Thursday, July 26, 2018

Travelogue 815 – July 26
A Thousand Years
Part Four


I’m running every day this summer. My pace has slowed considerably during the heat wave, but I’m still running. There’s some hope the heat may break today. The forecast says rain in the afternoon.

It’s afternoon, and I’m running. The sky is white with haze, though in the north are some darker clouds, a hint that there might be a shower coming. That’s what they’ve predicted.

I’m watching the sky as I run. The heat is interfering with brain activity. I find I’m getting impatient with the clouds. Let’s have that rain already, I’m thinking. Get with the program! The forecast said rain. The rain never comes, and I complete another summer hour of exercise in extreme heat.

Sitting outside afterward, putting down a large glass of cold water with lemon, I’m looking up at the hazy sky again. I had a script for the day, and Nature had other ideas. To be precise, as I watched, Nature departed from our script. In that moment, addled by the sun, I felt a sense of confusion.

I find the experience fascinating, reflecting on it over my glass of cold water. The human script had superseded Nature as reality. In essence, what I was watching in the sky during my run had already happened, when the prediction was made. So departure from the script felt like a disconnect from reality.

This is how the mind works in this age of science, prediction, and information saturation. Objective reality comes with a delay. It’s done already. So where is the nexus of our experience? Has our experience migrated to the template of the experience, and thus we actually live in our anticipation? Or have we failed to displace the real moment of experience, and therefore functionally live in the past? Did we create today’s warm sun? Do we enjoy it more because it was our plan to enjoy it?

These are the subtle powers of the mind. I’ve been studying history. And I’ve been questioning our labels for times past. The starting point was Huizinga’s study of the Middle Ages. I’ve wondered first about the patently silly name of the time period. ‘Middle’ hardly makes one think of a civilization lasting a thousand years. It makes it sound like a tram stop or two on a long line, far from anyone’s real destination. ‘Ages’ robs the period of coherence, even if it comes under one rubric. It’s not one ‘age’, it’s a hodgepodge of them, collected here for convenience.

The term, as we’ve seen, is an expression of disappointment, coined by the historians coming immediately afterward. The point of contrast was Rome, preceding the Middle Ages, victim of the Middle Ages.

What I’ve found most enlightening about Huizinga’s study is the possibility that there was far more coherence to medieval culture than it may be popularly credited with. The decaying values he finds in the ‘waning’ of the civilization, are, by extension, defining values for a thousand years.

The culture of chivalry, for example, that was self-parody in the court of Burgundy in the fifteenth century was innovation in France centuries earlier and was nascent when Germanic tribal values mingled with Mediterranean Christianity.

Rome itself lasted a thousand years. We see coherence there. It’s one civilization. That’s made easy for us because there is one political entity to reference. But would a citizen of the early Republic have recognized the late Empire? It was already Christian. It was already proto-feudal.

By contrast, would, say, a seventh-century Lombard have had as much trouble recognizing the cultural values of a fourteenth-century French knight? I admit I don’t have the expertise to judge. But I do wonder.

When the clouds don’t form, when the rain doesn’t come, we are startled. That is a wake-up call. Which reality am I living in? Similarly, it can be refreshing when history surprises us. It forces us to re-examine the locus of experience. What exactly is the image we are studying?

Friday, July 20, 2018

Travelogue 814 – July 20
A Thousand Years
Part Three


In his study of the Late Middle Ages, Mr. Huizinga looks at cultural phenomena that define the time. Among other things, he looks at the popular preoccupation with death. The memento mori is a common religious trope, a reminder that all things pass. We’ve all seen the skulls in funerary sculpture and in Renaissance paintings. But this is something different: poets and painters taking great care to represent the decay of corpses or describe the agonies of dying.

Pictures of corpses may be edifying, I suppose, and that’s how they were understood at the time. Mr. Huizinga is less indulgent. He calls it ‘macabre’, and he says it’s no more than the dark side of the sensuality of the culture.

Wondering how people could become so entranced with ugly symbols of death, I couldn’t help thinking about our own bizarre obsession with violence. I think about our capacity to watch violent TV every night, play violent video games, and then join in emotional debates about gun ownership. It strikes me as manifest fear. I’m not the only one. Michael Moore argues eloquently in his film “Columbine” that the US is an extraordinarily fearful society.

A compulsive need to be reminded of death strikes me as a symptom of fear. Mr. Huizinga argues that the fear is one of passing youth and ephemeral pleasures. It seems to me like a strong tonic for a mild sort of sentiment. Rather, the corpse thing reminds me of the feeling of not being able to tear one’s eyes away from something terrible.

There is one parallel between their time and ours that seems to me valid. Maybe it’s a stretch; you will judge. People living in the year 1400 lived only a few generations after the times of the Black Death, when, indeed, corpses were everywhere. We live a few generations after World War II, the greatest show of violence in history. There’s something of the psychology of survivors that endures long after historical trauma, whether we are aware of it or not.

Survival translates into anxiety. Why did I survive? Why was I born into a time of peace, but my grandfather wasn’t? How do we know it won’t happen again?

We don’t. We are powerless over history. We are close enough to sense its magnitude, but far enough away to have a hard time imagining. We are overawed by the thought of it. Remember “Saving Private Ryan” and its effort to make the horror of war real? There have been a number of movies like that, trying to make us feel the war – bullets whizzing past, friends dying next to us in gory ways. We have a thirst for the virtual experience of large-scale violence.

Then there’s the ambivalence we feel about having benefitted from the suffering of others. Europeans in 1400 were materially better off than their ancestors of a hundred years earlier, simply because there were fewer people to share the wealth. This led directly to the slow collapse of feudalism, millions dead and the new scarcity (and value) of labour.

World War II kick-started the world economy and created the revolution in technology still being played out. Many of us were raised in times of peace and prosperity that were designed and zealously guarded by people who had lived through the war. They wanted to build a world order that would safeguard stability above all else.

Could this have been the real close of the Middle Ages, I wonder: the Black Death, and the years of trauma following? History doesn’t follow such simple schematics as that, but it’s interesting to contemplate.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Travelogue 813 – July 18
Hands Up, It’s Summer


It’s been hot and dry for weeks. The grass is uncharacteristically brown. This kind of yellow brown is just not a Dutch colour. The deep brown of mud in winter, yes. But this shade of desiccation, this is a California colour. The sight of yellow grass and dry leaves must make a Dutchman feel ill at ease. He peers into the skies, searching for signs of rain.

The heat makes me slow, and I embrace it. During every long month of a particularly hectic work year, I imagined exactly this: the long days of summer taken at a lazy pace. I imagined the bright sun in the windows early in the morning. I imagined getting out of the house later and later every day, after leisurely playing with the girls. I imagined writing nonsense for hours in a comfortable café. I imagined wasting plenty of time on a book idea I had years ago, something frivolous. I imagined taking long and very slow runs every day.

I set out very slowly. Just outside our building is the sleepy little canal. I can jog along the gravel path beside it, warming up with an easy pace. Here, bordering the water, the grass is still green. A few ducks will be sleeping away the afternoon, nestling their beaks into their wings, making themselves inconspicuous among the reeds just canal-side. There’s a willow tree by the small bridge with long leaves that dip down as far as the surface of the water. Right under the bridge, there is a nest where a mama coot sits patiently.

The girls like taking walks by the canal. After my run, I will bring them out. We’ll cross the bridge slowly. I will lead one girl on each hand to be safe. On the other side, we’ll look for the ducks again. Little Sister will waddle after a rabbit that dashes into the bushes. Baby will talk to me; she will explain the world to me. She likes making indicative statements like ‘We don’t eat trees,’ or ‘We don’t eat grass.’ I say, ‘No, Baby.’ She continues with, ‘Not good.’

They will both want to run screaming up and down the path. I find the sight particularly affecting, the girls running and laughing. Baby will run back toward me with a joyful grin, her arms outspread. I’ll take her in my arms and swing her around. That image of her smile: it will never fade, I am very sure. It’s becoming a foundation stone for life, something that defines, confirms, justifies.

I wish I could surrender to that kind of joy when I run. It’s not easy for someone with so many years and so many worries. But I can attain the adult version, I’m judging, which is something like peace. I settle into a moderate pace, never too fast, and I can let the rhythm take over. The heat is calm and constant. The sense of passing time drops away; the day is timeless. The city is quiet. People are away on vacation, or they’re escaping the heat. At twenty minutes, the hypnotic rhythm and the endorphins take over and I can access a little bliss.

Would it come back to me, the joy of a child, if I threw my hands up and screamed and ran as fast as I could? It’s not likely to strike anyone as very cute. It might scare a few people. Is the cuteness the efficacious element of the run? I’ll try it anyway, one day when it’s not so hot.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Travelogue 812 – July 16
A Thousand Years
Part Two


Some things don’t change much from one historical age to another. I’m reading how the aristocrats of the fifteenth century became infatuated with pastoral or bucolic literature. It became a pastime of the elite, trading precious rhymes about the simple life in the fields and playacting as shepherds and country maidens. According to Huizinga, it as just another eroticism of sorts, an alternative to the prevailing game of knights and ladies, with the added value of criticizing life at court. How horrible, all the posing and backbiting at court! They whispered their disdain as they circulated among the courtiers at the ball with shepherds’ crooks under their arms.

Each age has its silly masquerades, and its own signs of decadence. That’s nothing new. But Huizinga doesn’t stop there. The author of “Homo Ludens” explores how playfulness has its dividends. Posing as shepherd boys may signify no real appreciation for country life, but it did accomplish something else: it inspired the development of an extensive language and vocabulary for describing nature. That seems timely, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.

Sometimes, language is all we have. We play with words, and revolutions come about. It might seem as though the revolutions couldn’t have happened without the vocabulary. Could the French Revolution have happened without the philosophes? What revolution have we been preparing for? What seems obvious is the information revolution. We’ve spent several generations cultivating a language for computer technology and experience. There is probably an extensive gaming lingo by now. That would match Huizinga’s philosophy of play as human development.

I might argue that there is a post-Cold-War surfeit of rhetoric about democracy and free markets that is almost entirely empty and tailored for posturing. We all pose as democrats (small ‘d’,) like shepherds at the royal banquet, full of indignant passion, even as the rhetoric and the institutions themselves seem more and more hollow. It’s eerie how hollow. But this over-sophistication of political language and vocabulary must serve some purpose in the big picture. It creates possibilities.

Anyway, the ages do change, and we name them as we see fit. Somewhere in fifteenth century, the baton was passed. The Middle Ages became the Renaissance. It seems to have happened first in Italy and then moved northward in a wave, following the ideas of humanism and a new devotion to classical antiquity. It arrived in Northern Europe only just ahead of Luther’s revolution. The greatest of northern humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam, spent the last twenty years of his life grappling with the explosion of Protestantism. He debated with Luther in letters and treatises that circulated across Europe, and he urged moderation.

In truth, it becomes hard to untangle the two phenomena, the Renaissance and the Reformation, at least in the north of Europe, and one is left wondering what to do with the categories. What is the Renaissance? Is it an event? If so, how do you localize it? Is it a movement? If so, does it involve more than a thin social layer of intellectuals, artists, and eccentric patrons? Is the category really a time period? Then how do we adjust for the wave effect, arriving at different places at different times, and how does it fit between the other categories? The term Renaissance has been problematic since the humanists first called their own time one of ‘re-birth’, feeling inclined to divide history into three parts: the great classical era, the intervening ‘media tempestas’, and then their own era. To them, it was crystal clear. Artists and scholars may have bickered; statesmen may have engaged in constant warfare; but they could all agree they lived in a new and enlightened era in the history of humankind

Did the citizens of the ‘Middle Ages’ identify themselves as such? ‘We are the great people of the Middle.’ No, ‘Middle Ages’ was a term invented by their descendants, the historians of the Renaissance. It was not a complimentary term. Before the Renaissance, all was dark. Civilization was lost. That much was universally understood by people of the new age.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Travelogue 811 – July 14
A Thousand Years
Part One


I’m writing a piece that is set in the Middle Ages, so I’m doing some background reading. One of my sources is “The Waning of the Middle Ages” by Johan Huizinga. It’s a classic and written by a Dutchman to boot. “Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen” was the book’s original title, and I wish I could say I was reading it in Dutch, but I’m not. It would have been rewarding, as the author takes a close look at the Dutch, Flemish and French cultures of the era.

Maybe next time. I’ve been picking up my Dutch study again. It’s no easy thing learning a new language. It takes so long. Proper language study is taking on a way of thinking. Language is like a schematic for a culture. And a history.

Clearly Mr. Huizinga spent a lot of time in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his mind: I’m not speaking of time travel, not yet. But his intensive research must have felt like immersion. How much of the era did he take on board? Does it explain his rambling style, his colourful choice of themes, his subtle conclusions? Those centuries were a time of ornately subtle philosophies. It was also a time of high moralizing. Did that influence his air of authority? I kind of like his self-assurance. It’s refreshing in our age of excessive deflection and qualification, apology and deference. It might have been the general tone of scholarship in 1919, when the book was published.

Huizinga was a cultural historian. He wasn’t looking to rehash any litany of battles or royal succession. He was interpreting cultural cues, fashion, literature and the rituals at court. What he found underlying them were a set of core principles that informed centuries of medieval culture, now decked out like a high medieval lady, in layers of richly ornamented garments, kirtle, chemise, and houppelande; fur and black velvet; crespine, chaperon with liripipe, kruseler, wimples or hennin.

He studies Burgundy. These were high times for the Burgundian dynasty, and in truth they were themselves a phenomenon unique to the times. Their ascendancy was short-lived. Being entirely unique to the times, they represented them well, with the most stylish and colourful court of its time. All the richest rituals of the times were in evidence, processions and banquets and jousts where ladies wore scarves for their knights. Chivalry was the secular moral philosophy of the age, and the dukes of Burgundy were exemplars. Books were circulated that detailed their manners as much as their heroics. Treatises were written about their how their table was set.

Huizinga puts all this on displays to illustrate a point. The exaggeration in fashion, manner, and ritual were all evidence to him of the decay of the principles they served. This was the end of an era. Like many young historians, he had begun his research looking for the signs of great things to come. Many had studied the same era looking for the first signs and first causes of the Renaissance. But he quickly realized that the more interesting study was the autumnal story unfolding in his texts, not the vernal. This was the end of something big, as much as it would become the beginning of something new.