newly the old. The one is material to be memorised; the other, to be cherished and remembered.

Shakespeare at Charlecote Park

2009-07-16T16:05:00.014-04:00

Since Mrs Roth got out of hospital, I have been reading her Baron Munchausen. The first time I read this, I made the mistake of using one of the many modern bastardised editions—my copy had Ronald Searle illustrations, with a short but hyperbolic introduction by S. J. Perelman—but this time I returned to something like the original text, in a Dover reprint with the Doré plates. (The chapters are a little rearranged, but the prose is much the same.) Munchausen, written in English by a German, Raspe, and first published in 1785, is rife with grammatical peculiarities. When the Baron is posted to keep the Sultan's bees, his duties are

to drive the Sultan's bees every morning to their pasture grounds, to attend them all the day long, and against night to drive them back to their hives.

'Against night'? That Middle English idiom was long dead; the OED's latest citation is Stansby's 1634 Malory, and before that, Lord Berners' archaising 1523 version of Froissart. Raspe, of course, knew it as good current German idiom—gegen Abend, 'as the evening approaches'. Raspe also seems to have had difficulty with preterites: 'In an instant I took my gun from the corner, run down stairs, and out in such a hurry. . .', 'My ball had missed them, yet the foremost pig only run away. . .' The third edition, much expanded, makes the same mistake: 'while the whale was running away with the ship she sprung a leak'. But this expansion, which contains most of the material plundered by Terry Gilliam for his film, was written by a different hand: the anonymous hack paid to continuate Raspe's adventures perpetuated his solecisms as well.

The modern reader who has already heard a few of the Munchausen tales will be startled by the casual brutality of the original narrative. A fox is literally flogged out of its skin, a wolf eats its way through a horse's body and becomes trapped in the carcase, another horse has its rear end dissevered by a falling portcullis, and keeps on running nonetheless—in the continuation, the Baron nonchalantly slaughters 'several thousand' polar bears:

I had heard an old army surgeon say a wound in the spine was instant death. I now determined to try the experiment, and had again recourse to my knife, with which I struck the largest in the back of the neck, near the shoulders, but under great apprehensions, not doubting but the creature would, if he survived the stab, tear me to pieces. However, I was remarkably fortunate, for he fell dead at my feet without making the least noise. I was now resolved to demolish them every one in the same manner, which I accomplished without the least difficulty; for although they saw their companions fall, they had no suspicion of either the cause or the effect. When they all lay dead before me, I felt myself a second Samson, having slain my thousands.

Clearly, this is not a book most parents will want to read to their children. Later, the Baron finds himself with King David's sling in his pocket, and uses it to extricate his friends from a pickle. This episode gives rise to a digression on the sling. "You wish (I can see by your countenances) I would inform you how I became possessed of such a treasure as the sling just mentioned. (Here facts must be held sacred.)" (The insistence on probity and accuracy had been a motif of the outrageous fable since Lucian's True History; at the start of Baron Munchausen, the Baron's fidelity is testified at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's seat, 'in the absence of the Lord Mayor', by Sinbad, Aladdin and Gulliver.) In this digression, the history of the sling intersects with another body of folklore:

One of its possessors, my great-great-great-grandfather, who lived about two hundred and fifty years ago, was upon a visit to England, and became intimate with a poet who was a great deer-stealer; I think his name was Shakespeare: he frequently borrowed this sling, and with it killed so much of Sir Thomas Lucy's venison, that he narrowly escaped the fate of my two friends at Gibraltar. Poor Shakespeare was imprisoned, and my ancestor obtained his freedom in a very singular manner. Queen Elizabeth was then on the throne, but grown so indolent, that every trifling matter was a trouble to her; dressing, undressing, eating, drinking, and some other offices which shall be nameless, made life a burden to her; all these things he enabled her to do without, or by a deputy! and what do you think was the only return she could prevail upon him to accept for such eminent services? setting Shakespeare at liberty! Such was his affection for that famous writer, that he would have shortened his own days to add to the number of his friend's.

Ho ho ho, said the reader of 1786, by which time the Bard's reputation had been solidified; the literate gentleman knew this bit of lore, Shakespeare the Deer-Stealer, quite well. It was Rowe, in the seminal biography he prefixed to his 1709 edition of the Works, who had given the story popular currency:

[The young Will Shakespeare] had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag'd him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong'd to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho' this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig'd to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.

Exciting, eh? The Greatest Writer of all Time™ began life as a mischievous rebel: not wicked, just naughty enough for a little frisson of insubordinacy. Mort aux vaches, indeed. Only last week was I browsing my little 1903 octavo of the Essays of Douglas Jerrold, Bard enthusiast and author of the bizarre satire, 'Shakespeare in China', when I chanced across his prose vignette, 'Shakespeare at Charlecote Park'.

One of the culprits was specially distinguished from his companions, more by the perfect beauty of his face than by the laughing unconcern that shone in it. He seemed about twenty-two years of age, of somewhat more than ordinary stature, his limbs combining gracefulness of form with manly strength. . . And as he doffed his hat to a fair head that looked mournfully at him from an upper casement, his broad forehead bared out from his dark curls in surpassing power and amplitude. It seemed a tablet writ with a new world.

Shakespeare's escape, here as in Munchausen, is obscure: "The servants rushed to the cellar—but the birds were flown. How they effected their escape remaineth to this day a mystery, though it cannot be disguised that heavy suspicion fell upon four of the maids." And as with Munchausen, Jerrold insists that the story was corroborated, in this case by one 'John-a-Combes'.

The legend has become something of a totem or shibboleth among Shakespeare scholars. Thus Sam Schoenbaum, one of the most influential of the poet's biographers, dismisses it as 'a picturesque relation deriving, one expects, from local Stratford lore passed on to Rowe's informant, the actor Betterton'. Schoenbaum notes that Lucy had no park at Charlecote until 1618, two years after Shakespeare's death; the apparent evidence of a pregnant pun in The Merry Wives of Windsor is dismissed as a coincidence, and not much of one.

One wonders if the legend might not have originated in Stratford long after The Merry Wives of Windsor was written and its author dead, among locals who read the play, recollected jests about luces and louses, and interpreted the passage in accordance with their own resentment against a powerful neighbourhood family.

"Time plays tricks," he concludes, sounding for a moment like a smug Iain Sinclair; "events merge." But he does not deny the story's romantic appeal, quoting Sir Thomas's descendant, Alice Fairfax-Lucy: "If it were ever authoritatively disproved, children of the future would be deprived of something that for centuries has made the poet live for them." And he allows that certain respectable scholars, including A. L. Rowse, give the tale credence.

René Weis, a Romantic at heart, when he came to write his own Shakespeare biography a few years ago, concluded that there wasn't much of interest still to be said on the subject, unless one simply accepted all the stories ever told about the Bard. What if. . . ? It is an original approach, in this sceptical age, to be sure. And a fun book. Weis has an entire chapter, not unexpectedly, on the Deer-Stealer. This passage is typical of the book:

Though its credibility has been repeatedly impugned, this is the only account with roots reaching back into the seventeenth century to offer any explanation for Shakespeare's abandonment of his wife and family. At the very least it has the authority of a written source with links as far back as Shakespeare's lifetime, and unless there is a reason to think that Rowe, and with him Betterton and, possibly, Davenant, aimed to mislead posterity, there is no good reason to distrust Rowe.

The argument from authority comes into its own on the next page:

Rowe had no interest in making up a scabrous piece of gossip. It is worth remembering that the greatest Shakespeare scholar and antiquarian of the nineteenth century, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sidney Lee, the author a classic essay [sic] on Shakespeare in the original DNB, both admired and trusted Rowe.

We should trust Rowe's story, not for any intrinsic plausibility, but because two scholars of a century later admired his moral character. Sure, it's preposterous, but what else was Weis going to make of the afternoon he'd spent reading O H-P and Sidney Lee? About the deer, Weis has clearly done his homework, but his evidence never rises above the fabulously circumstantial. True, there was no deer park at Charlecote until 1618, but

There was certainly a warren, with plenty of game in it for hunting, including hare, pheasants and roe deer—the roes of Charlecote may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe' in Taming of the Shrew. . . As a game reserve, the Lucys' warren was patrolled by several gamekeepers; they were there for a purpose, and perhaps one of them arrested the young Shakespeare.

Weis does himself a disservice with all this hedging. Let our leaps be unbridled! Let our baseless assertions at least be made with some deuced conviction, like in the good old days! Damn it man, the roes of Charlecote were in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote 'fleeter than the roe'; a gamekeeper at Lucy's warren did arrest the young Shakespeare. And he was subsequently freed when an old Monkhouse solved an itchy problem for Good Queen Bess. If we would embrace a legendary of Shakespeare, the latter story is as good as the first. No, better. We live in a gelded age, my friends. Munchausen is now only ever by proxy. We no longer have tall tales; only lies, and historians.

Malcesine

2009-06-07T18:26:00.012-04:00

Anthony Sutcliffe's London: An Architectural History (2006) is a useful book, if rather odd in some respects. Useful for providing a reasonable discussion of a wide range of buildings, both well and less known, and comprehensively illustrated. Odd for the sudden outbursts of scorn ornamenting its general level of dispassion. For instance, Sutcliffe interrupts a review of Victorian public architecture for a rant against the 'Outright Bad Design' of R. L. Roumieu, labelling him 'the McGonagall of London design'. He sneers at Roumieu's often admired Dutch façades on De Beauvoir Square as 'crude Tudor detailing', and labels the architect's masterpiece, 33-35 Eastcheap, 'grotesque' and 'brutal'. (Incidentally, Ian Nairn does not 'condemn' the work, as Wiki claims; if you were familiar with the rhythms of that critic's thought, you would not reach that judgement of this passage—

Victorian wildness can come from half a dozen causes, from mere fashion to cantankerousness. But this is truly demoniac, an Edgar Allen Poe of a building. It is the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare. Like Poe, and unlike Horace Walpole or a modern detective novel, the horror is no game. Acutely pointed arches shrink away in front of the windows, the wall shrinks back in half a dozen varieties of terrified chamfer. Demolition is in the air; but it must be preserved—not as an oddity, but as a basic part of human temperament, and one which doesn't often get translated into architecture.)

So Sutcliffe has some character as a critic, even if he is no Nairn. But more interesting than Sutcliffe's quirks of taste is his candid reflection of his—our—age. From the introduction:

It is now difficult to go inside most London buildings. Churches have been a problem for many years, but since 11 September 2001 security and general suspicion have made matters worse. My 'Stop and Search' by a City policeman near the Monument was entirely courteous and indeed informative but it took thirty minutes, by which time the light had gone. I often shied away from encounters with security staff and other employees.

Sutcliffe's eye is therefore not the omniscient lens that one expects from an art-book; it is human and frail, clinging unabashed to chance and contingency. This was the real surprise of the book, and at moments the real pleasure. It means bizarre photographs like this one, transposing the glorious red brick of St Pancras to a wintry 1960s Moscow:

Elsewhere, a shot of the Caledonian Market clock tower is captioned: 'The threatening sky emerged mysteriously when this picture was developed.' Security paranoia, meanwhile, reaches its peak in the caption to a glorious old aerial panorama of Pentonville Prison: 'The author did not dare photograph the prison at a time of great tension.' This isn't at all ridiculous; stories abound. A notorious instance occurred two months ago, when an Austrian tourist was approached by two coppers (or possibly PCSOs, as one blogger has observed) and made to delete his photographs of double-decker buses and a modern bus-station, because taking pictures of London transport allegedly contravened some anti-terror legislation. There is indeed a seeping fume of suspicion, and it did not immediately follow 9/11, nor even the London bombings of 2005.

I myself, who take pictures every Sunday on my walks, have only encountered narrowed eyes once, and not those of the Met. I was up in Walthamstow—not far from where the Austrian tourists were shanghaied—examining the Town Hall, which I can't quite decide if I like. It does at least have a fine interior, and a full complement of chunky mid-century relief sculpture on the fronting columns:

Anyway, there I was, camera in hand, in the blazing light of day, the stone so bright my eyes were beginning to hurt, when a middle-aged Carribean woman approached me and asked 'if she could help me'. She was not, of course, asking if she could help. Her tone allowed no doubt: she meant, You do not belong here, please leave. This was officialdom shaking its suspicious stick. Nonetheless, she had, strictly speaking, asked if she could help me. I replied that I would love a cup of tea. She was not moved. What did I want here? I pointed at the building—a fine specimen, isn't it, I exclaimed with a false jollity. In retrospect, I should have taken a photograph of her, there and then. But she continued to watch me darkly until I sidled off, admittedly content with the pictures I had. I felt the thrill of having rubbed up against genuine oppression, but also a disappointment at the mildness, the tameness, of said oppression.

There is a historical precedent for all this. On September 13, 1786, a 37 year-old Goethe, in the course of his Italian tour, and in the face of strong winds on the road, stopped at Malcesine, near Verona in northern Italy. The next morning he went to visit the town's old castle; he sat on a step next to a locked gate, and began drawing the castle's tower. As he sat, people began to appear, until at last

one man came up to me, not of the best appearance, and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was sketching the old tower, as a memento of Malcesine. Thereupon he said that this was not allowed, and I should stop it. This he said in the common Venetian tongue, so that I really could hardly understand him, and so I answered that I could not understand him. Then he seized my paper with a true Italian Gelassenheit [best translated into Anglo-French: somewhere between sangfroid, nonchalance, and désinvolture], tore it up, and left it lying on my board.

The podestà, magistrate, is fetched, and asks Goethe why he is sketching the Festung or fortress; the young wag replies ich dieses Gemäuer nicht für eine Festung anerkenne, 'I don't credit these mere walls as a fortress'—'I prompted him and the crowd to consider the ruination of this tower and these walls, the lack of a gate, in short, the defencelessness of the entire situation, and assured him that I thought myself to be seeing and drawing nothing but a ruin.' Then comes the key passage:

Someone answered me: If it be only a ruin, what about it could then appear worthy of consideration? I replied very anfractuously, seeking time and favour, that they knew how many tourists wanted to travel to Italy purely for the ruins—that Rome, capital of the world, laid waste by the barbarians, remained full of ruins, which were sketched hundreds and hundreds of times—and that not everything from antiquity had been so well preserved as the amphitheatre at Verona, which I hoped to see soon as well.

Thus: Romanticism. The scene at Malcesine is suddenly transformed from an irrelevant squabble into a dramatised conflict between the aesthete, with his love of mediaeval ruins, and civic authority, which sees the fortress not as a beautiful work of architecture, but only as a site of political significance. It is observed to Goethe that the tower marks the boundary-line between the territories of Venice and the Emperor's Kaiserstaat, und deshalb nicht ausspioniert werden solle, and therefore ought not to be spied upon. The Italians worry that Goethe is an agent of Joseph II, a 'restless' man. Our hero replies that he is in fact from Frankfurt and in no thrall to the Emperor; a local Malcesinesco named Gregorio steps in and everything is sorted out, but not before Goethe gets a chance to practice his Italian, waxing lyrical to the throng on the desolate glamour of the scene at hand. (Goethe was not in fact arrested, as Wiki claims. Apparently that famous website is not always accurate.)

The 1786 story neatly mirrors today's clashes between photographic scurriers, their eyes out for the beautiful, the delapidated, the unexpected, the recondite, the fascinatively hideous; and local officials who can understand the urban landscape merely in terms of its civic and political function. Deviance, no matter how undeviant when seen in the context of culture or history, must be barred and debilitated.

[Update 05/07/09: I am stopped outside Crystal Palace station, during a routine Sunday stroll, by cops with sniffer dogs. Somehow, mirabile dictu, the hounds fail to detect the sizeable quantities of smack and blow stashed under both my oxters. Despite my (apparent) innocence, the officer requests my name, date of birth and address. 'Routine procedure, sir.' I ask if I am compelled by law to give my details, and he admits that I am not, but then tries to trick me. 'And what did you say your name was again, sir?' Could he not tell by my very voice that I am not one of his usual subjects, blasted and dupeable, with plenty to hide? He speaks into his walkie-talkie, in an attempt to intimidate me. I confess that I was a little intimidated. But I did not give. Still, at last—a police encounter with real menace! Another authentic London experience to cross off the To Do list. Jellied eels next week, cum liquore.]

fauteuil de nuages

2009-06-03T19:03:00.003-04:00

It is a little disconcerting, although perhaps appropriate, gruesomely, to our atomised age, to learn of a friend's death via Wikipedia. I had not seen Stanley around the Library recently, and a month ago he was doing very poorly; he had been in hospital, and was sluggish of moment, suddenly his age—eighty-three—after years, presumably decades, of sprightliness. He said that he felt it was the end, but I thought this simply a figure of speech. He said he would come to dinner, sample my wife's cooking; but now that will have to wait. Neither the Times nor any of its competitors seem to have run an obituary, which saddens me. It is not mine to write here. But I will remember fondly his widescreen disdain for almost everything: for A. S. Byatt, 'the big armchair', for Iain Sinclair, who 'insists on starting all his sentences with 'And'', for a play, for a poem, for all the poseurs of today's avant-garde. I was touched that he always expressed a warmth for me, taking me by the arm when we parted. For the last two years, when I knew him, he spent his days doing not much of anything at the Library, just reading, whatever came to hand, under his enormous beard, free.

Squaquarinellus

2009-05-31T16:28:00.015-04:00

In Book 21 of Teofilo Folengo's Baldus (1517), a spoof epic in macaronic hexameters—that is, half Latin, half Italian, the latter frequently provincial—the eponymous hero and his friends find themselves in battle with a dragon or serpent (anguis, serpens, draco, drago, dragus, according to taste); finally, after one warrior rides its back and punches it to the ground, on the verge of death, it transforms into a formosa putina. . . cui nomen Smiralda fuit, de gente luparum, a beautiful girl by name of Smiralda, of the race of she-wolves. Falchetto, the dog-man leading the attack on the dragon, is about to duff Smiralda up too, but she entreats him:

Talibus ingannans, Falchettum porca carezzat
barbozzoque eius digitis putanella duobus
fat squaquarinellum, velut est ars vera piandi,
sive carezzandi menchiones atque dapocos. (ll. 446-449)

The putanella, little whore, fat squaquarinellum eius barbozzo duobus digitis: she does something to his chin [barbozzo in dialect, see here] with two fingers. The poem's recent translator, Ann Mullaney, renders the passage:

Tricking him with such words, the pig caresses Falchetto; the little whore takes his chin between two fingers and gives it a small tug, in accordance with the true art of getting and stroking dolts and low-lifes.

In Emilio Faccioli's 1989 translation into modern Italian, this squaquarinellus is given as 'con due dita gli va titillando il barbozzo'. Folengo's own phrase derives from the Mantuan idiom far squaquarin, which Cherubini paraphrases as far vezzi, that is, 'to fondle, caress, flatter'. The word seems to come in turn from the verb squaquarare, which appears three times in the poem: 1.144, 7.437, and 24.39, translated variously 'to sport', 'to live it up', and 'to soak up', where Cherubini offers ciarlare (to chat) and gozzovigliare (to carouse). The more usual meaning is 'to soften, quicken, loosen', also 'to shit, blurt out, reveal a secret', with connotations of both diarrhoea and soft cheese, two Dalinian motifs that occur throughout the poem.

At any rate, it strikes me that Smiralda's chin-pulling alludes to the well-known gesture made by Thetis when entreating Zeus at Iliad 1.501: she dexiterēi d' ar' hup' anthereōnos helousa, takes hold of his chin from below with her right hand, while at 8.371 Athena reports that Thetis ellabe cheiri geneiou, grasped [Zeus'] chin with her hand. (Compare 10.454, where the Trojan spy Dolon is about to do the same to Diomedes.) This gesture is illustrated in Ingres' rather garish and ungainly early painting:

Samuel Butler, in a notorious 1892 lecture arguing for the poem's female authorship, remarks, à propos of this passage, that 'it is still a common Italian form of salutation to catch people by the chin. Twice during the last summer I have been so seized in token of affectionate greeting, once by a lady and once by a gentleman.' Butler's holiday reminiscences aside, Thetis is not making the gesture as an 'affectionate greeting'—she is indicating her suppliancy. For Walter Leaf, who, like Butler, translated the Iliad, with a little help from his friends, the action suggests a beaten warrior who 'can only clasp his enemy's legs to hamper him, and turn aside his face so that he cannot see to aim the final blow, until he has at least heard the prayer for mercy'. R. B. Onians, in his fantastical Origins of European Thought (1951), disputes Leaf's interpretation, arguing that the chin (geneios), like the knee (gonu), is related to genus and generation: 'this would also explain why the chin, as if holy in the same way as the knee, was clasped by the Greek suppliant'.

Folengo's Smiralda, whose name has already been misheard as Smerdola two hundred lines earlier, is not humbly entreating Falchetto. Her gesture is instead ironic, a two-fingered teasing or chucking of the chin, softening Falchetto's heart and brain: a solicitative trollop, Thetis in burlesque.

Intercision

2009-05-24T20:46:00.015-04:00

Imagine you're a harmless drudge. You've been assigned the task of scouring the works of Sir Thomas Browne for new words, or new uses of old words, or antedatings, and so you sit in your bright-lit windowless cubicle, poring over Urne Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus, and then it's on to Religio Medici, and finally the Vulgar Errors. In the last of these, not quite as lexically fecund as the other works, you stumble on this:

What therefore may consist with history, by cessation of Oracles with Montacutius we may understand their intercision, not abscission or consummate desolation; their rare delivery, not total dereliction, and yet in regard of divers Oracles, we may speak strictly, and say there was a proper cessation.

You have little understanding of what it means, since you are only a humble word-spotter. And the word you spot, in this case, is intercision. You check your lists, and those of your colleagues; nothing yet. The word, whatever it means, is contrasted with 'consummate desolation', so it must mean something less than a complete destruction, and it must correspond in some degree to 'rare delivery'. More than that is hard to say. You check Cockeram, who says it means 'An intreating in ones behalf', clearly confusing it with intercession, which he has just defined as 'An intreaty in ones behalf'. You check Blount, who has 'a cutting off in the midst', from Latin intercisio. Clearly, whatever intercision means, it has a lot to do with intercisio. Du Cange merely has 'injuria', which seems to help little. How about modern Latin dictionaries? Lewis and Short offers 'a cutting through'. The OLD has nothing.

You are not stuck yet; intercisio, you reason, is clearly a nominal form of the verb intercido, which in turn is inter (between) and caedo (cut). So what do your lexica say on the verb? Here you strike gold. Lewis and Short list two intercidos: the first is 'to cut asunder, cut up, divide, pierce, cut through, part, divide, mangle, destroy', this clearly corresponding to the listed noun. But there is another: 'to fall between, to occur meanwhile, to happen, to fall to the ground, to go to ruin, be lost, perish'. This is promising. OLD, likewise, has 'to fall between, to be lost or wasted, go astray; to be lost from memory, fall into oblivion, be forgotten; to perish incidentally, to be destroyed during an action; to cease to exist, be lost, lapse, fail'. Intercisio, and therefore intercision, must have been formed from one of these verbs, each differing in shade. But which?

This is the classic problem of the neologism. Without an accepted context and range of meanings, a consuetudo, it can be impossible to determine the meaning of a word. It turns out, however, that intercision is not a neologism. In one context, in fact, it is common: the theology of grace. Lutheran doctrine held that it was possible for a member of the elect to fall from grace forever; Calvinism held that this was impossible, for a man's sin cannot override the divine act of bestowing grace. Thus Peter, who denied Christ, was nonetheless saved. This fall from grace is called intercisio or intercision; but even here the meaning is not clear-cut, at least in English. In 1626, the Cornish theologian Francis Rous published his Testis veritatis, writing:

God is for the Saints all the way from the first foreknowledge, unto the finall glory; what Arminius or [Peter] Bertius can make any Apostacy to be against us, when God is throughly for us? God being stedfast with us from Election to glorification, no interloper can come in with intercision to cut off and put a sunder this continued chaine of happinesse, which God hath joynd together and guardeth all the way.

In the same year, George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, argues likewise: 'This is certaine, all is not gone, all is not cut off by intercision; here is a Seede of God abiding. . . If all be not falne away, then this man in whom it abideth can not fall totally.' In both of the above quotations, intercision sounds like something permanent. Carleton returns to the theme in 1629, claiming that 'Man cannot by any sinne make void any act of Gods', and arguing against the possibility of 'an intercision of justifying grace, caused by the sinnes of the flesh'.

In 1633 George Downham, Bishop of Derry, thinks it 'ridiculous' that 'there should bee an intercision of justification (which I proved before to be a continued act) so oft as there is an intermission of the act of faith'. Here the intercision seems more temporary, as a phenomenon accompanying an intermission. A similar meaning is found outside a theological context, in 1641, when John Jackson notes, 'there hath beene of late an intercision, and interruption herein'.

Ambiguous also is a line from a 1627 oration by Thomas Gataker: 'Their death is rather a departing, or a going out of this world, or a passage to heaven, or a returne to God, then a deceasing, or surceasing, or intermission, or intercision, yea, or diminution, either of life, or of their good or happy estate.' We are tangled up by conjunctions: the or cannot always be an 'or rather', but may be between intermission and intercision, or intercision and diminution. Trying to pinpoint the exact meaning of 'intercision' comes down to a morass of hard-to-determine textual passages of uncertain relations to one another.

The OED lists the Browne passage under the meaning 'The action of cutting off the course of, stopping, or interrupting, esp. temporarily; the fact of being interrupted or ceasing for a time.' Immediately preceding the Browne is a quotation from one Richard Montagu—in Latin, Montacutius—Bishop of Norwich, Browne's home-town. The passage in full runs:

Doth ARMINIUS maintaine touching finall Perseverance, (you must tell mee, my good Informers, for I have not read him) that sometime the Called and Elect of God, the Chosen ones and Justified by Faith, such as S. PETER was, though they doe fall totally for a Time, shall yet recover necessarily againe, and not fall away finally, or for ever? If this be Arminianisme, and so his conclusion, then therein He holdeth with ARMINIUS. But I have bin assured, that ARMINIUS did hold as the Lutherans in Germany doe, not only Intercision for a Time, but also Abscission and Abjection too, for ever.

This in fact is from Montagu's 1625 Appello Caesarem, against which Rous published his Testis the following year. The last line looks suspiciously similar to Browne's 'intercision, not abscission', and the entry's compiler must have thought that Browne was referring to this in writing 'with Montacutius'. Montagu's 'Intercision for a Time' is clearly the same intercision as Downham's and Jackson's: an interruption, rather than the permanent sundering of Rous and Carleton. If this is Montagu's intercision, then presumably it is Browne's too. In 1647, John Trapp seems to make a similar distinction when he writes that 'Happy for us, that we are kept by the power of God to salvation, 1 Pet. 1. 5. for else it were possible for us to fall away and perish: an intercision there might be, nay an utter excision from Christ'.

The problem is that the 1625 passage is not the origin of Browne's words, at least not directly. Browne is in fact translating another line from Montagu from Latin. This is from his 1635 refutation of the ecclesiastical history of Baronius, and glosses the word cessare, normally translated as 'cease':

Cessare dicitur id, quod cum olim in usu frequentissimo fuisset, postea rarissime adhibetur: non penitus autem cessare, sed respectu prioris frequentissimi usus. Secundo, Cessare dicitur aliquid dupliciter: vel per Intercisionem ad aliquod tempus; vel per Abscisionem, et desolationem consummatam.

To paraphrase: cessare is what happens when a frequent activity becomes much rarer, without necessarily stopping altogether. And cessare can mean either an intercisio, or an abscision or consummate desolation. It is clear, Montagu continues, that the cessatio of the oracles was not an abscisio, but only an intercisio, for the oracles continued to speak thereafter. The natural reading of this passage is that after the cessatio, the oracles were still delivered, only much less frequently; in other words, that they fell into disuse. One might compare Quintilian: 'verba intercidant invalescantque temporibus', 'words become obsolete or current with the lapse of years'. This is not only the natural reading, it is consonant with what many other people had written about the oracles. To understand the word this way, therefore, would necessitate not only knowing other uses of intercisio, but also the contemporary discourse about this rather arcane subject: and how many lexicographers would be capable of that?

The 1625 passage, with its 'Intercision for a Time', seems to resolve the question in the other direction: presumably, though not necessarily, Montagu intended the same distinction in each case, and by intercisio and intercision meant a temporary interruption in proceedings. The oracles, then, would stop being given, but then later return. Nobody else, to my knowledge, ever argued this. And so the claim has a rather spectral quality to it: it rests on no consuetudo, and has no support other than the use of a similar word in a different language in a different work. If Montagu's Appello had been lost, we would have had, I think, to read differently his intercisio, and so Browne's intercision. All of a sudden, the meaning of this word, a museum-piece, looks highly contingent.

The Shrine of Ammon

2009-05-19T19:50:00.006-04:00

Upper Clapton, on the edge of the largest Hasid community in London, just north of the old Murder Mile, an urim's throw from the Lea, and from the cricket grounds alongside Springfield Park, on the corner of the Common, by the fountains, with children being children and the buses idling by, and the endless young women in long black skirts, with their remarkable faces, on a bright Sunday afternoon, presaging an evening of poetry, I find myself in the Good Shepherd, originally erected for the Agapemonites, and latterly occupied by the Georgian Orthodox Church. I politely ask an elder lady, the only person inside, when the church was built.

Ahh, she says, after a pause. Tuesday Saturday.

— No, when was it built? The date, when built?

Ahh. Easter!

The lady's English is evidently somewhat limited. The building, when built? Building. It is curious that we should slip into this sort of bastard pidgin when dealing with those not so gifted with the tongue, as if we were talking to a small child or retard. Still, it is a natural reflex.

Oh. Sixtin centry?

I shake my head. No, I smile, it can't be earlier than the late nineteenth century. But never mind, it's not important.

— And why you want know? You Orthodox?

No, not that.

— Catholic?

No, atheist. I don't believe in God.

— You no believe God? Why you no believe God?

I reply that I think the language barrier between us too great for that conversation. She tries to convince me that Britain was Orthodox before it was Catholic. In return I try to explain, with some patience, that this is not true, and that in fact Orthodoxy and Catholicism only became distinct religions about four hundred years after Britain was officially Christianised.

— You young pipple, you no understand history. You go read history book.

Come, she wants to show me something. In the dark recess of the church is an icon, painted or possibly printed on cloth, fraying authentically at the edges. The image is a rather gangrenous, Gothic Jesus, staring reproachfully out at me.

— You understand, says the lady, when we have this, it all like this, white, dark. Then, last year, you see? She points to the area around the right eye. Is red. Is blood. This is living person here. Then, the day after, varr between Russia Georgia, varr, you understand?

Oh. It's magic, I say, somewhat startled. She gives me a stern look. It's a miracle, I repeat, nodding my head.

— Yes, miracle. It's miracle. So now you Christian.

Yes, yes, you convinced me. That's amazing.

— Come, come, I baptise you. She takes me by the shoulder. Not today, I fear. I'll come back next week, I promise. I ask to take a picture of the icon. Yes, yes, she beams. I explain that I will bring news of the Orthodox Church, spread its message. We introduce ourselves; she's delighted. It seems a better solution to the situation than simply marching off, or, indeed, being baptised. I'm not ready for the font and aspergill quite yet. In the light of day the world is a little more magical, a little more miraculous; if I have not truly been converted, at least a strange corner of London has acquired that bit more mythical resonance—place made of a space, crisis memorialised in an artist's blood, the heart of a religion yet beating, even surrounded by civic indifference, cynicism, rationalism. I smile, tease, but do not sneer in earnest. I am too curious.

Peiresc explained his willingness to believe the unbelievable, such as the possibility of seeing through walls, because he had himself 'seen things, so incredible without having seen them, that I am, in faith, almost disposed not to be surprised by any other'. —Peter Miller.

Had the Georgian lady seen such things, things incredible to you or me? Had she been victim of a fraud? Perpetrator? Was she insane, stupid? Did she simply allow herself to believe, because believing explained everything that needed explaining? The small accounts for the great, the dash of red on a picture for the reality of the Godhead, Christ, the Spirit, who proceeds from God the Father, and not the Son, thank you very much.

Plutarch. 'Demetrius went so far as to say that it was ridiculous to try in this way to draw great conclusions from small data, not, as Alcaeus puts it, "painting the lion from a single claw," but with a wick and lamp postulating a mutation in the heavens and the universe.' Cleombrotus has just suggested that, since the lamp of the shrine of Ammon consumes less oil each year, so the years must be getting shorter. He responds to Demetrius: 'not to allow that small things are indication of great stands directly in the way of many arts; for it will result in taking away from us the demonstration of many facts and the prognostication of many others.' Proof and prophecy go together, deduction and induction.

I wanted to ask her how, even if she knew it was a sign, she knew she had interpreted it correctly, and what sort of assumptions she had to have in place already before she could reach the conclusion she did. These are the very questions I ask of my scholarly protagonists, such as Peiresc or Plutarch; I fear she would have been just as unable to answer them as the long dead. I wonder, too, what questions I would be at a loss to answer.

Flow gently, sweet Afton

2009-05-01T17:21:00.007-04:00

You know when you haven't e-mailed someone for a while, and you feel you ought to, but the longer you leave it, the more embarrassed you feel about not contacting them, and the longer still you want to leave it? Well, so it is with the Varieties. Still I walk—a jaunt from Heathrow to London; a stretch in Waltham and Leyton, where the word alright has become a mere two schwas of rising intonation; a saunter through the campus at Imperial, where hard science and technology are symbolised architecturally by flat glass façades in royal blue and hot pink; East Finchley Cemetery, where the dead are erased from memory, as with poor Henry and Agnes Ritchie, above; and so on and so on. Still I read—Lost Girls in the Library this week, amid a sea of prim Courtauldians sharing out table-space between Foucault and Tiepolo, I relish the thrill of postmodern fin-de-siècle child-porn drawn après Beardsley, Mucha and Schiele. Still I write—my 15,000-word, rather Varietesque opus on the Golden Bough should be coming out in a month or two, and I am already several thousand into a new piece on tripod iconography. In the Roth household, life goes on, and even promises to increase in number. All is well. Sure, there is a certain void, where once were varieties. But this will pass. It always does.

An Unbridled Tongue

2009-04-01T19:34:00.003-04:00

The precise origin of the expression 'as happy as Larry', like those of almost all modern colloquialisms, not to say colloquialisms dead to the present, has been swallowed in the fogs of time. The OED, for one, cops out with 'Etym. uncertain', its earliest citation coming from the Australian writer Joseph Furphy, aka. Tom Collins, writing in the newspaper Barrier Truth, local to the marvelously-named Broken Hill, New South Wales, on the 29th of December, 1905. One website devoted to this variety of philological speculation manages to get it back further, remarking confidently:

Larry—certainly the best known character in the world of similes. The expression he instigated is most likely to be of Australian or New Zealand origin. The earliest printed reference currently known is from the New Zealand writer G. L. Meredith, dating from around 1875:

"We would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats".

The Antipodean origin looks clear, then, even if nobody is really sure who that Larry was. So imagine my surprise, when, perusing a little treatise entitled, The vain religion of the formal hypocrite, and the mischief of an unbridled tongue, penned by the Puritan theologian Richard Baxter in 1660, I came across this:

Immediately was paid put to the Antipodean theory; the expression must have been current already in seventeenth-century England, even if it reached print only seldom. My initial response to this discovery, naturally, was to enquire, with everybody else: Who was Larry? But the question seemed impossible to answer. Even if it was indeed Baxter who coined the happy Larry—obviously an unlikely scenario—we would have precious little way of knowing to which Larry or Lawrence, or even Laurens or Lorenzo, he was referring. But I was suspicious: the lone hit in Baxter was not enough to be sure, and would never lead to an answer. A cursory search of the printed text database on EEBO, indeed, turned up two or three more happie Larries; but it was a 'happy as Laurentius', in one of many anonymous broadsides of the 1640s, that got my nose twitching, for in the margin was the little note, Vid. Erigena his Division of Nature.

I turned, therefore, to the Periphyseon, also known as De divisione naturae, of the Irish philosopher Johannes Scotus Erigena—or Eriugena, as we now more correctly have him. Eriugena, pretty much the only serious philosophical mind between Augustine and Anselm, is best known for re-translating, for Charles the Bald, the mystical treatises ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite into good Latin. He thus played the same sort of function for Charles that Marsilio Ficino would play for Lorenzo de' Medici six hundred years later, and was favoured accordingly. One story, so often repeated in books about mediaeval philosophy that it even turns up on the Wiki page, is that Charles, teasing Johannes across supper with the question, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?, that is, What is the difference between a drunk and an Irishman, was met with the Wildean reply, Mensa tantum: 'only a table'. Books about mediaeval philosophy, I trust you will take my word, need every amusing anecdote they can get.

Scotus's other work of note is the aforementioned Periphyseon, written in the 860s, and the first major introduction of Neoplatonism into Latin philosophy. It was condemned by the Church, like all good books, in 1210 and 1225, though it remained one of the most influential treatises in Western history: Henry Bett lists Hugh of St. Victor, Abelard, the Jewish Zohar, Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and even Hegel as its intellectual debtors. And it is here, in Book Three, that we find our happy Laurentius:

To translate: 'Therefore, [if it hadn't been for that pesky Original Sin] all human society would have been as happy as Saints Lawrence and Stephen, who were troubled by no perturbations in their souls.' In the case of the martyr saints, their spiritual felicity or happiness was brought into greater relief by their physical torments. St Lawrence, you will recall, was that carefree fellow who, when he was griddled alive under Valerian in 258 AD, managed to mutter 'This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite,' thus displaying equanimity in the face of torture. Eriugena, it seems, took a popular attribution of felicity to Lawrence (and Stephen, the first martyr), and expressed it in such a way that later writers could make it proverbial. Here, undoubtedly, and ironically, was the Larry of 'happy as Larry' fame.

On the Textures of West London

2009-03-22T19:44:00.022-04:00

Sure, it's been a while. Not that I've had nothing to say: but my intellectual energies have of late been directed instead towards the munificent footnotes of my opus. I was going to return with an arcane disquisition on religion in the later Renaissance; I still have it planned, but after such a charming request for another 'of the same order' as my last post, I offer you this instead. It is about walking in London; I do hope you are not sick of the subject.

Today I returned to the Grand Union Canal, west of Scrubs Lane. The weather was fine, and cyclists pelted repeatedly past me on the towpath. Strolling the canal in London is unique: for one can see to the other side, but not attain it. Thus whatever the far bank has to offer must be enjoyed at a distance, almost as through a glass. One of the finest spots in the city, indeed, is the passage of the Canal through London Zoo: on the near side, a great modernist aviary filled with peacocks, and on the far, a stepped enclosure with antelopes. At seven on a weekday morning, with nobody about, one can imagine the whole world obliterated save for these stray exotics. West of Scrubs Lane, the mood is quite different. There are no zoos, no genteel back gardens opening onto the canal, no grand Nash terrace or Elgood mansion to stare one down from without, fewer houseboats; and instead, plenty of industry, old and new. Also, now and then, an uncategorisable oddity, such as this:

Strangely, the woman's head in the gold capsule (see details, right) rotated as I watched, such that I initially thought it a live person. I was unable to determine the mechanism of its movement: was it, for instance, electric? Nor could I ascertain its function. Perhaps simply to instill fear and awe in the beholder, an effect largely achieved in my case, due partly to its distance, which allowed the illusion to remain unspoilt, and partly to its physical separation across the water of the canal. I hope that Park Royal Salvage are sensible enough to light the head at night, and even to add smoke effects for the true Gothic horror experience. Still, she was strangely peaceful in the five o'clock sunshine, silent, with nary a soul about, just revolving merrily in a junkpile above the canal, on the edge of the least human area of London. Right from Scrubs Lane, the towpath is full of sounds, present, but never invasive: the chug of occasional barges, the hum of toy planes flown over the copse in Wormwood Scrubs to the south, the whish of bicycles and cackle of the geese they fright up as they pass, and a two-note alarm you can hear for quite a distance, the same two notes, I think, chosen by John Cale for his acute production of 'Facing the Wind'. The canal is also haunted by a smell, warm and half-sweet, like a bakery.

This should be one of the sights of London. Instead you have to slip on to it furtively from Acton Lane or Old Oak Lane. Cooling towers, steaming engines, chimneys, black corrugated-iron sheds: a new industrial excitement every few yards, mellowed and bound together by the water in the foreground and the grass on the banks. — Nairn, London.

This texture I recalled from my last visit here, almost a decade ago. I have pictures from that trip, in sepia, some of the few photographs I took in the pre-digital age. They are scratched and muddy, but only appropriately so. I would not reform them.

At that time, Butterfingers and I were overwhelmed by the darkness and brutality of the place. This was not the North London in which I had grown up: a crueller beast, and a thrilling one. Our urbanites are too flattered by their surroundings, allowed too easily to master their streets, pretty and neatly arranged at the human scale. We need, rather, a range of moods: the gentle, certainly, but also, as here, the harsh, alienating, monumental. As the Romantics knew, though they were able to find it only in the countryside, we need to experience subjugation at the hands of a landscape, to keep us humble, in lieu of a religion. For this reason I was relieved to find the same remorseless passages today, albeit in full March colour:

But not all of my memories were intact. Here is another: the '57' on the side of the brick building behind the silos tells us what it is, namely, a Heinz factory.

Today I reached Abbey Road at Stonebridge with a start: I had not seen the old 57. Where was she? Gone, vanished, and in her place, simply endless rows of faceless grey boxes, walls without architecture, like these. Nairn's 'industrial excitement' is diminishing year by year; I presume that it had largely dissipated even before my first trip. Our architecture is tending away from these black chimneys, towards an absence of character, and particularly of texture. Dirt, grit and variety is bending to sheen and monotony. As an example, take the outer wall of London's new über-mall, Westfield, at the southern end of Scrubs Lane:

Look closely: this is a wall upon which the sun is shining directly, as you can see from the concrete supports below, and by the polished metal strip running along the side towards the top. The supports have their shadows, and the reflected glow of the strip indicates the path of the sun's light. But the wall itself has no glow or texture: only colour. Light diffuses smoothly, immaculately, across it, and becomes invisible. And so the wall resembles a simulation. Inside, legions of immigrants labour to maintain spotlessness. I saw one girl at her post, in a free moment, take a cloth to wipe an imaginary mark from the glass above her till. The antiseptic cleanliness of the place is most impressive. And it has been very cleverly laid out: there are no dead ends, and at the conclusion of each row of merchants, another vista opens out suddenly, beckoning you forward. The lines are not straight and orthogonal, but sinuous and irregular, ergonomic. Even signs have the soft edges of a modernist sculpture, of an Arp or a Moore:

(Hatherley, in his account of Westfield, says the signs remind him of 'prehistoric rubble'.) The tiny detail is utterly revealing. At every moment the aggression of commerce is masked and quieted, and the environment becomes instead cosy, childlike. The glass ceiling allows sunlight to penetrate every nook; there is no darkness, no possibility of the secret or occult, no possibility of 'slipping onto anything furtively'. One moves not by espying and following, not of one's own accord, but as if in a dream, automatically. The sounds are not chug, whish, hum, cackle, alarm, but consumer chatter and the reassuring strains of over-produced radio pop. The smell is not warm and nostalgic, but processed and global, expensive and indeterminate.

Westfield is the future of London, of England—the latest stage in an evolution away from awe, away from brutality, monumentality, and towards cosiness. We are no longer to see the guts of our industry: the girders, pipes, valves, tanks, the bits that get dirty. Instead, smooth lines, matte surfaces, public art. The industry along the Thames, for instance at Chelsea Wharf and Nine Elms, is being swept away for shiny flats in the Westfield idiom, and one has to trudge out east of the Dome to see the desolate remains of the old, to experience the filthy sublimity of industrial scale, and of its continued operation. On the Canal, meanwhile, south side, just east of the Hythe Road Estate, where the towpath swings away from the railway lines, one discovers a puny birch grove, littered with rubbish. I took a few steps down into the grove, and espied an old gentleman by himself, in this most forgotten spot, haunting the trees.

The sun was still coming down as it had been all afternoon, but the trees beat it back and made the place obscure. The old fellow was just standing there, not moving, for as long as I watched him. I was unable to determine the reason for his presence, or his stillness. Perhaps he was busy bringing to mind the canal as it once had been. I moved on, towards the factories.

Periegesis Londinii

2009-03-06T17:33:00.015-05:00

So far this year I have been writing less, and reading less; and walking more. Already I have undertaken fourteen London walks, a full stretch every Sunday, and recently a little extra during the week, between academic pursuits. But I dream of walking as an art, or at least as a craft. So far I remain at the propaedeutic level, setting myself exercises, finding my way around the city, as I would around a canvas, or an essay. Of course, London has already been walked so much—Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright, both of whom spoke at the LSE last weekend, are two of London's more distinguished flâneurs. And so when I walk I cannot merely walk; I must walk as Conrad, I must find my own way to walk, my own reasons to walk. This will take time, but even now I have managed a few quirks and motifs: the eye out for datestones, the prosifying ear, and the determination to walk until it grows dark, until the lampadaires spring into light, and then no more.

I am drawn to places where I do not belong; to the feeling of not belonging. It is fortunate, then, that I am in London, for the city makes ample provision for such an emotion. I wander onto an estate, and try to look as if I'm actually headed for somewhere in particular, for the locals, like the filth, little appreciate idle explorers, especially when they are waving cameras, and will take any opportunity to peer at me suspiciously, as if I were a nonce, a detective, or simply a dreaded bourgeois. Even a twee old version of the council estate, Waterlow Court, warns non-residents away. When I trespass regardless, making a leisurely circuit of the court's fine cloisters, I am tickled with a frisson of lawlessness: a little, as they say, goes a long way.

London's signages, for one thing, are ominously rebarbative. Where Agar Grove crosses the railway lines, a note on a lamppost barks, PROSTITUTES BEWARE. YOU ARE BEING WATCH BY OVERT CCTV. How much more overt could CCTV be? The bluntness of 'prostitutes' is mysteriously shocking. Couldn't they have been more euphemistic? The inépatable Londoner recoils instinctively, shewing his true, Times-reading nature. On Widdenham Road, N7, the porches of the terraced mansion blocks admonish, NO HAWKERS OR CANVASSERS. And on Leighton Road, Kentish Town, the old Victorian post-office offers a little found-poetry, in weathered bronze inscription-capitals:

NOTICE

H. M. POSTMASTER GENERAL
THE OWNER OF THE LAND
AND FORECOURT
IN FRONT OF THESE PREMISES
HAS NOT DEDICATED AND
DOES NOT INTEND TO
DEDICATE AS A HIGHWAY
THE SAID LAND AND FORECOURT
OR ANY PART THEREOF
OR ANY WAY THEREUPON
OR THEREOVER

I particularly love those last lines: 'or any part thereof, or any way thereupon, or thereover'. This is, as I have come to appreciate lately, a Beckettian prose. It represents the defining feature of his early sentences, reaching climax in Watt, but most lapidary in Murphy:

Some [patients] were at matins, some in the gardens, some could not get up, some would not, some simply had not.

The anger that gave him the energy to begin again was gone before he had half ended. A few words used it up. So it had always been, not only with anger, not only with words.

That last sentence actually brought joyful tears to my eyes when I re-read Murphy last month. It is an authoritarian prose: it cannot simply give, but must delineate exactly, permuting words within the syntax. It is a Platonic or scholastic prose: it always pushes away from the concrete ('A few words used it up. So it had always been—') towards abstraction ('—not only with anger, not only with words'). The commas, especially that between anger and not, unlike traditional prose commas, separate grammatically-distinct clauses: in other words they are rhetorical, and indicate the movement of a mind as it considers the broader consequences of a particular. Each thought is pushed, to see what will happen. The music, the rhythm of ideas, is perfect.

So it is, in miniature, with the bronze tricolon of 'or any part thereof, or any way thereupon, or thereover'.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is this, by the Chelsea river, far away from the monotonous suburbs of North London, and closer to those streets of heavy, columned porches, far more monotonous, which I am apparently the first to designate Stuccovia:

The notice states, 'This park is open from 7.30am until dusk every day.' Assuredly, this syntax is a plain one, with neither the ingrammatic rudeness of Agar Grove, nor the baroque repetition of Leighton Road. But the surrealism of the scene, deadpan, is pure Alice, or Monty Python. In the latter case, the sign would be played by Idle or Palin, the walker by an irascible Cleese. What d'you bleedin' mean, open from 7.30 to dusk? How d'you propose to shut it, then? Both Alice and Python capture the absurdity of British authority, of the voice that declares a patch of grass 'open' only at certain times of the day. I would not have it otherwise. Let the city say Keep out, Hop it, Piss off, Your kind not wanted here, and say it in a thousand different voices, not only with anger, not only with words. Let it say Begone, and I will be all the happier to stay.

Glebe Place

2009-02-26T08:48:00.009-05:00

Glebe Place, off the King's Road, Chelsea: home of artists since the 1880s. Fine old houses, in a variety of styles, although not quite as beautiful as those on Old Church Road and its neighbours north of the high street. Next to the Open Air Nursery School, at the street's elbow, where it curves towards Bramerton Street, and then down to Cheyne Row and Cheyne Walk—number 50, a folly, done up in a patinate Mediterranean baroque:

This picture taken not by me, but by Jamie Barras. Built, as Barras tells us, for Sir Frank Lowe, advertising magus, and completed in 1987. The sheer ridiculousness of the facade! With its plaques, statues, ivies, metalwork, pink and green. And with a date on the gutter hopper, as became popular in the twentieth century, reading. . . 1723! It would not be out of place at Portmeirion.

Nobody is about, except two georgeously posh old mums twittering a few doors up. The light is not much good, even at midday or so. In the entrance-way, just next to the large filigree-worked double doors, on the left hand side, this, most preposterously of all:

Which either is, or very much resembles, a painting of Sir Frank himself, done in a pastiche Flemish-Renaissance style. I mean, isn't it? Heavy lids, generous nose, broad brow, the rest one can put down to a couple of decades and artistic licence. Only the painter has made him crueller and more calculative.

The possibility remains that Lowe simply found an old burgher who resembled him, but I doubt it. There is a delight, after endless walking in the grit and grime of the suburbs northeast of the City, where there are yet pleasures in the efflorescences of penniless artistic statement, and in the fragments of the old ekeing amid the new and broken, in all the undone, there is a delight here, in Chelsea, in the decadent prettiness of it all, the comfort and the devil-may-care, in good money spent idiosyncratically if not well.

On Neologism, Part Two

2009-02-17T17:35:00.012-05:00

[Part One here.]

The Good Book.

Lily and I—and, indeed, the rest of you, from afar—are approaching the fifth anniversary of our first romantic entanglement. At times like these we enjoy reminiscing about that first date of ours, which culminated, qua date, with us sitting on the bed, me reading to her, in my sonorous English voice, from her favourite Edward Gorey tale, 'The Unstrung Harp'. This was my introduction to Gorey, and I was sufficiently intrigued to read through the rest of his collected stories. One which we enjoy recalling is 'The Beastly Baby'. It is difficult to forget this monstrosity, unable to sleep by virtue of its guilty conscience, and, as we see here, frequently abandoned by its unfortunate parents, in the vain hope of being rid of the thing:

One wonders if Gorey had in mind Stephen Leacock's story, 'The Inexplicable Infant', from Nonsense Novels (1911). He must have known it. Here we have the same idea, delivered in the same deadpan, dry and black:

She had taken the baby and laid it tenderly, gently on a seat in the park. Then she walked rapidly away. A few minutes after a man had chased after Caroline with the little bundle in his arms. "I beg your pardon," he said, panting, "I think you left your baby in the park." Caroline thanked him.

Next she took the baby to the Grand Central Waiting-room, kissed it tenderly, and laid it on a shelf behind the lunch-counter. A few minutes an official, beaming with satisfaction, had brought it back to her. "Yours, I think, madame," he said, as he handed it to her. Caroline thanked him.

Then she had left it at the desk of the Waldorf Astoria, and at the ticket-office of the subway.

It always came back.

This 'nonsense novel' is not best of the collection: for my money, that would be '"Q." A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural'. It does, however, contain one brilliant joke. The poor farmer in his rural homestead, all clichés present and correct, is comforted by his wife:

"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it"--and she handed to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received had stood him in good stead. "Take the book," she said. "Read, John, in this hour of affliction; it brings comfort."

The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid's Elements, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud: "The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal each unto each."

Likewise, at the end of the story, Enderby has learned his lesson: 'Ah, my sons, henceforth let us stick to the narrow path. What is it that the Good Book says: 'A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.'' The comic potential of the confusing the Book with some other bible is a classic. One of my favourite instances is from an otherwise rather dull short story, by a literary overreacher, fool's gold: Alasdair Gray's 'Logopandocy', from his Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983). In this dialogue, 'Cromwell's Latin secretary' confronts a pro-Royalist Scottish aristocrat in his gaol-cell at the Tower in 1653, Midsummer's Eve. The secretary, Paradise Lost still but a gleam in his eye, says:

When time is ripe for it, my verse will do far more than illuminate the best essence of Thomas Malory's text, it will translate, clarify and augment the greatest and most truly Original Book in the Universe.

On which the aristocrat—the story's narrator—remarks to himself:

Such is my aim also, and I am thunderstruck to discover in the Puritan camp one who admires the work of Rabelais as greatly as I do.

The Scotsman is, of course, Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel was published that very year. Now Urquhart was the literary neologist par excellence of his century. And so, finally, we arrive again at neologism, having faffed and fumbled about for far too long with other matters of relative insignficance.

I doubt Leacock would have cherished Urquhart. In the last of the Nonsense Novels, 'The Man of Asbestos'—unlike the others a story without humour, a sermon on dystopia, more Puteicis—the eponymous Man, a grey creature of the technological future, shows the narrator, to the latter's disgust, one of the scars where his education has been surgically implanted:

Here is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering.

To appreciate Urquhart, and not merely to be quaintly amused by him, one has to be the sort of person who values spherical trigonometry over poetry and history. Urquhart's treatise on the subject, the Trissotetras of 1645, must rank as one of the least intelligible mathematical works known to man. In one of the three dedicatory epistles—'An Epaenetick and Doxologetick Expresse, in Commendation of this Book and the Author Thereof, to all Philomathets', written by one 'J. A.' but sounding suspiciously like Urquhart himself—it is claimed that 'the abstrusest difficulties of this science by him [are] so neatly unfolded' that we should rank the author with his hero, the great Scottish mathematician John Napier. We also get a preposterous panegyric to Urquhart's erudition by the well-known Scottish polymath, Alexander Ross: 'Hoc duce, jam Lybicos poteris superare calores, / Atque pati Scythici frigora saeva poli.'

Within the fortress of the text itself, abstruse difficulties are merely manufactured. 'In amblygonosphericalls,' claims Urquhart, 'which admit both of an extrinsecall and intrinsecall demission of the perpendicular, nineteen severall parts are to be considered; viz. the perpendicular, the subtendentall, the subtendentine, two cosubtendents, the basall, the basidion, the chief segment of the base, two cobases, the double verticall, the verticall, the verticaline, two coverticalls, the next cathetopposite, the prime cathetopposite, and the two cocathetopposites.' Almost none of these words, of course, are listed in the OED. Urquhart comments on these 'Greek and Latin terms', which

for the more efficacy of expression I have made use of in this Treatise; in doing whereof, that I might both instruct the Reader and not weary him, I have endeavoured perspicuity with shortnesse; though, I speak it ingenuously, to have been more prolixe therein could have cost but very little labor to me. . .

One will readily believe that additional prolixity would have cost Urquhart very little, as suggested by the ellipsis truncating the above quotation. At any rate, the 'Lexidicion' which follows thereon attempts to explain each of the barbarous coinages found in the work, including, among those not above, obliquangulary, 'of all angles that are not right', poliechyrologie, 'the art of fortifying townes and cities', and my favourite, plusminused, 'said of moods which admit of mensurators, or whose illatitious termes are the never same, but either more or less then the maine quaesitas'. At this point one has the sensation of being suffocated with verbal ivy, a riot of syllabic curlicues, involving the throat.

In addition are the names of trigonometric figures; for these Urquhart deliberately follows his mediaeval forebears in logic (barbara, celarent) and music (gammuth, fa-so-la-ti-do), and coins words artificially stuck together from significant syllables. Thus, dacramfor is composed of da, 'the datas', cra, 'the concurse of a given and required side', m, 'a tangent complement', and for, 'outwardly'. Dacramfor is not in the OED; nor any of its myriad fellows.

The novelty of these words I know will seeme strange to some, and to the eares of illiterate hearers sound like termes of conjuration; yet seeing that since the very infancie of learning, such inventions have beene made use of, and new words coyned, that the knowledge of severall things representatively confined within a narrow compasse, might the more easily be retained in a memory susceptible of their impression. . . I know not why Logick and Musick should be rather fitted with such helps then Trigonometrie.

So many words, words, words! It is a classic seventeenth-century argument, nonetheless, and all the Royal Society fellows would be at it soon after. But why no admittance to the hallowed Dictionary? You will say, I know: these words are only used once! What use could they be? Let them perish at the rockface! And to you I reply, lickety-split:

prostisciutto, n. nonce-wd. [Blend of PROSTITUTE adj. and PROSCIUTTO n.] A female prostitute regarded metaphorically as an item on a menu. Perhaps with allusion to MEAT and related slang metaphors. 1930 S. BECKETT Whoroscope 1, "What's that? A little green fry or a mushroomy one? Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?"

A punning portmanteau from Beckett's Joyceolatrous juvenilia, used once in the history of the language, until the carrion scholars descended to feast on Beckett's early poetry, and had to quote him. Well, the OED likes to encourage young authors. How about older words?

scientintically, adv. A burlesque nonce-word, formed by a blending of scientifically and tint. 1761 STERNE Tr. Shandy III. v, "He must have redden'd, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half. . . above his natural colour."

But come now! Everyone knows and loves Tristram Shandy! Who, by contrast, cares for old Urquhart?

cidentine, a. nonce-wd. (See quot.) 1653 URQUHART Rabelais II. xxxii, "As we have with us the countreys cisalpine and transalpine. . . so have they there the Countreys cidentine and tradentine, that is, behither and beyond the teeth."

A word for describing the location of countries within a giant's mouth, from a particular episode of Pantagruel: an integral part of the English language, no doubt. But stay, this is still somewhat Rabelais, 'tis in his book, even if it is not him as such ('. . . aussi ont-ilz deçà et delà les dentz'). What do you have in the way of pure Urquhart?

disobstetricate, v. Obs. nonce-wd. trans. To reverse the office of a midwife concerning; to retard or hinder from child-birth. 1652 URQUHART Jewel Wks. (1834) 210, "With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility."

Too corny. Anything else?

epassyterotically, adv. [f. Gr. epassúteron, one upon another; cf. chaotically.] 1652 URQUHART Jewel Wks. (1834) 249, "He killed seven of them epassyterotically, that is, one after another."

Yes, that's better, yes. . .

hirquitalliency, n. Obs. nonce-wd. [f. L. hirquitallī-re (of infants) to acquire a strong voice (f. hircus he-goat) + -ENCY.] 1652 URQUHART Jewel 125, "To speak of her hirquitalliency."

Ah-ha! You see, again and again the OED tongues words out of The Jewel, or, to give its more authentic title, as the 2008 draft revision does (s.v. penitissim), Ekskubalauron. There are dozens of these vocables in the dictionary, each with only one citation, and that from The Jewel. None was used earlier, none has been used since. They are, strictly speaking—at least until this very post—Modern English hapax legomena. Or, as the Dictionary's first great editor, James Murray, put it, nonce words. The OED lists nonce word—'a word apparently used only ‘for the nonce’, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer's works'—and, in a delicious mise-en-abyme, quotes itself.

But not a single entry from the Trissotetras. Why is the one work slighted for the other? The one was surely known, as The Jewel is commonly cited from Urquhart's 1834 Works, which includes both treatises. Is it that the OED accepts such words only from 'literary' works, like Whoroscope, Tristram Shandy, Pantagruel, and, let us suppose, The Jewel? This cannot be the case: not only is The Jewel hardly literature in the same category as the others, being, among other things, a treatise on universal languages, and a panegyric to Scotland—but, as we saw in the last instalment, the OED is quite happy citing blas from technical books of the seventeenth century. So why?

Perhaps admittance into Murray's temple, or that of his descendants, is an aesthetic act. Or even an ethical one. Prosticiutto, scientintically, hirquitalliency: fine, bold, strong pieces, vivid, if a little rococo. What etymological fantasias they conjure! How they expand the language, as brooches pinned on the plainer stuff of a good prose or verse. And blas, too: a noble attempt, if ultimately in vain, to affix the vocabulary of a nascent and uncertain science. Into our society, along our finely-ordonnanced colonnades, we allow a hint of wonder, of the clamour of past voices, to prove we are not prudes, not puritans. We encourage diversity. As the people need their carnival or Saturnalia, the release of bottled energy, so the dictionary needs its nonce-words, to throw the makes and thises and perspicuouses into clearer relief, as good, upstanding members of lexical populace.

But— but this, this horror: this Trissotetras. All puffed up with arrogant frankensteins, choked and garbled, a masturbatory mess of syllables. Like that other book— what was it, yes? Finnegan's something? No expansion of the society, of the literature, of the language, just halls of heavy mirrors closed off to the world. We cannot encourage that sort of thing. Pantagruel we allow; The Jewel we allow. But not this Trissotetras. It may not be admitted to the Law. Let us abandon this beastly baby on a doorstep.

Will it be officious of me to observe that the Trissotetras is in danger of being left behind?

I say again, perhaps this doorkeeping is an aesthetic or ethical activity. The descriptivists, God bless them, want a grammar and a dictionary that do not prescribe, but only record. Who can blame them? As one of them recently said, 'how a language is used in the present is much more interesting than how it should be “properly” used'. Dealing with the fringes of the language—the neologisms, the portmanteaux and the nonce-words—we seem to see the necessity of choice. The lexical galaxy gets thinner, dimmer, as we recede from the centre; but it extends, in half-attested substance, to infinity. To admit all stray elements would be to admit typos, half-finished words, proper names, dords, and in all languages. Some words attested only once are accepted; others not. Thus we are forced to observe the rôle of personal judgement, unanswerable to absolute reasoning. The arbiters of the language, when their voice wavers, tell us why they arbitrate; what they would see in the Good Book.

High Table

2009-02-12T05:42:00.011-05:00

And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Thanks to the internet, we can prove Socrates wrong. Yesterday Hayden White broke a ten-month silence on his own blog, and added the same text as a comment to my last post, taking me to task for taking him to task for his presentation to the Courtauld Institute last week. Naturally I am honoured—and I'm not being ironical—by his presence. And here is my reply:

Many thanks for taking the time to comment on my post; if I had known you would turn up in the audience, I would have minded my manners more. But I didn't, and must live with my own rudeness. Now, it would be disingenuous for me to take back what I have written, and so I will not; but I should observe at least that, in the heat of making a particular argument, one's overall perspective may be obscured. Indeed, a friend of sorts, who enjoys patronising me, has already commented, in light of this very confrontation, that 'Conrad is young and enjoys slashing attacks without much in the way of nuance'.

It is not true that my opinion of your work (or you) is 'totally hostile'. I was critical of your 'speech'—I would not call it a speech, which I think of as a more formal oration—because I thought it lacked substance. It was certainly entertaining, which immediately set it above the vast majority of lectures or papers one hears. I have no problem with garrulity or with America or Americanity, as my wife's response above should make clear. Nor did I expect you to be more, nor would I want you to be more, still less would I want every academic to be, 'donnish' or 'quietly authoritative'. Donnish and adventurous, quiet and aggressive—both have their place, as I myself more mutedly suggested in my comment above, that "there is [a] place for Whites as well as Murrays." And I did like Metahistory: I appreciated its grandeur, and moreover, opined here that 'much of it is convincing'. Suffice to say, it would not be hard to find a less sympathetic, more hostile opinion of your work than mine. If I had found your views uninteresting, I would not have come to hear you at the Courtauld.

I have no idea if the audience liked your speech; it is always difficult to get a measure of these things. One or two people I spoke to, certainly, seemed awed by your breadth of reference. I was also embarrassed—on your behalf—by the vacuous questions you were asked after you'd finished. But such, perhaps, are the inevitable dangers of these events. At any rate, whether the audience liked you or not makes no difference to the quality of your argument.

As for Momigliano, I have no doubt that you are infinitely more familiar with his work than am I; and that he was a perfect gentleman both in person and on the page. What I wrote, however, was that he penned not a 'devastating attack' on you, but a 'rather damning review' of your work, which is surely compatible with a politesse of tone, and even with intellectual respect; furthermore, my expression, unlike yours, does not commit me to agreeing with him. The subject of Momigliano's fascism, while interesting, is not remotely germane to the discussion at hand, nor to your speech. But when you write,

It is true that he believed that "Dov'e la rettorica, non c'e la storia," but if he really believed that he would also have had to deny that the whole of historiography written prior to the 19th century (from Herodotus to Gibbon) was real historiography!

you are merely contradicting yourself. Either he did not believe it, in which case it is not true that he did, or he did believe it, in which case, either he did deny that pre-Rankean historiography was genuine—and I don't believe he did—or he would have rejected your reasoning. Is it not possible to argue that, for a Gibbon—in whom, let us assume, there is both rettorica and storia—the extent to which a particular passage is rettorica is the extent to which it is not storia? In other words, although rhetoric and history may be mixed together in a work, even indistinguishably, like hydrogen and oxygen in water, might they at least be conceptually distinct? Why must we deal in absolutes?

My lecture at the Courtauld was in defense of returning historical research from its pretensions to the status of a "science" back to its service as branch of moral philosophy. . . on the grounds that a purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts can never be of any service to the "present."

This is a laudable intention, and one that Momigliano could only have sympathised with: his own project was described in exactly these terms by Murray and others last week. Murray himself, moreover, defended your philosophy of history as having moral value. But I am surprised that you allow even the possibility of a 'purely scientific or objective account of any set of facts'; and I am not convinced that your own defense adds much to what we have already, for instance from the myriad authorities you yourself quoted, from Nietzsche to Oakeshott. The statement that a set of facts 'can never be of any service to the present' seems little more than a historiographical reiteration of the age-old is-ought problem.

Furthermore, it is pointless to argue that 'The idea of the "practical past" would turn historical inquiry to the service of reformist movements in historical thinking', since it is these very species of historiography—the feminist, post-colonial, and so on—that have dominated academia for the past two decades or more. Who needs a defense of the status quo?

The real problem with the claims you made at the Courtauld is that they were not supported by any serious examination of actual cases. Which is not to say that they could not be so supported: it was a lazy speech because you expected your audience to take your word for it, ballasting your claims not with examples and evidence, but with references to previous philosophers who have said much the same, and devised terminology for the purpose. This is why the following assertion rings hollow:

I am all in favor of leaving professional historians to do their work of excavating facts about specific parts of the past, and giving out information about this past that can never imply anything about how this information might relate to the efforts of present individuals and groups to derive some "knowledge" about human self-making.

The impossibility that you describe is precisely what Murray achieved in his paper on Momigliano. Murray excavated facts about the eighteenth century, and in doing so could produce specific evidence of the flaws in his subject's efforts to comprehend man. Momigliano, he argued, misunderstood the process of history because he denied the intimate connections between 'fiction' and 'history'. Made baldly, this is is an uninteresting, or at least an unpersuasive statement. But made with reference to 'specific parts of the past', it begins to have authority and conviction. For a philosopher so fascinated with rhetoric, you must appreciate the value of winning the assent of your more critical listeners, and this requires not just names but facts, or if you would prefer, fact-like things.

I hope the discussion will not end here.

[Update: Discussion seems to have ended here.]

White and Momigliano

2009-02-07T18:25:00.010-05:00

Hayden White spoke at the Courtauld on Wednesday night. Ken Clarke Lecture Theatre, a grand old room in pink, with white trim, like the inside of a wedding cake. A ghastly introduction from a fawning ex-student, not redeemed, but rather aggravated, by its kitschy, self-conscious irony. Hayden White is the king of irony. Then we clapped her off stage to make way for the master himself. White spoke for three quarters of an hour, with the utmost geniality, casually sweating references—Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Vico, Hugh Blair, Cicero, Dante, Winckelmann, Gombrich, Oakeshott, er, Toni Morrison, and so on, not to mention plenty of Hayden White. At the end of it, none of us was any the wiser. He was supposed to be talking about 'Novelesque Histories', apparently the (rather radical) notion that novels can be history too. I mean, just think of Walter Scott—Hegel thought him a great historian! After an hour he apologised for having no slides: this was, remember, at the Courtauld Institute, and he was lecturing to most of a roomful of art history graduates. Then he remembered he had some, and wheeled out some pictures of webs spun by spiders on drugs: an internet meme over a decade old. Still, it got the laughs. White said it was supposed to be a metaphor for the way literary history works, but it was a better metaphor for his own maundering, barely-coherent presentation. White, it seemed to me, was still trading off Metahistory, a book which had a few worthwhile ideas when he published it in 1973, even if it has been grossly overrated, then and since. Now he is a charming and erudite drunk*, still enjoying a meal of thirty years past, clean out of ideas.

None of which would have been worth writing a post on, if I hadn't attended a lecture today by Oswyn Murray, its subject ostensibly being '[Arnaldo] Momigliano and the Eighteenth Century'. Now, Momigliano wrote a rather damning review of Metahistory in his 1981 article, 'The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: on Hayden White's Tropes'. White's basic point had been—and still is, apparently—that historiography is a branch of rhetoric, and that the way one writes history is governed by the same sorts of rhetorical tropes as are found in oratory and fictional literature. Style becomes more important than truth: what could be more postmodern? Momigliano, the old-guard Warburg philologian, objected: what sense can we make of history if we forget that it centres on facts and problems? He wrote:

As the history of historiography is basically a study of individual historians, no student of the history of historiography does his work properly unless he is capable of telling me whether the historian or historians he has studied used the evidence in a satisfactory way.

Amélie Kuhrt, in the discussion after Murray's paper, described Momigliano's response to White as a moral distaste: the aim of historiography should be an ethical engagement with the problems of the past in relation to those of the present, not mere games with words and ideas, as White, the formalist, wanted to give us. Murray himself was more sympathetic to White. His paper, as charmingly delivered as White's, and with ten times the content, wanted to reconfigure Momigliano's map of narrative historiography in the Enlightenment. The old Italian, Murray observed, had paid too much attention to Gibbon, and scorned, to his own detriment, writers of literature: John Gast, for instance, or Walter Scott, who, as Murray pointed out, had been prized as a historian by Hegel and Carlyle. Novelists will tell you what colour trousers people wore, so to speak: and that was most important to the historian sniffing for clues.

What struck me was the contrast between White, American hero of the culture wars, and Murray, donnish, British, quietly authoritative. Both made the same point, or similar, and with the same example: the one rambling and blustering, bursting with comments on the Great Philosophers, the other excavating, methodically, a moment of history, letting the scholarship do its own talking, allowing the little to speak for the big. It has been a week to renew one's faith in the Murrays of the academic world.

* Not literally, of course. He may be, as well—but that is not what I meant.

[Update: Hayden White comments, here and on his own blog. Greg links. Steve sneers. Greg defends my honour. I respond to White. "Verstegan" defends my honour. Steve sneers again, with a dash of sanctimonious hypocrisy: my favourite kind! Thanks to all.]

London Belongs To—

2009-02-01T19:29:00.017-05:00

(In homage to, via intermittent pastiche of, the long defunct, and the funct, too.)

Woken by a saleswoman of uncertain ethnicity; voice sounds like a machine, Stephen Hawking. Five minutes go by before she tries to sell me something; I hang up. Band-aid has fallen off my thumb in the night, leaving the dried wound. Breadknife accident, after several beers; a flap of skin cut obliquely, in the shape of Osiris' crook, presaging death, gashed thumb as macabre totem of a journey curving back on itself. Today I will cut a gash of my own onto the London map, inscribe a V in footsteps through the city streets, from King's Cross to the Barbican, and up to Stamford Hill. It is lightly snowing as I leave, a scurrilous fag ash at best; no suitable hat; briefly wonder if I should turn back and ascend the stair (with a bald spot in the middle of my hair). But no; I shall not let myself be ruled by the vagaries of season. London belongs to me, among others. Noon.

Euston Road
Gray's Inn Road
Britannia Street
King's Cross Road

Bagnigge House plaque, well-noted by latterday Fleet River pilgrims. Someone, no doubt Thatcher, has thoughtlessly sited a bus shelter immediately in front, obscuring the view. Travelodge, murderer of London roads.

Lloyd Baker Street
Amwell Street
Rosoman Street
Exmouth Market
Pine Street
Catherine Griffiths Court
Northampton Road

Came to see Lubetkin's Health Centre, now that my attention has been adverted to it. Who would ever even notice it? Not as arresting as the sleek, monochrome photographs make it look. More noteworthy is the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering, which seems to operate under the Health Centre's general auspices, and whose name suggests a Python sketch that never was. Not that Palin has or has ever had a stammer; just that he once played a character with one. Slip round the back, into a bit of greenery, and then through a muset in the hedge, into a gated-off area, trying to get some sense of Lubetkin's derrière, but no luck.

Bowling Green Lane

A little swarm of coppers bombinating from two cars, lights flashing, outside the closed and oversize gates of CZWG Architects, housed in an old 1872 warehouse, dirty yellow brick banded with red, replete with free-floating terracotta tympana, and pulley equipment in period red iron. One of them crouches down to look under the gates; sees nothing; the coppers mutter discontentedly to each other and then disappear into their vehicles, the whole a shamanistic exorcism of deserted weekend Clerkenwell, come to nought.

Farringdon Road
Farringdon Lane
Clerkenwell Green
Aylesbury Street
St John Street
Clerkenwell Road
Old Street
Golden Lane
Golden Lane Estate

By this stage the sun has emerged, appropriately, and the old estate, with its saffron and primrose highlights, beams munificently from above. Sudden view into an apartment, with a bright and impressive roomful of books. Mother and daughter in the indoor pool below. Stains on one wall coalesce into a Leonardo phantasmagoria, faces of an older and more ancient London appearing again to haunt the estate's designer tenants.

"The buildings themselves—a very high density housing estate for the City of London—are sometimes fussy and sometimes weather-beaten. But in a way they are unimportant compared with the spaces between them. Every trick in the book is brought in, and not for cleverness's sake, but to create a real place out of statistical units of accommodation. There are half a dozen ways of crossing the site: along corridors, under buildings, down steps and up ramps. And it is all meant to be used." — Ian Nairn, London.

Fann Street
Fortune Street Gardens

"Scuse me mate, can I ask you a civil question?" Old fellow, beard, well wrapped-up, bright eyes. "Er, yes, go on." "Now, I'm not beggin, I'm not a mugger, I'm not a terrorist, I just wanted to ask you, since I'm sleeping rough these days, if you might happen to have any small change on you." So you. . . are begging? "I'm sorry, I haven't got any change." It's the truth, this time. "Ah well, God bless you son." Sun still out.

Errol Street
Dufferin Court
Bunhill Fields

Defoe's big prick. IT REPRESENTS THE UNITED CONTRIBUTIONS OF SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PERSONS. Blake. Bunyan. "Please nominate this park for a £200k grant," or something to that effect. Let it be derelict and overgrown, I say; let our literary heroes be hidden under creeping weeds, unearthable by dérive-ing Sinclairian enthusiasts. Though they probably won't bother with Defoe or Bunyan; what could these dissenters say to tomorrow's visionaries? A Hoxtonite with a big camera, up on the bench, gets a long view of all the graves.

City Road

One of those transitions of which Nairn is so fond, from the bumbling tombs of Bunhill, and before them the back streets of Peabody Estates, onto City Road, with its distant edging of the City's glass and steel. Brief flick round the Wesleyan Chapel, where I have arrived in the nick of time, as the minister, who appears with a spectral suddenness, tells me the Chapel is closing in fifteen minutes. It is a relief to be out of the terrible cold, at least. The interior is pleasant enough, and its ornamental ceilings are especially fine. Traditional old-timey stained glass in the narthex, facing out into the courtyard, flanked by two windows, modern, painted rather than stained, with a sinister, end-of-days feel, as if a new-century channelling of the old Methodist spirit.

The ship or ark, from which huddled masses stream (via parted waters) towards the foreground, reads -OGOS on the keel, which I take to be LOGOS. To the right, an old fellow fructifies the wanderers with a living river, and a kindly gent in spectacles toys with a branch. To the left, the cyclist's messenger-bag reads JESSEE COURIER, and at the rear of the ice-cream van is Angelos. The council-estate mum buying a coke from the ice-cream man has a child in tow, who is holding a palm-leaf. Rich with pregnant images, the cartoon on the glass is trying to tell us something. Back out into the cold, neither snow nor sun.

Cowper Street
Tabernacle Street
Pitfield Street
Old Street
Kingsland Road

I come across at least two hat shops, and consider making a purchase, since my head and ears are now burning. Endless onslaught of pretty girls, Hoxtonites, in outlandish fashions, even pencil-markings on their faces. I peer at the menu of every Vietnamese restaurant I pass, looking for soft-shell crab. An acquaintance informed me of this delicacy last week, and said this was the place to get it; now I am gagging to try it. But this is not the time. I don't want to sit down just for a single dish, nor to eat alone.

Kingsland Road
Geffrye Court
Kingsland Road
Dunston Road

Over the canal; I decide to call in on Butterfingers, who lives in a warehouse with a bunch of gangly artists. Brilled hair, cream jumper, scuffed brown chelsea boots with pointy brogue toes. Stopping by unannounced, or in this case almost so, is a rare opportunity in this diffuse metropolis, and so I take a peculiar pleasure from it, a perfect half-hour caesura from the march. When I arrive he is cooking up a lovely rösti and fried eggs. Orange juice. Haven't eaten all morning, so it goes down a treat. The great communal room is littered with eccentric bits of furniture and half-realised artworks and statements. One of the gang thinks Federer won the tennis, which gives me cheer. The fag-ash blizzard has begun outside again, but this time we can see the sun still shining as a gangrenous spot through the grey, an image of faint triumph. I ask if I can borrow a hat. He rummages around, but turns up nothing. "It's alright," I say, "I've come this far and I can keep going without one."

Kingsland Road
Kingsland High Street
Stoke Newington Road
Stoke Newington High Street
Stamford Hill
Lynmouth Road

After an evening spent reciting and discussing poetry, mine and others', it is still snowing in Stoke Newington. He walks me to the bus-stop, past the marvelous Egyptian entrance to Abney Park, and I reminisce with him of my walk in the San Francisco downpour. The flakes are thickly glazing our coats, and now coat the streets, deliciously. The 67 takes forever to come, but it's fine, we are good to talk for as long as it may be.

When I get back home, Aubrey is mewing with a pitiful vengeance, and he must have freshly laid, for the flat is saturated with an aroma of dung. The thumb is healing nicely; the pale white skin reattaching itself to the trunk, an almost alchemical process. Osiris' regenerative crook has been vindicated; life to death, and death back to life. London itself, with its range and sweep of light, textures, is itself an alchemical, regenerative city; never mere existence. Three in the morning, and the snow is still falling, still settling. Glowing in the dark. This must be the grandest city in all the world.

[Update: Monday. The newspapers are right: snow is general all over England. My soul swoons slowly as I hear the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. I have the sensation of having walked London for the last time, before it is engulfed in the blizzard forever.]

On Neologism, Part One

2009-01-29T20:12:00.010-05:00

The Scottish physician Thomas Short, at the end of a parenthesis on diseases, in the middle of a long footnote, extending over several pages through a discussion of chalybeate waters, from his 1734 Natural, Experimental, and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, writes with a twinkle:

The Causes we assign for these Diseases, we have borrowed from the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphicks, as the incoercible Flatus, culinary Digestion, Evestrum vitae, Peroledi, Archeus, Gas, Blas, Deulock, &c. which we discourse of as distinct intelligent Beings in the human Body. These are things beyond the Ken of the present Age.—

It is a rare moment of linguistic fantasia in an otherwise unremarkable text: a series of lexical gobbets from the natural science of Paracelsus and Van Helmont, via his immediate source, William Simpson's Hydrologia Chymica (1669). Of all these charming arcanisms, only one has made it into popular currency, almost invisible in the cloud surrounding it here: gas. Of the others, only one, blas, has survived at all—revived a month ago, for instance, in the languagey sectors of the internet—thanks to a freak citation in the OED, handily cross-referenced in the etymology awarded its more famous twin: 'Van H. also invented the term BLAS'; although the OED's entry for blas rather bizarrely pairs it with an unrelated bit of Middle English dialect (sense 1), offering for sense 2 only, 'Van Helmont's term for a supposed ‘flatus’ or influence of the stars, producing changes of weather.' The OED clearly assumes no readers will come to blas except by way of gas: for while the latter entry clarifies which Van Helmont, the former does not. All the citations for blas, the phantom word, are Helmontian, except the last, a reference to Whitney's seminal Life and Growth of Language (1875). This is cited without quotation; but for you, reader:

Of the out-and-out invention of new words, language in the course of its recorded history. . . presents only rare examples. Sometimes, however, a case occurs like that of gas, already noticed as having been devised by an ancient chemist, as artificial appellation for a condition of existence of matter which had not before been so distinctly apprehended as to seem to require a name. Along with it, he proposed blas for that property of the heavenly bodies whereby they regulate the changes of time: this, however, was too purely fanciful to recommend itself to general use, and it dropped out of sight and was forgotten, while the other came to honor.

The full text of Life and Growth is online, although one word seems to have puzzled the OCR: that word, of course, being blas, which it renders Mas. So the OED defines blas as an influence of the stars on the weather, and Whitney, the old American windbag, defines it as an astral property that regulates time.

Stellae sunt nobis in signa, tempora, dies, & annos. Ergo patrant temporum mutationes, tempestates, atque vicissitudines. Quorsum opus habent duplici motu, locali scilicet, & alterativo. Utrumque autem, novo nomine Blas significo. . . Blas motivum stellarum, est virtus pulsiva, ratione itineris, per loca et secundum aspectus.

The stars for us are as signs, tempora, days and years. Therefore they effect the changes, tempestates and vicissitudes of the tempora. For this they require a double motion, that is locomotive and alterative. Both, however, I signify with the new name 'Blas'. . . Blas, the movement of the stars, is a propulsive power, by reason of their journey through places and according to their aspects.

The problem comes in the definitions of tempus and tempestas, which can mean time, season, occasion and weather. Either way, the Helmontian stars play a role in the astrological mechanism of the universe, which was wholly within the regular laws of natural science. Now the interesting question is: why has the OED preserved blas? Sure, it makes a nice rhyming twin with gas, and, as in Whitney, the two nicely illustrate the divergent possibilities of two initial bedfellows, a lexical version of Hawking radiation. That was the Liberman angle: 'it's too bad that 18th-century chemists couldn't find any real substance to which the reference of blas could be transferred, as the reference of gas was'.

But blas has no real substance as an English word: it exists in the penumbra of the lexicon, teasing us as a little jewel of potential meaning, but never so well-defined (time or weather? 'Both I signify. . .'), and never, more importantly, a true element in the inter-referential web of the vocabulary. It has no interaction with its fellows, except gas. It was only ever a parody of a word.

See, if not blas, why not peroledi or peroledes? For this is another Helmontism:

Habet ergo aer suos, non minus quam terra, fundos, quos Adepti vocant Peroledos. Invisibile itaque Gas, variis aeris stratis hospitatur, si aquae sua sint barathra, suae voragines, suae portae sunt in Peroledis, quas periti Cataractas Coeli, & valvas dixere.

Therefore the air, no less than the earth, has its own grounds, which the adepts call 'Peroledi'. Thus the invisible Gas is a guest in the various layers of the air, if the waters have their abysses, their chasms, so its own gates are in the Peroledi, which the experts call the sluices and folding-doors of heaven.

Oh, you want it in period English? It's only Margaret Cavendish, the second most famous English writeress of the seventeenth century, in a Philosophical Letter:

But rather then your Author [Van Helmont] will consent to the transchanging of Water into Air, he will feign several grounds, soils or pavements in the Air, which he calls Peroledes, and so many Flood-gates and Folding-dores, and make the Planets their Key-keepers; which are pretty Fancies, but not able to prove any thing in Natural Philosophy.

Is it purely in deference to the cute historical narrative of gas and blas that the OED likes blas and not peroledes? And why is it so much less generous to Van Helmont than to Paracelsus, who is awarded several neologisms in the dictionary? (In addition to the uncontroversial gnome and nostoc, Paracelsus gets archeus too, with a wholly unsatisfactory etymology section.) What are the criteria for formal recognition in the lexicon? What does it take to be a word?

[Part Two here.]

One mania after another

2009-01-22T08:17:00.003-05:00

A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which their fathers have made for them; while of the minority, who are indeed thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men have we seen wearying their souls with study undirected, often misdirected; craving to learn, yet not knowing how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwholesome energy, the head at the expense of the body and the heart; catching up with the most capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing it away again for some new phantom; gorging the memory with facts which no one has taught them to arrange, and the reason with problems which they have no method for solving; till they fret themselves in a chronic fever of the brain, which too often urges them on to plunge, as it were, to cool the inward fire, into the ever-restless seas of doubt or of superstition.

— Charles Kingsley, Glaucus (1855). This is not the best sentence in the book, on a purely formal level—there are two or three better—but it is the most stinging.

Patience

2009-01-18T14:54:00.013-05:00

'Old stone to new building. . .' Stephen Dillane pauses. He scrunches up his eyes, and clutches controlledly at the air, like some Chinese master channelling his ch'i. 'Old stone to new building—' The repetition is hardly jarring in the context. How many of us knew it was a mistake? Not me. After all, Eliot was never afraid of pointless repetition. Then: What's the line? I have heard that tone before. (Where?) Neither patient nor impatient, neither calm nor irritated. Old timber! snaps his invisible prompt, a woman, this one as if impatient, like a wife. Nary a flicker from him.

— Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth,

And so on. That was the only obvious mistake in Dillane's rendition of 'The Four Quartets', aside from pronouncing eviscerate (4.2) with a hard c, and, worse, figlio (3.4) with a hard g. But darling, this is Eliot, one doesn't quibble with the details! Well then. What of the whole? Nicholas de Jongh, lustily guzzling clichés, calls it an 'extraordinary performance', in which Dillane 'holds the audience in rapt silence'. I'm not sure if he was expecting conversation in the back rows. Remember, budding journalists: every stressed noun must have its adjective: 'It is a performance of riveting purity, under Katie Mitchell's inspired direction, which ought to restore the lost art of speaking poetry in public to a proper eminence.' Is the art of speaking poetry in public lost, indeed, or simply ineminent? Dillane has a 'voice of meditative calm, all extraneous emotion drained from it'; his hands 'weave' neither 'distracting patterns', nor, thankfully, 'flamboyant gestures'. And so he 'allows the philosophical ideas and lyrical beauties of The Four Quartets to speak for themselves.' You can see how de Jongh's mind turns: once the faucet is open, the water will follow a prepared course. De Jongh will never surprise you.

Dillane was in fact calm, but not meditatively so. He spoke, rather, much in a tone of explanation, patiently, breaking now and then into reverie: 'And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly' (1.1). A dry light, full of measure. Then the tone was the tone of a sermon: 'Who then devised the torment? Love.' The tone was that of a sermon, because the words were those of a sermon. Oh, Eliot wants to tell you something, damn it, and he doesn't care if you know it.

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

Just try reading that aloud: see if you can read it and sound meditative. I defy you. You will not sound meditative, you will sound like a bird who has swallowed a philosophical plate. When De Jongh writes that Dillane has let the ideas and beauties 'speak for themselves', he is not only verbally taking the road more travelled, he is repeating without consideration the myth that a plainness, or even, in this instance, a quietness of delivery, necessarily gives the sense better. (Ivan Hewett, in a possible coincidence, had said the same about Dillane's Quartets back in 2005: 'The lack of any "manner" meant that Dillane became a transparent vessel for Eliot's often complex tangle of philosophy and imagery to shine through.') It is the story that style is mere unnecessary ornament on substance. Same goes for the words themselves: Eliot could, after all, sell us his mystical profundities in simple language, for the people, without recourse to pompous archaisms like 'eviscerate', or pompous foreign cuckoos like 'Figlia del tuo figlio'. Or could he?

At any rate, we all agree that Dillane gave us a naked Eliot. Sam Marlowe, whose trend-bucking credentials are confirmed by his admiration for the 'Lord of the Rings' musical, nonetheless rates the Dillane as 'an austere expression of compressed passion'. (Marlowe clearly an alumnus of the same prose school as de Jongh, his own music clunkier but at least more varied.) Some more Marlovian adjectives—by which you will easily allocate Dillane's performance to the appropriate box—'chilly yet compelling control', 'uncompromising directness', 'a contained figure', 'focused intensity'. We were all listening. We all heard our Eliot. Dillane did not giggle when he had to say 'In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not'. We got what we came for. So that's Dillane done. But what did we come for?

My mother said, afterwards, 'What's it all about, then?' Let de Jongh tell you: 'Eliot. . . writes in terms very difficult to grasp. [But de Jongh grasps them.] Yet [why 'yet'?] these four poems—inspired by faith, by the history of places personal to Eliot, by the seasons of the year, by each of the four elements and the busy flux of time past and time present—arrest the emotions with their visionary strangenesses.' No, alright, that didn't tell you. Let Marlowe tell you: the poems 'are dense meditations on the implacability of time and humanity's struggle to find meaning in the flux of existence, couched in the rich language and symbolism of Christianity and mysticism'. Ah! Also: 'A complex picture of the self-perpetuating, ever-changing patterns of life emerges from his spoken words and from Eliot's plethora of literary and religious references.'

My father said, afterwards, in response to a request for his opinion, 'Sententious rubbish.' Certainly, it is hard for a cynic to take seriously all this zennish mumbo-jumbo, filched from St John of the Cross or the Bhagavad Gita or wherever. 'Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.' When Eliot wrote 'Prufrock', he sounded like a clever poet. When he wrote 'Burnt Norton' and the rest, he sounded like a poet trying to sound like a clever philosopher. It is a gambit that never works, unless you're Lucretius and can write a good, rough Latin hexameter. Why do poets do this? And painters too. Fine sound and composition is no longer enough: our artists must strive for something more than art. This shift seemed to happen between the wars. What is true of 'Prufrock' is true of Harmonium and The Bridge. What is true of the Quartets is true of 'Of Mere Being', and parts of "A". Eliot's poetry quickly lost its wit, a misunderestimated virtue. Contrast, for instance, two thoughts of superficial similarity. From 'Prufrock':

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.'

But from 'Burnt Norton':

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Likewise, from 'East Coker':

So here I am. . .
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

(That got a laugh, the slightest of laughs.) In 'Prufrock', Eliot can tarry with the difficulty of precise expression, in essence the most banal of concepts, and make it humane, charming. We do not believe him here; the irony is pleasant. In his Quartets the same banality becomes so much the more sincere, and the more pitiable. It is particularly pitiable for the fact that Eliot is, no, not a philosopher, but a poet: we are paying him for words—come on Tommy, give us some lovely words, won't you? A nice rhyme? No? A bit of onomatopoeia? No? Make it dance, can't you?—and certainly not to be told he can't do words. There is an indignity to it, as if we were to turn up at the football and hear Ronaldinho moaning about the difficulty of scoring goals, only moaning in the medium of missed goals; or as if we went to a gallery and found no nice paintings but only a bunch of flies stuck to a canvas. Up yours, Beauty! Indeed. This irony is hardly pleasant, only grating, and I have no patience for it.

Hewett, writing on Dillane's earlier Quartets, makes a preposterous claim about the poems:

What this performance proved is how, in a mere 60 years, the Quartets have woven themselves into our consciousness. Every line had that feeling of a half-remembered quotation. . .

I cannot imagine why anyone should want to claim such a thing for the Quartets. Is it true for you? (The only part that has woven itself, or grafted itself, into my consciousness is that wretched doggerel about 'knowing the place for the first time', which has wound up as an epigram for every other self-regarding science or history book.) Then comes the great cliché: 'Never before had I realised just how "musical" the quartets are. They're full of recurring refrains, variations on themes, contrapuntal weaves.' Hewett later remarks that 'Eliot tries to get beyond words'. Why do we want our poetry to be musical? Why would we want a confection of words to get beyond words, in Hewett's sense of it? Irving Babbitt, ironically one of Eliot's own mentors, thought that desire a result of the modern romantic disease, and I am inclined to agree. The Quartets are full, not of 'refrains' and 'weaves', but simply of repetitions. Some of these repetitions ('And a time for living and for generation / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane') are those of a sermon: they have the rhythms not of music but of oratory. Others ('where you are is where you are not', 'In my (end/beginning) is my (beginning/end)') have no rhythm, only the flat mock-wit of a koan.

Our stage journalists are too soft. They are slightly in awe of this new thing, these words of a Great Poet, bare and direct, or apparently so, and have no calculus for judging it. They call the Quartets complex, but they mean only that the Quartets are long. Perhaps the Quartets are complex, and perhaps their complexity does not make them any good. It is not hard to write a few hundred lines of verse, with a slew of repetitions, and a slew of quotations from, or allusions to, the Bible, the Mahabharata, Dante, and so on. What is the use of your 'philosophical ideas', your 'meditations on the implacability of time', if you reach no conclusions of interest? If your lyricism cannot rise above the humdrum of rose-gardens, yawn, of twittering birds, yawn, of the yew-tree, the 'womb, or tomb', the 'parched soil' of mid-century ennui? If you have to rhyme 'food' with 'blood' and 'good', like you're Shakespeare or something? On Eliot's grave should be inscribed, Poeta, ne ultra verba. Poets, do what poets can do.

Lens Grinding

2009-01-11T15:10:00.016-05:00

In Skye I snapped away at the ice and frost quite happily, and at my comrades, who themselves snapped, with their crappy iPhones, at tree and face with wanton abandon. Only one of us demurred. Some of us, he snorted, prefer to use our minds. I was not unsympathetic to his response. After all, it was only a few years ago, at sunset, on one of the bridges from Cambridge into Boston, that I had said the same to another friend, only not, I hope, with such preening pomposity. The essential complaint is given loudest voice by one Becca Bland, founder of 'No Photography Day', who seems to have required a few books about Zen Buddhism to reach her conclusion, that photographers are

missing out on so much of the given moment through their obsession, an act of possession—of wanting to own the appearance of the place, as if this was all it had to give and photographs were their way of taking it.

Richard at Castrovalva comments (almost three years ago, mind):

Originally, I felt that photography was a mechanical way of viewing the world, which only served to dim the immediacy of experience. Since then, I've come to see it as a way of slowing experience and regaining observation of intricacy and detail. I'm thinking of how neuroscience has come to describe consciousness as a series of individual moments, which like a flickbook are asembled to create the illusion of a continuous stream; photography or painting return us to the moment that lies underneath the illusion.

As I believe I replied at the time—though since Richard has blanked out the comments, damning dialogue to the memoryhole, it is hard to be certain—this sort of aesthetic would strongly favour a photography of people, of living, or at least of moving subjects. But Richard is the snapper of buildings par excellence: he has even published. Even with a bit of sophistry, it isn't easy to defend the photography of architecture as 'a way of slowing experience', or as a recapturing of moments beneath the maya of continuous phenomena. Nor is it obvious how a good clean shot of, say, the Victoria Tower is 'as contrived a representation of reality as impressionist or cubist painting'. These are the sorts of things, in my own experience, that photographers have to say to defend and justify their own activity as an Art Form.

I find myself reaching for the camera, now, to photograph buildings, like Richard. Only I do not wait for the sun, and have neither a good camera, nor any interest in adding yet another image of the Victoria Tower or other London icons to the world's collection. So I walk the back streets of the city, in that grey with which all its architectures must compete, and take down anything which strikes my fancy; rarely the pretty or the glamorous, but rather that which speaks, and usually the incongruous, in particular—

You will see here, probably, that I have made some attempt at framing the picture for aesthetic effect. The first-floor windows snuggle neatly against the frame, the door is trig in the middle, indicated most obviously by the proximity of its flanking windows to either edge of the image, and the gates in the foreground provide a sense of depth. Moreover, the whole result has been tweaked to lessen the blue, so as to give you a better sense of how I seemed to see, or perhaps wanted to see, the subject in question. A Richard will say, There, your impressionist painting, your picture contrived straight out of reality.

But I think this is to attribute too much to the adjusting hand and eye. I deny that this is art; it is simply artisanry, at best. Something in my soul—is it a Platonism?—wants to safeguard the category of art. I cannot explain the mood, cannot give good reason for it. Still, it is there. I want to reserve art for the Rembrandts and Picassos—and for the bad artists too, the Renoirs and Rothkos—but not for the Richards and Conrads out for a jolly day around town with the old SLR. To efface that distinction, to deny any barrier between tekhnē and empeiría, science and knack, art and craft, is to have become blind to the value inherent in each. A programmer once said to me, quite unguardedly, that he was creative, but not artistic, an admission in which I find a very admirable modesty: and by modesty I mean not the false humility of so many intellectuals, but a true understanding of the nature and the limitations of one's own endeavours. Photography, and especially the photography of the static, like programming, is a creative activity, but not an artistic one: it aspires to be elegant and to give pleasure—but not to genius.

So I bring the above picture to your attention, and of course it is only an example, not so that you can admire my flair for composition, but only because I wanted you to see what I had seen, and wanted you to see it well. The beauty or interest in the image is entirely the work of other men. I aim for a handsome record of experience. But what of this aim? Is it worthwhile?

I try to avoid the false pride of the photographer: to retain my admiration or concern for the subject, not the image; but this is not always easy. I had long wondered why Owen Hatherley, who spends much of his time online writing about architecture, should offer his readers photographs of such poor quality: ill-framed, ill-lit, and unedited. It could not be a lack of talent, though he seems to suggest just that at the end of a post on Paternoster Square. No, I think he has deliberately given us bad pictures to remind us that they are pictures, not artistic end but utilitarian means within an argument. (I once recommended clunky translations for a related purpose.) Perhaps this is a more honourable choice for the purpose of recording an engagement with the world. I have praised the beauty of pylons, impossible to photograph elegantly: experience resisting formulation, sublimity transcending façade.

Moreover, the snapping process contributes to the slow but alarming devolvement of human faculties onto technology: the Thamus Effect. Just as we now let our Wikipedia remember facts for us, so we have long let our photographs remember experiences for us. In making our inner life communicable to others, whether by alphabets or cameras, we lose a little of it. For the pleasure of public admiration one sacrifices the pleasure of walking high and alone. And my memory, indeed, becomes fragmented; more precise in places, but perhaps a little less rich, or less sublime. The hand inside my pocket for the camera has come to be, I confess, too automatic. I press the button, in the immoral hope of obtaining a fine composition, but I do so with misgivings, like the recidivist smoker peeling the plastic from a new pack of fags, or the child with his fingers in a jar of candies, clever enough, but fat nonetheless.

It is only when I find a subject that will speak, not only for itself—for that it will do without the lens—but for me, that I seize it with impunity. When with words I can give a thing life it has not in the wild, domestication is an ennobling act. It is the rarest of chances.

[By the way, lots of photographs better spotted than mine, and much better taken, at my colleague M. W. Nolden's project, Rabbit Meets Hat. Update 17/1/09: James Sligh also comments.]

Cryography

2009-01-04T10:39:00.017-05:00

Well, a happy arbitrary point dividing two periods approximately corresponding to orbits of the Earth about the sun to all my readers, and I trust you all enjoyed yourselves in the appropriate, or at least appropriately inappropriate, manner. I returned from Skye on the second, to my treasured city; wife's loving arms; restless and neglected cat; white shirt turned lavender by careless lavendry, that is, ruined in the wash; two chapters of a book still to edit; and a postcard S. kindly sent me from Varanasi, bearing on it a rather painterly photograph of two riverside crematoria. On the drive home—eleven hours in the back seat of a car, followed by three and a half on a bus—I struggled to read Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, a book aiming for Oulipian wit and playfulness, and perhaps for a fragmentary approach to encyclopaedism, à la Perec, but in fact monumentally boring, mired in the enumeration of banal detail, à la Robbe-Grillet. My last creative act at the cottage in Skye was a stoking of the hearth fire, a process of fadging, progging, scraping, jiggling, variably-sized lumps of coal, sticks of wood, and firelighters, without burning my hands, though leaving my fingers black enough to require two bouts with the sink and soap. On December 31, as our cellphones beeped midnight, in the black wastes of the countryside, under constellations bright and enormous, a celestial scurf—not unknown to the Londoner, but at least utterly unfamiliar—we experimented with fireworks. What with the pyres, the Roubaud, the hearth, the rockets, one might think the dominant motif of the holiday was fire. But it was not.

It was the ice. O, the most marvelous ice you did see, friends. White and dark, in frost and hoar, on rocks and grasses, in tendrils and stars, razor-straight and sinuous, anfractuous, fragile tendons and crude unbreakable masses, whole and fragmentary: the ice of royal treasuries.

On the third day, after following the tourists up to the ruined Duntulm Castle on the northwest coast of Trotternish, and before joining the tourists again at the Kilt Rock waterfall, we drumbled upon a little lake secluded by low mountains and frozen over: it was not enough to walk on, and the sheets of ice were broken up at the shore (above), and littered with discarded wheels and engine parts, moulded and solidified into the surface. We cast rocks against and along the ice, and made the most remarkable sounds thereby, like pinball, or space invaders:

Early on in the trip we discovered the icicles hanging under a ridge by the road, hundreds of them, and, like FfRS, began to experiment with force and resistance, carving ice with rock, calving ice with ice. Eventually two of our number broke off specimens large enough to fence with. Gloves doffed, I took pictures as long as I could manage before my hands went numb and started to burn. It was so cold you could have pissed snow. At the end of our session the ridge resembled Shane MacGowan's mouth, and we sped off, the violence of youth expended harmlessly on Nature's most transient objects.

On the journey home we paused in the car on the mountains just above the clouds of mist obscuring a loch beneath, a floor of vapours burning spectrally in the naked sun. Then we drove down into the haze, through the forest at Achadhluachraich, all grey five metres from your face, and clambered down the slope on foot, to the lake, a ringed and perfect carpet of ice in three shades. (Fifth picture, above.) Alas, the surface was still too frail to walk upon, but we skimmed stones again, and watched them vanish, imperceptibly, from one grey into another, the ice into the water, or simply into the mist. Further still, out of the basin, in the highlands near Fort William, we found another frozen loch, and this one—finally—was deep and thick enough, several inches, at least at the lines of fracture between plates, to tread safely. On this we walked and slid out to the islands, and played with shadows in the clearer ice, and the sky was empty, a cold blue, and the car seemed a hundred miles away, and the dreadful voyage impending, forgotten; it was our last call of freedom, as our collective friendship, fissuring underneath, had begun to show its lines of stress at the surface, little kingdoms delineated translucently: unaided by sun or stamping feet above, we moved apart of our own accord.

And onward, into year four of the Varieties.

Macaronic Frühneuhochdeutsch, anyone?

2008-12-23T14:35:00.010-05:00

One passage of many such, from the 1883 Weimar Luther, volume 34 of 127; in this instance, from the 'text' of a sermon delivered on the evening of 11 April, Easter Tuesday 1531.

Audivimus de poenitencia et remissione peccatorum. Das hab ich umb der kurtz wyllen uberlauffen et tamen clare, expresse. Das wyr aber das fest bschlissen, wollen wyr ein stuck odder ii vor uns nhemen. Der Her hat uns vorgemalet, was er vor eyn geberde furet unter seynen jungern, quod in medio illorum progrediatur et salutet illos ita, ut terreantur discipuli. Die selbige erschreckung wyl er nicht leyden, quia non vult estimari spiritus, qui non habet carnem et ossa. Er bekennet, das die geyster alßo erscheinen, tum non habentes carnem et ossa. Diß ist eyn sonderlich bylde pro impiis conscienciis. Der teuffel hat auch die arth, das er offentlich zw uns durchs worth odder heymlich durch gedancken zw uns kumme, uff das er hoc malum, das man heist ein falschen Christum. Satan hat auch die art, quod venit ad nos offentlich und heimlich, 1. per praedicationem, 2. per cogitationes potest etiam dicere: 'bonus dies' et 2. conscientiam terrere et sic hominem irr machen, ut nesciat homo, Christus sit necne, semper vult simia esse dei.

A translation of which would look something like this:

We have heard about repentance and the remission of sins. I wanted to run over that briefly and yet clearly, expressly. To conclude the feast, let's have a look at one or two passages. The Lord has shown us what gesture he makes among his disciples, for he goes among them and greets them thus, as the disciples are frightened. He does not want to suffer the same fearfulness, for he would not be thought a spirit without flesh and bones. He acknowledges that the spirits appear thus, not having flesh and bones. This is a peculiar image for impious consciences. The Devil is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly through words, or secretly through thoughts, such that, on account of this evil, one calls him a false Christ. Satan is of like disposition, that he comes to us openly and familiarly, 1. by spoken words (or, more specifically, 'by preaching, prophesying'), and 2. can also say 'good day' by thoughts alone, and 2. can frighten the conscience and thus make a man mad, so as not to know if Christ exists or not; always would he be the ape of God.

Luther is alluding to the narrative in Luke 24.36-39, where Christ appears to his disciples after the resurrection. In the Vulgate: 'Iesus stetit in medio eorum et dicit eis pax vobis ego sum nolite timere / conturbati vero et conterriti existimabant se spiritum videre / et dixit eis quid turbati estis et cogitationes ascendunt in corda vestra / videte manus meas et pedes quia ipse ego sum palpate et videte quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet sicut me videtis habere.' And in the KJV: 'Jesus himself stood in the midst of [the disciples], and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. / But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. / And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? / Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'

The function of Satan is always to burlesque God, that is, to imitate him in reverse; he is found as the 'ape of God' (simia dei, Gottes Affe) throughout Luther's sermons and commentaries. (Alfred Adam traces the motif to the Cistercian hagiographer Caesar of Heisterbach.) Like Christ, Satan strikes awe into the soul, but where Christ makes his presence manifest, Satan makes a man forget whether Christ exists.

So that's the theology taken care of. But what's going on with the languages? It seems highly unlikely that Luther should have delivered a sermon in hybrid German-Latin, even to a small circle of intellectuals. Some of the Latin fragments play on the Vulgate, but they are not direct quotations, and others have no obvious provenance. Malcolm Parkes writes:

The evidence indicates that the scribes [in Luther's circle] translated the essentials of what they had heard in German immediately into Latin, and then set down the discourse in Latin in order to use the customary methods of abbreviation in that language, which enabled them to record spoken discourse more quickly. Only when the process of instantaneous translation was too difficult, or when the German phrases were particularly striking, did the scribes write down Luther's own words. Subsequently the "reportator" translated the text back into the original language, expanding both the simplified forms and abbreviated thought in such a way as to make the record more readable.

Did the scribes omit to re-translate, in this instance? Or was the Weimar editor using an odd source-text? In any event, the German and Latin seem to play against each other, the one sometimes half-repeating the other, or elaborating upon it, like the interaction between a God and his Ape.

Two Plays in One Fitts

2008-12-19T14:52:00.009-05:00

In 1955, Dudley Fitts published a translation of Aristophanes' Frogs for Harcourt & Brace; in 1957, of the Birds. The two versions were issued separately by Faber in London, and, in 1959, paired in a new edition for the Heritage Press; the matching pale red and pale blue original Faber octavos have graced my shelf for years now. I bought the one on the basis of the other, and the other—the Frogs—on the basis of a single verse:

Ah the logotomy! Verb breasting adverb, the cristate nouns
plunging 'gainst pavid pronouns. Let the bull stylistic
(husband of cows) rise up and whirl his whiskers!
Ah the lambent raiding of verse, the (my God!) tripsis
of boant anapests leaping in lucent line
against the skiaphagous luculent ululant
phalanges of the foe!

At the time I had been sipping Nashe and books on Joyce; you will readily understand the flash of recognition here. (Fitts himself compares Frogs to Joyce: it 'is almost as rich as Finnegans Wake in literary allusion and rhetorical parody—indeed, it is a haunted text'.) Fitts' passage bears little resemblance to the original:

estai d'ippolophōn te logōn koruthaiola neikē
skhindalamōn te paraxonia smileumata t' ergōn,
phōtos amunomenou phrenotektonos andros
rhēmath' ippobamona.
phrixas d' autokomou lophias lasiauxena khaitan,
deinon episkunion xunagōn brukhōmenos hēsei
rhemata gomphopagē pinakēdon apospōngēgenei phusēmati.

The mock-Homeric grandeur of which, in some dull sense, is better captured by the clunking hyphenese of Matthew Dillon's translation at Perseus:

There will be the helmet-blazing strife of horse-crested phrases;
Axle-splinterings as the chisel-working fellow defends himself
against the horse-galloping utterances of the mind-building man.
Bristling the shaggy-necked mane of his natural-hair crest,
Knitting his terrible brow, bellowing, he will launch
bolt-fastened utterances, ripping them apart board by board
with gigantic blast of breath.

To depart so radically from the original takes balls. But Fitts knew what he was doing. This was a gold still moment in the self-realisation of late (American) modernism, a full ripening on the tree, before the pecking sparrows and necrosis of postmodernism. Nothing new arrived between 1955 and 1960; but the dust settled. When Fitts and his friends turned to criticism, they could write with an air of authority, of a Matthew Arnold, only their accepted truths were now those of formalism and the New Critics. The mood was erudite, philological, good-humoured, word-oriented, and concerned, most of all, with the nature of poetic authenticity. In his little bookling, The Poetic Nuance (1958), Fitts dismisses Nabokov's violently-annotated prose translation of Eugene Onegin—a popular bugbear of the time, at least among poets:

A tireless writer of footnotes, I find this concept endearing; but I am not sure that it is anything more. The trouble is that such a translation, though it might give the prose "sense" of the original together with an explanation of whatever goes to lift the prose sense above itself and transmute it into a form of art, might also provide no evidence beyond the saying so that the art was art in the first place. . . We need something at once less ambitious and more audacious: another poem. Not a representation, in any formal sense, but a comparable experience.

How Nabokov would have sneered at such cant! Fitts is merely reproducing Cleanth Brooks on the 'heresy of paraphrase' [NB: please to observe the Wikipediast's literalistic wit, bottom]. Like a good on-message poet (or critic) of his age, Fitts assumes that poetry is irreducible, that a poem without the Poem is nothing, or, worse, a betrayal. Like so much modern dogma, this is essentially a romantic absolutism. The same thinking leads him to equally conventional remarks on the translation of jokes, conceived as the most difficult of idioms:

A joke can be a nuisance. Nothing is more inert than a witticism that has to be explained. Topicality, the recondite allusion, special jargon—these are matters that can not be handled even in Nabokovian footnote without inviting the embrace of death.

To illustrate this point, Fitts discusses one of his own choices, from his Frogs of three years past. The cowardly Dionysus is being taunted by his servant Xanthias, on the existence of the hellish monster Empusa, before the latter winds down his prank, assuring his master that the beast is gone: 'As Hegelochos would say, ek kumaōn gar authis au galēn horō.' The Greek means, literally, 'After the storm I see again the polecat.' Here comes the Nabokovian death-embrace: Aristophanes is alluding to a line of Orestes, mispronounced by the actor Hegelochos: the word galēn, depending on stress, can mean either 'calm at sea' (from galēnē) or 'polecat' (from galeē). The translator is therefore faced with a classic untranslateable pun: what to do?

The dread hand of Nabokov would translate, 'After the storm I see again the polecat', and spend half a page in 9-point explaining the allusion. Such, precisely, was the pre-Romantic approach. Thus a 1785 version by the cleric Charles Dunster offers: 'I see a weasel rising from the storm', and, true to form, clarifies the joke in a footnote. By the time we reach Benjamin Rogers' 1914 Frogs, Romanticism has already set in, and the pun is not preserved but re-imagined: 'Out of the storm there comes a new fine wether.' The only problem is that 'wether' cannot be a mis-pronunciation of 'weather': as a satire on Hegelochos' delivery, it fails. Fitts, at any rate, offers a similar solution: 'After the storm I see the clam again'. (Dillon, straining, has 'calm-ari'.) He justifies his decision thus:

It is a hoary one, certainly, but only a cad would object to it. . . there are still customers who will suspect the whole thing of being an enigma or a typographical error, and these people must be led through some such process as the one we have just traversed.

And so we get, if we look in the back, unprompted by any little digits, an explanatory note. A Fittsian modernism is therefore a softened and saleable doctrine. He would preserve the art qua art, and gloss it still, so as to reassure the sceptic that it is, after all, art. Proust had written 'une oeuvre où il y a des theories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix', a literary work with theories is like an object with the price-tag still attached. He had written this, a bit of theory, in his great literary work, the Recherche, thus contradicting himself even as he wrote. But this dictum remained the essence of High Modernism, whether or not it reflected practice. A poem should not mean, but be. By the time of Fitts there is some forgiveness.

Fitts dedicates his Frogs to his younger friend John Ciardi, the great translator of Dante. Ciardi was a card-carrying New Critic, editing an annotated anthology of verse in 1959 with the almost cartoon-formalist title, How Does a Poem Mean? In the introduction he insists, smelling of Empson, against a 'high-minded appreciator', that poetry is to be understood as a feat of engineering and formal invention. The ultimate modernist-romantic, he asserts, 'The pretty, by a first law of art, is never the beautiful. The two cannot coexist. . . all greeting cards are pretty and therefore no greeting card is beautiful.' For his dedication, appositely, Fitts chooses a sliver of Dante, the conclusion of Inferno VI:

Ed egli a me: 'Ritorna a tua scienza,
Che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta,
Più senta il bene, e così la doglienza,

Tuttochè questa gente maledetta
In vera perfezion giammai non vada,
Di là, più che di qua, essere aspetta.'

Noi aggirammo a tondo quella strada,
Parlando più assai ch'io non ridico:
Venimmo al punto dove si digrada:
Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nimico.

Ciardi himself has this, in his 1954 Inferno, on which Fitts remarked, 'This is our Dante. . . a shining event in a bad age':

And he to me: "Look to your science again
where it is written: the more a thing is perfect
the more it feels of pleasure and of pain.

As for these souls, though they can never soar
to true perfection, still in the new time
they will be nearer it than they were before."

And so we walked the rim of the great ledge
speaking of pain and joy, and of much more
that I will not repeat, and reached the edge

where the descend begins. There, suddenly,
we came on Plutus, the great enemy.

The context is this: Dante and Vergil are discussing the judgement of the damned at the Second Coming. Dante wonders if those in Hell be better or worse off after this point: 'When the great clarion fades / into the voice of thundering Omniscience, / what of these agonies?' His master replies that since they will recover their flesh and bodies, they will, secundum Aristotelem, be more perfect, and so they will feel more pain.

For the dedication of his Birds to his disciple and collaborator, Robert Fitzgerald, more famous for his Aeneid, Fitts chooses a morsel not of Vergil, but of Erasmus, from the Lucianic colloquy 'Charon':

Alastor. Sed quid opus est triremi? Charon. Nihil, si velim in media palude rursus naufragium facere. Al. Ob multitudinem? Ch. Scilicet. Al. Atqui umbras vehis, non corpora. Quantulum autem ponderis habent umbrae? Ch. Sint tipulae, tamen tipularum tanta vis esse potest, ut onerent cymbam. Tum scis, et cymbam umbratilem esse.

To translate:

Al. But what use is the trireme? Ch. Nothing, if I want to wind up shipwrecked in the middle of the swamp again. Al. On account of the throng? Ch. Naturally. Al. But you transport shades, not bodies. And how little must the shades weigh? Ch. They are only crane-flies (tipulae), but crane-flies can have enough weight to sink a skiff. You know, too, that the skiff itself is shadowy.

In neither instance is explanation given: the reference is hermetic, like in the good old days of Pound and Stevens. One might reasonably suspect, given the chthonic setting of both passages, that Ciardi and Fitzgerald were dead. But both were in the prime of health, dying within a year of each other, just under thirty years later. In each case we have a dialogue, a guide and a pilgrim. Surely Fitts claimed for himself the role of the cicerone in hell, a role at the core of the modernist worldview. Pound had begun his masterpiece by translating a translation of Odysseus's katabasis; Williams booted his own career with a work entitled Kora in Hell; Eliot guided his reader not through hell but through the Wasteland, its fertility latent but real; Leo Bloom is given a whole chapter for his own nekuia, and H. C. E. an entire book; and before them all, the forefather of modernism, James Frazer, had turned his own opus on a symbol representing safe passage through the underworld. The poet is the acknowledged legislator: the trireme weighed with the tipulary souls of men, not only the true dead, but those still feeling of pleasure and pain. Fitts, conservative 'in a bad age', explicitly shares the pain of a conservative Aristophanes, who, in the Frogs, 'now regards the War, desperate as it is, as only another symptom of the disease of his time'. This from a man who, according to David Slavitt, rated student papers 'PB (pretty bad), NTB (not too bad), NB (not bad), and NAAB (not at all bad)'. Only a very few, the last generation of American modernist-humanists, were eligible to walk with Fitts himself.

[Update: Dave Haan, on a forum thread on translation, links. A respondent calls my post, bizarrely, a 'paean to etymology': no wonder he finds it unpersuasive! Said respondent also seems to believe that I argue that 'one person or group has a monopoly' on knowledge, and that I have something against Nabokov's Onegin, or even Nabokov in general. I do not, I do not, I do not.]

Schällen der Leidenschaft

2008-12-04T21:24:00.009-05:00

As a student of history, of sorts, I know only too well that all ages, almost all, have seen their own as an age of cultural decline. Even Homer was longing for the good old days, even Plato, in his golden aura of genius, never to be rivalled, wistfully looked to Sparta, Egypt, the Age of Kronos. Coming to understand the universality of this sentiment cannot help but challenge one's own innate sense that fine culture has gone to the dogs. And yet, one goes to the gallery, the theatre, the bookshop or poetry recital, and one cannot shake that sense. This, I think, is truly the most poignant break in the historian's psyche.

I go to a recital. (I open a book of verse. I flick through the New Yorker. Somewhere, other than in my own Documents folder, there must be some good poems. If only by the law of averages. Repeatedly is my search frustrated. Usually on a low simmer, my loathing of modern poetry comes to full boil now and then, when I make the attempt to challenge my dismissal. It cannot be said that I do not try.) Listening to a woman in her sixties describe, in graphic detail, a bout of rough sex, listening to a man, only a little younger, describe, in graphic detail, his own masturbation, read from a page, and read, mind you, while the audience titters and looks about in embarrassment, watching a rotund fellow, maybe thirty-five, make hand-gestures as he serenades the number 58 bus-route, and a wee girl not much older than me recite, from an imaginary diary, bullet-points about an ex-boyfriend and self-esteem issues, an assortment of people using rude words as if it were still the 1960s, and raising their eyebrows to deliver the last line of their poem, as if to say, Pay attention now, this bit's clever, listening to all this, I wish I could turn off my own ears, or at least concentrate on some work. Most of all of course I wish I could meet someone, or even hear someone from afar, who actually knows how to use words, who actually likes words, or even, at a push, someone who, while not brilliant with words, has something in their brain worth letting out of their mouth, something more than feeling, descriptions, endless and endless concrete banalities, enumeration of detail itself so utterly conventional—not even clever because well-observed—as to merit swift oblivion. Why are poets so incapable of telling us what they know?

There is a look on a poet's face when she is reading, or about to read. It says all sorts of things. It says, Quiet now, this is poetry. We are here to listen to poetry. It also says, I humbly offer my audience just something I sketched out the other day. Perhaps, it isn't finished, or, I'm still working on this and would appreciate your feedback. Of course she does not want your feedback, except to say, I really liked the bit about the sky. That image, what was it, 'the sky was blue as azure', it's such a beautiful image, don't you think, really captures the blueness of a blue sky? The atmosphere at such a recital, in other words, must be simultaneously deferential to the magic of poesie, and relaxed enough to accept it all as a bit of a joke. This is a light piece, she might say. Before each poem she will say, 'This one's called—' or 'This one's about—'. Gravity never comes from the words themselves, but only from the temple of excuses and explanations erected around them. Or better, gravity never comes at all, for it is easier to make a crowd laugh with the word tits or a silly voice, and have them say, afterwards, I enjoyed that, it made me smile, as if making someone smile should be the purpose of poetry.

One comes away wanting to profess, with an air of thoughtfulness and high critical dignity, that some poems were good, others less so. One would be fair and even-handed, and admit that even if that piece is not one's cup of tea, still, one can see the merit in its earnestness or eye for detail. It feels wrong, deeply wrong, ignorant, primitive, lacking in sensitivity and sensibility, to think, this is all bad, and not only bad, but entirely bad; this is all, literally, worthless. I confess that I have never been brave enough to say this in public. There are ways not to lie, or to lie less, as you well know. Poetry isn't my thing. I'm more into novels. They smile benignly, accepting that not all mortals are built to appreciate real beauty. It is no better with the stuff printed in books by famous people. This was penned by a well-respected Etonian with a big heart:

A lot of people have been looking at me recently.
Oh, she's too disgusting. I see you've changed your
hairstyle again. Why don't you kill yourself next time?
I'm cutting down on mirror checks - 100 an hour
is about average - tv screen, microwave, people's
glasses, a knife while eating, if I can eat anything.
I wanted to cut myself into little pieces, then everything
would be all right and I would pass the audition.

I know some readers will quibble this claim, but I do not like to rant. Those who feel as I do cling to a single poet they like, as proof that they are not Neanderthals. Or they say they do not like poetry and leave it at that, as if it were simply alright not to like poetry, as if not liking poetry were the same as not liking cauliflower. I do not like to rant, and prefer to criticise. But sometimes there is too much steam and smoke for criticism, too much clamour of mock subtleties to be heard simply speaking, and one must cry out instead. A considerate man who will not let himself be angry, just a little, and even at those who mean well, damn their pens, is only half a man.

[Update: Avva comments. In Russian. One of his own commenters observes that I have not properly adjusted the case of 'Schällen' for my title: true, perhaps, but then, if I had altered it, Herder would have been obscured.]

Improvement

2008-11-30T15:23:00.008-05:00

In 1789, Noah Webster, still 39 years away from his seismic dictionary, published his Dissertations on the English Language, sort of a linguistic manifesto, at least in part, for the new nation. It advocates radical spelling reform, only a small part of which would actually be adopted by young Americans struggling for their own identity; of the advantages of reform proposed by Webster, this is perhaps the most amusing:

Such a reform would diminish the number of letters about one sixteenth or eighteenth. This would save a page in eighteen; and a saving of an eighteenth in the expense of books, is an advantage that should not be overlooked.

The Dissertations are dedicated to Benjamin Franklin—'Late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania', though not, at least for another year, Late—out of respect for his 'common sense' and for his industry in the collection of 'facts'. Furthermore, Webster progresses to include as an appendix a 1768 letter by Franklin on the subject of spelling reform. On Boxing Day 1789, Franklin wrote to Webster in Hartford, returning the compliment: 'It is an excellent work, and will be greatly useful in turning the thoughts of our countrymen to correct writing.' He shared and appreciated his friend's prescriptivist distaste for vulgar idiom, and wanted to contribute further follies to a future edition of the work. (Franklin's prose is not always so 'plain and elegantly neat' as Webster thinks. On occasion he strives after the style of his German contemporaries:

The general use of the French language has likewise a very advantageous effect on the profits of the bookselling branch of commerce, it being well known, that the more copies can be sold that are struck off from one composition of types, the profits increase in a much greater proportion than they do in making a greater number of pieces in any other kind of manufacture.)

He deplores the verbing of nouns: notice, advocate and progress all incur his censure as verbs. (Richard Bailey, in his 1996 book on Nineteenth-Century English, notes that progress had been standard as a verb in older English, but revived around this period in America, and subsequently seen as an Americanism. On verbing nouns in general, contrast this, from Thomas Gunter Browne's exquisite Hermes Unmasked (1795):

I suppose even that any object of any kind, or any word, may serve to make any part of speech of any sort.—Oh! that I had known this when I was a boy at Westminster!—Birds, beasts, and fishes will make excellent verbs, without the least alteration in sound or spelling.—A pig, a peer, or a pismire, will make as good a verb as the sublimest thing in nature.—The wooden post which stands before us, and which is usually the emblem of stability, will make a verb expressive of great celerity.)

Franklin further laments the loss in printing of capitalised common nouns, as well as the long s, about which, with a rather inappropriate analogy, he remarks:

Certainly the omitting this prominent letter makes a line appear more even, but renders it less immediately legible; as the paring of all men's noses might smooth and level their faces, but would render their physiognomies less distinguishable.

But of most linguistic interest is Franklin's remarks on the word improved.

When I left New-England in the year 1723, this word had never been used among us, as far as I know, but in the sense of ameliorated, or made better, except once in a very old book of Dr. Mather's entitled "Remarkable Providences." As that man wrote a very obscure hand, I remember that when I read that word in his book, used instead of the word employed, I conjectured that it was an error of the printer, who had mistaken a short l in the writing for an r, and a y with too short a tail for a v, whereby employed was converted into improved; but when I returned to Boston in 1733, I found this change had obtained favour, and was then become common; for I met with it often in perusing the newspapers, where it frequently made an appearance rather ridiculous. Such, for instance, as the advertisement of a country house to be sold, which had been many years improved as a tavern; and in the character of a deceased country gentleman, that he had been, for more than thirty years, improved as a justice of the peace.

Thus Mather: 'the Ministers of God have been improved in the Recording and Declaring the works of the Lord', and 'her Tongue was improved by a Daemon to express things which she her self knew nothing of'. Mather's work appeared in 1684; the OED finds this improved, both of persons and of places, in William Hubbard's 1677 Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England. Of a place: 'Near some River. . . whose Streams are principally improved for the driving of Saw-mills.' And of a person: 'Such of the Women as were gifted at knitting and sewing, were improved to make Stockings and Garments.'

In both cases, the OED quotes an 1865 Bostonian edition of the work (volume 2), number 4 of Woodward's Historical Series. This edition corresponds closely to the 1677 first edition, printed in London. (Another 1677 edition was printed in Boston, but this omits the section containing the two above quotations.) But intermediary editions offer a surprise. In an 1803 edition, printed not in Boston but in the idyllic Stockbridge, MA, we notice that improved, in the second quotation, has been emended to employed. Plenty of improveds still remain, but none both a) of a person, and b) interchangeable with employed. For instance, of a place, we still have 'Other places adjoining were soon after seized and improved for trading and fishing'. But of persons we have only:

yet seeing they themselves, as the westward Indians have so ill improved that which they had before

and:

their labour was well improved, and followed with good success at the last

Here the sense is more clearly 'capitalised on': the positive connotation is stronger. In the case of the sewing women, improved has a different shade: 'put to work', rather than 'capitalised on'. In this instance, perhaps thought the 1803 editor, conceivably—one would love to imagine—under the influence of a Franklin, improved was a Bostonism too far. At any rate, the 1828 Webster dutifully lists 'Used; occupied; as improved land' as the third sense of improved.

The Place's Name

2008-11-16T16:41:00.016-05:00

Dullest of days, most brutally grey and dark and overcast. The rain relents, and then lents again. I take the opportunity for a walk in north London, to Highbury, to find, if I can, or even if not, the home of a childhood friend—long past, say twenty years—the interior of which I remember with apparent exactness, down to the sculpture on the kitchen table, of a carton pouring milk into a bowl: real bowl, real carton, disc and frozen column of milk in plaster. I remembered it to be near a park or green; I remembered the green to be immense, and rather fantastical. But when I arrived in Highbury Fields, I discovered the green to be rather small, though admittedly picturesque in its autumnal finery. The disappointment of age: a tableau.

It was still raining when I found the house, or what might have been, and so I continued my interrogation of the area. Highbury, it seems, is a place of architecture beset by vegetation. A dull block in the private enclave of Aberdeen Park, just to the east, is vandalised by a rather aggressive and brightly-fledged gang of creepers:

A nearby wall, meanwhile, has been shamelessly defaced by some reckless local greenfinger, tired of small canvases:

Just across the street from here is one Baalbec Road, the sudden apparition of whose name is so extraordinary to me that I am compelled to reproduce the signage as documentary evidence:

The street itself is very fine, a series of variations in terracotta and brick, each a slight shade different from the last, nothing supercelestial, but beautifully proportioned. 'Here is a raucous Cockney answer to the Georgian good manners of the [Highbury] Fields,' writes Simon Jenkins: 'an 1880s essay in what a firm chisel could do with red bricks, terracotta and a builder's pattern book. The small houses are covered in carved leaves, swags, dentils, every conceivable stylistic gimmick.' I can enjoy the description of a street as an 'essay': let us literarify our built environment, and let us do it without blue plaques. Jenkins adds, inexplicably: 'This is the London which tourists will want to see in a hundred years' time.'

The terracotta stone in the centre of this wall bears the letters 'AD', to match another bearing the date, 1889. But look at the stone: is its monogram not almost the same as that forming the signature of Albrecht Dürer?

The street is fine, but what of the name? Baalbec? The ancient city of Syria, now Lebanon, was built over centuries under the Roman yoke, and long considered the great ruin of the Near East—so great, in fact, that it was reputed to have been built by Solomon himself. After all, I Kings 9.17-18 tells us, 'Solomon built Gezer, and Bethhoron the nether, / And Baalath, and Tadmor in the wilderness, in the land'. Tadmor, we know, is Palmyra, which was usually twinned with Baalbek—and the name was, for some, too close to Baalath for chance. (Even as late as 1964 we find the identification accepted, by Ruth Nagle Watkins in an article on Baalbek for Art Journal.) Furthermore, Solomon invoked demons to lift and arrange the cyclopaean stones used in the city's temples. Thus in the 1425 History of Timur by Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi, we read:

This town is very famous, as well for the beauty of the walls, as for the height of its buildings; and it is believed to have been built by Solomon's order, by daemons and genii, over whom he had an absolute command.

This sort of folklore was soon common currency among the explorers of later centuries. When John Ray visited in the late seventeenth century, he described the same huge stones as Sharafuddin, noting one in particular that measured 66 feet long (28 cubits in the History). Daniel Fenning, who, in his New System of Geography (1778), calls Baalbek 'the boldest plan that appears to have been ever attempted in architecture', notes also that 'All the inhabitants of this country, both Christians, Jews, and Mahometans, confidently maintain, that both Balbec and Palmyra were built by Solomon.' A slightly later article in The Britannic Magazine labels the site ruins 'some of the most beautiful and best preserved of any in Asia', and remarks:

By what means could the ancients remove these enormous masses? This is doubtless a problem in mechanics difficult to resolve. The inhabitants of Balbec, however, have a very easy manner of explaining it, by supposing these edifices to have been constructed by djenoun, or genii, who obeyed the orders of King Solomon; adding, that the motives of such immense works was to conceal in subterraneous caverns vast treasures, which still remain there.

In good Enlightenment fashion, the moral is spelled out:

All tradition relative to high antiquity is as false among the Orientals as the Europeans. With them, as with us, facts which happened even 100 years before, when not preserved in writing, are altered, mutilated, or forgotten.

But a more modern use of the name, European rather than Oriental, even though preserved in writing, is shrouded in as great a mystery. It was chosen by Proust to designate an important location in his Recherche, contracted a little for delicate Parisian tastes, as Balbec. Most modern scholars, if not all, identify this with Proust's own beloved Cabourg, on the Normandy coast, although not too far from the resort, just east of Le Havre, is a town called Bolbec. Indeed, in an anonymous English novel of 1796, entitled Elvira; or, the World as it Goes, we find a reference or two to 'Balbec' near Le Havre:
I'm going to leave you in suspense about that head dress. Anyway, Proust's Balbec is just too spicy a comfit for the slavering critics waiting to get their teeth into the myriads of words in the Recherche. Let us listen to some plaintive and poignant voices. Here's David Ellison:

What is this strange split city of Balbec? What happens if we, like the young Marcel, pronounce its syllables and allow them to resonate with associations? Balbec sounds a lot like BAALBEK, the ancient city, now in Lebanon, whose name derives from the god Baal, the Phoenician sun god. The congruence of names is so obvious as to be blinding.

And here's Allan Pasco (truncatedly):

Proust's 'Balbec' comprises several of the interlocking patterns of allusive support. The homonymous Persian city, now in Lebanon, was named after the false god Baal, mentioned in the Bible, and thus joins the two biblical cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, found along the protagonist's way. Brichot, the author's pedantic professor who corrects many of the Curé de Combray's false etymologies, points out that –bec means stream in the Norman dialect. Brichot is not sure about Bal-. He suggests it is a corruption of 'Dalbec'. Proust may have chosen the first syllable of Balbec because of a belief that the Baal of the Persian city Baalbek meant 'sun'. It is also possible that he was aware that Bel- in many French place names derives from the Celtic sun god Belenus. His love of puns attests to an interest in the phonic texture. With this in mind, it is difficult to ignore the associations of the French word bal ('dancing, youth, mating,') and of the ornithological bec ('beak').

The phrasing is remarkable: 'What happens if we pronounce its syllables?', 'it is difficult to ignore the associations of—'. Let's just kick back and muck about with words. After all, Proust did. Is this any different from the practices of mediaevals, who identified Baalbek with Baalath? In a somewhat embarrassed footnote, Pasco winds up ransacking a bunch of dusty German philological lexicons, and tracing bal- to PIE *bhel ('white, shining'), which he can then affix to Albertine, whose name clearly derives from Latin albus, 'white'. (He even quotes the delightful kook Harold Bayley, whose linguistic speculations we last encountered here, also in Islington, and not too far from Baalbec Road.)

Best of all, though, is Marie-Magdeleine Chirol's L'Imaginaire de la Ruine. Nobody can do spiel like the French. After discussing a few references to antiquities in an early description of Balbec from Recherche ('De Balbec surtout, où déjà des hôtels se construisent, superposés au sol antique et charmant qu'ils n'alterènt pas, quel délice d'excursionner à deux pas dans ces régions primitives et si belles!'), she concludes:

One last sign points towards a Norman Balbec that is reminiscent of the ancient Baalbek: the presence 'of hotels' (in the modern sense) which, in an ancient context, may seem displaced, even anachronistic. However, if one should replace hotel with 'Temple-Palais' or with 'palais'—terms which the narrator uses to evoke the Grand-Hotel at Balbec—the desired spatio-temporal link seems to be re-established. The substitution would appear reasonable since, after all, when the narrator talks of the hotel at Balbec, he is surely always referring to the Grand-Hotel.

Here is a voice pleading for acceptance, especially in that last sentence. In all these works is the same exegesis of the world we find among the mediaevals, only made secular, and transferred to a world of words only. The study of literature is, as we have long known, the last refuge of the theologian.

But what about Baalbec Road? Why Baalbec? Perhaps in lieu of asking, 'Why was the road called Baalbec?', we might ask, 'What has it done to deserve the name?' Or even, What do we see in the road, and in its environs, that we should not see if it had a different name? Would it smell as sweet?

Baalbek itself, once magnificent, was taken over by nature, and became a ruin. Highbury, as we have seen, is also under threat from its flora, real, painted or carved in terracotta. The name itself becomes that bit more pregnant. Perhaps that is what Jenkins meant about the tourists of a hundred years hence. Before the creation of the road in 1889, London had a single nod to the Baalbek of antiquity. This was in the Temple of the Sun at Kew Gardens, built in 1761, in a Corinthian style inspired by the ornate columns of the ruinated Syrian city. Eighteenth-century letters and notices are full of proud and admiring references to this elegant structure, which has none of the sublimity of the original, preserving only a few flourishes and proportions. In 1916, a tree fell on the temple and it was demolished, not even leaving a ruin. For shame! Still, we have the ruins of Baalbec Road, Highbury. If they are not ruins yet, they contain all the omens of such. The city is like the mind: it never forgets. My old friend's kitchen, with its ridiculous sculpture, is still with me, perhaps altered and mutilated, but not forgotten. I did not want to mention the splendid effusion of autumn in Highbury Fields.

Update: Language Hat on H. W. Bailey, not to be confused with Harold Bayley.

Wine and Water

2008-11-11T19:31:00.012-05:00

When one cup in fell confusion
Wine with water blends, the fusion,
Call it by what name you will,
Is no blessing, nor deserveth
Any praise, but rather serveth
For the emblem of all ill.

Wine perceives the water present,
And with pain exclaims, "What peasant
Dared to mingle thee with me?
Rise, go forth, get out, and leave me!
In the same place, here to grieve me,
Thou hast no just claim to be.

— 'Denudata veritate', from the Carmina Burana, tr. Symonds.

The American next to me is in transcribing formulae for posset and gooseberry wine from a Middle English receiptboke. I go to the enquiries counter for some pointless request. As I wait, a young gentleman receives his book from Special Collections. It comes in a little packet, and when he pulls it out, I can see that it is smaller than his thumbnail. The look on his face, somewhere between surprise and annoyance, is priceless. He tries, momentarily, to read it, but is briskly defeated, and returns it to the counter. Curious, I order it myself. It turns out to be an 1896 Salmin edition of Galileo's Letter to Cristina (1615), 15 x 9 mm.

(The nice man on the desk says he has personally researched the book. Galileo wrote it so small, he informs me, to avoid the watchful eyes of the Inquisition; I hesitate to point out that this edition was printed almost three centuries after its words were penned, when the Inquisition had become a story with which to scare young Protestant boys into good behaviour.)

Galileo's letter is a plea for religious toleration of experimental science:

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense experiences and necessary demonstrations. . . It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.

If you stop and think about this, it is a little odd. The Bible, so as to make itself better understood, says things which are not literally true. But how can false things be well understood? Galileo's idea, which had in certain circles become a commonplace by 1700, was that the Bible fudged its physics (and metaphysics) so as not distract the foolish ancient rabble from their worship of God. But Nature acts without condescension, and so never lies.

Galileo, no doubt, would have pursed his lips at Cana—the classic miracle. Nature cannot transgress her laws: water cannot become wine. Perhaps, if he had been feeling scholastic, he might have suggested that the water merely took on the accidents of the wine, without changing its substance; a hundred years later he might have found some scientific approximation for the miracle, and trumpeted it up as a rational explanation. But here, for now, he would say that it mattered little about water and wine: the Bible simply wants us to know that Christ is the Lord our Saviour.

At any rate, Galileo could work apparent miracles with water and wine himself. In his 1638 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche he describes an experiment, which runs, in Thomas Weston's elegant 1730 translation:

If I fill a round Crystal Bottle [palla di cristallo, ie. a crystal globe] with Water, whose Mouth is no bigger than that of a Straw, and after this turn its Mouth downwards, yet will not the Water, altho' very heavy and prone to descend in Air, nor the Air, as much disposed on the other Hand, as being very light, to ascend thro' the Water; yet will they not, I say, agree, that that should descend, issuing out of the Mouth, and this ascend, entering in at the same; but both keep their Places, and yield not to each other. But on the contrary, if I apply to the Mouth of this Bottle a little Vessel of Red Wine, which is insensibly less heavy than Water, we shall see it in an Instant gently to ascend by red Streams thro' the Water; and on the contrary, the Water, with the same Slowness, to descend thro' the Wine, without ever mixing with each other, till at length the Bottle will be full of Wine, and all the Water will sink to the Bottom of the Vessel that's underneath.

This is what Salviati, standing in for Galileo, claims to be happening in his thought-experiment:

The wine, instead of mixing with the water as we should expect, changes places with it, each liquid remaining pure. This passage has caused a certain stir in the scholarly literature. Alexander Koyré, the great historian of science, best known for his work on cosmology, considered the story as a reliance on untested thought-experiments gone too far: 'Galileo. . . had never made the experiment; but, having heard of it, reconstructed it in his imagination, accepting the complete and essential incompatibility of water with wine as an indubitable fact'. So much for casting off authority and beginning afresh from sense experience! Koyré, however, does not name a source.

As Koyré one-upped the empiricist Galileo, so James MacLachlan one-upped the rationalist Koyré in turn, and actually performed the experiment in time for a cheeky 1973 note in Isis.

In the late summer of 1971 I filled an after-shave bottle with water and inverted it over a goblet of red wine. A piece of drinking straw sealed in the mouth of the bottle dipped beneath the surface of the wine. For more than an hour I watched in fascination as a perfectly clear layer of water formed at the bottom of the goblet and became deeper and deeper! As Galileo had described, a thin red streamer wafted up through the water in the bottle and occupied a progressively redder and larger region at the top of the bottle. A light shining through the goblet made possible the detection of a streamer of water descending through the wine to form the layer at the bottom. After about two hours the bottle above had become a quite uniform red, and the layer of red left at the top of the goblet began to descend, ultimately making the liquid in the goblet a uniform pink.

So for MacLachlan, the wine and water do ultimately mix, but not before acting roughly as Galileo had said they would. Galileo, he is sure, actually witnessed the experiment, and so was able to describe its results with some precision. But, as it took Antonio Beltrán 25 years to point out, again in Isis (1998), the fact that the experiment can be done does not mean that Galileo actually performed it, and it is just as possible that, as Koyré had suggested, Galileo merely used a well-known example. Beltrán's evidence? The only similar experiment he can find is in Ambroise Paré's Des monstres et prodiges (1573):

The experience of two glass vessels called a wine-raiser, in which device, by placing the vessel filled with water on top of another filled with wine, it can be clearly seen how the wine rises through the water and the water descends through the wine, without their mixing, although they move through the same narrow pipe.

And just so Beltrán didn't go thinking he'd one-upped MacLachlan in turn, the editors of Isis allowed MacLachlan to blow Beltrán an amused raspberry in a note following the latter's article. MacLachlan thinks it pretty unlikely that 'a medical student in Pisa (being indoctrinated from Galenic treatises) would have read a French surgical work', although he does not at all deny the probability that Galileo's experiment was unoriginal. Both Beltrán and MacLachlan, in fact, miss a much more likely source for Galileo: Francis Bacon's 1627 compendium of experiments, Sylva Sylvarum, which contains, very near the start, an even stranger proposition:

Take a Glasse with a Belly and a long Nebb [spout]; fill the Belly (in part) with Water: Take also another Glasse, whereinto put Claret Wine and Water mingled; Reverse the first Glasse, with the Belly upwards, Stopping the Nebb with your fingar; Then dipp the Mouth of it within the Second Glasse, and remove your Fingar: Continue it in that posture for a time; And it will unmingle the Wine from the Water: The Wine ascending and setling in the topp of the upper Glasse; And the Water descending and setling in the bottome of the lower Glasse. The passage is apparent to the Eye; For you shall see the Wine, as it were, in a small veine, rising through the Water.

Here the wine not only slides up past the water without mixing, but actually further unmixes itself! Bacon states clearly that the experiment doesn't work the other way around, or with coloured water, and concludes from this that 'this Separation of Water and Wine appeareth to be made by Weight; for it must be of Bodies of unequall Weight, or ells it worketh not; And the Heavier Body must ever be in the upper Glasse.' And then he moves swiftly on.

Bacon, the better mage, really could turn water into wine, his own sort of miracle. Both he and Galileo described a Nature that seemed so marvelous, even as they insisted it was not. And so as to accommodate the occult secrets of hydromechanics to the understanding of every man, both wrote in the common tongue, and spoke in vivid parables, which they called 'experiments'.

Electio

2008-10-26T18:23:00.007-04:00

One of the great neglected essays of antiquity is the Dialogue on Oratory by Tacitus, written in 102 AD. Why, he asks, has the fire and eloquence of the old orators deserted us? We have lawyers and speech-makers, but no genuine oratory. As Marcus Aper points out from the start, rhetoric is a sword and buckler in argumentative battle, and moreover a pleasure to every ear. Vipstanius Messala and Curiatius Maternus debate the causes of oratory's decline since the golden days of Cicero. (Plutarch, around the same time, was debating the causes of the oracle's decline since the golden days of Pericles.) Messala attributes the decline to the debased wisdom and abilities of modern Romans: a standard narrative of degeneration. Maternus' explanation, on the other hand, is far more interesting; he argues that 'the discourse of men always conforms to the temper of the times'—a position we now associate with the historicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and that firebrand oratory is suited to an age of war and dissent, an age like Cicero's Republic, but not at all like Trajan's placid Empire:

Eloquence, it is certain, flourishes most under a bold and turbulent democracy, where the ambitious citizen, who best can mould to his purposes a fierce and contentious multitude, is sure to be the idol of the people. In the conflict of parties, that kept our ancestors in agitation, laws were multiplied; the leading chiefs were the favourite demagogues; the magistrates were often engaged in midnight debate; eminent citizens were brought to a public trial; families were set at variance; the nobles were split into factions, and the senate waged incessant war against the people. Hence that flame of eloquence which blazed out under the republican government, and hence that constant fuel that kept the flame alive.

The state, it is true, was often thrown into convulsions: but talents were exercised, and genius opened the way to public honours. He who possessed the powers of persuasion, rose to eminence, and by the arts which gave him popularity, he was sure to eclipse his colleagues. He strengthened his interest with the leading men, and gained weight and influence not only in the senate, but in all assemblies of the people. Foreign nations courted his friendship. The magistrates, setting out for their provinces, made it their business to ingratiate themselves with the popular speaker, and, at their return, took care to renew their homage.

Back when we first started this enterprise, my colleague and friend Gawain and I agreed that politics would be off the agenda. For one thing, we have so little of merit to contribute. There are so many blogs and punditries swimming in this stuff, or rather drowning; and clearly the temperature, at least in America, is now unbearable. I try to explain to some why, despite my continuing lack of interest in politics, I have developed, like so many, an enthusiasm for the current fight. To some I say it is like an absorbing soap—but I do not watch television—to others, like a brilliant game of chess; but nor do I play or follow that sport of brains.

If you mention that you are gripped by the elections, the first question asked, invariably, is 'Whom do you support?' This question does not interest me. In my last two posts I examined microcosms of philosophical conflict—Lockeans vs. Cartesians, and Catholics vs. Protestants. In neither case was resolution possible, as common ground was missing. As Carl Becker argued with such wit, real dispute is intelligible only when there is a substratum of agreement, and none exists in these examples; nor in modern politics. There is no possibility of reasoned choice between red and blue, for the choice is a priori. Partisan accounts of one of the debates, for instance, will provide glittering testimony to how contrarily a word or gesture can be interpreted; what you already believe determines your judgement of its value.

It seems reasonable, therefore, to succumb consciously to surfaces, to admit that one will judge a candidate not on his policies or character, but merely on aesthetics. This entails denying the very possibility of post-partisanship, and embracing tribalism instead. It is at least, I think, the more honest path. Of course I like the way he speaks, and fairly loathe the way she does. But that is simply because, were I American, I would be Noveboracensian. I like fancy-talk, and I like eloquence. I liked it when the New Yorker gushed:

Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one—something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

Not because I think it is true, but because I think it is a handsome idea, and handsomeness is a neglected virtue, in today's politics as in its art. In a bold and turbulent democracy, let us see eloquence flourish, at the risk of idol-making.

This contest for office is remarkably similar to the contest for Wimbledon that we enjoyed three months ago: it is a struggle between an artist (in this case perhaps a con-artist) and a fighter, between grace and toughness. Back then I favoured Federer for the beauty of his game, but also because I wanted to see him make history; because I wanted to witness, even to participate in, a historic moment. It is so much the greater with Obama: whether or not his presidency turns out a success, November 5 will be a genuinely historic day. The entire world, like it or not, will rejoice, just as it mourned and mocked when the towers fell. To experience the making of history, even terrible history, is one of the profoundest aesthetic pleasures of civilised man, and to that, politics and substance must be deemed, at the last count, palpably irrelevant.

Goal and Guides: How Christians Think

2008-10-15T17:55:00.006-04:00

1. How Catholics Think.

A few months ago my wife, returning from the States, offered me a family heirloom. It is a 1945 catechism textbook from a Catholic high-school: Our Goal and Our Guides: Our Quest for Happiness. Most people who learn about the history of a subject will read the most significant, revolutionary or influential works on that subject: they will read Anselm and Aquinas, John Newman and Karl Barth. But if you want to understand a subject properly, it is important also to read the standard works, those that regurgitate material in simple and accessible form for the masses, so as to know the baseline against which the great works innovate. Our Goal is just such a work.

The book is full of marvelous diagrams in a vaguely moderne style, three of which I reproduce here. Catholic thought is essentially a diagrammatic thought: it is ordered in analogies and hierarchies, which lend themselves well to spatial representation. Before woodcuts and printing, which made actual diagrams easy to reproduce, Christian texts were full of verbal diagrams: elaborate correspondences between real and metaphysical objects, architecturally-structured theological summae, even the meditation-wheels of a Ramon Llull.

And with modern technology, these guys are unstoppable. Just look at that, above: that, truly, is wonderful. I don't think it bears much analysis. A few elements are doubtful. I can't identify the man and woman either side of Christ: I had thought of Mary and Joseph, since his attribute is a carpenter's square, but they are wearing monastic robes. I do not know the symbol at Christ's feet; nor the martyr-bishop with the book beside Agnes and Peter at the top right, if indeed he is anyone in particular. You have to admire that classic Catholic horror vacui: every spare cranny is crammed with symbol and ornament. The Church, like its late mentor Aristotle, has always occupied a plenum.

Here, on the tree of sin or death, superstition is on the second tier up, on the left, next to indifference. Superstition fascinates me, as nobody can agree on what it is. Our Goal never defines it; the closest it comes is to say, 'Other sins against religion are those which pay homage to a false god or which give false worship to the true God. Idolatry, divination, magic, and superstition are such sins.' On witchcraft, Our Goal has the audacity to suggest: 'Perhaps someone remembers the trouble this superstition caused in American history.' The book is not referring to the superstition that witches exist: it is referring to witchcraft itself (which 'endeavors to inflict harm with the aid of the devil') as a superstition.

On the next branch up, we find irreligion and presumption. At the top, apostasy, and despair. At the bottom are the rhizomatic deadly sins, symbolised by cute critters. It is all so charming!

Faith, says the Church, is necessary to salvation: it is one of the three Catholic virtues, along with Hope and Charity. The text of Our Goal distinguishes only between unconscious or 'habitual faith', infused into the soul at Baptism, and 'actual faith', consciously practiced by those with the power of reason: 'they are obliged to make acts of faith by which the infused capacity to believe is actually developed and strengthened'. The other divisions represented above are explained in Wilhelm's 1906 Manual of Catholic Theology:

A distinction is sometimes drawn between Explicit and Implicit Faith, founded upon the degree of distinctness with which the act of Faith apprehends its subject-matter; also between Formal Faith, which supposes an explicit knowledge of the motive and an express act of the will, and Virtual Faith, which is a habit infused or resulting from repeated acts of Formal Faith, and produces acts of Faith as it were instinctively without distinct consciousness of Formal Faith.

These three dichotomies (habitual / actual, formal / virtual, explicit / implicit) delineate much the same territories: but Our Goal is so committed to its rigorous hierarchies that it must order them sequentially. Theology is all the richer for it.

Cleverly, the Church stipulates that you must believe all articles of faith, even those you do not know. As an example, Our Goal offers Vatican I, 'man can come to a knowledge of the existence of God through the use of reason alone'. (The actual phrasing is: 'The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, / can be known / by the natural power of human reason.') In other words, we are to accept on faith the idea that faith is not necessary for the knowledge of God. A few pages later, Our Goal offers the reader a list of the catastrophic results that follow from faithlessness: the second is 'rationalism':

Many persons reject faith as a guide in religion and accept only what they can understand. This sin is called rationalism, a term which implies excessive reliance on reason. A person who believes only what he can understand is called a rationalist.

Compare Vatican I on the Reformation:

Thereupon there came into being and spread far and wide throughout the world that doctrine of rationalism or naturalism. . . Thus they would establish what they call the rule of simple reason or nature. The abandonment and rejection of the Christian religion, and the denial of God and his Christ, has plunged the minds of many into the abyss of pantheism, materialism and atheism, and the consequence is that they strive to destroy rational nature itself, to deny any criterion of what is right and just, and to overthrow the very foundations of human society.

This sort of nonsense was being refuted—or 'schooled', as I believe one has it on the interweb—back in the eighteenth century by Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal, both chums of John Trenchard. But what interests me is the line that rationalists 'strive to destroy rational nature', presumably because it is irrational to be unfaithful towards Church tradition. You have to admire how Catholics could once get tangled up in these knots with a straight face.

2. How Protestants Think.

What I didn't tell you is that Mrs. Roth's granddaddy, the Reverend Bailey, who owned Our Goal and Our Guides, was no Catholic but a Southern Baptist, and a minister at that. Unshockingly, he weren't too keen on the book, and back in his day, if you weren't keen on a book, you didn't tell Amazon, you told the book. Which suits me. His views are manifest from the title-page onward:

Here the hands writing and the hand annotating are so at odds with each other that they cannot even agree on the grounds of theological dispute. And so the volume comes to serve as a scintillary document of religious worlds refusing to meet and interact. When Our Goal reaches the subject of Protestantism—the last of the heresies—Bailey is content to underline, whether amused or outraged:

Catholics should pray for the poor old Protestants? We should prove the truth of the Catholic faith 'by our lives as well as by our words'? The epistemological difficulties are great, as they are throughout the book. How are lives and words to demonstrate any proof to another? They can only demonstrate to those who believe already, those already primed to interpret those lives and those words as they must be interpreted. I would love to ask the authors of Our Goal what it would have taken to persuade them of the truth of Protestantism. Elsewhere, Luther gets lumped in with a Roman pagan and a Deist: a sorry lot!

Of course, at the heart of the dispute between Catholics and Protestants is the value accorded to institutional tradition. It was already the same with the Sadducees and Pharisees; and philosophical epigones still contest the significance of oral, esoteric or unpublished teachings, from Plato to Nietzsche. The Protestant Bailey is always asking: Who says? How do you know that? Does Scripture—the sole criterion of truth and falsehood—contain that doctrine? The Catholic, in turn, observes that it is no simple matter to read the Bible: the text is corrupt, the languages alien and idiomatic, and the sense frequently allegorical, obscure or ambiguous. And so we need to rely on a consensus, a tradition, as a guide to interpreting it. But Bailey will ask: Why your tradition? Why your guide? What criterion is to check and ground your assertions? The one wants liberty; the other assurance from without.

Of course neither side can convince the other; the two voices are locked in eternal battle, stilled and captured on the page, the one in printed Roman serifs and elegant diagrams, the other in oblique, exclamatory manuscript, the commentary pointed up by rough lines of the pen. Bailey is not fond of diagrams, of hierarchies, of systems—'This is a wicked system'. He attacks that distance in his very decision to annotate, uncowed by the serifs. It is a dangerous aggression, destined to pervert the young mind at the very moment it needs strength and discipline. Faith is a fragile shoot. So, too, is reason. It is a noble aggression, destined to liberate the young mind at the very moment it is in danger of submitting forever to a corrupt authority.

Constitutions and Distempers

2008-10-10T23:29:00.008-04:00

In 1681, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet—tutor to the Dauphin and unofficial head of the French Catholic Church, stuck with playing advocatus diaboli to theological hotshots like Jean Claude and Leibniz—published his Discourse on Universal History, a triumphalist account of ancient and mediaeval Christian history, largely forgotten in the eighteenth century, but resurrected in the nineteenth as a masterpiece of literature for French collégiens to copy out and learn by heart. In Discourse 2.11, Bossuet deals with idolatry:

God knew man's mind and knew that it was not through reason that one could destroy an error which reason had not established. There are errors into which we fall when we reason, for man often gets tangled up because of his reasoning: but idolatry had come in by the opposite extreme, by stifling all reasoning, and by granting predominance to the senses, which sought to clothe everything with the qualities that strike the senses. Thus the Deity had become visible and vulgar.

Religious errors, says Bossuet, occur when we no longer listen to Reason, and devote ourselves instead to sensory experience, which is full of confusion. The true Christian distinguishes what he sees from what he knows: he realises that God cannot be grasped by the senses, but only by thought.

Bossuet was on the losing end of history; he and his ilk would soon concede Ohio and spend the next century on the back foot. This concession is popularly known as the 'Enlightenment'. One faction who stood to make big gains in Ohio were the Deists, and among them the English Whig, John Trenchard, whose Natural History of Superstition appeared in 1709, lambasting popery and enthusiasms. Having offered a litany of superstitions, Trenchard proposes his own account of religious error:

It must necessarily happen when the Organs of Sence (which are the Avenues and Doors to let in external Objects) are shut and locked up by Sleep, Distempers, or strong Prejudices, that the imaginations produced from inward Causes must reign without any Rival, for the Images within us striking strongly upon, and affecting the Brain, Spirits, or Organ, where the imaginative Faculty resides, and all Objects from without, being wholly, or in a great measure shut out and excluded, so as to give no information or assistance, we must unavoidably submit to an evidence which meets with no contradiction, and take things to be as they appear.

The problem for Trenchard is not sense experience but our own minds: where Bossuet saw corruption seeping in from outside, Trenchard sees the outside world as a necessary check to our fantasies.

Bossuet lived in the France of Descartes—Trenchard in the England of Locke. Descartes's Discourse on Method had spoken of man's lumière naturelle, given us by God to follow reason and distinguish truth from error. For Trenchard this is merely an 'Ignis Fatuus of the Mind, which the Visionaries in all Ages have called the Inward Light, and leads all that have followed it into Pools and Ditches'. Descartes is really no better than a mystic: his daimonion or 'voice of God' has become a secular lumière, but it is still claimed to be a divine gift. Of course it can provide no criterion of truth and falsehood, for it has no ground in experience, and thus is subject to the humoral imbalances of the body—'Complexions, Constitutions and Distempers'.

Wer band dich in Schlummer so bang?

2008-10-05T23:10:00.009-04:00

Today I went along to a little film-screening, courtesy of Owen Hatherley and his cinematophile chums, as part of an ongoing art exhibition called the Wharf Road Project. The walk from Angel took me through the back streets of Islington, under a precipitate artillery—the ideal landscape of a miserabilist London. I almost walked right past the front door. Inside I was greeted first by a uniformed security guard, then, beamingly, by one of the artists, who invited me to explore the four floors of art. And the four floors were full of the usual rubbish that passes for art today—abstract paintings, video-screens, the distended head of a cat with black gunk oozing from its eyes—the sort one sees shortlisted for the Turner Prize every year. It made no impression on me.

On the second floor two pretty girls were wiping walls and rails. They seemed to be cleaning, but the motions of their hands were so spectral and disembodied, or mechanical, they might have been droids, or apparitions. They evinced no desire to exercise any control upon their surroundings. This did make an impression on me. Perhaps it was a performance piece.

Hand-dryers were located in the corridors outside the toilet cubicles.

In one of the rooms on the third floor I found the films being set up. Another young woman in an attractive brown dress handed me a little pamphlet, bearing essays on the event's theme of apocalypse, clamouring with references to T. S. Eliot and Heidegger, Dasein and diegesis. One of them quotes an article by the Marxist economist Harry Cleaver:

Crises are not to be feared or "solved"; they should rather be embraced and their opportunities explored. We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us. Only those who benefit from these structures should fear such cracks.

Naomi Klein, clearly, disagrees. (Affidavit: this is the first and last reference to Klein that will ever appear on this site.) We sat in the dark silence, some of us, not me, slurping Red Stripe, others munching on chocolate bites. Owen sat in the middle, communicating little to the assembled crowd. We watched a Herzog documentary on a volcano that never erupted, ending rather inappropriately to Siegfried's Trauermusik, and then an odd made-for-TV drama about nuclear apocalypse in Sheffield. The beards and scarves slurped and munched in passive silence; the DVD broke, and they couldn't find a remote; the rain spat a bit outside; the conspirators were quiet but really very pleasant.

There is now so much emphasis on the revolutionary. I suppose the contribution of modernism, on which Hatherley has written a book, was to make revolution—aesthetic, and then political—the aim of art. The problem is that revolution runs itself into the ground very quickly. Revolutions in taste happened every year until Duchamp put urinals on display, and then there could be no more. Revolutions in literary technique happened every year until Finnegans Wake, and then writers could only go backwards. The same happened with atonalism, photorealism, brutalism. We are still in the abyss of modernism. Its finest results are all in the past: we cannot best them, and we refuse to be conventional—or rather, to accept the conventional, for there is really nothing more conventional than today's art. By refusing to accept convention we have become hollow, straining for empty revolution, which in artistic terms no longer has any meaning. This was brutally and hilariously clear in the Hirst pre-auction show I attended last month out of pure idle curiosity, a fadged-up array of sheikhly gewgaws entirely lacking in talent, ideas, beauty, originality, even shock for Christ's sake—but whose contents went on to fetch £111m.

Up the road from the gallery, on the south side of Noel Road, the interwar Hanover Primary School is heavy and powerful in the drizzle. An architecture that lumbers and speaks, grey and dark. The sky, too, is grey and dark, and the canal. I walk the mile to the Barbican. London can be so flat, so unremitting, lacking in love and romance, so unrevolutionary—and it is magnificent.

Rodriguez on Greatness

2008-09-29T19:16:00.012-04:00

Despite bright spells, the klaxons of winter seem to have arrived early in London. We shiver in the flat, and on the steps of the Embankment, in the gungy puce of an evening, beneath the Needle and sphinges, leading down to the rocks and slippery rubble that pass for a beach under the wall—camera (broken, lens protruding), mobile (broken), fragment of a pipe with valve, bottles (some intact), and a barge of junks moored at the edge—

—at the Library I work and work—I have been tutoring a German lad in the fine arts of feminist literary theory. From the issue desk I collect the books I've been commissioned to read—Shakespeare and Gender, Women's Writing, Erotic Politics, Desire on the Renaissance Stage—and I suffer the shame of a man buying pornography at the kiosk, recalling the time when, as a teenager, I had to purchase an Elton John CD as a gift for my sister. What if someone I know should see me with these books? What should they think? But they aren't for me, I would say—I'm just helping a friend! Judge not, lest ye be judged. Of course, such a shame quails in the agony of reading the damned things.

Paul Rodriguez, Lullist and Ruricolist, has put into more substantial form the essays of his blog's first year. Rodriguez likes his Hazlitt and Quincey, he tells me, but Bacon most of all. With a wry irony, he calls Bacon his 'idol'. Myself, I do not care much for Bacon, at least not for his Essays—but still.

Paul's best reflections excite the possibility of conversation. 'Do masterworks tend to occur at the beginning of an art form only because they are easiest then?' he asks. Which immediately prompted me to wonder why masterworks did seem to occur at the beginning of literatures (Homer, Vergil, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais) but not at the start of painterly canons—the traditional view of the Renaissance, for instance, or of modernism, is of gradual progress towards perfection. What it is about a literature that requires the seal of greatness above the door? Paul notices the disparity across artforms:

Do we always owe the name of greatness to whomever makes way for the rest? Patently, no—in the history of painting, for example, for any virtue we can name the greatest are not the earliest; not even in primitive vigor, where the twentieth century trumps prehistory.

Only Roger Fry could disagree. But this raises questions again. Why, despite our strong distrust of historical singularities, does the twentieth century appear so singular in its cultural (and technological) production? Why should it be that art changed more between 1865 and 1915 than between 1265 and 1865? Why does modernism feel so convincingly like an irrevocable expulsion from Eden?

More freedom does not make work easier. We follow simple orders with clear objectives: write a novel, write a drama, write an essay. The first followed another order: make a work of genius; and that is always a reconaissance in force.

No, it is not freedom but constraint that makes art easier: I cannot help but read the modernist thirst and struggle for artificial constraints—from minimalism and Duchamp to the OuLiPo—as born of a lazy desire for impact: wit and virtuosity at the expense of lasting beauty. Freedom is, in fact, the greatest challenge to the artist: 'The great are not great by being first or earliest in something; rather, by being great, they start something.' How tempting is this view! How the Romantic in us longs to be a Shakespeare, a Picasso!

Rodriguez is a Romantic, by which I mean—and one could almost take this for a definition, almost—that he polarises the great and the good, genius and skill. He is self-assured enough—easy for a pollos, more difficult for an intellectual—still to valorize Leonardo, Beethoven and Homer. (And, oddly, Archimedes.) Christ, he even admires the Mona Lisa as a 'painting which earned its place'! I am inclined to agree. The Gioconda is, paradoxically, an underrated work of art, among those who do not gawp and snap but rather rate and underrate.

Paul asks, 'is the phenomenon of greatness only a manifestation of the familiar public taste for the bizarre?' No. Greatness is not reducible to taste, ex hypothesi. The great is always confused with the apparently great, that is, with the lauded; but despite that we must not confuse greatness with apparent greatness. Perhaps it would be better to say that the familiar public taste for the bizarre is a necessary corollary of greatness, an inevitable flinch, serving to make the great less painful to the ungreat, because more remote.

Paul is a Romantic because he polarises the great and the good, the 'honesty of genius' from the 'honesty of the camera or the map'. 'Maps lie,' he says, 'for mappability is what all places have in common: maps deny that places are different'. (Cartographic princess Mary Spence, for what it's worth, feels the same way about internet-mapping, which, she reckons, blands out the landscape it purports to survey.)

I will call a depiction of a place honest if it gives me what I could never learn from maps or satellite photos, but know with a minute of its sunlight; the form of a person, what I could never learn from imaging or lab reports or databases, but know with a minute of their conversation. That kind of honesty is the kind found in greatness, even at the cost of the other.

Here again is a fundamental Romanticism: this honesty of genius is in fact what might better be called insight—that which penetrates the surface. To believe in greatness is to believe that greatness cannot be discerned from surfaces. Hence there is an irreducible difficulty in discerning greatness, and consequently, Paul believes that we should humour greatness: 'we often must accommodate the opinions of those whose judgments we otherwise trust without any evidence of our own'. Here I disagree: greatness should never be humoured, always denied for as long as denial is possible, and only then accepted.

Let us have a thought experiment. Consider those ancients whose works survive to us only in fragments—say, Heraclitus or Sappho. Here is greatness we sense and know, yet cannot prove—a promissory note of greatness that we accept only on the word of writers of good credit.

Let us have as well an anecdote. Recently I read a poem that contained the clause, 'As Heraclitus put it in his Collected Fragments'. The words really stung me, not only because they are thoroughly lacking in poetic merit—for nothing else in this or the other sexdecilliard poems of its stock possesses any poetic merit—and not simply because, as I first articulated, Heraclitus did not put anything in a work entitled Collected Fragments, but because— because the poet had dared to sand and polish, to familiarise. Heraclitus was being implicitly cast as some sort of Poundian modernist, the sort who might produce a book with a title as precious as Collected Fragments. Heraclitus was being made less remote, and less great, because less distinctively Heraclitean. He was simply being assimilated into the general tedium. But it is the very fact of his obscurity and fragmentation, the fact of his historical slipperiness—in Gibbon's words, not of Heraclitus, 'a remote object through the medium of a glimmering and doubtful light'—that, for us, must make Heraclitus Heraclitus. Again, our faith that Heraclitus is fragmentary only by chance, by the whim of history—and the consequent necessity of accepting his words half on trust, with a 'promissory note of greatness'—are intrinsic to the peculiar nature of that greatness.

The klaxons of winter have arrived early. We shiver on the steps of the Embankment, in the gungy puce of an evening, beneath the Needle and sphinges, leading down to the rocks and slippery rubble that pass for a beach under the wall—camera, mobile, Erotic Politics, Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Those inglorious words are oozing into the water, and east, out towards the Estuary, to be drunk up as ersatz opinions. From the promontory we look east upon St. Paul's, remote and promissory, as if all else had fallen, like Macaulay's melancholy New Zealander, surveying the ruins of London.

[Update: Paul responds. I realise I have forgotten to say how much I enjoyed his invention of the word 'rebarbicans'.]

JMK185G

2008-09-17T20:31:00.006-04:00

My friends and I happen to be in the Angel area; we have returned from a walk down the canal from London Fields. At a loose end, I suggest showing them the New River Head, and so in a typically British greyed daylight we head down to Rosebery Avenue to gaze at those glorious edifices. I am still irritated by a mix-up over Belgian beers in a dark pub up Hackney way. We bloody bourgeois, eh? Still, it is hard to remain too endudgeoned when out and about in North London. Round the back of the New River Head I deliver my spiel about the Great Seal and Plui super unam civitatem and the rest of it. A local fellow suddenly appears, just as the sun ceases to be occlouded, and draws our attention to the brick wall encompassing the grounds.

The wall is dotted and scored all over with numbers, letters, codes. What could they mean? You see, said our new interlocutor, there was once a prison near here, and the prisoners, when they were in the exercise yard, would carve their numbers on the bricks. Then the prison was demolished, and the bricks were reused in this wall here. The wall must have gone up in the 1930s with the rest of the Board buildings; the numbers date back to the nineteenth century. We are all delighted by this quiet little effusion of the criminal voice, marring or at least glossing the elegant lines of the chi-chi apartments and gardens beyond.

[15.11.08 update: Upon re-perusing Ulysses, I discover a mention of the gaol in question, in relation to its Fenian spring in 1868, from 'Proteus': "Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry."]

An Inconvenient Tooth

2008-09-12T11:24:00.003-04:00

— He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos.

Sometimes the world has an appalling air of doneness. I work best with unsolved, incomplete and unwoven materials—and the Germans have been doing their utmost to foil me of late. I spend a week researching the story of the Golden Tooth, with the plan to write an article on the subject, only to find that it has already been written, and as a whole book, with a comprehensive bibliography, only four years ago, and in German. The swinehound!

Teeth seem to be everywhere at the moment. My cuñada likes to tell the story of the Ndembu tooth-extraction ritual. The Ndembu culture, according to Victor Turner, attributes great spiritual significance to the front incisors, and when a tribesman is thought to be mixing awkwardly with the rest of his tribe, the witchdoctor pretends to extract one of the man's teeth, as a scapegoat object, symbolic of his social problems. The accompanying ritual includes the airing of grievances on both sides, so that the community can return to normal. Thus, cultural homoeostasis at work.

At the moment, Mrs. Roth's second lower right molar is more than a symbol of difficulty: it is a literal source of agony, having broken apart and set her gums and jaw at war with each other—the dentists can only throw up their arms in helpless confusion. Perhaps extracting the tooth would put her soul to rest, and cure her heart of its intrinsic evil: we are yet to discover. It is not the first time we've had a contretemps with her mandibles. Only last year she had to be fitted with a toothguard for her nocturnal bruxism. They took a cast of her dentures, a picture of which I saved for my own macabre enjoyment—

Fifteen pages of typical elegance are devoted to teeth in D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form (rev. ed. 1945). This is one of the most beautiful books ever written, on a visual, literary, even on an intellectual level. It is one of those books written for dreaming, and I'm sure I could produce a post on every single page. The images are works of art. A photograph of an elephant's jaw, for instance, could double as a recumbent Surrealist nude:

Meanwhile, a series of diagrams demonstrating the shapes of a horse's molars anticipate the biomorphisms produced by Hans Arp in the 1920s. Here we have the beauty of pure form if we want it, and the beauty of scientific analysis if we want that. Figure A represents an eroded molar in cross-section, and B and C are each less eroded. (Funny that Thompson should have chosen to arrange the diagrams in reverse order.)

What do the key-letters stand for? Logophiles rejoice! a (and a', a'') are ectolophs; b is a protoloph; b' a mesoloph; b'' a metaloph. -loph, here, from the Greek for 'crest'. c and c' are lakes, valleys, or fossettes, x is a col, and o cusps or conules. The vocabulary is ported from topography, which unexpectedly becomes the dominant metaphor in Thompson's prose:

"To recognise this lake or pit in the simple contours of the young incisor is an easy matter; but in the abraded molar the enamel-layer which once covered all its ups and downs forms a contour-line, or "curve of level," of great complexity. This contour-line alters as the levels change, and varies from one tooth to the next and from one year to another, so long as wear and tear continue. The geographer reads the lie of the land, with all its ups and downs, from a many-contoured map, but the worn tooth shews us only one level and one contour at a time; we must eke out its scanty evidence by older and younger teeth in other phases or degrees of wear. The "pattern" of a horse's molar tooth is indeed so closely akin to a map-maker's contours that some of the terms he uses may be useful to us. He speaks, for instance, of ridge-lines and course-lines, lignes de faite and lignes de thalweg; of a gap, or lowland way between two hills, in contrast to a col or saddle at the summit of a mountain-pass; or of a gorge, which is a narrow steep-sided valley; or a scarp, which is a long steep-faced hillside."

All this is consistent with Thompson's overall project to bring the living kingdoms closer to the mineral. In his mechanical-mathematical world, life diminishes in significance, and the processes of life, namely the evolutionary processes, begin to jostle with more fundamental physical forces for impact on living creatures. In perhaps the most dazzling chapter, sort of a twentieth-century Garden of Cyrus, Thompson expounds on hexagonal patterns in nature as the simplest product of symmetrical forces:

If the law of minimal areas holds good in a "cellular" structure, as in a froth of soap-bubbles or in a vegetable parenchyma, then not merely on the average, but actually at every node, three partition-walls (in plane projection) meet together. Under perfect symmetry they do so at co-equal angles of 120°, and the assemblage consists (in plane projection) of co-equal hexagons.

What interests us is that soap and vegetable matter are treated side-by-side, as equals—along with tortoise shells, sunflower whorls, the basalt columns of Giant's Causeway, cracks in drying mud or varnish, honeycomb, and so on and so on. The sheer scope of the argument is greater than any division between living and non-living objects: 'In dealing with forms which are so concomitant with life that they are seemingly controlled by life, it is in no spirit of arrogant assertiveness if the physicist begins his argument, after the fashion of a most illustrious exemplar, with the old formula of scholastic challenge: An Vita sit? Dico quod non.'

On Growth and Form is a great book because it is a transformative book: it transforms, or transmutes, the world we know into a world of fantasy, of secret forces vying for power. It transmutes geology into geometry, biology into pure mechanics. And as Thompson's thought tends towards a procedural (hypothetical) inanimism, it coincides with its opposite, animism. It was an animism, or something like it, that suggested to Jakob Horst, a physician at Helmstedt University (and a contemporary there of Giordano Bruno), the idea that gold could grow naturally, for instance on a boy's tooth. In 1594 he was presented to a young Silesian lad named Christoph Mueller, among whose new adult teeth was—supposedly—one made of solid gold. In his account of the phenomenon, De aureo dente (1596), he asserts:

The strange and distant material of the golden tooth comes about from blood flowing through veins in the cavity and substance of the golden tooth. The golden appendage is born from the tooth's osseous roots. The gold on the tooth feeds, lives and feels.

Horst goes on to argue that on Mueller's date of birth, 22 December 1585, the sun was in conjunction with Saturn in the sign of Aries, producing an excess of heat, which in turn fanned the nutritive force in the tooth, producing gold—an effect both natural and miraculous. Years later, Duncan Liddel, a Scottish physician also working in Germany, pointed out that the sun only entered the sign of Aries in March—even Horst's hokum astrology was bad. In 1599, the Ramist and alchemist Andreas Libavius summarised the philosophical grounds of Horst's thesis, to which he himself was opposed, and invoked an old methodological principle later adopted by Charles Darwin:

That gold can assume a vital principle, and perhaps become vegetable [i.e. growing], will not seem absurd to those who believe in the living gold born in the Danube, on which were branches and leaves of pure vegetable gold. Thence the chemists claim that the golden stone is also vegetable: then it seems that the beginning and foundation of vegetation belongs to 'mineral spirits' (succis mineralibus), since these occupy the middle position between vegetable and elemental things, just as zoophytes are between plants and animals—for Nature does not make a leap (natura non faciente saltum).

Thompson would have agreed: Nature does not make a leap, She makes transformations. Hence the perfect continuity between the organic and the inorganic. Of course, Horst's thesis was soon exposed. The tooth was a fraud: its gold had been merely painted on. One account claims that 'a certain nobleman got an inkling [of the imposture], came to the place pretty drunk, and demanded that the tooth be shown him; when the young fellow, at his master's word, kept silent, the nobleman struck his dagger into the boy's mouth, wounding him so badly that the aid of a surgeon had to be called, and so the deception was fully exposed'. When it comes to the generation of gold, the organic appears demarcated from the inorganic after all, despite such modern marvels as this.

In the West, these sorts of stories attract the positivist mind, comfortable in its assurance that such shenanigans don't get taken seriously by intellectuals any more. Thus Vincenzo Guerini, in his History of Dentistry (1909), scoffs: 'In our days news of such a kind would be immediately qualified, and universally held to be an imposture. But three centuries ago the most marvellous and unlikely things were easily believed in, often even by the learned'. Anthropological respect is accorded only to the superstitions of darkest Africa, as to those of the Ndembu in Zambia—superstitions that are not discomfortably close to home, and which, for this very reason, present no threat of fantastical transmutation, of bouleversement.

Plato has not been of much help to my suffering Lily. (Although she did enjoy having her nails done at Aristotle's little salon, next door.) Too busy with all this deuced chatter about Ideal Teeth and intradentine hierarchies. He has no drills in his office: only an assortment of books and lenses. And his understanding of the human anatomy and physiology, at least such as he presents in his Timaeus, is simply idiotic. His fees are astronomical. When I mentioned to him the possibility of gold teeth, he shook his head. But at least if she managed to grow a bit of gold on the end of her crowns it would help pay for an operation. I think it is worth giving it a shot, "science" be damned.

erstarrte Musik

2008-09-07T12:27:00.025-04:00

When I first met my wife, at a dormitory party at the University of York—an encounter I described here—I took her for a walk around the campus at four in the morning. We climbed up the Central Hall and stood looking out over the artificial lake, shivering in the chill of a northern February. I explained why I liked the campus—its bare geometric forms, its variety of spaces, its schematism—but try as I might, I just couldn't convince her that gravel-grey modular prefab had any architectural merit. It wasn't just her—most of my fellow students thought it a hideous place, a classically ugly product of 1960s tastes, like the South Bank or the Barbican. If Baukunst really is an erstarrte Musik, as Goethe said, then the campus must be near absolute zero.

Hostility towards this style often derives, I suspect, from a confusion of architecture with sculpture, from a criterion of beauty based in the plastic arts. It isn't pretty, is what they're thinking—individuals who'd never dream of requiring prettiness in literature or music. The campus, indeed, is far from pretty. Concrete rarely is. The architects had originally planned to clad their designs in banded white and green—limestone-fluorspar and Cumbrian granite—so as to approximate Siena Cathedral. That would have been prettier, but it proved too expensive, so instead they left exposed the concrete gravel that they'd dredged out of the Trent River. As a result, the campus is a terribly grey place, but it is at least a grey of the earth. (How often we forget the greyness of the earth, our eyes caught up in its greens and ochres, the garish spray of its flower beds and orchards.) The concrete itself is in precast panels arranged on a light steel framework—a method called CLASP, and revolutionary when it was devised around 1960, the campus being its first major application. Some of the panels were sculpted in abstract designs; these 'were an attempt to reassure people as to the fact that prefabrication didn't mean the end of all human variety and the touch of the human hand'. It did seem that way. A reviewer for the Architects' Journal in 1965 noted:

The edges of the precast concrete wall panels show, obliquely, and include angled drainage channels. There is an immediate natural reaction that these gaps need filling—and a further reaction that if they are not to be filled by the builder they will soon be filled by spiders' webs and the like.

The prediction turned out to be correct. When I was there, spiders were everywhere, especially hanging in mazy webs from the lit panels affixed to the ceilings of the walkways that stretch throughout the campus. Those walkways might as well have been taken from the utopian proposals of Charles Fourier—'everything is linked by a series of passageways which are sheltered, elegant, and comfortable in winter thanks to the help of heaters and ventilators'—one walks with nature, protected from it, but not isolated. Frank Lloyd Wright had written of his Living City utopia that 'hard-and-fast lines between outside and inside. . . tend to disappear'—'In spite of all untoward vicarious circumstance, man is now to be less separated from nature'. (Part of me resists Wright's vision: when I typed out this sentence, my fingers put 'not' for 'now' three times, a pregnant parapraxia.) In the same way, as you wind through the older colleges, the paths become corridors, colonnades, open now on this side, now on that: you are neither wholly inside, nor wholly out.

One is supposed to wander in this little world, to dérive: Guy Debord had only just started to use that sort of language when the York development plan was being drawn up. In a 1977 lecture, preserved only on an antique reel-to-reel audiotape sitting misfiled in a dusty corner of the university library, the tape itself threaded the wrong way through the spool, Andrew Derbyshire, one of the chief brains behind the campus, remarked:

We realised pretty early on that this was going to be a difficult place to find one's way about in. . . One wants to be able to explore. I don't like situations that expose themselves immediately, reveal all their secrets.

What we have is a version of the political utopianism so characteristic of post-war architectural theory: the design of the campus rejects hierarchical structure and places man directly in contact with nature. The organisation of buildings, loose and irregular, around intersecting nodes for congregation, are entirely anti-authoritarian: Haussmann would have been appalled. Contrast, for instance, the plan of the York campus:

to a map of Arizona State University, where I spent three long years:

In Tempe, most of the residential blocks are outside the campus, as is its centre of administration. There are some 30,000 students—twice that figure if one takes into account the other campuses. Provision is made for easy access and functional clarity, not for organic flexibility: hence long, broad avenues, lined with palms and palo verdes. At York, on the other hand, residential, educational and administrative blocks were deliberately combined. It was to be a small, close community, for a few thousand students. As Stefan Muthesius put it, 'this university is arguably not an assembly of separate units, but forms a whole, a kind of complete and 'anti-diagrammatic' organism.' This was the vitalistic language of the Smithsons, or of Constantin Doxiadis, who wrote in 1966 that the ideal city 'will evolve continuously, and when it ceases to do so the death of the whole organism will occur'. We are back at Mesa vs. Hornsey.

You can see plenty of pictures of the campus online. But for a more authentic vision, it will be worth examining pictures from the manifestos and early journal reviews of the campus, shot in a gorgeous 1960s high-contrast monochrome, the floors and facades all shiny and modernist. In these photographs, and attendant prose, we can recover some of the initial excitement.

A courtyard in the chemistry department; the columnar object
to the left is an old water tower, since demolished.

Pyramidal rooflights, Goodricke College

Colonnade, Derwent College

Boilerhouse, "ship-shape and shining. Ex-navy boilermen take
keen and obvious pride in their jobs."

And the greatest concession to a sculptural aesthetic, the boilerhouse chimney sticking up from the campus periphery, now usually sidelined by the roving architectural eye in favour of the spaceship-like Central Hall at the heart of the campus, seen here in half-installed form (1965) from a later retrospective:

Finally, the whole campus seen from the air:

The boiler chimney is at the far right, centre; in the bottom-right corner, meanwhile, can be seen Heslington Church, whose spire delightfully resounds in the pyramidal rooflights dotted about the campus: a 'happy harmony,' according to Derbyshire, 'which we hadn't actually ever intended or thought about'. The rooflights provide relationships of form within the campus, as well as a relationship between the campus and its environs.

And the language used to describe these lights is astounding. The 1965 reviewer saw them as evidence of an 'overall romanticism'. A later reviewer concurred: 'roofs and side-elevations were embellished by romantic details in the form of pyramid-shaped rooflights and box bay windows'. Michael Brawne, also in 1965, had mused in own his review of the campus that 'certain systems exert, through their apparent technical neatness, a romantic fascination'. What are we to make of romantic rooflights? They gesture upwards, with the spire at Heslington: they mitigate the modular repetition of the CLASP blocks: and at night they haunt the wanderer in his labyrinth.

Neminiana

2008-09-05T12:49:00.003-04:00

The conservative poet and critic David Solway begins his essay 'Culling and Dereading' with an obvious falsehood, clumsily expressed: 'It seems that one can no longer survive in the academic world today unless one has mastered the trick of thinking and phrase-making characteristic of deconstruction.' His conclusion, however, is more reasonable—namely, that while the original proponents of the postmodern turn had something of merit, their acolytes are insufferably dull and unimaginative:

those who blithely and unreflectingly repeat its congenial rhetoric begin to resemble the members of the Neminiana secta, founded by the thirteenth-century Frenchman Radulfus who, having the idea that the Latin word for no one, nemo, was the name of an actual person, came to the conclusion that Nemo was the son of God and established a sect of worshippers.

The comparison is cute—Derrida and his friends talked about the presence of absence—a variation of the ancient idea that if you say that something is not, you are already implying its existence—just as the wacky mediaeval (supposedly) began to believe in the actuality of nemo. In Radulfus and (say) Derrida, the mistake is charming—in their followers, it is plain daft. The analogy also plays on the popular conception of postmodernism as a sort of high church with officiants, blind adherents and incomprehensible cant.

The irony is that Solway learnt about Radulfus—almost certainly—from Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World, a central text in today's postpostpost canon. (The Russian is mentioned once in the essay, and labelled 'chic'.)

If Radulfus is a figure of scorn for Solway, he is much more positive in Bakhtin's account, which discusses Radulfus and his Historia de Nemine at some length, finding in it a longing for freedom, expressing 'the recreative, festive suspension' of quotidian restraints—'the free carnivalesque play with offical negations and prohibitions'. Radulfus 'probably did not take his character seriously; probably Nemo was no more than a game, the diversion of a medieval cleric': it was his accuser, Stephen of St. George, with his agelastic condemnation of the Neminian sect, who plays the villain in this history.

Bakhtin's book has made the tale rather popular in certain circles, and browsing Google Books I can find nods to his telling in Joseph Koerner's Moment of Self-Portraiture and Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness, to name just two. But where did Bakhtin get the story from? We know that he and his circle (especially Voloshinov) were reading Karl Vossler, whose Spirit of Language in Civilization, written in 1925, offers a miniature of the legend:

But the maddest invention was reserved for a Frenchman, Radulfus, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century. This man had the idea—whether in earnest or in jest is hard to decide—that the Latin word for no one, nemo, was the name of a person. He hunted for passages in the Bible and other authorities in which this Nemo was mentioned, and actually discovered that Nemo was the true son of God. He preached sermons about him, attracted believers, and founded a sect of worshippers of Nemo, Neminiana secta.

Here, as with Solway, the tale illustrates the dangers of taking language too seriously; Vossler, a German Romantic through and through, characterises languages in terms of religious inclinations or spiritual physiognomies. We are in the same world as the modernist obsession with word-magic. How different in tone from the account in George Coulton, a rabid anti-Catholic, who was all primed to savage this as a classic example of Dark Age foolishness in his 1907 From Saint Francis to Dante:

A certain Radulphus, about 1290, got it into his head that whenever the word nemo (no man) occurred in Latin writings, it was no mere negation, but referred to a person of that name, whom he proved to be identical with the Son in the Holy Trinity. His own reading (as may well be believed) was small: but he paid monks and clerks to make a collection of such passages, mainly from the Bible, from which he composed a "Sermon Upon Nemo".

Clearly, Coulton was not averse to pulling facts out of his arse in support of his thesis. The parent to all of these passages is the full account of Radulfus provided in an 1888 article by Heinrich Denifle, who describes the sermon as 'wie es scheint, ernst gemeinten'—as it appears, seriously meant. More on Radulfus can now be found in Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter; Gerta Calmann, 'The Picture of Nobody'; and most of all in Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages.

Sarvas on Roth

2008-08-23T17:46:00.004-04:00

Steven Augustine, the bête noire's bête noire, draws my attention to some kind and thoughtful comments on my work, offered by Mark Sarvas, a famous blogger and published novelist, in a piece entitled 'Thinking about Roth' from his fine blog The Elegant Variation:

Thinking about Roth's familiar touches, motifs repeated, things like that, I thought that an instructive comparison might be made to Picasso. Besides a lifelong fascination with sex (with a dose of terrified mortality thrown in near the end), the symbols of Picasso's art were always personal, almost narcissistic: His lovers, his family, his personal iconography—bulls, harlequins, matadors—put a personal stamp on his body of work that bears some resemblance to Roth's own concerns.

A putative artistic kinship with Picasso had never occurred to me, but I think this is a perceptive observation. Sex and death, certainly, are recurrent motifs in my own blogging oeuvre, and, like Picasso, my symbols are always personal: though perhaps 'narcissistic' is a shade too far. (My readers will disagree.)

I was particularly haunted, in this instance, by the (unstated, or half-stated) suggestion that my own development as an artist might have mirrored or echoed that of Picasso. For example, I could easily believe that early Roth posts—say, from March through September 2006, when I dealt frequently with poverty and blindness, often allegorically—will come to be understood as the flowering of my own Blue and Rose Periods. Likewise, the metaphorical bulls and harlequins of Roth's 2007 pieces participate in a collective unconscious inherited (as I now see) from Picasso and the Spanish heritage. And if I have my own Démoiselles, inaugurating an epoch of daring perspectival distortions, it is surely my already-classic 'Unknown Object' trilogy from November 2006.

Some sceptics, or as I would prefer to call them cynics, may question the value of comparing creative artists as different as Picasso and myself. They may suggest that such a comparison requires a level of generality so great as to leave lifeless both Picasso and Roth. But I cannot agree with such facile, knee-jerk reactions. As Sarvas points out, quite aptly, Guernica (like my own 'For the Birds') 'is a resolutely personal work'—'something, incidentally, Picasso', like Roth, 'has been criticized for'. Such a similarity cannot be easily brushed off. Perhaps Picasso, as the twentieth-century paragon of the artist (as Einstein was of the scientist) has set the template for all subsequent creative endeavours.

Luding Bridge

2008-08-19T18:44:00.008-04:00

Home after work, eightish, as the grey at the horizon glisters that bit brighter than the grey overhead, and the gasometers are giving out; the blackberried professionals pour off the first carriage onto Hornsey platform, and struggle up the stairs in a flat throng. I drop eaves on a young woman:

He was also, he also had a marionette of death with him. I mean, well—who would bring that to a christening?

I am in every mood to appreciate the macabre. The AHRC has withheld its fecund nipple for a second time, pooh-poohing my scholarship application and denying me my rightful forty grand. I am consoled only by the thought that doctoral theses on John Lennon, Prada handbags and poofter Shakespeare are being well rewarded. Not that I'm bitter or anything. An elder colleague, no friend to the AHRC, wisely counsels me 'not to capitulate to their imaginary'. But now they have hacked away the planks once and for all, and the Luding Bridge will be just that much harder to cross. Still, onwards to victory, comrades:

To fight with Heaven is infinite pleasure!
To fight with earth is infinite pleasure!
To fight with men is infinite pleasure!

*

At Metafilter, someone called Nasreddin, whose identity I can only suspect, links here with generous words. The context is a "Which important books haven't you read?" discussion, where the assembled stooges try to impress each other with greater and greater lacunae. Naturally, the idea behind these admissions is: I have come this far without [Ulysses / Hamlet / War and Peace, etc.]—and I'm no worse off for it. The bigger the book you scorn, the bigger you are. Philosophy comes in for a bit of one-upmanship too, including gems like:

I think a lot of philosophy is actually best ingested via secondary sources. Especially works in translation, where you'll be missing out on possible linguistic nuances anyway. You can certainly get the "meat" of Plato in 100 pages of well-written exposition.

And later:

I've read quite a bit of Plato, I like Plato. But, honestly, if you're going to read philosophy as a matter of cultural literacy you would do better to read the early moderns: Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, with a dash of Hobbes, Pascal, and Malebranche for good measure. (I would add Kant, but he is all but impenetrable.)

(Myself, I advise against expectations of increased 'cultural literacy' from any study of Malebranche.) But the bloke who really annoys me goes by the soubriquet of 'Yoink'. At the request that he illuminate the Greatness of the Great Books, he snorts:

Well, the request is a bit absurd (if you want to know why, see Cliff's Notes), but, with regard to the authors I mentioned above (Austen, Melville, Flaubert and Tolstoy), here you go:

"Oh, alright—if you really must have a display of my superiority." The subsequent display is 'favourited' by no fewer than five fellow readers, including—gasp!—Nasreddin himself. Do these epigoni take him at his word? Here's what Yoink thinks of Melville:

Melville: delerious prose-poetry of the most intoxicating kind. Melville puts the whole of Western Lit in a blender and sends you out sailing on a turbulent sea of allusions, puns, half-caught echoes. To read Melville is to find yourself remapping the literary and philosophical world.

What disturbs me about this assessment is the casualness of its sublimity. Sublimity must never be made casual: then it becomes bathos. It ruins Melville, or more accurately Moby Dick, for which 'Melville' is here blatant synecdoche, to call him 'prose-poetry', and it ruins him to use the expression 'of the most intoxicating kind', which a trip to Google will soon expose as crass gush. Melville does not put the 'whole of Western Lit'—a tasteless abbreviation—'in a blender' and to read him is not to find oneself 'remapping' any sort of world. What Yoink has done is reiterate a slew of clichés, on the very level of the Cliff's Notes he disparages, dressed up in the prose style of a Coldwater Creek catalogue. Yoink might as well not have read Moby Dick if all he could glean from it was a hackneyed encyclopaedism. And in that case, he'd have done better to keep his views to himself, lest his respondent think reading books is merely about checking 'Greatness' boxes off a list.

Let's see what he says about Flaubert:

Flaubert: where to begin? Madame Bovary is the obvious example, although I prefer "L'education sentimentale." For a start it's simply a privilege to be exposed to such a whip-smart mind and a prose style that combines an extraordinarily labile grace with sinews of steel.

Here is another species of false humility. This species is signalled, as so often, by the use of the word privilege—a word that should be razed from dictionaries, as a punishment for its services to the obsequious. Were I Ayatollah, I'd law it that anyone claiming such a thing as this to be privilege should have that privilege immediately rescinded.

The snivelling begins in the first words. Notice the rhythm of ideas: Where to begin? It is all too much; the genius of Flaubert escapes all mortal summary. But then, with a tip of the beret to the 'obvious example', a little jab in the ribs: I acknowledge the preference of the many, but I am capable of subtler appreciations. But it gets yet more vain. Flaubert's prose 'combines an extraordinarily labile grace with sinews of steel'. Labile means 'unstable, prone to lapse', and so it is not surprising that Google has hardly heard of 'labile grace'. Is it really the word Yoink wanted? Did he perhaps mean 'agile grace'? Or is he, rather, attempting a bit of theology? And what could it really mean to say that Flaubert's prose has 'sinews of steel'? No passage I adduce from the novel could possibly confirm or disprove the statement.

Worst of all is the contention, superficially unremarkable, that Flaubert has a 'whip-smart mind'. I have just googled the phrase. Who else possesses a whip-smart mind? The teenage protagonist of a young adult novel; a hypothetical physics-major freshman; someone's 13 year old niece; the Frances McDormand character in Fargo; and the soft-rocker Craig Finn. What these minds have in common is that they are smart, yes, but possibly not quite as smart as the speaker, or else, so smart as to be deficient in other, more important qualities present in the speaker: 'whip-smart' has the quiet soupçon of condescension. Mrs. Roth, not given the context, confirms my intuition. In the circumstances, calling Flaubert 'whip-smart' frankly lacks taste.

And what is so damned wrong with lacking taste? Why should I castigate some irrelevant schlub on Metafilter for failing to meet my standards of delicacy? Doesn't that lack taste? Possibly. It is my suspicion—soupçon—that being a good writer, a good thinker, is essentially about possessing or acquiring good taste. By taste I do not mean politeness. Taste is judgement in the realm of the unquantifiable. It is the aesthete's equivalent of phronesis, practical know-how: it is aesthetic know-how. To have taste is to know not only the dictionary definition of a word, but its precise colour and nuance—knowledge that cannot be transmitted succinctly or mechanically. To have taste is to know that, if we would communicate the greatness of a Melville, we must not rely on stereotype. It is to be alive to possibility, and above all to the rare possibility of bouleversement. It is to know, likewise, when to be outrageous. Flaubert and Melville had perfect taste. Both could be outrageous: Melville with his bloody mess of a book—hardly a 'fabulous quest-narrative which is gripping at the level of narrative'—and Flaubert with his St. Anthony and his Dictionary of Received Ideas, into which would now have to go the mental contents of a Yoink.

He says that the main reason to read these works 'is that they're just fucking amazingly enjoyable to read', as if that proposition could genuinely answer the question, put to him initially: 'For what reasons, besides blunt-force insistence, are they considered required reading?' Yoink lacks taste because, with his literary nose retroussé up Flaubert's arse, he has not allowed himself to hear this question: he has not entered into dialogue. Words are labile things, and require mastery: to deal with words is to deal with people—to hear, to communicate.

Parnassus

2008-08-14T15:57:00.015-04:00

One scholarly excursion among others: a tiny tangle of errors.

This week I was reading the 1522 Geniales dies of Alessandro Alessandri, a real olla podrida of anecdotes, erudition and lore, very typical of the period. Here is what he writes about the celebrated Mount Parnassus:

Parnassus was a mountain of Phocis in Boeotia, divided into two hills [colles], Thitorea and Hyampeum, of which the one was sacred to Liber [ie. Dionysos], the other to Apollo, but Helicon to the Muses.

Now, Phocis was not in Boeotia. But perhaps we should forgive this oversight, as the scholars of the sixteenth century seem not to have been too clear on the difference. Thus in the Elucidarius of Hermann Torrentinus, completed in 1518, we read that Delphi is a 'town [oppidum] in Phocis', but in Charles Estienne's 1596 revision of this work, we discover that actually Delphi is a 'city [civitas] in Boeotia, next to Parnassus'. For what it's worth, both Parnassus and Delphi were indeed in Phocis, which was adjacent to Boeotia. Delphi itself was by the border.

I was more interested in these two hills of Parnassus. They are proverbial in classical literature, where the mountain is often called biceps, 'two-headed'. In fact the two points are not twin summits but low local peaks sitting above Delphi; today they have the names Rhodini, rosy, and Phleboukos, fiery, and together they are known as the Phaedriades, shining ones. But where was Alessandro getting his names, and where was he getting the notion that one was sacred to Apollo, the other to Dionysos?

My first stop was to check the commentary on Geniales dies composed by the French humanist Andreas Tiraquellus—a friend of Rabelais's—and published alongside the text in 1586. Tiraquellus claims Thitorea and Hyampeum are the names given to the peaks by Herodotus, and further points the reader to two commentaries from late antiquity: Servius on the Aeneid, and Lactantius Placidus on the Thebaid of Statius. So what does Herodotus say? Well, in his Histories 8.32 he mentions 'that summit of Parnassus. . . the name of it being Tithorea'. The word 'summit' is κορυφη, and in Lorenzo Valla's Latin version it is cacumen, although vertex is also used—the latter word defined in Valla's own Elegantiae, just so there is no confusion, as 'the highest point on a mountain'. Meanwhile, in Histories 8.39 we find an offhand reference to Hyampeia, also called a κορυφη (and vertex). So if you were a humanist carefully reading Herodotus in 1522, you might very naturally put the two together; Alessandro's orthography is a bit odd, but otherwise the names work.

The Greek writer Strabo, Geographica 9.3.15, also mentions, but does not identify, 'Hyampeia on Parnassus'. Plutarch, in his little essay On the Delays of Divine Justice, mentions Hyampeia as a 'rock' (πετρα) from which Aesop was thrown by the Delphians, and notes that, since this provoked Apollo's wrath, their place of execution was later transferred to nearby Naupleia. Pausanias, who composed his Description of Greece a hundred years later, cites Herodotus on Tithorea (10.32.8), but by his own time the name Tithorea applied to the nearby town, which Herodotus calls 'Neon'. Pliny, likewise, mentions the town of Tithorea, and it still a municipality today. Otherwise the names seem to have disappeared from the two peaks, neither of which, let us remember, is a summit.

The sixteenth-century physician Girolamo Cardano, whose Latin is so bad that Kristian Jensen once wrote an article about its awfulness, seems to have followed Alessandro on the matter of Parnassus, though it is also possible he filched straight from Herodotus. He tells us that 'Mount Parnassus was in Phocis, in Boeotia, exalting itself with two peaks [cacumina], Thitorea and Hyampeum: on one peak [fastigium] of which was Nysa, sacred to Bacchus, on the other Delphi, sacred to Apollo.' Again we find one peak assigned to Dionysos, the other to Apollo. Whence this?

Lucan, Pharsalia 5.72-73, describes Parnassus as 'a mountain sacred to Phoebus [Apollo] and Bromius [Dionysos]', without distinguishing its peaks. Macrobius, a cultured pagan nobleman writing in the late fourth century, writes that 'the Boeotians, although they speak of Mount Parnassus as sacred to Apollo, nevertheless pay honour there both to the Delphic oracle and to the caves of Bacchus as dedicated to a single god, so that both Apollo and Liber Pater are worshipped one the same mountain. . . Apollo and Liber are one and the same god.' Servius, a contemporary of Macrobius, says the same in a comment to Aeneid 6.78; meanwhile, in his note on Aeneid 10.163, he writes that

Parnassus is a mountain of Thessaly next to Boeotia. . . which is split into two peaks [iuga], Cithaeron belonging to Liber, and Helicon to Apollo and the Muses.

Servius is really confused. Not only is Parnassus not in Thessaly, but Cithaeron and Helicon are two entirely different (though adjacent) mountains in Boeotia; iuga can mean 'range, ridge' as well as 'peak', and perhaps Servius took Parnassus as the whole morass of mountains in Central Greece. Cithaeron was indeed sacred to Dionysos, and Helicon to Apollo and the Muses. At any rate, the attribution of Apollo and Dionysos to separate peaks seems to stem from Servius' confusion between Cithaeron/Helicon and the biceps Parnassus.

A century and a half later, Lactantius Placidus, in his note on Thebaid 1.62-64, follows Servius in describing Cithaeron and Helicon as two iuga of Parnassus. Isidore of Seville, whose Origines (mid-seventh century) was the single most important source of classical information in the Middle Ages, agrees with Servius and Lactantius: although he first assigns Parnassus to Apollo (14.4.12), he later (14.8.11) says that Apollo and Liber were worshipped on separate peaks, which were named after Cithaeron and Helicon.

This is how mix-ups get transmitted as the standard line to the Middle Ages. And it doesn't stop there; Boccaccio picks the story up and runs with it, noting in the short entry on Parnassus from his De montibus: 'one peak [vertex] is sacred to Apollo; the other to Bacchus'. So it was from this river that Alessandro fished out his lore about Parnassus, only like a good one-upman humanist he had the ingenuity to trick it up with names he fadged together from Herodotus.

In the eighteenth century scholars were still getting it wrong, though a bit less wrong. Richard Jackson, in his Literatura Graeca (1769), writes that Phocis 'is famed for three mountains, Parnassus sacred to Apollo. . . [and] Helicon and Cythaeron, both consecrated to the Muses.' According to Edward Dodwell, in his 1819 Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece:

The two celebrated rocks, the Phaedriades, rise almost perpendicularly above the fountain, dividing into the two points of Naupleia and Hyampeia, which were sacred to Bacchus and to Apollo.

Dodwell has taken Plutarch's Naupleia—not localised by the Greek—as the other of the two Phaedriades. It is the latest in a long line of fudges and confusions.

All this will no doubt be seen as a pointlessly long discussion of a dull subject: the name and nature of two hills of Parnassus. But it reveals a serious problem inherent in historical geography. Our approach to the identification of objects and places is now fundamentally archaeological: we go to see what we can find on the site itself, and measure the classical sources accordingly. But for Latin-speaking scholars from the Renaissance through to the nineteenth century, all information came through a network of late, obscure and often fragmentary literary sources, badly preserved in crabbed-handed manuscripts, and then in clumsily-edited fifteenth-century editions. Trying to decipher just where and what were Parnassus and its hills, peaks, ridges, summits (colles, iuga, vertices, fastigia, cacumina) was no simple matter.

The Weeping Philosopher

2008-08-09T00:14:00.009-04:00

Scholars do like to spout off. The subject of the Delphic oracle is no exception: it has attracted the usual charivari of feminists and postpostposts. What else would you expect? The oracle is given by the Pythia—a woman—who is 'played like an instrument' or else sexually violated by Apollo, whose words she is made to speak, from a dark cave, in a state of hysterical frenzy—can you conceive any image more inevitably bound for the chair and drill of the derridista?

Giulia Sissa, in a 1987 book on Greek Virginity, tells us in her preface that by the end of the work she will have 'woven around [the Pythia], mysterious in the middle of the world, a web of analogies, similes, and suggestions'. Is this all we want from a scholarly tome? Is it enough? Such a line as this is typical:

Given that the concepts of enthusiasm and inspiration are indispensable for thinking about divination, the unique sense of Pythian utterance needs to be looked at with alertness to what was always unspoken, and perhaps indecent, in the image of a woman who opened her mouth to speak the truth while her body was penetrated by currents and vapors.

Similarly, Page duBois, a singularly pious and irritating writer, whose footnotes consist largely of references to her own books, writes in 1991:

The Apollonian truth, pure and uncontaminated, after passing through the material body of earth and woman, takes on a distorting residue of corporeality that separates and distances the divine word from the mortal seeker.

Again: 'These images of interiority [oracle, temple, etc.] are associated in ancient culture with female space, with the containment and potentiality of the female body.' The reasoning is that because we, with our hyper-associative modernist mentality, can make the analogy between cunt and cave, so the two objects (titivated up, of course, in hackneyed spatial metaphors) must have been 'associated'—whatever that might mean—by the ancient Greeks. It is sort of a magical realism, the most flaccid of modern literary modes, that has pervaded the academy: a sickly obsession with analogies and similarities.

And if scholars love the oracle, so they love Heraclitus on the oracle even more. Heraclitus, quoted in Plutarch, writes, '^cο αναξ, ^cου το μαντειον εστι το εν Δελφοις, ουτε λεγει ουτε κρυπτει αλλα σημαινει' (H93). The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither legei nor kryptei, but semainei. You see I have not translated the key words. Legei is usually 'speaks', kryptei 'conceals', and semainei 'indicates' or 'gives a sign'. Philemon Holland in 1603 had 'doth neither speake, nor conceale, but signifie onely and give signe'. Frank Babbitt's Loeb has 'neither tells nor conceals, but indicates'. G. S. Kirk, in the standard English guide to the pre-Socratic philosophers (1957), explains the line:

The method adopted by Apollo in his Delphic pronouncements is praised, because a sign may accord better than a misleadingly explicit statement with the nature of the underlying truth, that of the Logos.

Similarly, Charles Kahn in 1979: 'There is no doubt that Heraclitus is referring to the Delphic practice of giving advice in indirect form, by imagery, riddle, and ambiguity, so that it was obvious to a man of sense than an oracle required an interpretation. . . The Delphic mode of utterance presents a plurality or complexity of meaning, so that reflection is required, and unusual insight, if the proper interpretation is to be discovered.'

For Kirk, 'Probably Heraclitus intended by this kind of parallel to justify his own oracular and obscure style.' For Kahn, 'This parallel between Heraclitus' style and the obscurity of the nature of things, between the difficulty of understanding him and the difficulty in human perception, is not arbitrary: to speak plainly about such a subject would be to falsify it in the telling, for no genuine understanding would be communicated. The only hope of 'getting through' to the audience is to puzzle and provoke them into reflection. Hence the only appropriate mode of explanation is allusive and indirect: Heraclitus is consciously and unavoidably 'obscure'.' For Jonathan Barnes, in the same year, 'Heraclitus the Obscure, the Riddler, the oracular prophet, stands dark and majestic in the early history of philosophy. He set out to imitate 'the king whose is the oracle at Delphi', who, in Heraclitus' own words, 'neither states nor conceals, but gives signs'.'

Robert Lamberton, generally an excellent scholar, gets a little over-excited by this charming maxim; in his 2001 Plutarch he gushes, 'It is no exaggeration to say that semiotics, in the tradition of European thought, starts here, with this notorious, sententious claim'. But it is an exaggeration.

Still, this maxim on meaning and interpretation was clearly ripe for the greedy fingers of the Continentals, and, sure enough, we find the wrangling begins with Heidegger. In his 1939 essay on the concept of physis (nature) in Aristotle, he observes that legei is best translated by contrast to kryptei, 'conceals'—he opts for 'reveals' or even 'unconceals'. Thus:

The oracle does not directly unconceal nor does it simply conceal, but it points out. This means: it unconceals while it conceals, and it conceals while it unconceals.

As my new friend would be quick to remind me, the notion of 'unconcealment' is central to Heidegger's reading of the pre-Socratics—and, indeed, to his entire philosophical project—for as he delights to observe, the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means 'not-hidden'. Legein, 'to speak', is given etymologically as 'to gather', identical to Latin legere, which also means 'to read, choose', whence select and lecture. Legein is thus to gather together and make manifest, a Heideggerian description of the function of language. As some guy called Brian Bard has put it,

This making manifest is the unconcealing of physis which for humans occurs in discourse and language; legein comes to mean 'to say' because language provides the collected space in which beings arise and become manifest.

There is no little joy to be had in playing these etymological games with Greek. No doubt Heidegger also noticed associations between phōnē (voice), phanai (to speak), on the one hand, and phōs (light), phainein (to reveal, appear, bring to light), on the other. The connection is a distinguished one: it is found, just to give three examples, in August Schlegel's 1820 Indische Bibliothek, John Donaldson's 1839 New Cratylus, and Georg Curtius' 1858 Grundzüge. Watkins, on the other hand, lists two distinct but identical roots.

It is hardly surprising that Heidegger, with his own notoriously oracular style, should be fascinated by the oracular Heraclitus, just as Heraclitus praised the oracle itself. (Between Heraclitus and Heidegger stretches a long line of great oracular philosophers whose names begin with 'H'—Hamann, Humboldt, Hegel and Husserl, not to mention Hierkegaard himself.) Hence the pronounced tone of mystical nostalgia for the oral, pre-Socratic mind:

If the Greeks conceive of saying as legein, then this implies an interpretation of the essence of word and of saying so unique that no later 'philosophy of language' can ever begin to imagine its as yet unplumbed depths. Only when language has been debased to a means of commerce and organization, as is the case with us, does thought rooted in language appear to be a mere 'philosophy of words,' no longer adequate to the 'pressing realities of life'.

Paradoxically, Heidegger's friend and interlocutor, Eugen Fink, insists in their published conversation that 'In his fragments, Heraclitus does not speak in any veiled manner like the god in Delphi'. Nonetheless, the weeping philosopher has always attracted, since Heidegger, scholars with a penchant for the oracular style; one of the most recent examples being the gorgeous and monumental Sunbowl or Symbol (1998) by G. L. J. Schönbeck. More well-known and more influential, on the other hand, is a book by Jean Bollack and his student Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation (1972), based on Bollack's lectures of the late 60s. Unlike Heidegger, Kirk, Kahn or Barnes, Bollack sees no consistent philosophy, cosmology or metaphysics in Heraclitus, all that being the product of the Stoics or Platonists (such as Plutarch) who transmitted his fragments. A priori the thesis attracts me, but alas, its exposition is pure turgid bullshit in the French style. Here is a sample of their two pages on H93:

Applying to the oracle's ambiguity the categories of their own discourse, men would interpret it as true (speaking) or false (concealing), so that it accords or not with the outcome which they await or have experienced. The equivocal oracular word seems here to remain a determinate affirmation, whether truthful or mendacious. In fact, it transcends the opposition and escapes the dilemma. Divine discourse neither speaks nor conceals because it speaks-and-conceals, indicating by what it says that which it does not say.

Bollack has clearly inherited Heidegger's taste for concluding a paragraph of over-inflated and jargonistic waffle with an over-compressed koan—as if hoping to compensate Scylla with Charybdis. He succeeds in sounding profound without actually making any contribution to the fragment's interpretation.

And what of the feminists?

Sissa: the god does not speak; he does not press his seal into a totally impressionable and malleable substance. Nor does the god conceal, as if he wished to deceive in the manner of a distorting mirror. Rather, using the soul as an instrument, Apollo reveals his truth in a "mixed," confused, pallid form. The Pythia's psyche, though not false to the truth, inevitably diminishes its brilliance.

And duBois: The word semainei demands our attention here because it is sometimes used synonymously with sphragizo, 'to stamp with a sign or mark, to seal'. This metaphor for the relationship between the god, the medium, and the consultant of the oracle bears echoes of the earlier discussion of inscription on the body as a marker of truth, of the contents, the nature of the thing marked. Here the body of the woman is stamped, sealed, with the god's truth: the body itself becomes a sign, with its acoustic rendition of the ineffable divine truth.

So the one says the Pythia is stamped and sealed, the other says she isn't. One describes the soul (psyche), the other the body. Both are equally meaningless: 'not even wrong'. Of the two, duBois is the worse simply because she is the more hackneyed. Her pathological but wholly typical obsession with the body is just not warranted by the material, nor is the fact that a given word can be used in other senses. Sissa's reading, while inarticulate, is at least rooted in Plutarch's text, which continues, '[Apollo] makes known and reveals his own thoughts, but he makes them known through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul that is unable to keep quiet'. Lamberton, likewise, writes that 'if Heraclitus pointed to a tertium quid for the pair 'speak—conceal', he must have meant this projection of meaning down the hierarchy, with the attendant necessary distortion introduced by the medium'. Is that a pun on 'medium'?

We seem to have wound up with a very pretty modern allegory for the mouth betraying the brain, or else for the différance of the sign. Heraclitus weeps.

How to judge a book

2008-07-27T15:51:00.015-04:00

A little show and tell.

As I said in a comment to my last post, reading the content is 'only a small part of what I want to do with a book'. I have no truck with the Platonic injunction never to judge a book by its cover, because it relies on a too easy separation of form and content, body and soul, to the discredit of the former. Just as one shudders to drink wine from a paper cup, or eat a fine steak with plastic cutlery, so one is ashamed to have one's Joyce or Shandy in an ugly classics edition, let alone on the screen. None of us here has a problem with the taste for fine volumes. But what constitutes a fine volume? If you are going to have a fine Aristotle or Cicero, a lavish eighteenth-century edition in gilt calf is undoubtedly the way forward, for those who can afford it. But what of those modern (or even pre-modern) authors who refuse to be manifest in gilt calf?

Myself, I favour the browned dustjackets, attractively limned in black and red, that flourished in the middle of the last century, especially in the 1940s. Here, for instance, is my 1948 copy of Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, which had previously appeared only in period pamphlet form, or else in buckram-bound Workses of 1833 and 1904:

The layout of the cover loosely imitates a standard Elizabethan title-page (though not Nashe's), gently modernized. Ayrton's image illustrates Nashe's account of the 'sweating sickness' that broke out in London in 1517: 'This sweating sicknes, was a disease that a man then might catch and never goe to a hot-house. Manie Masters desire to have such servants as would worke till they sweate againe, but in those dayes hee that sweate never wrought againe.' An apt reference, given the sudorific humidity currently plaguing London. Here, again, is a 1945 Phaidon edition of Burckhardt:

The materials are the same—cheap paper, red and black ink—but the effect is quite different, largely due to the crabbed inscription-capitals of the title, and to the Quattrocento woodcut. (Can anyone identify it?) Best of all in the genre, though, is undoubtedly this, sadly a reprint, but an authentic one, which I once picked up in the rare books department of the famous Strand bookstore, NYC:

I find it virtually impossible to dislike the Menippean contents of this volume, no matter how light the Surrealists' literary talents might have been. The design is a modernist masterpiece. How much variety can be obtained from these jackets, so simple and elegant. I wonder if their progenitor is the marvelous cover of the Kelmscott Chaucer. Certainly, there is not enough design any more: so many modern books, even when they've been well budgeted to look handsome, resort to photography or, worse, a famous painting in the adornment of their covers. Such recycling, at its best, can be clever, but like Eco's novels, it demonstrates the sad triumph of erudition over imagination.

Buying attractive editions of cherished books poses no problem. I feel less comfortable when I come across a work with beautiful covers but no interest between them. I have vacillated, in my collecting days, in my opinion on owning a book purely for its pretty face. I try to stand firm, the rationalist and Platonic collector. But now and then I have bowed to the lure and allure of physical beauty. For instance with books of poems, purchased despite my intense hostility, or at best indifference, to most poetry.

An undated (ca. 1900) George & Harrap edition of Browning's Pippa Passes, in limp plum suede with Nouveauish gilt and stamping—only three pounds last summer. The poem is infamous for its hilarious misuse of the word twat—amply covered by Language Log.

A 1958 New Directions paperback of Ferlinghetti which I 'borrowed' from my parents: the cover photograph is simply astounding, and the typography inside is a treat. Shame about the words ('Kafka's Castle stands above the world / like a last bastille / of the Mystery of Existence'). This was already the end of the line for modern poetry.

You notice the contradiction. At the beginning of this post I denied Plato and the strict separation of form from content, and yet now I happily disengage brilliant jackets from their puerile wearers. Wie gliet ich auß! Is it possible that the face could change my opinion of the mind?

I fear that if Crow, above in its 1970 first edition, were packaged differently, I might find it equally as tepid as the rest of Hughes' works. (And I pray that I never stumble upon a well-designed volume of Plath.) At times the adolescent sophisms sink to Ferlinghettiesque levels:

So finally there was nothing.
It was put inside nothing.
Nothing was added to it
And to prove it didn't exist
Squashed flat as nothing with nothing.

But then there are moments of amusement, or better sophisms, at least:

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realised there were two Gods—

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

It ain't poetry, but moments like this chime with that grotesque, Dubuffetian cover drawing by Hughes' buddy Leonard Baskin, so pathologically hostile to the prettiness of poetry-lovers: the antitype of Pippa Passes and A Coney Island. It is therefore fitting that the cover evokes the raw elegance of the old mid-century covers shown above, black and red on matte paper. We don't need subfusc suede or glamorous photography, it says; only a simple graphic. And that cover gives wings to the words, epea pteroenta, that struggle to sing inside.

I leave you with two other favourites in my collection, bad books with terrific jackets. And which two books could possibly be more different?

A bizarre tragedy by Queen Victoria's novelist of choice, in a 1937 Methuen edition, which I acquired from a Charing Cross vitrine solely on the strength of its cover. The spine features what seems to be an exploding atom rendered as the Japanese naval ensign: oddly prescient, in its symbolic way, of coming atrocities. The cover photograph—date uncertain—shows Clovelly High Street, which remains little changed to this day. The dedication is 'To those self-styled 'progressivists', who by precept and example assist the infamous cause of education without religion and who, by promoting the idea, borrowed from French atheists, of denying to the children in schools and elsewhere, the knowledge and love of God as the true foundation of noble living, are guilty of a worse crime than murder'. And so the novel itself is a work of sickly piety, a sermon that the new science is not, after all, incompatible with the old religion: that the Atom is God.

It is important to read these sorts of books now and then, mixed in with your modern classics. One needs to acquaint oneself with the clumsy and hard to understand—with the Sylvie and Brunos as well as with the Snarks and Alices. In this case I found the wormwood of the message sweetened the over-writing, and by the magical primitivism of the jacket design. And then, from the rear to the advance-guard, a French atheist and 'progressivist':

A 1958 Gaberbocchus first edition, in cute saffron cloth, of the well-known Exercices des Style in Barbara Wright's translation. You can pay 200 dollars for one of these on abebooks, but I picked up mine for 50p in a library sale at the University of York. The title-page is of some interest: it reads, for some reason in French, Exercices de Style par Raymond Queneau. Someone has crossed out the 'c' in Exercices and written 's' in red pen, likewise replacing 'de' with 'in' and 'par' by 'by'. The work itself is juvenile: a smirky gimmick that could have been, and probably was, tossed off in a couple of hours—but it has some charm as a period document, conjuring that noman's land after Surrealism but before the OuLiPo, when the French avant-garde were trying desparately to find their feet again. Again, the cover design, with its jazzy doodles and parodic portrait, is the perfect essence of Queneau's literary spirit.

Now, what are your favourite covers?

Garments of the saints

2008-07-23T21:27:00.017-04:00

For Peony, and for Midshipman Easy.

A friend—Mr. Easy—returns from Africa. No, that is not right. He is not a friend: he is the friend. The friend who has known me since I was four, with whom, most of all, I grew up in adolescence, and whom I chose to be best man at my wedding. One of the reasons our friendship has survived so long is that it is founded less on shared interests, which, as I have learnt recently, are precarious to fortune, and more on shared experience—memory. He has a vociferous [sic] memory, in particular, for the history of my embarrassments, faux pas and non sequiturs, a memory which served him well in the composition of his wedding speech. And he is one of the very few people with whom I can reminisce with true pleasure, recalling times shared that were not like ours today: even with my wife, in our earliest moments together we were still as we are now, much the same. But with Easy, shared memory is sweeter, more poignant, because it makes us foreign to ourselves, and so just a little closer to each other.

When I see him he is lounging on the sofa, his expensivesque loafers and striped socks dangling over the edge. He shows me his new toy: a device for reading electronic books. I forget which model it is. He has already tried to convince me to buy a mobile phone and an iPod. The very thought of interesting me in one of these e-books amuses him. Later at my house, he gestures at my bookshelves, and says, Just think, you could get rid of all of these and have them at your fingertips, on a reader like mine. I give him a look.

Books are, of course, tactile, beautiful objects. That alone is enough of a reason to shun the grey digital box. But there is something else, too. I find sinister the thought of this box, with all its gigabytes, claiming ten-minute dominion over a world fashioned by patient hands, for thousands of years, and still unfinished. The box has an insouciant finality about it. The grim humour of this is related to that moment of the new Pixar film, WALL-E, when the human of the future, a grotesquely obese and over-satisfied creature, accustomed to passive voice-interaction with a computer screen, is handed a book and doesn't know how to work it. Similarly, the scene from Short Circuit that everyone remembers is the one in which the robot breezes a whodunnit in ten seconds. I think many of us feel, deep down, that reading should be hard. Reading should be hard because its rewards are so great: because it makes worlds of men.

The highlight of Frances Yates's famous monograph on the ars memoria—apart from her admission that she has no Arabic—is that page where the dull classicist mnemotechnics of Cicero's imitators give way to the freewheeling fantasy of the Neoplatonic speculators. This, possibly, is the money-quote:

It is because he believes in the divinity of man that the divine Camillo makes his stupendous claim of being able to remember the universe by looking down upon it from above, from first causes, as though he were God. In this atmosphere, the relationship between man, the microcosm, and the world, the macrocosm, takes on a new significance. The microcosm can fully understand and fully remember the macrocosm, can hold it within his divine mens or memory.

When I first read the book, it was this thought that deglazed my eyes. (By contrast, my eyes remained glazed throughout Paolo Rossi's Logic and the Art of Memory.) Man, by remembering, and especially by arranging his memories in the correct order, would not only grow in knowledge: he would actually take the universe into his head and thus become a microcosm, a Godlet, containing multitudes. Even the atheist can take something from this.

The e-book is an abuse, an aberration, because it is an insentient microcosm. It is a parody of Camillo's theatre, in which microchips memorize and arrange information in lieu of a defunct deity—an ape of God. Its words are insubstantial and too easily manipulable. Whereas the bookshelf presents a man with pieces ready to be put together, the well-stocked e-book presents him with the work already done. I, the Luddite, still want to preserve memory as a human faculty, imperfect though it might be, for it is memory that gives colour and shape to our experience. The Platonist Novalis wrote, with his usual knack for the quotable, 'As the garments of the saints still retain wondrous powers, so is many a word sanctified through some splendid memory, and has become a poem almost on its own.' The box robs words of their sanctity, for the words in the box are all digested, and therefore all equal. You can never make a discovery in an e-book, just as you cannot on Wikipedia: nothing is ever lost. But it is the threat and actuality of loss that makes memory—and thus reading—worthwhile.

[Update 11/02/09: James Ashley comments.]

Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

2008-07-14T19:45:00.022-04:00

I come to the town of Nancy. It is a place of quiet souls, like my older self, Ulysse, not at all the sort I have been accustomed to meeting on my travels, the sort who would have found Achille, my younger years, far more to their liking.

Stanislas, the King, is a man of contentment. He knows how to gaze: an art, I fear, we have all too often forgotten. I have spoken to him on more than one occasion. He treats me with great respect, for my father was among those brave of Saint-Malo who fought for him in Danzig. From his pedestal he is willing to provide informations, the result of observation, or of private thought; and indeed, he has had time to think, to become. The cursus of the sun affords him the opportunity for every kind of vision: because he faces north, the glare never blinds him, except, of course, for the scintillae of windows, coated or shuttered, burning in reflection. The shadows, always quite sombre, begin long, grow short, and grow long again, as the works of history. But the shadow of his index, pointing out the north, remains always the same length.

We discuss posterity. That devil Diderot, I mention, said that posterity for the philosophe was the same as the afterlife for the religious man. We who have an afterlife—must needs we have posterity also? Ah yes, says the King, who was a friend of Diderot. It transpires that he has composed an essay on the subject, which he recites to me in a stertorous voice from his plinth. It is a thirst for posterity that makes us perform miracles to humanity. His words swell:

That which we desire for our descendants, Nature and Reason make us desire for ourselves. Down here we live, if I might put it thus, two sorts of lives: the one we have in common with the animals—it is only a simple vegetation, it begins again each day, it makes us last for years, we hold on to it without merit, and we should have as little regret to lose it as we had to acquire it. But there is another life more essential to man, that makes him appear with éclat on the world stage, or that at least makes it pleasant by a sweet and beneficent humour, by a scrupulous probity, a constant application to all the duties of society. This man lives in the esteem of others, and his life, for the advantages he derives from it, is more precious to him than that by which he simply exists, and through which he would be no more than a creature destined to consume the fruits of the earth, a breathing automaton who, forever useless, would be in effect buried even before his death.

I can certainly appreciate his sentiment. All my years I struggled not only to exist, but to live, and moreover to be remembered with fondness and admiration. Stanislas enjoys posterity here in Nancy and perhaps in Poland, but not elsewhere. He has been subsumed by the currents of history. I myself retain a little fame, but the memories of my glory are swiftly fading.

I have petitioned the King to release me. I would find my tomb again, and remember the sweep and stave of my great mother. Nancy is too far from the waves! When I brought my case before him he would only point. The north! Oui, le Nord, mais aussi l'Ouest, n'est-ce pas? He is not generous with words today. Just then the sun turns in its course, and for the first time the shadow of his index is distended along the square. It is an auspicious dawn.

By late morning I arrive in Verdun-sur-Meuse. There is a great wailing among my comrades, as if the last shocks of a catastrophe. Ils ne passeront pas, said Nivelle—or was it Petain?—and so, ILS N'ONT PAS PASSÉ. Death did conquer man; and man, death. Le Mort-Homme, a greater king even than Stanislas, was already here, a little colline near the town, before the War broke out; that I have learnt in my travels. I am familiar with him, of course. I have met him many times, only to evade him. Ah, loss! In the future some exquisite critic will write,

Chateaubriand-Achille should have died in Combourg, when he tried in vain to commit suicide, or in Rennes, when his comrade Saint-Riveul was massacred before his eyes, taking the place which should have been his, or in Le Havre, when he was spared at the last minute by a shipwreck that should have been fatal, or in Thionville, where the manuscript of Atala stopped the bullet that should have struck his heart, or even in London, where he was only an outcast, promised death. . . This Achille watched in sympathy the Chateaubriand-Ulysse who sought to regain Ithaca in 1800, and who, from career to career, found himself in the end growing old, with everyone else, under the rule of usurpers, and reduced to memories.

Now I am doomed to remaining an old man, an Ulysse, for eternity. But there has been plenty for me. I did venture into the land with my winnowing-oar, and now I am returning to the sea.

Afternoon by the rocks of the shore near Cognac. Here, by the land we call 'Groies', full of chalk and clay, walk Achille and Ulysse, the young man and the old, the cut short and the livelong, competing in posterity. Stanislas had changed his mood after his first discourse; in his second address he had said—

Does history not teach us that dreadful chasms, in which the monuments and stories of our times are swallowed up forever, yawn open before those ages in which we flatter ourselves to live by our reputation? All has perished, as far as the memory of most of the nations that precede ours. The chain binding their time to ours has been smashed by floods, earthquakes, violent tremors that have knocked over the universe. All totters, all ends, all is lost in the immense spaces of eternity—and one man, one simple atom, the chance product of the nothingness that begat him, flatters himself that he might bear his name to the final extremities of Time, which has no limits at all!

After his peroration I teased him—I said he should stop reading Cicero before bedtime. If I was Scipio, he was my Manius Manilius. But the King would not be teased, and remained solemn. I still think of his words. We have our afterlifes, and perhaps he and I should be content with a diminishing posterity.

The most marvelous thing about the Grand Bé, other than its name, is the smell, its scents and aromas of hyssop and uncut thyme, and bergamot, and the almost incessant petrichor, and the smell of great noise and tumult, quieted, a romantic caesura facing out into the unknown. When I first arrived at Saint-Malo from Le Havre, just after the revolution, I had cause to remark on the divisions and misfortunes of France: the châteaux were burnt or abandoned, and their owners vanished. The place retains even now the same mood of ruination. But now, as I return again, it is the most brilliant of dusks, and the grand cour of the heaven is full of birds, coming from nowhere to swoop and glide over the edge of the black rocks, to be transmuted into waves. Les ondes, rondes, surrondent, rebondent, surabondent, sarabandent.

Here, where I was born, I am again almost among the living. François, René. The whole world is speaking of my life. And neither am I alone now. Maclou is here with me, the great traveller, who, they say, has seen the Isles of the Blest and the Paradise of Birds. His pockets are overflowing with precious stones. I have no pockets. It must be the perquisite of a saint.

And here again, by my six feet of sand, I vividly recall the ceremony in which I left. On ensevelissait souvent les morts fameux au bord de la mer. My friend M. Ampère, the son of the celebrated scientist, related the event to his confrères and colleagues in the Académie.

When we had arrived on the beach, shuffling between the ramparts and the sea towards the funeral rock, the magnificence of this unequalled mourning, the incredible poetry of the spectacle, just for a moment veiled the sadness of death beneath the pomp and the glory, and the funeral assumed the character of a Christian apotheosis. At the foot of the Grand Bé, the coffin was raised up by the marines and carried to the top, against a gust of wind like a tempest—the ocean's supreme caress of that man who had so loved the noise of the waves and the winds.

I found it an admirable tribute. It sealed my death, as my life, in the ears of his listeners, as it will in the eyes of his readers. The sea is the source of mythology, as the ocean, which tides twice a day, is that abyss of which Jehovah said, You will go no further. And so in the face of the sea, endlessly ruffled in detail, but perfect in smoothness from horizon to horizon, I can think only of posterity. I have, I believe, bequeathed myself appropriately.

All our life is spent circling our tomb; our various maladies are the winds that approach us from the harbour. I was near death from the moment I entered the world; the roar of the waves, whipped up by a squall heralding the autumn equinox, prevented my cries being heard. There is never a day that I do not see again in my mind the rock on which I was born, and the chamber in which my mother inflicted life upon me.

Tout fut difficile dans ma vie. I long wanted to be buried here, and wrangled incessantly to have it. They came to me as I lay gasping, finally, and petitioned me—What words will you have upon your tomb? I brushed them away. Let me think on the matter. Give me two days. And so I considered the problem. What words could carry the weight of a whole life? For the first time in my life, I, a wit, a brazen pen, a great doyen of the language, could not muster a single phrase. What could be more ironic, than that I should fail to devise my own epitaph? They returned in two days. M. Chateaubriand, what will you have upon your tomb? I looked up from my circles, and said, Give me four days. They went away, barking and mooksing. I shut my eyes tight and toyed with abstracts—Liberty, and Poetry; Immortality and Eternity. It was no use. Le Mort-Homme was mocking himself of me. I scribbled down some rhymes and rearranged them into some semblance of a poem. Gribouilleur. In disgust I could only fling the wretched papers across the room for the servants to tidy up. What words could possibly carry the weight of a whole life? My window, which opened west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, was open: it was six in the morning, and the moon I could see was pale and gravid, sinking over the spire of the Invalides, scarcely reveiled by the first golden ray from the East. Finally those cagotz and magotz descended upon me, carrion birds, and demanded of me, with the most appalling obsequy, Grand Seigneur Chateaubriand, what will you have graven on your tomb? All I could pronounce, by now, and with a grave laughter already on my lips, was: A week longer. The next morning I was dead.

[Update: The charming Peony comments, kindly. I would like to take this opportunity to assure her that in conversation I am not in the habit of dropping anecdotes about Cicero's Dream of Scipio or Chateaubriand's (fictional) deathbed—some things are best left for the desk with its array of books, real or virtual—and that, were I to manage a salon, or even a memory palace, she would be most welcome.]

Horlicks

2008-07-10T23:46:00.014-04:00

A friend sends me a link to an article in the Scientific American, entitled 'An Unethical Ethicist?' I try to read through the intricate morality tale, but all I can think about is the word, ethicist. Why does it stick in my craw?

The word's suffix groups it with physicist, geneticist, classicist, historicist, lyricist, publicist—the OED lists 133 in total, but the others are either compounds or much more obscure. This group, however, is illusory: or rather, it consists of two meaningful groups—those words that derive from nouns and adjectives in –ic, and those that derive from nouns in –ics. Thus: lyric, public, historic, on one side, and physics, genetics, classics, and ethics on the other. Here it will be worth quoting the OED at length, on –ic and –ics:

In English, such words of this class as were in use before 1500 had the singular form, and were usually written, after French, –ique, –ike, as arsmetike, magike, musike, logike (–ique), retorique, mathematique (–ike, –ik), mechanique, economique, ethyque (–ik); this form is retained in arithmetic, logic, magic, music, rhetoric (though logics has also been used). But, from the 15th c., forms in –ics (–iques) occur as names of treatises; and in the second half of the 16th c. this form is found applied to the subject-matter of such treatises, in mathematics, economics, etc. From 1600 onward, this has been the accepted form with names of sciences, as acoustics, conics, dynamics, ethics, linguistics, metaphysics, optics, statics, or matters of practice, as æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics.

The formation of agent-nouns in –ic is predictable: arithmetic, logic, magic, music and rhetoric all have agents in –ician (although we also have rhetor, straight from the Greek). But –ics is unpredictable. Mathematics has –ician. Economics has not economicist but economist. Linguistics, likewise, has linguist, although curiously, the OED offers linguistician ('One who is versed in linguistics') as opposed to linguist ('One who is skilled in the use of languages', 'A student of language; a philologist', but not a student of linguistics). Athletics has athlete, and gymnastics gymnast. Georgics, of course, has nothing.

But hold on a moment; let's look at these groupings. Are we really to say that 'æsthetics, athletics, economics, georgics, gymnastics, politics, tactics' go together as 'matters of practice', as opposed to 'sciences'? Surely aesthetics and politics sit neatly next to ethics, just as economics fits next to linguistics. The streamlining of categories is beginning to look like a mess.

Still worse when we examine types of agents themselves. The politician is the man who practices politics, while the politicist—there are citations old and new in the OED—is the man who studies it. But the aesthetician, like the aestheticist, is the man who studies aesthetics; the practicer is the aesthete, which in turn goes formally with athlete. Metaphysics has been studied both by metaphysicians and, less recently, by metaphysicists. The criteria for –icist as against –ician appears bound neither to form nor to function. Rules collapse.

Before I began thinking about this in detail, ethicist stuck in my craw because its suffix seemed to give it a legitimacy as a technical discipline, like physicist and geneticist. But the whole point about ethics, to me, is that it is utterly lacking such an apparatus, despite the efforts of generations. To say 'I'm a physicist' is to identify not just your profession, but your body of knowledge—your scientia. But to say 'I'm an ethicist' is to identify only a profession: your body of knowledge can be no different to that of another. The very notion of an ethicist seemed, and I think still seems, incoherent to me: at best he could be reduced to a policy-maker, a jurist, a counsellor, or a bloviator. Hence the Wiki list of ethicists is really just a list of thinkers, or even more blandly, of people.

If we consult the OED on ethicist, we are in for a surprise. The first thing it says is '= ETHICIAN'. Indeed, ethician is attested earlier, from 1889, whereas ethicist appears only in 1891. French, by way of comparison, seems more comfortable with éthicien than with éthiciste, although the Trésor lists neither. Ethician seemed to fit better with aesthetician and metaphysician. We all have our ethics, our aesthetics and our metaphysics; none has validity as an objective scientia. And so one wants the morphology to reflect the conceptual agreement: one wants a stricter distinction between –icist and –ician.

But, damn it, there are mathematicians, physicians, technicians and all the rest. Language betrays me. It always does.

On Wimbledon

2008-07-06T21:02:00.007-04:00

Today I found myself in the disconcerting position—disconcerting because, I think, historically unique—of being alone among my friends, with the exception of my wife, to take any interest in the sport. Normally, I'm the one who'd rather read a book than watch men in shorts. This will not surprise you. But the tennis, my god! Did you see it? They're saying it's the greatest tennis final ever. I haven't a clue about that, having watched comparatively little raquetry in my life. But there is no question it was a great match. I spent the last hour of it, with Nadal tossing away match-points like sweet-wrappers, in a state of increasing tension. Tennis is the ideal sport for the individualist: each match is like a scholastic disputatio, each drop and volley a stinging syllogism. You can see the whole of a match, weigh and measure every motion made. Give football, with its bluster of blues and reds, to those drunk on collective experience.

I was rooting for Federer; Lily, advocata diaboli, for 'The Spaniard', as the BBC commentators kept calling him. I was on the Swiss side for two reasons. The first, and more superficial, is that his game is so much the more beautiful. As Paul Weaver put it in the Guardian,

For the first two sets [which Nadal won] it rained on poets, and on aesthetes, stylists and all those with a keen sense of the refined.

Sure, Nadal had the power, accuracy and determination: but Federer was making his opponent do things I've never even seen. By the end of the fifth set, the dazzling Swiss sprezzatura had peeled off, finesse was out of the window, except of course for the continuing rattle of aces, and Federer, like Nadal, was human again. But my choice of side was founded on more than aesthetics. I wanted Federer to win because I need to believe that some things are fixed and permanent. I am uncomfortable with the Heraclitean flux of sporting rivalries. No, I want to witness a palace outlast its assailants, and I want to witness records broken, history. I want to be living in a historic age, an age of greatness, of six consecutive wins, not an age of decline, such as that proffered by all the front pages. Mine is a patriotism of time, not country. Nadal's victory was the announcement of inevitable decay, of death and rebirth, the hounds at the gate: all things must pass. What could be more humiliating?

Boomburbs

2008-07-02T20:32:00.009-04:00

Four years ago, the English historian Tristram Hunt signed up as a visiting professor at Arizona State University, Phoenix. In Fall 2004 he taught an Urban History 598 with three other lecturers; the reading list is a delight, moving from modern urban analysts—Robert E. Lang, Kenneth Jackson and Dolores Hayden—to Walter Benjamin on Paris, and Asa Briggs on Victorian London. (Hunt did the London stuff, as one would expect from his book Building Jerusalem, published that year.) In February 2005, he wrote a longing missive back home to the Guardian, describing his new home with expressions like 'master-planned communities', 'the brave new world of exurbia', 'McMansions', 'big-box discount stores', 'boomburbs' and 'technoburbs'. He quotes David Brooks, the conservative pundit best known for coining the word 'bobo': in Phoenix 'there are no centres, no recognisable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. Only Brooks didn't write that; he wrote that in Phoenix 'there are no centers, no recognizable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. Such are the practices of the copy-editor. Hunt adds to the picture:

It is a polycentric universe where the rhythms of the day are oriented around drives to the shopping mall, housing subdivision, gym, church or work. There is no downtown or inner-city; few civic landmarks or historic signifiers. Through the highways of Phoenix's boomburbs, Walgreens follows Burger King follows Kmart [sic] follows Starbucks.

Hunt is horrified. No marks, no signs; just roads and commerce—call that a city? The force of his article is to implore the British government not to go down the same route. He notes, with equal horror, being a good New Labour boy, that it was places like Phoenix that handed the 2004 election to Bush, and also that these areas are the fastest-growing:

In a movement known as 'natalism', those decamping to the zoomburbs are choosing to buck the US birthrate by conscientiously raising large families.

Boomburbs? Zoomburbs? From where was this baroque language? At a guess, Phil VanderMeer or one of the other faculty introduced Hunt to Dolores Hayden's little 2004 bibelot, The Field Guide to Sprawl, in which she identifies a number of the classic features of American suburbia, and assigns them their latest pop-culture buzzwords. Here we get McMansions and big boxes, boomburbs and zoomburbs. A boomburb, according to Hayden, is 'a rapidly growing urban-sized place in the suburbs', and she quotes the original source of the term, a 2001 report by Robert Lang and Patrick Simmons for Fannie Mae: 'places with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities in their respective metropolitan areas and that have maintained double-digit rates of population growth in recent decades'. A zoomburb, she says, is a 'place growing even faster than a boomburb'. Technoburb is not here, but comes instead from Robert Fishman's 1987 study, Bourgeois Utopias: 'By technoburb I mean a peripheral zone, perhaps as large as a county, that has emerged as a viable socioeconomic unit.'

I think I like boomburb. It's a bit kitschy, for sure. But I've always found suburb to be unsatisfying as a trochee: sub- lacks punch as a stressed syllable. (Whereas suburbia is much more successful.) Boomburb rectifies suburb with good old-fashioned American moxie. (And boomburbia would be terrible.)

Two weeks ago Hunt wrote a piece for the Times on the current presidential election, contrasting the urban environments of Chicago (Obama) and Phoenix (McCain). Clearly, he is still reeling from the nightmare of the desert, and is fresh out of ideas. Thus, he resorts to self-plagiarism. He quotes David Brooks: in Phoenix 'there are no centres, no recognisable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity'. (Only Brooks didn't write that, etc.) Hunt adds:

It is a polycentric universe where the rhythms of the day are orientated around drives to the shopping mall, gym, church or work. In contrast to the great railway stations and art galleries of Chicago, there isn't much downtown or inner city; few civic landmarks or historic signifiers. Through Phoenix's boomburbs, Wallgreen's [sic] follows Burger King follows K-Mart follows Starbucks. I lived for a year in this exurban terrain of freeways and drive-thrus and at least once a week I would get lost trying to find my home through the sprawling, anonymous cityscape.

Does this sound familiar? He quotes the same Kerry statistics, the same figures from Steve Sailer, as he did three and a half years ago. He tells us again that 'those decamping to the zoomburbs are choosing to buck the US birthrate by consciously raising large families'. Only now he wants to say that Obama's got to watch out, and that whoever wins the presidency is going to have to court the vote of this conservative heartland, its natalist population pullulating and its myriad zoomburbs and strip-malls proliferating.

For all his love of metropolitan, liberal Chicago, it is grumpy old John McCain's Phoenix that represents the psephological future. And sooner or later, Mr Obama will have to join those tens of thousands of his Illinois compatriots swapping the icy winds of downtown Chicago for the sprawling embrace of metropolitan Phoenix, “Valley of the Sun”.

(He used the word 'psephological', or its variant, in his 2005 piece too. Hunt has an exquisitely small sesquipedalium.) This is interesting for a number of reasons. It is sort of a return to the climatic determinism beloved by Herder and his students in the nineteenth century. Back then, they said that Northern Europeans had a hard, harsh language, due to the cold, whereas Mediterraneans sang and danced gaily, with the rippling music of their Italian and Spanish, due to the heat. The heat, the sprawl—now that's the future. We are witnessing, again and again, and in anguish, the last half-hour of Annie Hall.

It is difficult for me not to feel some sympathy for Huntie. He and I are quite alike: young, handsome, bourgeois Londoners—his father went to my school, and for all I know he did too—who went to live in Phoenix for a year or three. I shared Hunt's horror of the low-rise and featureless monotony.

And Hunt is right to allude to the boomburbs and zoomburbs. All that not only applies to Phoenix, it comes from Phoenix. In 1984 Chris Leinberger wrote a planning document for the Phoenix region, advocating 'higher-density urban village clusters that mix high-rise offices, multifamily housing, and major retail stores.' In 1987 the Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau picked up on this term, 'urban village', and in 1991 he came out with his own version, the 'Edge City'. He describes its development across America:

First, we moved our homes out past the traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization of America, especially after World War II. Then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism—our jobs—out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City.

In the chapter on Phoenix, he writes:

Phoenix is the first municipality in America to recognize formally, for planning purposes, that it is made up of a constellation of Edge Cities, locally referred to as "urban villages." It is logical that Phoenix came to this conclusion early. The urban village referred to as "downtown" historically never amounted to much. As recently as World War II it was the trade and government center for a rural area that did not add up to more than 185,000 people. Even as the Phoenix area erupted to an urban population of two million, downtown did not become grand. Two other cores with better parking and fewer derelicts grew larger. One was the area north, along Central Avenue, called "uptown." The other was the posh area along Camelback Avenue near the Frank Lloyd Wright-styled Arizona Biltmore. In fact, compared with older, Eastern metros, there is no sharp distinction between downtown Phoenix and those other centers. They all look and function like Edge Cities.

Garreau also discusses in this chapter another insidious feature of the Edge City, namely the 'shadow governments', powerful but unaccountable—homeowners' associations and the Salt River Project. Garreau concludes that the Edge City, which congeals out of sprawl, is actually a return to urban density, albeit in disparate pockets. As a description of a new urban pattern, the book was a hit. But not everyone was convinced.

One such person was Robert Lang, who helped to define 'boomburb' in 2001. In 2003 he published his book Edgeless Cities, arguing that most of the suburbia and exurbia around metropolitan cores was still low-density—an 'edgeless city' with no clear borders. He classified various important American cities by their distributions of office-space, citing Chicago as an example of a core-dominated, low-sprawl city, and Miami as high-sprawl, a continuous edgeless city. Phoenix, mysteriously, is left off the table.

But in 2007, Lang's Boomburbs, co-published with Jennifer LeFurgy, brought Phoenix right back onto the map. Here we find a thrilling list of failed buzzwords for the new, barely-classifiable suburban developments: anticity, city à la carte, disurb, outtown, penturbia, rururbia, servurb, slurb, stealth city, and my own favourite, net of mixed beads. But of Phoenix:

It is ironic that there are so few edge cities in Phoenix, considering that this is the region where the edge city concept began. . . While downtown Phoenix has a small office space market for such a big city, its buildings are much taller and larger (at an average 155,104 square feet) than the area's boomburb offices (with an average of 51,531 square feet). In fact, downtown Phoenix's offices are almost three times the size of those in Scottsdale, the boomburb with the largest average building size.

Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, Chandler and Gilbert are thus boomburbs; however, they are not high-density 'edge cities', as Garreau thought—he labelled Scottsdale as an edge city, Tempe and Mesa-Chandler as 'emerging' edge cities—but more akin to the edgeless, low-density sprawl characterised in Lang's earlier book. Mesa, in fact, would probably qualify as a zoomburb, as it is the biggest boomburb in the country, having outgrown Minneapolis and St. Louis. (Wiki counts it the 37th largest city in America.) And yet it has 'no centres, no recognisable borders'. As Hunt experienced, and as I did, you can drive straight from Tempe to Mesa without noticing any hiatus.

The boomburb—or boomburg, as it is delightfully typoed in an even more recent article—is big business, and it is specifically a feature of the West, or rather the Sun Belt stretching from California to Florida. Lang explains the phenomenon in terms of free, unincorporated land, and the problems of water regulation, as with the Salt River Project in Phoenix: 'Big incorporated cities are better positioned by buy water rights, providing an incentive for suburbs to join a large incorporated city.' And the sprawl of boomburgs between two cities leads to linear 'corridors', such as the Sun Corridor between Phoenix and Tucson. (Michael Crow, my old whipping-boy, drools vacuously about this here.)

So Hunt has applied the right label to Phoenix. And his British readership will be justified in its inevitable recoil from the image he paints. Garreau, despite his own intense dislike of the new suburbia, is forced to admit its massive appeal to the American man. He quotes Jack Linville:

In Paris, you've got roughly six million people living on maybe a hundred square miles, an area that would fit inside Loop 610 here. We have about 200,000 living inside that area. . .

The people in the United States are not going to live the way the people in Paris live. They will not live in a thousand-square-foot apartment and raise a family and go out and get the loaf of bread and the jug of wine and walk down the street and live their whole lives within one square mile. That is not the way Americans live. They have a different level of freedom, a different level of expectations. There's still a lot of Daniel Boone left in America. I don't know what the people in Paris want. But what they have is a very very small amount of space that is theirs, and a lot of public amenities. What we have is a huge amount of space that is ours and that we control, and very little in public amenities. We have much more individual life styles.

London, of course, could easily stand in for Paris. To Hunt, to me, this is awful. To Linville and David Brooks, it is wonderful. My wife, used to the authentic, old-fashioned suburbia of Fairfax, Virginia—with its archetypal Edge City of Tysons Corner—often remarks on the lack of space in our flat in Hornsey. (Hunt, incidentally, lives in our borough.) But that's what you give up when you want, no, need, to live on an organic, pedestrian-based street-plan like this:

Rather than a hierarchical, motor-based plan like this in Mesa:

Space is what you give up when you need to shop at corner-stores, or at worst High Street chains accessible by foot and public transport, rather than at giant Walmarts accessible only by car. The idea of these 'individual life styles'—and Hunt echoes this in his conception of Phoenix as 'profoundly individualistic terrain'—is frankly meaningless to me. Brooks has a similar fantasy that centrifugal movement to the suburbs and boomburbs represents a great, imaginative leap into the unknown, and that all the glittering consumerist attractions—the 'ampersand magazines', the faith healers, the mediaevalist or faux Wild West community names, the theme restaurants—are evidence that in America, 'material things are shot through with enchantment'. Nothing could be further from the individualist. Everywhere, the imagination is pre-packaged.

At the end of his Building Jerusalem—I read the chapter on Victorian London, and found lots of nice quotes but learnt very little about Victorian London—Hunt cries: 'Vibrant, living cities depend crucially upon people residing in their centres. The challenge for the former Victorian cities is to ensure that when singles become couples and have children they do not instinctively fly to the suburbs.' This was written before he went and saw for himself what happens when people instinctively fly to the suburbs: 'suburb' becomes inadequate to describe the result. At least, not in the sense that Hornsey is a suburb.

But Hunt, at least, can stop worrying about the forthcoming election, or so it seems. Despite being an urbanist, and despite having perused the glossy photos of Hayden's Field Guide, he still has a shallow notion of voting demographics.

Rather than parrot statistics already three years out of date, he should have attended Robert Lang's May 21 lecture in Paris on US voting trends. Or at least, like myself, looked at the online powerpoint. Lang examined the 2002 and 2006 mid-terms, and found a different story from Hunt's. He discovered that the 'megapolitans'—the huge cities composed of edged and edgeless boomburbs—were swinging Democrat. The denser a suburb became, and the more Hispanic, the more liberal its voter. Even in 2004, Bush's victories were narrowest in the fastest-growing boomburbs: Riverside, Dallas, and Phoenix. Lang told me by email that the 'booming states' of Virginia, Nevada and Colorado are 'turning Democratic as they grow'. Arizona itself would turn, he thought, if it weren't McCain's home turf. What Hunt fails to realise is that although the Republican territories are growing, their variety of growth is changing their political orientation. We'll have to wait and see what happens in November.

Languagey odds and ends

2008-06-30T19:01:00.020-04:00

Earlier English had a fair number of words with short vowel in the context [f_____k]; cf. (38). Except for the well-known taboo word (not listed in (38)), none of these have survived as independent words, presumably in large measure because they sounded too similar to the tabooed word. Dates given in parentheses refer to the last attestation of given items.

(38)

fuk (a sail) (1529)
fac 'factotum' (1841)
feck 'effect, efficiency' (1887) (now only 'Scots Engl.' feckless)
fack/feck (one of the stomachs of a ruminant) (1887)
feck(s)/fack(s) '(in) faith, (in) fact' (1891)

— Hans Hock, Principles of Historical Lingustics (1991). Striking, the lengths to which even such a recent scholar will go to avoid a taboo word.

ΕΧΠΛΗΚΗΘ ΛΗΒΕΡ XV
ΑΜΑΛ
ΦΕΛΗΚΗΘΕΡ ΔΩ ΓΡΑ
ΒΕΡΤΟC
ΚΗΑC ΑΜΕΝ ΦΗΝΗΘ
ΜΕ ΦΕ ΚΗΘ
ΦΗΝΙC ΙCΘΑ ΓΑΟΔΙ
ΟΜ ΜΑΓΝΟΜ Ε

— From Chartres MS 152, St Augustine De Trinitate, 10th-century: a Latin explicit in Greek characters. Transliterated: Ekhplēkēth Lēber XV / Amal / Phelēkēther Dō Gra / Bertos / Kēas Amen Phēnēth / Me Phe Kēth / Phēnis Istha Gaodi / Om Magnom E. In Latin: Explicit [note that Latin 'x' has been wrongly written with a chi] Liber XV Feliciter D[e]o Gracias Amen Finit / Amalbertus Me Fecit / Finis Ista Gaudium Magnum E[st].

Talking of bad Latin, a recent Hollywood blockbuster has been advertised with a poster of its leading lady, her arm bearing the tattooed words 'TENEO VESTRI VOX'. This is ungrammatical and meaningless. And so assorted internetizens plug away in vain. I couldn't help but wonder if the phrase was chosen specially for its meaninglessness: as I put it to Steve, 'Get them talking and arguing—they'll never stop, because it doesn't mean anything to begin with.' A bizarre method of viral marketing?

(Two new Continental words, both usable in English. French abracadabrant, 'preposterous', and German Urdummheit, 'primordial stupidity'.)

Neologism, in revolutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice, seeking (to use the proverb of Cervantes), 'for better bread than is made of wheat', but is a mere necessity of the unresting intellect.

— Thomas de Quincey, 'Language', date uncertain.

nigri manus ossea Mauri
et cui per mediam nolis occurrere noctem,
clivosae veheris dum per monumenta Latinae

The bony hand of a blackamoor
Whom you'd not want to meet in the middle of the night
As you drove past the monuments on the hilly Latin Way

— Juvenal. The ancestor of our 'Wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley'?