Travelogue 1180 – 30 April
Workers

A couple of artists have been on my mind, a couple of hard-working artists. I’ve been reading the famous letters of one. One passage stood out. He’s about twenty-seven, and he has gone on a trip to see the country of a favourite artist. “I did go to Courrières last winter,” he writes, “I went on a walking tour in the Pas-de-Calais …. I had just ten francs in my pocket and because I had started out by taking the train, that was soon gone, and as I was on the road for a week, it was rather a gruelling trip. Anyway, I saw Courrières and the outside of M. Jules Breton’s studio.” He was too shy to knock on the door.

He continues on his trip. “I earned a few crusts here and there en route in exchange for a picture or a drawing or two I had in my bag. But when my ten francs ran out I tried to bivouac in the open the last three nights….” My body aches just reading it.

This artist repeats quite often his commitment to working hard. “Work” must be the most repeated verb in the collection. “So you see that I am working away hard ….”

“I saw something else during the trip,” he writes, “the weavers’ villages. The miners and the weavers still form a race somehow apart from other workers and artisans and I have much fellow-feeling for them …. And increasingly I find something touching and even pathetic in these poor humble workers ….” He wants to paint them.

Another artist was born centuries earlier in a humble section of his town, a neighbourhood called “Ognissanti”, after a thirteenth-century church there. At that time, the neighbourhood was inhabited by weavers and workers. His father had been a tanner but had become a gold-beater, which put him in contact with the artists and goldsmiths of the city.

The artist was a restless boy. Vasari says of him, “He was the son of Mariano Filipepi … who raised him very conscientiously and had him instructed in all those things usually taught to young boys during the years before they were placed in the shops. And although the boy learned everything he wanted to quite easily, he was nevertheless restless; he was never satisfied in school with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Disturbed by the boy’s whimsical mind, his father in desperation placed him with a goldsmith.” This was a fateful step. In those days, goldsmiths were close with painters, workers all, and the boy was taken by painting. Later he would add his art to the décor of the Ognissanti church itself. He never left that neighbourhood his entire life.

I hope to see the Ognissanti church myself in a few days. I will take a trip to the artist’s city.

Perspective 

History has been a study and an avocation all my life. It’s a passion. Some of my earliest thoughts were about history. Where did we come from? What were the first cities like? Ancient Egypt was especially tantalising to me. I asked my mother soon after I started the first grade, “When are we getting to world history?” I was frustrated: the school was getting a rather late start in academics, in my opinion.

When a history professor pitched his programme to me in my first year at university, I proved an easy sell. My original avocation still held me in thrall, even though adolescence had been a distraction. In the intervening years, I had moved on from Egypt: through the classical ancient histories and into the Middle Ages. In my subsequent studies, I settled on Renaissance and Reformation history, and I went on to write a forgettable honour’s thesis on Petrarch’s concept of history.

What have I gained from it all? This is a mercenary world, and the question is unavoidable. What is the dollar value of that degree, the study, those hours spent reading history? Believe me, I understand. I understand where history stands in the hierarchy of values in our society. My father was an engineer who used to mock the humanities. Now I teach in a business programme. What is the payoff, the ROI?

I will answer in one way that will not satisfy none of the needs of a capitalist’s soul. And then I will answer in another way that might just give the capitalist a moment’s pause.

First, I’ll say that, here, nearer the end of all my reading than the beginning, I feel like it takes a lifetime of reading and re-reading to begin to have perspective on the immensity of the human project. I won’t make any claims of mastery over the subject. In a sense, that keeps my ardour alive. I have never ceased to enjoy thinking about it, discussing it, and writing about it, always a beginner and always an enthusiast.

I use the word “perspective” with intention. Perspective is a result of reading history. It can also be said to be a value in reading history, meaning a reason to read history. Moreover, it can also be a way to read history. Summing up what I mean in teacher’s language, the way is to read actively. I tell my language students to read with a dictionary handy and to use it. Similarly, one needn’t read history passively; follow every branching detail or thought. For convenience, we conceive of stories as lines, but in fact they are webs, networks, or branching structures. History is no different; history is a story.

We are uniquely positioned, in the age of the internet, to understand this latter point. When we browse, we follow links. Think of every history text as hypertext, every name, date, place, and event a link. A productive session of study is a series of digressions. Some of us resist the urge to digress because we’re indoctrinated to think it demonstrates a lack of concentration. In fact, it is real engagement. Some of us resist digressions because we’re lazy. But the product of that is lazy history. Do you get irritated when your children interrupt you? Take a minute to consider their curiosity, and then consider the state of your own curiosity.

I do get it: to the impatient capitalist, wisdom and understanding fall under the rubric of “nice qualities”, which has a subheading, “so what?” I’ll turn to my example of the benefits of history, which might just inch us up the ladder of capitalist values from “so what?” to “hmm, interesting”.

First, a digression: is history fact? Much is made these days of the anti-factual climate we increasingly inhabit. Fact-checkers are working overtime, and in the face of increasing apathy. History is definitely one of the favoured categories of the fact-checkers, especially when dealing with the likes of Donald Trump. The implication is that history is a privileged discipline in that tarnished, old, fact-based reality that millions of citizens of the twenty-first century have found such a disappointment. But is history really fact?

If a politician is motivated for some reason to say that Hannibal crossed the Alps in 118 BC (rather than 218 BC,) he can be easily fact-checked, because dates clearly fall in the column of facts. But imagine he says that the Carthaginians were the Russians of their day. It’s a crass, emotion-based assertion, and obvious to most of us as empty rhetoric. But how is it we know that, and how do we check it? We cannot counter with fact. It’s an interpretation, and it must be countered with interpretation.

Context and depth of knowledge are required for interpretation. The politician in my example brings context, but a mismatching context; e.g., Cold War context vs ancient Roman. To successfully counter his conscious and intentional misinterpretation requires bringing the correct context to bear and then explaining it. It also requires the audience to have context. The propagandist counts on that being a difficult combination, and frankly being just too much work.

How do we rebuild context in the general milieu? It takes readers, and it takes writers. Remember that perspective is a method. A reader shouldn’t approach a biography, for example, as a train ride. On a train, there is one track, and one would prefer that the train stays on that one track all the way to the destination. That doesn’t work in reading. The destination encompasses all the territory in between. The journey is context, and is essential to comprehension. On ought to ride a few divergent routes, window-side, eyes wide open. Biographies are often academics talking to other academics. Lay readers will space out and remember little. There’s too much detail There’s little to link new knowledge to old.

Thus we come to the delivery systems. It could well be that proper histories are a civic enterprise. Perspective must also be a method for the writer. Modern readers know titbits about many things, few things deeply. Their attention spans are short. Assuming books still have a future, they should be written in such a way that they reflect the vagaries of enthusiasm, digging among details and then roaming the hills around the topic in order to scout the terrain. Excitement leads one far and wide in search of significance. And well it should be so.

The reader fascinated by Hannibal probably needs to also be exposed to Caesar and Scipio, Roman military tactics, and the roles of Sicily and Spain in Rome’s growing empire. The links should be natural. They ought to carry the reader forward simply on the power of their interest. Closing the book, the reader ought to feel comfortable that a new level of understanding has been reached, a kind of primitive navigation system, if you will, for a whole region in time, an environment that wasn’t familiar before. It’s not enough to know the milestones in Hannibal’s life; significance is derived from the geography and the stakes and the trajectories of empire before and after.

“Follow your bliss,” old Joseph Campbell used to say in championing the everyday hero, and I think it’s a fair bit of advice for the everyday, amateur scholar. We ought to every one of us have our humble ambitions as scholars, whatever the market value. And we ought to pursue them with whimsy, with liberty, and as though we had all the time in the world to follow every branching path.

We shouldn’t be rattled by the noise of our time; we should trust in the sturdiness of facts. We should simply cultivate the habit of sharing truth, and with something of joy we felt in discovering it.

Travelogue 1179 – 22 April
Never Sleep

I cannot sleep. My head is full of responsibilities and fear. My heart is racing. There are ideas chasing each other around the empty and resounding transit hall that is my head. Ideas about books, but also ideas about mundane challenges. The Metro is down this week between my station and the next two stations, and the day will involve at least half a dozen interchanges that would have led me through that home Metro Station. I must orchestrate the comings and goings of myself and the girls, sometimes together, sometimes separate. Even this is a puzzle beyond my powers.

In contrast to the charged atmosphere inside my mind stands the still air of the early morning. The spring dawn has not arrived. The songbirds are silent. They must be sleeping. The still air is beautiful. It is silky as ambrosia, but it is rare and dispersed as a moment without thought. I dearly love this hour before dawn, before I really wake, before I become the person who must wake. The stillness is profound; it teaches me about meditation.

As I record this, I am being stared at. There is a pink Styrofoam skull on my desk, a legacy of a play I wrote, and the eyes are turned toward me, its red irises set upon mine. The skull is pink and set with spangles because it is decorated in the style of the Day of the Dead. The play required a real skull, but I made this one suffice. It lies on its side now, among the chaotic jumble of items that have collected on my desk, lies within the tight circle of light described by my desk lamp. Its red eyes never sleep.

Travelogue 1178 – 13 April
Gracious

“Goed bezig,” they said as I passed. 

The sun had returned, and in a gracious manner: not brusquely or suddenly; not wanly, as though winter were still lurking, but just as a spring sun should, gently applying heat to the clouds, thinning them and shining through.

It had been a cool and breezy morning, perfect for marathoners. It was almost as though the sun had lent its blessing to the proud city’s event. Or maybe it was chance. I certainly gave the runners my blessing. One loop of the marathon’s course passed by the girls’ ballet school, and we stood at the side of the road and cheered for the athletes.

Spring was kind to the runners. The streets were strewn with pink petals from the cherry trees. The songbirds serenaded them in the parks. The clouds cooled them off, bestowing light, passing mists for their refreshment. The air was clement, and the sun made its entrance on the stage just as most of the runners were clearing their final kilometres.

“Is 41 kilometres a marathon? Is 39 kilometres a marathon?” Baby Jos asked. No, only 42. “Why?” Well, a competition needs to be standard, all around the world. There was no need to tell them the Pheidippides story again.

Later, I took a run myself. I ran along the road toward Schiedam, the one built along the back of the old dike. On one side were the old harbours of the River Maas. On right side was the little community of Witte Dorp, the little workers’ development, named for its white houses, built at same time as my own complex of flats.

From the dike, one must descend into the Witte Dorp. I took to one of the side streets, passing as I did a small playground. A boy was climbing on some bars. A couple who might have been the boy’s parents were sitting in their car, half in, half out, with the doors open. They were looking at their phones.

The mama saw me coming. “Goed bezig,” she said. I was past before I had processed her words. Good job, she had said. She had thought I was one of the marathoners. I probably looked like I had already run a marathon, the shape I was in, limping along, tired well before I should have been. I should have thanked her, but I was past.

I turned the corner and ran into the sun. This was spring. I felt renewed. “Goed bezig,” I said.

Travelogue 1177 – 5 April
A Fable for Rich Men

The powerful man has a thought. It’s not a very original thought, but he can deliver it with a wink. It’s only important that the man seem smart.

 

Our twitchy CEO, co-Majesty of the Untied States, Elonng Muisk, took to *their* (shall we try nonbinary pronouns for the father who has renounced a trans daughter) took to *their* inhouse chatbox to type a message to … no one? *They* wrote, “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”

 

It's the appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief, cheap tech bro wisdom delivered with a shrug. Insouciance is the signature. The aphorism must be self-consciously disingenuous, a patently false sentiment from the hybrid engineer.

 

The rich man is scornful. Humanity has been found wanting. Our tale is found to be one full of sound of fury, and the rich man just might be the idiot telling it. “It appears that humanity is a biological bootloader.”

 

Notice, by the way, the rich man’s punctuation, comma in its proper spot, but leaving off the full stop – just the hint of rebellion, –leaving us always breathless in suspense. The comma is a sign he knows how to do it correctly, and the dropped point is a hint of his delicious roguishness.

 

The appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief. Here’s the pose of a thinker, our premier waxing dystopian between mainstage appearances at political rallies, where he jumps around in short Ts and whoop for the crowd, waxing dystopian in a kind of weak-tea homage to Rutger Hauer in “Blade Runner”, while lowering himself wistfully to the toilet seat backstage to issue off-handed disdain for the rally crowd, disdain for being mere … humanity.

One might wonder then, who is the audience for *their* aphorisms? Mme Muskoinette has already said that the world is inhabited largely by NPCs (nonplayer characters). “If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” the Countess does “tweet”. One might just ask, “Who the fX is the “you” in *their* sage utterances?” – if one were to question a … genius.

At a Code Conference, some nine or ten years ago, the Countess Musk proclaimed that the likelihood that we are living in “base reality” was just “one in billions”. Meaning, all this is a computer simulation. (Run by a Muskovite teen in an alternate sphere?) It’s a terrible thought that might move a humble NPC to tears, but the Countess is fortified by nothingness. *They* survey all and see glorious Nothing, worlds emptied of soul. (The psychoanalyst of X punctuation might diagnose that void as the experience of pure ego.)

Among the poor suckers (NPCs every one of them) cheering on the Dark-MAGA hero are thousands of evangelical Christians who sit piously among their embroidered pillows reading devotional books like the one penned by the pious Jack Posobiec, entitled “Unhumans”, a book endorsed by Steve Bannon and JD Vance.

“For the last couple centuries,” those Christians read, “we’ve known them as communists. Socialists, with extra steps. And of course, leftists. Radicals and revolutionaries as well. A hundred years ago, Marxist Leninists, then more recently, Cultural Marxists. Even as, without irony and not as a joke, ‘progressives.’ For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans.”

We the obedient are losing track of the ways in which we don’t count. We may require a Venn diagram now, explaining the overlap between NPCs and unhumans. If we have to ask, are we unhuman? Or is that only when we speak openly about “the people”, which, the Countess and Posobiec inform us, doesn’t exist? We must resign ourselves to having become a fable for rich men.