Hilary Mantel writes in passing about the famous sarcophagus commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey and never finished. Wolsey was Thomas Cromwell’s protégé, and an early casualty in Henry VIII’s struggle for the annulment of his first marriage.
“There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone,” Mantel writes, “in which the cardinal never lay … Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.”
The sarcophagus sat at Windsor for nearly three hundred years. Some pieces were lost. Some of the angels have only recently been recovered. In 1806, King George III declared the sarcophagus would host the body of Admiral Lord Nelson.
Funerary art is one of the more tangible forms in which the Renaissance (and each era immediately following) reaches out to us. We discover it in many the great churches of Europe. We recognize the format immediately, the raised sarcophagus, the layers rising from base to heights, the rich Baroque elaborations, the stunning realism, and the frightening memento mori, in the form of skulls, dancing skeletons, and Death figures. These sepulchral displays are among the only art forms from the era that we get to see in their original form and in their original positions.
Reading Mantel’s passage, my first thought is not of the tombs of great men, but of the terracotta sculptures in the Oude Sluis in Delfshaven. This is a homey little pub set right above the waters of the old lock in Delfshaven where, centuries ago, village fathers settled to trade and build ships beside their little canal that connected Delft to the river and to the sea; where rich merchants from Holland’s Golden Age built the houses that we still enjoy today. I don’t know how long the Oude Sluis has been open, but it’s been at least a hundred years. It’s been a century that those relief sculptures have adorned the pub’s walls. They were a payment made by some Italian workers on their drinking debt. The pictures sculpted are scenes from Frans Hals or one of his contemporaries. Rude figures get up to rude activities in medieval taverns, and the effect is a very cheerful one. The scenes are quite large, more than several metres per side, and there are at least three of them to meditate on while enjoying one’s biertje.
One legacy for me from COVID times will be a new appreciation for local art. I spent months confined to my neighbourhood, inspecting all corners of my side of town, and developing a quick eye for bits of local decorative art, often art deco style from mid-century, which was when this area was developed. It’s nice to see things created close to home, and made for residents of the area. Not so polished as, say, the Rodin or Picasso pieces downtown, this art is still expressive, perhaps even more so for being raw and accessible.
All art was local at one time. The great Renaissance artists rose to prominence within the same late-medieval system that created tonnes of decorative art that we don’t find nearly so affecting. Art was commissioned by local churches and local patrons with a distinct end-purpose in mind: to be installed in one’s hall or one’s church in order to inspire Christian devotion and to emphasize the status of the patron. Even Michelangelo, famous as he was in his own day, worked on commissioned projects. The idea of international art treasures, belonging to the people as part of a universal human heritage, etc, is very recent.
The wealthier that patrons became and the larger their communities, the more intense their competition to show off their status, taste and wealth. This encouraged the emergence of individual style among artists. The difference between one generation of artists and the next was not superior skill so much as a change in the art market.
Individuation was the call-to-action during the era we call the Renaissance. We see it in the art, but it was emerging everywhere, in philosophy and governance and literature. That quality, that priority, can be said to be one hallmark of the European civilization that was emerging and that would last for five centuries.
Friday, July 09, 2021
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
Maybe it’s always been that way. Teachers see barbarism at every turn. The older we get, the more apparent the decline of civilization on all sides. We speaking examiners grouse about the impoverishment of our language. Is it true? Is everyday language in decline? I think it’s fair to say that the discourse in press and literature and civil discussion has declined. Is that the cause or the effect of what’s happening to everyday language? There is some agreement among researchers that vocabulary is in decline. Some are blaming social media. Social media and texting demand strict economy in language, whereas conversation is spacious and playful. Vocabulary is built through interaction, not in dreaming up cute captions.
My argument has been that language in decline will affect our experience of the world. An impoverishment among grammatical forms and vocabulary will narrow or simplify our perception of the world and our ability to communicate with subtlety. My example has been verb tenses. With fewer tenses at our disposal, wouldn’t our shared experience of time become more elementary? With fewer types of time, wouldn’t our accounting of time become clumsy? Consider the difference between “He has never been to Paris” and “He never went to Paris”. I’ve seen ample evidence that the latter is becoming an acceptable substitute for the former, as options diminish. Apparently, we’re under some kind of pressure to say things bluntly, so accuracy – and certainly elegance – must drop among priorities. ‘He never went’ is an answer to a specific question, something like, ‘Did he go? (I know he was thinking about it.)’ But instead we answer the general (has he ever been?) with the specific (he didn’t go). This conforms to a general pattern, in which abstraction and the hypothetical are sacrificed for the ever more concrete and personal.
A few more examples of starved grammatical forms might illustrate my point. Conditional statements have four fundamental forms in English, plus a few extra ‘mixed’ forms. We examiners have noticed that those six-plus forms have been reduced in everyday usage to two. Most commonly we hear the ‘zero’ conditional, all in the simple present, and an incorrect variety that deploys two ‘woulds’; e.g., ‘if I would go to school, I would learn a few things.’ The latter corresponds to a growing confusion about the difference between ‘will’ and ‘would’. ‘Imagine aliens landing tomorrow. That will change everything.’
Conditionals explore our relationship with the unreal: you would be a fool to quit that job; Hillary would have been a great president; etc. The decline in these usages offer further evidence of the deterioration of our capacity for abstraction. And this when faith in the scientific method is at its lowest since the days of the Inquisition.
Cohesive devices (for example, in fact, therefore, however, moreover, etc.) lead us through the logic of longer utterances, a function altogether useless in social media caption culture. In the new world, nothing worth saying takes longer than a sentence.
In sum, according to my Chicken Little interpretation, we’re losing degrees of time, we’re losing abstraction, and we’re losing cohesion. All is in the present. Nothing exists in any state but the concrete and real. And everything worth communicating can be delivered in single, disconnected, declarative sentences.
Monday, July 05, 2021
The Present Perfect
Please forgive the digression. I will return to the topic of Hilary Mantel ….
We are speaking examiners at a local language centre, conducting the speaking portion of English certification exams. Between sessions, we talk. Sometimes we even talk about language.
My colleague is a polyglot. She speaks Dutch, and so she has many opportunities to measure students’ language deficiencies in both English, their acquired language, and in Dutch, their mother tongue. How well do they align?
“Why can’t they get this?” teachers sometimes wonder. We assume that learners’ blocks arise from our flaws, bad judgement in lessons or in teaching style. My colleague tells me she has found, in trying to explain English vocabulary in Dutch, some surprising gaps in vocabulary in students’ own language. Learners are limited by what they bring into the learning experience. New concepts rely on old concepts. And language, like most skills, requires some equipment being in place.
Grammatical forms reflect conceptual thinking. We created verb tenses, for example, to offer variety and nuance in the communication of time. When did it happen? Is it over and done? Did it take a long time? Where is it in a sequence of events? Is our emphasis on the event itself or on its impact in the present?
I’m no linguist or philosopher, but I think it’s natural to ask whether thought happens without language. Will someone whose mother tongue has two tenses think about time the same way as someone whose mother tongue has twelve? Within a language group, what intellectual differences develop between those who are well-trained in a language and those who are poorly educated in the same language? Does someone with twice the vocabulary see the world in a more nuanced way?
A culture may have forged tools for thought that individuals within the culture don’t have access to. Say a generation drops the usage of the perfect tenses. Those tenses exist in the toolbox for the culture, but the individuals have no handy access to it. Does our experience of the past, for example, become shallower? Without the perfect tenses, does the past becomes more starkly separate from us? Does the past become a series of discreet events without continuity? These would be subtle things, but nonetheless with consequence. Never having been exposed to perfect tenses, you could be forgiven for not seeing the use for them. For example, the subjunctive mood in English has largely withered away, and we’ve done without it for a long while. Now, when we English speakers study Latin, with its rich subjunctive mood, we wonder why this elaborate structure was ever necessary. We don’t recognize its utility.
I think this is generally the human response to sophistication. Across cultures or among individuals, we tend to study each other and wonder how the other could be so captivated by some strange pursuit or by the development of some skill beyond our understanding.
(On a related note, I’ve often thought that we write time travel scenarios simply to congratulate ourselves. The medieval philosopher would be so impressed with us, we tell ourselves. In fact, he would hold a smart phone in his hands and wonder, “Why?”)
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Baby still confuses yesterday and tomorrow. She tells stories about what happened ‘tomorrow’, and we still get confused, though she has made this substitution for months. Our confusion is as telling as hers. It speaks to how deeply the constructs of time have become rooted. She’s clearly talking about a past event, and we get snagged on the one word. I’m not saying we can’t quickly make the adjustment in our heads; it’s just that the word stands out so sorely for us, like a jinx on time. From her perspective, it might be just as confusing that we are so adamant about this differentiation, time for her being one muddy reservoir for all the things that aren’t here now. When the girls were smaller, they used to hypothesize futures in which Mama and Papa were small and they were big, or when they would be babies again. Forward and backward were fluid and interchangeable.
Summer arrived in a haze worthy of Baby Time. The heat spell had run its course already. Clouds had gathered, and the longest day of the year was dim, cool and overcast. They still equate the season with sunshine, soe when I say, it’s summer now, Little Ren replies, “I can’t see the sun.” If Baby had a stronger grip on the concept of time as a river, unidirectional and subject to Renaissance-like measures of perspective, she might have objected that summer had already happened, and had actually only recently ended. The sun had shone, and then it had left. Why hadn’t we gone to the beach while it was summer? With more of a sense of continuity, she might have given me a good debate. But tide and time are still jumbled; things happen without order. That I would say that now it’s summer is like offering up nonsense.
A while ago, during the winter, I believe, I was writing about historical fiction. I have considered gathering those thoughts into one long essay, but, aside from my own laziness, other obstacles that have held me back. One is that it’s a subject that never ends. I never had a chance to comment on one huge project from the winter and spring, the first book of Colleen McCullough’s series on the late Roman Republic, recommended to me by Carolyn. That first book, a thousand pages long, reviews Marius’s glory years, between 110 and 100 BC, and there’s a lot I could say about it. That’s especially true in the context of my historical fiction winter, when I was reading “Julian” and Caesar’s “Gallic Wars”. But I didn’t. There’s never enough time, and McCullough’s achievement was a bit overwhelming.
My second obstacle in closing even an ad hoc discussion of historical fiction was the obvious lacuna, the author left out of the discussion. Any current discussion about historical fiction that didn’t include Hilary Mantel seemed incomplete. With her “Wolf Hall” series and “A Place of Greater Safety”, it seemed to me she’d changed and illuminated the genre. But I hadn’t read anything of hers in a few years. That has changed, as I have finally laid my hands on the third book in the “Wolf Hall” series about Thomas Cromwell, “The Mirror and the Light”. I’ve had some unexpected reactions to that book, and so maybe it’s time I try to comment on Mantel.
Sunday, June 06, 2021
Inside the Café
Yesterday some cafes opened for indoor seating. It was good timing for two reasons. I had to work the entire Saturday as an examiner downtown. Now I had somewhere to go during breaks: across the square to the Coffee Company. And, to make the visit all the more enjoyable, the weather offered only clouds and chill. It was our one relapse into May weather this week. Even with the cold, most customers were choosing to sit outside, so the inside was both warm and quiet. It’s a small space, dominated by one long, chunky wooden table. Along the ample floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides are divan-style couches, a long line of cushions. The tables there are just trays are short stands. I sat there by the window and set my espresso on a tray. I watched the traffic outside. I leafed through the Groene Amsterdammer, a venerable old Dutch magazine that always has something interesting to read. I should say, to apply my weak language skills to. This week, there’s an article about forgotten authors. It’s amazing that, after a lifetime of reading, there are still names I don’t know. Not that I claim to be exceptionally well-read. I love reading, and I’m curious. Even reading the short bios of authors is fun for me. It’s rewarding to see that my weak Dutch is up to at least this much. My break time is short: the perfect interval for an espresso. One might think that the espresso was invented just for this, a tasty shot of life to be taken while absorbing a few paragraphs of news. Before standing, I take a moment to appreciate the occasion: I’m having a coffee inside a café! Who would know this would become such a rare treat? Anyone who has known me for any time would be forced to wonder how I survived this year and a half of COVID time without cafes. I wonder myself.
Wednesday, June 02, 2021
It rained nearly every day in May. Now that the sun has reappeared, we are surrounded by a rich green. Every park, every margin by the road radiates spring colours. Where the grass has been allowed to grow, it has reached knee high. It is sprinkled with wildflowers. The red poppies are just starting to bloom. It is lovely.
The sheep have made their entrance this year. Every spring, they are imported into the neighbourhood to cut back the grass. Temporary fencing is put up, and they are moved from one patch of public land to another, chewing their way through weeks of wild growth, leaving behind them yellow nubs and – as my girls point out every chance they get – lots of poop. I’m enjoying the high grass before the sheep get to it. When I can, I take a walk along paths bound by these high grasses on both sides. It’s very peaceful.
Little Ren continues to enjoy a peak of cuteness. She’s become very girlie and very sweet. She likes getting hugs and kisses. She loves her family. Her older sister is over it already. When I pick them up at school, Little Ren lights up when she sees me, and her big sister just frowns as though I showed up late and without any candy. Big Sister has her moments, to be sure, but she is well past the phase of those simple, sweet behaviours.
Little Ren holds out a closed hand and asks me to guess what’s in it. I guess silly things, and she explains very earnestly why it can’t be what I’ve proposed.
“Is it a grape?”
“No, the grapes are in the refrigerator, father.”
“Is it a ball?”
“A ball is too big, father!”
“Is it sheep poop?”
“Father! Sheep poop would be too smelly!”
Monday, May 24, 2021
This spring has been a disappointment. Temperatures have been slow to rise, and it’s rained nearly every day this month. It’s been a further test for everyone who has waited for COVID restrictions to be eased. We have the opportunity to sit on cold and wet terraces and be served our coffee or beers, but we still can’t sit inside. And the wait continues for the freedoms that come with vaccination. I’ve had one shot now, which puts me into a kind of limbo. I can still get sick, and I still can’t travel. Further, like a well-aimed blow when I’m down, the shot made me ill.
I travelled as far as the neighbouring town of Schiedam on an errand a few days ago. I stood on the Metro platform in the central train station of Schiedam, looking longingly down the many train tracks. By and large, I haven’t suffered terribly from the claustrophobia that I know has afflicted many during the long COVID lockdowns, but this spring, I admit to some restlessness.
We go out. We do our best to fight these doldrums while staying safe. On our three-day weekend (for Pentecost), the family went out. We took the girls to the playground, wiping down toys for them, huddling under trees when the showers came. We took them for ice cream, huddling on damp benches outside the shop, shivering but defiant.
Any sort of travel would be a relief, even to a nearby town. Why does the psyche crave movement? Is it simply a hankering for variety, or is it something more profound?
Wanderlust is a quality often associated with my compatriots, especially Americans of the twentieth century. With “On the Road”, Kerouac took his place as author of post-war wanderlust. His friend Neal Cassady set the tone with his famous letter of 1950, and, as a character in the novel, Dean Moriarty, he took his place as shaman for the new movement, a cult of renewed Manifest Destiny. In this edition of the cult, Americans weren’t claiming land but Experience. The new man was a philosopher of action, all thought expressed in deeds, and individuality a kind of magic, best expressed in dance and music. Following Cassady the shaman, the Beats saw that action was libido released and that wisdom was instinct posing as Zen. There were a lot of words, but it was personality that counted. It was a literary movement that was impatient with words. It was literature that longed to be jazz.
It’s a different age. I wander what Ginsberg would have made of QAnon? I wonder what Cassady would have done with social media? I wonder what Kerouac and Watts would have thought of anime and Pokemon?
Friday, May 14, 2021
I’m in the process of editing a piece of writing. I’m under a deadline because I have an appointment to show someone what I’ve done. It would be better if I waited. Our household is living under a cloud because of the passing of my wife’s mother.
The proximity of death has a way of stripping meaning and beauty away from living things. In this state, looking at a piece of writing is like looking through skin to the bones. Beauty evaporates and one is left with a jumble of phrases, a patchwork of words hung sloppily upon the pretence of frame. Language is just an arrangement of pieces. Without aesthetics, they fit together rather arbitrarily.
I suppose every writer struggles with this dual sight. In a worst-case scenario, the writer can’t control the switch between levels. Suddenly, the lens of aesthetics falls, and language is stripped of order and beauty. If the writer can’t regain the original perspective, then the work dies on the vine.
I’m thinking of Kerouac and Cassady again. When Kerouac received the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” from Cassady, he was ripe for some bulletin about aesthetics. According to Kerouac, what he had found in that letter was a beautiful fusion between personality and style. Cassady’s writing was completely authentic, completely him. Reportedly, he returned to his work-in-progress, “On the Road” with new vision and new ambition. This is when he resolved to re-write the whole manuscript in one marathon session, typing onto one continuous roll of paper.
It was something more than style. The Beats were always in search of something religious, or at least ecstatic, in art. What Cassady had achieved was something like capturing the greater being that lived beyond the mundane, (the soul, the psyche?) inside the act of expression, merging being and expression of being. The Beats suspected, as many have in history, that madness and divinity, or perhaps madness and truth, were close cousins. This is a position common among mystics. Despite their pretensions, the Beats themselves fell far short of being real mystics, but they might have stood as weaker representations of the Renaissance- or Romantic-era identification of artist as seer or mystic.
The simple formula falls apart immediately. Whatever you may think of “On the Road”, it is apparent that Kerouac’s writing is of a different calibre than its inspiration, Cassady’s letter. It still required a writer to write. Kerouac marshalled the fragments of language into an often eloquent lyricism.
Saturday, May 08, 2021
COVID has left this kind of scar, this kind of legacy. It’s ugly and corrosive. It breaks the spirit. What the virus doesn’t destroy itself, it inspires humanity to destroy. It wasn’t enough to suffer the anxiety and grief of runaway pandemic, but we had to fight among ourselves over childish pseudo-ideologies. Trump’s bleach moment will probably go down as the low bar of human response to crisis in our time, primarily because it’s funny. But I believe more insidious and more emblematic is Tucker Carlson’s recent rant against masks, during which he called on his viewers to call Child Protective Services if they saw children wearing masks. That clip probably won’t survive. It’s not as satisfying as watching Trump make an ass of himself. Carlson is repulsive (even as he calls wearing a mask ‘repulsive’,) whining miserably and staring at the camera like the stunted man-child he is. But his performance is a snapshot of our worst selves.
Was anything like this sort of posturing ever necessary? How advanced is this species, after all? No doubt history will emphasize the (eventual) response and the (very compromised) successes more than the suffering. But we must remember what Nature wrought and how we made it worse.
COVID has taken my wife’s mother. Every day we live with the loss. We were not able to go to the funeral. The government in Ethiopia pushes for same-day funerals. We had no time to travel. The family in Ethiopia never got to see her during her final days at the hospital. This story is all too characteristic of the times and this disease.
Every day we live with the loss. Perhaps that’s the most salient experience of grief, the relentlessness of it, day after day, waking up to the realization of loss over and over. I’ve written about grief extensively in my book, “Careful So”. I don’t want to write about it now. My wife’s grief and her family’s grief come before mine. I have to respect it with silence.
Thursday, May 06, 2021
Deaths come like earthquakes. First came news of Bruce’s passing, and it shook the room, knocking things off the shelves and leaving a bit of a mess. But then came a more serious shock a few days ago, when COVID took my mother-in-law. That shook to the foundation, even as I was still tidying up after the last quake, breaking things and leaving cracks in the floor.
Repairs and re-thinks are necessary now. What happened was unsettling – in the way that death raises questions about life, life in general and the life of the deceased. There’s something unjust about the timing, and it rarely leaves a neat close to the human story. Illness, in particular, never seems fair. In the case of my mother-in-law, there were so many variables in the course of that disease, and so little information. I think this is a common feeling in the wake of COVID.
Sometimes the quake requires deep renovations. Sometimes it’s excessively painful to know that this is what Nature has wrought. It’s one thing to know that all things must pass; it’s another thing to come to terms with the cruel randomness of how they pass. It seems unkind.
Our girls don’t understand what’s happened yet. They partake of Nature. They are random themselves, random in their blessings and random in their trials.
Little Ren, my youngest, has reached a peak of cuteness at her age. It’s so lovely, and it aches because stages pass so quickly. That’s not how I should think, I know. I should enjoy the moment.
“It’s night!” she told me, taking my hand and guiding me to the window to point out at the darkness. She was concerned. Menna and I had been out on a desperate errand to a dentist in Amsterdam, while a baby-sitter watched the girls. I’m facing years of serious work on my mouth, and I wanted a second opinion. We got home from Amsterdam late, and Little Ren wanted us to understand that we that we had been too late. She took my hand and brought me to the window. “It’s night!”
Sunday, May 02, 2021
Being young is finding something to care about, many things to care about, and to care about them with power and with whimsy. Not just with devotion, but with abandon and with irony, because youth has an abundance of energy.
My small group of associates cared about art and politics, and that’s no surprise. Those have been the concerns of youth since Orwell? since Byron? since Rousseau? Our politics were fairly shallow, though it was a serious time, being America’s first experience with neo-con rule. We preferred literature. And for critical few years we were enamoured of the Beats.
People roll their eyes at the Beats now, and there’s a lot to roll eyes about. We laughed at them then, even as we loved them. Their virtue was their exuberance, their well of youthfulness, which overrode the abundant rhetoric about suffering. They talked about troubles the way young people do, with heartbreak and wailing that is delivered with such vigour that it’s ultimately unconvincing.
I’ve been breezing through the famous “Joan Anderson Letter” by Neal Cassady, credited by Ginsberg and Kerouac as a primary inspiration for Beat prose and recently re-discovered in someone’s attic. “I wake to more horrors than Céline,” he writes, “not a vain statement for now I’ve passed thru just repetitious shudderings and nightmare twitches. I have discovered new sure doom ….” This was the rhetorical position of the Beats, an embrace of trouble, a conviction that they were more powerful than their pain. It was a language of salvation, the language of a generation rescued from annihilation. Remember that Ginsberg, Kerouac and Cassady met only two or three years after the German surrender and Hiroshima.
Here we were, picking up the novels and poetry decades later. It should be noted that we were closer to the time of the Beats then than we are to our own youth now. We actually met Ginsberg himself in the East Village, when he performed Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. It was all still alive.
We read “On the Road” and we realized we had Dean Moriarty in our midst. That was our friend Bruce, fresh from Texas and hungry for life.
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
It’s King’s Day again. The king’s birthday is one of those holidays that stand in the calendar as uneasy amalgams. There a real king who has a real birthday, but the day is a celebration of Dutchness and a lot of other things that have nothing to do with royalty. It’s history for the living, irreverence and tradition, carpe (holi)diem with a nod to the dignity of preceding generations. It’s a frustrating assignment for journalists every year. What can you say? You print photos of people having fun beside photos of the king humbly smiling and waving. You leave it at that.
These silly paradoxes are what trip up nationalists every time. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s short-lived Anglo-Saxon caucus in Washington, D.C.! It was patently ridiculous and offensive. Greene wouldn’t be able to pick an Anglo-Saxon out of a medieval line-up if her life depended on it. And I’m quite sure she couldn’t find ten words to describe the history of that maligned group. Does she realize they were the losers in the battle for primacy in England almost a thousand years ago?
People like Greene go out of their way to perform these intellectual pratfalls for us. But in fact, they are just providing us with catharsis for our own sense of awkwardness. We don’t like to admit how foolish we all are made by living in the present as products of time. Our histories make fools of us, our natural, national and personal histories. Loveable, hapless, God’s-children kind of fools.
The passing of my friend Bruce reminds me how difficult it is to assimilate all one’s life into one coherent identity, or even one coherent narrative. It’s like the personality of the present is living with personalities from the past in one big house. The house is spacious enough that our hero can pass whole weeks without encountering housemates. The hero becomes quite secure with his or her identity. But the day comes when the past and present cross paths in the hallway. If we’re honest, it’s a bit shocking every time. The act of recognizing oneself is rarely an encounter with the beloved, but an encounter with the Stranger. One can love the Stranger, as Jesus was at pains to say. But love for the Stranger isn’t achieved by misnaming the Stranger or by outfitting the Stranger in familiar garb or attractive masks.
As I talk about Bruce, I’ll talk about ideas I entertained back then. I’ll talk about places we knew, and how I knew them then. I confess it will be impossible to recapture the precise quality of my thought and feelings, and so I will freely mix them with current impressions. That is the uneasy marriage of ‘personalities’ arranged by Time.
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Little Ren has developed a taste for the outdoors. In principle, I approve, but whoever is tasked with taking her out must be rested, alert, and warmed up. Little Ren likes to run and run. Once out the door, she sets off and the excursion becomes a chase.
She leads me to the park at the end of the canal behind our building, next to Spart Stadium. It’s a big park, with lots of playground toys and lots of room to run. It has a fence around it, which I find a blessing. I get to retreat to one of the benches and sit while she cycles madly through her round of games and amusements.
Not that I don’t join in, once I catch my breath. I enjoy pushing her on the swing or helping her climb. But it seems as though her favourite pastimes are the messy ones, digging in the sandpit, or rooting around in the grass to find odd bits of Nature’s discards.
So rest on the side-lines I do. I recharge. I take in the first pleasant signs of spring. Trees are in the early stages of budding, sending up red shoots and ethereal clouds of green. It’s that delicate period when nature seems to be considering whether spring will take hold. The skies are big; the air is crisp. The trees, with their new growth, seem small. The tender new leaves might be a tentative query.
And, yet, below appearances, life is insistent. It’s unstoppable. It’s the weed that cracks the concrete. Life is the need to live, ravening and implacable.
This reminds me that I wanted to talk about Bruce. We were friends not even a full decade, though it seemed much longer. So much happened. We were young, and events were dramatic. Relationships were like drugs.
I wouldn’t say I was the Kerouac of our little group, but he was the Neal Cassady, the wild man, satyr and shaman. He was bigger than life, always laughing, and in perpetual motion. Everything he said was revelation or pure bathos. We followed him, and we recovered from him, and then we sought him out again. And then, suddenly, it was all over. He had crossed lines that couldn’t be forgiven, his antics gone too far. His friends turned away, grew up. The truth is, we had all crossed lines. His crimes were simply the most evident. I never really held a grudge, even though I had had to close the door. His life force was unrefined and unrestrained. He partook of that unstoppable power of spring.
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Spring skies don’t always bring spring temperatures. The sun has been reclaiming its skies, rising early and then climbing high, putting the clouds to flight. But in the morning, we still need our coats and scarves. This can be a frustrating time of year.
My workplace has made the mysterious decision to station us squarely in harm’s way, just as case numbers are rising. To be fair, they are just following the Dutch government’s advice and model, as they open restaurant terraces while taking their own sweet time with the vaccination rollout. It would be hard to find reason in the move. Expediency and obstinacy, yes; sensitive and thoughtful leadership, I don’t think so.
Someone close to us is struggling with COVID right now, so I may be a little humourless on this topic. This person is not in the Netherlands. She is in Ethiopia, where the healthcare system tries the best it can without the resources Dutch institutions have. They fall short when they would rather succeed. Here in Europe, it feels at times like we fall short just to be contrary.
Last week an old friend died. I don’t believe it was from COVID, though I can’t be sure. I had lost touch with him, and the news of his passing reached me in a circuitous fashion. We haven’t been close in many years, but I was nonetheless saddened by the news.
I’d like to write about my friend. I’d like to write about the many things he taught me. And I’d like to write about the galaxy of thoughts and feelings sparked by the event of his passing. It’s really impossible. Capturing honestly and accurately even one moment in writing is impossible. Writing requires structure that betrays the substance of being. I found this while writing the memoir about my first years in Ethiopia. I could buff the experience into a smooth narrative, which would be falsehood, or I could throw a mental net and capture fragments and impressions, commit them to the page somehow, and create a different type of falsehood. Memoir is a well-intentioned lie. A writer of memoir can only try, with every effort, to fashion a closer resemblance to truth.
It puts me in mind of Michelangelo, with no justification at all. He famously (apocryphally?) saw the statue inside the stone. When the statue is finished, it seems to live. His style is based on ancient Roman sculpture, and those Roman busts are indeed impressive. I’ve noticed lately on youtube efforts to animate those busts, so that we might get an idea of what the Caesars looked like. It really doesn’t work. It makes you realize the beautiful bust is not the person.
Monday, April 05, 2021
I interrupt my meditations again with an important bulletin. I have now seen the original pilot for “Suits”, a TV show that aired between 2011 and 2019. That means I’m qualified to report on the British royal family. “Suits” is the show that, of course, made Meghan Markle famous before her marriage to Prince Harry. In the pilot, she plays a sassy paralegal working at the high-powered law firm.
The series is a legal drama, and the show is not sparing with the tropes we love about this genre. The lawyers are cold-blooded and ruthless. They will do anything to win. They indulge in excess and luxury. Everything around them is beautiful. The male lawyers are womanizers in embarrassing style, meaning their behaviours are portrayed as cute and funny. They can’t help themselves; their physical attractiveness is a kind of imperative.
The practice of law is also portrayed in the usual film shorthand, time lapse drudgery and two-minute clips of a partner being a badass in a negotiation, and dramatic breaking points in interrogations. Who wouldn’t be mesmerized by the glamour of the law office? A lot of rhetoric is dedicated to the virtues of hard work and smarts, but the medium of television defies any real portrait. The screen allows for boredom but no pain, disaffection but no despair. It loves conflict, but can’t abide the long days when, hour after hour, you wonder how you will continue. It fails to depict mediocrity, even when it manages to be mediocrity in itself. Existentialist struggles don’t exist in law firms or on Wall Street.
Turning my newfound insights to an analysis of the royal family in England, it’s clear that the new Duchess was uniquely suited to join ‘The Firm’. She’s smarter and more attractive than the rest of us. She can be a badass in a negotiation. She rarely suffers from ennui or existential angst. If either intrudes on daily experience, she can be sure that a scene change is coming quickly. There will be none of these dreary depressions that beset royals of the twentieth century.
Piers Morgan has carried on with his crusade against Markle. It’s an odd obsession. “She’s just one of many whiny, privileged, hypocritical celebrities who now cynically exploit victimhood to suppress free speech,” he writes. Well, okay, it’s fun to call out spoiled celebrities, but isn’t he one of them? Does he get to do that? He calls out her “woke world view” and her service to cancel culture. Sure, the politically correct try our patience at times, but do they do that any more than the politically incorrect? Does being annoying make someone’s viewpoint wrong? Is it possible we’re annoyed because the politically correct are, in fact, correct? And again: does someone attacking another person so vehemently get to decry cancel culture? It appears that self-awareness remains the rarest quality in political discourse.
Friday, April 02, 2021
Baby Jos sees air molecules now. One beautiful morning, walking to school, Baby announced that she could see the molecules in the air. “They’re going everywhere,” she said. Her mama and I were suitably impressed. “You don’t see them?” she asked. I didn’t mind admitting that I couldn’t. I see a lot less than I used to, but even at its best, my sight was never up to spotting individual molecules.
After remarking a number of times on her new discovery, she asked why she couldn’t see the molecules as easily where the sun was making its slow appearance in the east. I said I couldn’t be sure, but maybe it had something to do with the sun’s strong light. She agreed. She warned me I shouldn’t look at the sun. Further, she said I shouldn’t try to reach out to touch the sun. I might hurt myself.
In short, I’m see Scaevola everywhere these days, now that I’ve begin the all-important discussion of that ancient Roman legend, the discussion that will reveal all sorts of truths and near-truths and passive truths and unconscious truths.
I see Scaevola in the old rock music videos I’ve been watching in between more sober activities. I do this to reminisce, and I love the memories. But I can’t help being amused sometimes at the earnest abandon those singers brought to the mic. They had no self-consciousness and very little sense of irony. It takes belief. You can see it in their eyes. Once the music starts, they are absolutely immersed and swimming in the experience. All for the show.
I see Scaevola in Trump-(and-post-Trump)-era headlines in the U.S., like “Car Rams into Barrier at the Capitol”. Or the January 6 assault itself, where hundreds of dum-dums led by the QAnon shaman in buffalo horns stormed the Capitol building. Like Icarus challenging the sun, … but lacking the wits, the charm, the joie de vivre, the innocence, or the pathos; lacking, basically, any quality that might have excited sympathetic response from any corner. The January 6 assault has little to recommend it as a mythical event, other its flirtation with fire.
One watches spectacles like these and wonders whether these people were sober.
Sunday, March 28, 2021
There’s a relentlessness to the Republican cant. They are incontinent, powerless over their message, powerless over their garrulousness. Their cant has the relentlessness of psychological need. When Baby is very tired, she seizes on some grievance and she cries and cries. She stomps a foot and demands attention. “You aren’t listening to me!” she shouts. This is what the Republican cant sounds like. Part of growing up should be a process of becoming self-aware of what one sounds like.
Apologies to my readers who were waiting for answers to the Scaevolan mysteries that have intrigued us for millennia; I’m needing to think out loud about this upsetting situation in American politics.
I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but the times force us to re-evaluate what we thought was bad before. Reagan and the Bushes do not deserve to be considered as good leaders by almost any objective measure. And yet, we are forced by the extremity of the Republican moral collapse to display them as models of behaviour. It’s extraordinary!
I don’t find it impossible to believe, for instance, that there were moments when G.W. consulted his conscience. Those times may not have been frequent. He may have overruled his conscience, or had it overruled. But I can believe there was some foundation of humanity there. How is it we have become so desperate that that seems a gold standard?
Tucker Carlson agreed with a guest on his show yesterday that the Republican Party would be forced to resort to a fascist candidate "within 10 to 20 years". Oh, really? And why is that? Because “… we’re going to be all treated like criminals, and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free ….” These are the thoughts that take the place of policy in America’s second party. It’s extraordinary!
What do you advise the child who complains that no one likes him? You advise that child to re-assess his way of relating to the other kids. The Republican cries of injustice are the cries of a bully who’s been ostracized. There are real reasons the other kids don’t like him! What the Republicans are saying when they cry foul is that they want the right to say and stand for offensive things without consequence. “My racist feelings are sincere. They represent deep values for me!” they cry. “You aren’t listening to me!”
So the governor of Georgia signs a law restricting voting rights while locked in a room with six other white dudes, sitting at a desk placed underneath a painting of a plantation that profited from slave labour. A black state legislator knocks on the door of the chamber and is hauled away by police. How does a politician become so blind to optics? By living in a bubble of grievance. “In my heart I’m a good person. If I’m a racist, it’s a good-guy racism.” He stomps his foot and cries that we’re not listening. It’s embarrassing.
The purpose of the political theatre that Republicans claim to abhor is to show us what’s inside a politician’s heart. The rest of us can’t see into your heart. Telling us, in ripe tones of indignation, that you’re a good guy doesn’t cut it.
I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but I do believe there is a place for a viable conservative party. I may never vote with them, but they form a function in political debate. The trouble is the Republican Party is no longer a viable conservative party. There is no constructive policy debate in the Republican Party. There is only grievance, and the grievance of people who have earned their exile. At this point, the Republican Party has to convince the nation and the world that they are not fascists. You don’t get to cry that people call you fascists when you act like fascists. Do the work! Find something positive to contribute to the nation!
Monday, March 22, 2021
Television is finally a force for good. There’s a show called ‘Number Blocks’ that has inspired Baby Jos with a passion for numbers and maths. She watches the show at every opportunity. The numbers have personalities and voices and colours, and Baby knows them all. When the TV is not on, she draws Number Blocks. She playacts with numbers.
More than knowing what colour the character Number Eight is, she has internalized the math. It’s astonishing. She knows that eight is made of four twos and two fours. She knows that five and three makes eight. Two and six, too. She became absolutely besotted with the idea of big numbers like a thousand and a million. She knows how to write a thousand. She knows it’s ten hundreds. She understand the rudiments of squares. I’m blown away, both by her acumen and her passion.
Youth is a succession of passions. This we know. Watching the unfoldment of those passions is mesmerizing. It’s one of the great joys of being a parent. It’s also something of a mystery. Do we ever understand human passions? We nod at them with wisdom, acknowledging them as a fact of life; we empathize, because we know what passion feels like; but do we understand another person’s passions? Why numbers? Why now? I don’t know. I love it, but I don’t understand it.
Returning to my last topic, the myth of the Passion of Scaevola, I find myself wondering why parents told their children this story. It may seem self-evident: to inspire patriotism. But what emotion did parents expect to rouse? Pride, horror, or aspiration? Each has its purpose, but they might be contradictory purposes. Most obviously, the child was meant to be proud to be a Roman. The child identifies as the same species as Scaevola, an exceptional race of people.
Identification goes further, though, especially for the child. The child imagines him- or herself in Scaevola’s shoes. What feeling ensues? Hopefully a horror at the thought of thrusting his or her hand into the fire. Eventually, the horror may turn into fascination. It was an act of passion, after all, something attractive to the human imagination. The word passion, by the way, derives from a Latin word for suffering. Thence, Christ’s Passion. Strange that it has come to mean desire! The child conceives a passion for the Passion of Scaevola. The child suffers what Scaevola suffers? The child desires what Scaevola suffered? The child desires to be a hero, or the child desires simply to suffer? Have the two become the same, by virtue of the framing of the story? What did the Romans praise when they praised Scaevola, the cold abstraction of patriotism or the fiery sacrificial impulse? What would the child absorb?
I haven’t really provided any answers, have I? Do I get another try?
Monday, March 15, 2021
It’s the Ides of March. Last year, I was being initiated into the new world of COVID lockdown. A year later, I’m still working at home. Bars and cafes are still shut. I’ve had exactly one beer so far this year, and, somehow, even though I’m eating at home and never drinking alcohol, I’m still in worse shape than ever. I’m gaining weight. I don’t run anymore, lacking the motivation of races. My eyes are fried from constant computer use. My psyche is in no better shape, though more spare than my flabby exterior, starved as it is by lockdown, haggard, lean, and spooked. I can’t remember the last time I was outside the city limits. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie in the theatre. Was there ever an Ides of March more fateful? Well, maybe one.
I’ve been listening to a podcast about the history of Rome. The podcast starts at the beginning, of course, and, being a well-behaved auditor, I’m starting there, too. It’s funny how Roman history starts in legend. Even the modern historian of Rome recounts the legends, admitting they’re legends, but having no alternative but the sketchiest archaeology. The legends, says the historian, may serve as a kind of code, betraying some truth behind their colourful dramas. The strange thing is how legend and truth are melded somewhere in the fifth century or so before Christ. For a century or two of Roman history, according to the histories written during the late Republic and later, legendary figures lived side by side with historical ones.
Prominent in Rome’s early history, legendary or otherwise, are the Etruscans, Rome’s powerful northern neighbours. It can safely be assumed that much of early Roman history was played out in the shadow of that civilization. One legend we inherit has its roots in a conflict with the Etruscans, the legend of Gaius Mucius Scaevola. This soldier was sent to assassinate King Porsenna of Clusium, who was attacking the city. Scaevola was captured and brought before the king. The soldier brashly told the king there would be many more assassins, and, when threatened with death by fire, the young man held his left hand in the fire without so much as a whimper, to prove the terrible resolve of his people. Porsenna let him go and promptly retreated, intimidated by the boy’s fervour. Legend or truth, you may be wondering. One clue might be that the soldier’s name, Scaevola, means left-handed in old Latin. What are the odds?
Is this patriotism or extreme predation? Is this passion or psychosis? All the answers in my next blog.
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
It’s embarrassing when your side makes bad art. Liberals and lefties have had it good in recent decades. The greats among the arts have primarily been fellow liberals. It must have been frustrating for loyal right-wingers with any aesthetic taste. What if they didn’t like country music? All that was left was Adam Sandler, reality TV and Expendables. Readers had propaganda, all inspired by the grande dame Ayn Rand. It’s tempting to think that the laws of physics don’t allow right-wing perspectives and good art to inhabit the same space. But it wasn’t so long ago that conservatives were the great patrons, and in some cases, the great artists. Look at T.S. Eliot. Look at what happened to his friend, Ezra Pound, weird convert to fascism and fan of Mussolini.
We watched the film “Moxie” on Netflix the other night, and it left me fearful that our golden age was passing. I realized how delicate the balance was between art made by lefties and leftie propaganda. It was a horrible movie, and not for any lack of talent on set. It was horrible because the filmmakers gave in to excess and demonstrated they were fine with propaganda. I couldn’t disagree with any of the political principles driving the film. But I was left utterly dejected by the mallet taken to the subject matter, and to the heads and shoulders of the audience. My God, it was tiring. Absolutely nothing could be left to the imagination. There was nothing that could be left to chance. There was nothing that could be ambiguous. The bad boy (played by the son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as it happens) could be left with not a shred of humanity. The good boy was painted with similar subtlety, a caricature of the attentive and selfless lover, who virtually evaporated into the mists whenever female eyes were not upon him. The girls and women (other than a good-hearted but misguided school principal) were all versions of cartoon superheroes. Each had her superpower and each had her cross to bear, but, gosh, when they united, there was no force, terrestrial or otherwise, that could withstand them. And never could they (or we) waver. Miserable.
Defenders of the film could say, “Reverse the casting, male for female, and what you’ve just said could apply to dozens, maybe hundreds, of movies made in recent decades. (See Expendables.)” That may be true, but you don’t defend bad art by referencing other bad art. It only makes it worse that they should have known better. It’s too late in the game to claim “Moxie” was satire.
The type in performance and narrative is coming back (as discussed in my last entry) and there is no better place for the type than in a propaganda piece. The heroes and villains play out our personal morality plays, not to remind us that we are fallible, but to remind us how mighty we are in our righteousness.
We know in our hearts we are the heroes, and we know we will vanquish. The pleasure of the drama is indulging in furious indignation at the villains and in the glory of seeing them smitten. We know that Thanos will be smitten in the final Avengers movie, but that’s a wholly different sensation to anticipating the glorious smiting of an arrogant son of a Republican governor. Rah, rah! Send in the cheerleaders.
Tuesday, March 09, 2021
Forgive me if I return to Chesterton. I have another insight from his writings about Dickens. It has some tangential relevance to my current meditations on historical fiction. He tells us that the difference between characters of ancient fiction versus modern literature is the difference between types (divine because unchanging) and individuals (changing and mortal). Chesterton claims that Dickens was the last to create divine characters in the modern era. “Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist,” he writes. What makes types appealing is their timelessness. They are ‘divine’ in the sense that they don’t age. Even when their stories demonstrate narrative arc, their essences are unchanging. Pickwick is Pickwick from start to finish of Dickens’s novel.
Discussing pre-modern literature, Chesterton makes reference to “the comic literature”, and my mind automatically reads it as “comic books”. It’s a telling substitution. Forgetting for one instant when Chesterton was writing, I make him a spokesman for a question of my own. Isn’t our century’s fixation on super-hero narratives odd? Isn’t there something medieval or ancient about this falling back into morality tales populated with heroes and types? Characterization has become fairly shallow and formulaic, even in the films that don’t feature heroes and villains in costume. Audiences must be informed which characters they’re dealing with within seconds, identities communicated through signals like costume, gesture and speech patterns. This is a theatre of masques.
When this principle is applied to historical fiction, then what do we get? Is that where Regency romances come from and time travel novels? This is history written for the thrill of interacting vicariously with types. Heroes are types almost by definition. Our historical heroes have become types that live eternally in the imagination. We want to see them alive in imagery. Alexander the Great enters the field of battle. We want to see how he walks, hear what he sounds like, know who his lovers are. It’s like brain candy; it’s simple gratification.
There’s this voyeuristic element to all historical fiction. What matters is whether the gratification is the first purpose of the book or whether there is a story to be told. I mentioned that I had been reading “Circe”. Here’s a book that definitely trades on the thrill element; we get to see the Greek gods walk the earth again! (Did anyone see them the first time?) But there is more going on. The first level of deeper engagement is the ‘what if?’ What would the memoir (in the modern sense) of a goddess sound like? I think Miller was very successful with this challenge. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written, and the heroine does change and grow. I won’t reveal Miller’s ending, but I will say that it’s made nearly inescapable by the choice to rescue the character from type.
One aspect to the novel seems less successful. Is Miller using Circe’s ‘life’ to teach us about women’s struggles? If so, I don’t find it very convincing. She’s in good company there, since scholars and writers have for millennia been interpreting mythology and projecting pedagogical narratives on tops of the stories of Greek gods and goddesses, despite the very evident chaos that characterizes the world of the Olympians. Miller’s tell is the typing of male characters in juxtaposition to the individualization of the heroine. Circe’s complexity stands in almost humorous contrast to Telemachus’s stasis as the man who listens and also is darn handy. But, there you go: no goddess is perfect.
Thursday, February 25, 2021
Very slowly, the temperatures have been dropping, though they’re still unseasonably high. We have had almost two weeks of beautiful weather, something very noteworthy in the Netherlands. It has been the perfect opportunity for me to start exercising again, and yet I haven’t. I have shown great resourcefulness in avoiding the necessary. I have discovered and invented any number of excuses to put off my responsibility to be healthy. Fortunately, I have a better angel in Menna, who has been stubborn about insisting that I start running again. Yesterday, finally, I started. In the same way that I needed excuses to avoid exercise, I also needed one to start running. It seems there is little I can do in life simply because I should. My excuse was, as it was for Ted Cruz, my kids. Baby Jos needs more practice on her bicycle, so I suited up for running, and I took her out on the bike paths. That was a workout! What I hadn’t thought out was that, once she was pedalling, there was very little I could do to control the pace. Neither could I indulge in my suffering. I had to smile and encourage. There was no room for huffing and puffing, swearing or weeping, like I might reasonably have been expected to do. And that was my first run in months. The good news is, Baby Jos is becoming quite proficient on her little two-wheeler. Even better, she was having a good time. She was absolutely delighted to be out on her bike again, and so excited to be testing herself on the bike paths. She wore a huge grin the entire time, easy and genuine, as a stark contrast to her father’s expression of real distress, masquerading as supportive-daddy face. I’m forced to assert, though, that there is nothing like sharing your child’s joy, no matter the personal duress. The part of me that hovered high above the sweating and suffering physical self was sincerely happy.
Sunday, February 21, 2021
Baby asks me wonderful questions. Riding home on the train, as we watched the fields spin by, as we watched sunlight glint off the canals, Baby asked, “Why does the sun like us?” One week after our snowy trip to Baby’s violin lesson, we’re making the same trip in temperatures nearing 60˚F. It’s uncanny.
“Why does the sun like us?” It’s such a lovely question, and I was delighted. It doesn’t matter what I answered, because fanciful and beautiful questions deserve fanciful and beautiful answers. Any response beginning with, “Actually,” would never have made it past my lips. I think I said something about the sun loving all it surveys, or something about how the sun gives life to everything. Baby’s mom is a Christian, so I figure I have some room for playful paganism.
I was reminded of the god Helios, whom I’ve always revered in my agnostical, not-quite-serious, pantheistic manner. Helios is also a character in the novel I’m reading now, “Circe” by Madeline Miller. The book is a fanciful book about the Greek goddess and sorceress, Circe. The goddess tells her own story, and it’s a fun read. Okay, it’s not historical fiction, but it does feel like a fit with my theme of historical fiction in recent months, just because it complements so neatly my unceasing fascination with ancient Greek and Roman history.
If I were to analyse the voice given to this ahistorical figure, Circe, I would say it has authority and it’s seductive. The narrative demonstrates dramatic arc, discovery and personal development, opportunities for assertion and for redemption. I have few objections to the language attributed to someone speaking to me across several thousand years, other than my usual regret combined with gratitude for the overlay of modern psychological concept. The regret is that’s it’s anachronistic; the gratitude is that it makes characters relatable.
If anything, I wish for tougher choices. Of course we want the hero to be the sorceress. Of course, we want her to redeem the path of witchcraft with her humanity and her self-possession. I could have wished for a story, say, from inside Athena’s light and wisdom and dull righteousness. The choices all seem too easy. But I certainly can’t complain about the adept story-telling and refined language.
I’ve been thinking about these deities and the complex mythologies they populate. Helios is the sun, but he has a form and a life beyond being the fiery disc in the sky. In that sense, he is not the disc itself, but somehow the personality of the sun in the sky and, in some senses, the supervisor of the operational side of being sun. It’s a sort of feudalism. Helios is Duke of Sunshine.
Philosophers of the classical ages felt compelled to explain and interpret their inherited mythology. It strikes me as the obvious first step that Plato would have offered the idea of forms defining and animating the things of this world, kind of like the way gods and goddesses did, but without the personality, pranks and sexual escapades. Real philosophers will wince at this reductionist thought, but it does follow, doesn’t it? My child sees Helios in the sky. She’ll later abstract it into an idea, a placeholder in the mind, before science ‘solves’ her problem: why does the sun like us?
Sunday, February 14, 2021
It’s been a festive week. Last weekend it snowed, and temperatures dipped below freezing. They fell, and they stayed below freezing all week. The canals froze. The sun came out. And slowly we saw people venturing out onto the ice. By yesterday, skaters were out everywhere, turning elegant circles on the ice. Baby and I had a chance to watch them in a number of locations. We travelled to a nearby village for Baby’s violin lesson. Since the lockdown has closed the school, we receive video lessons and, once in a while, we travel to the teacher’s house. All along the way, from the tram and from the train, we saw cheerful people on the canals. In the small town of Pijnacker, we walked by families enjoying the day together outside. Many of them had gathered on the ice. Dads were pulling sleds with toddlers. Moms on ice skates were holding young ones with skates. Older kids were pushing each other on the ice. Baby and I went out on the canal together. It was her first time on the ice, and she couldn’t have been more excited. We slid around on the ice, and Baby demanded I teach her how to ice skate immediately. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We have no skates!” This snowfall caught us woefully unprepared. We had no shovel to clear the walkway. We had no sled. We had no ice skates. The media is telling us we haven’t seen these conditions in ten years. Certainly not since we’ve been here. There have been a few snowstorms, one or two that were big ones, but no snow that stuck. The girls have enjoyed themselves, despite our lack of preparation, making snowballs until their hands hurt so much they cried. They gathered ice and called it treasure. They made snow angels. They even got to see an igloo. Mysteriously, they had clamoured to build one. I don’t know where that idea came from. And then, amazingly, we discovered that a downstairs neighbour had made one, packing snow into a shallow recycling bin to make bricks! Today is Valentine’s Day, and, in a kind of bow to the divine Eros, the freeze has broken. There was no evident change in the skies. The wind was constant. The sun shone in the same way it had the day before. And yet, by noon, the temperatures had broken through freezing. We took a walk by our canal, and there were already long cracks in the ice. We were sad to see our winter-in-winter already passing.
Saturday, February 06, 2021
If we consider “Blood Meridian” as historical fiction, even tentatively, then maybe we have a basis for analysing the voice, the way we did for Vidal’s “Julian”. “Blood Meridian” is not a first-person narrative, of course, and so the strategies of the two books must diverge. Vidal had to make a decision about what Julian himself should sound like, and he opted for accessibility. It’s fair to say that McCarthy had something very different in mind. We are just about as far from McCarthy’s characters’ states of mind as we could imagine. The third person narrative distances us. The lack of a single clear protagonist distances us. The stratospheric perspective taken by the narrator distances us. And what is the voice of that narration? When I ‘listen’, I hear a few different strains interwoven.
Much has been said about McCarthy’s ‘Faulknerian’ style. I’m not convinced. His style reminds me more of the beat writers than of Faulkner. There is that (dark) lyricism stretched to breaking point. There is that sense of something big forever imminent, a sense never quite fulfilled except by the thrill of imminence. There is that playful, if sometimes strained, use of vocabulary. My experience of Faulkner has been one of sinking deeply into convoluted sentences and tidal emotion. Faulkner was sleeping pills and whiskey, whereas the beats were amphetamines. McCarthy might fall in the middle, nearer to tequila on a hangover. There just isn’t the emotional depth or radical constructions of the language. Long sentences don’t make Faulkner.
McCarthy reaches occasionally for nineteenth-century cadences, sometimes with a Coen-Brothers-like exaggeration, employing the wooden and stodgy formality that cinema has taught us is Civil-War-era language. It’s a concession of sorts to the exigencies of historical fiction. But the beat liberties clearly take precedence, making for only a fleeting period feel. Take as example these excerpts from the beginning to Chapter XI: “The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles.” “… and they crossed a high saddle at sunset where wild doves were rocketing down the wind …” It’s expressive language, but language that can’t decide when or where it was written.
All in all, I’d say “Blood Meridian” is about “Blood Meridian”. It has a terrible beauty of its own, but I’m not sure it aspires to speaking either for or about its chosen time period. A few singularly savage images are offered as symbols of the pillaging of the continent. In that sense, it’s a didactic piece. Beyond that, it’s simply fanciful language for a cold-blooded story.
Wednesday, February 03, 2021
Taking Scalps
Who are, after all, the characters of this novel? I would say the primary one is Nature. Dizzying amounts of language are devoted to the deserts and the treacherous skies. That does not mean that Nature can be allowed to be a sympathetic character. No character can be in a book like this. The book is set in wartime, and so each force and every character is painted in adversarial light, pitted not only against each other, but against the reader. The war is not one given a name in history books. It’s the continual assault on humanity and Nature that is the mundane history of North America after the Europeans invade.
There is ‘the kid’, whose unreliable presence provides the main thread through the book. The kid doesn’t speak much. He’s destitute without knowing it. He moves from one degrading experience to the next. He proves himself capable of unthinking acts of violence. He proves himself capable of survival. He survives without a conscious reason to, as far as the reader knows, and a cynic would firmly state that that sets him apart among humans in no way at all. I might answer, no, this is not a metaphysics. It’s fiction, and still a portrait rather than a medical treatise. Few people accept so blandly that they have no reason to live. But all right: point of view is a choice.
The kid runs into some bad company. There doesn’t seem to be many other options in the world he inhabits. He falls in with a troop of bounty hunters, led by the foul Glanton and the supernatural Judge Holden. This troop rides around northern Mexico taking scalps and causing mayhem in any town that allows them in. There’s little to like about them, but there’s no one else to root for in this landscape. The Apaches are bizarrely vicious. The Mexicans are passive and venal. One might root for the landscape itself, which is always lovingly described, but it, too, seems guided by malevolence.
It should be stated that Glanton and Holden are based on historical figures. This novel, as creepy as it is, as set as it is on portraying reality as unreal, or at least unnatural, qualifies as historical fiction. The historical figures are only points of departure in characterization, but the outline of the narrative cleaves more or less faithfully to what remains of a historical record. Maybe it qualifies as historical fiction mostly as a kind of meta-narrative about the rape of the Americas.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
It’s not a great leap from GK Chesterton’s “Charles Dickens” to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. At least, it presents itself that way to me. Chesterton sees the core of Dickens’s character and achievement in an essential optimism, some of which is inidvidual and some of which is inherited from the post-revolutionary optimism of his times, the mood that engendered the great reforms of Britain’s political system in the 1830s. Chesterton himself writes as though sending an epistle from inside the dark, oppressive regime of the Enemy, a brooding systemic pessimism. Those of you familiar with McCarthy see where I’m going.
I think of my years in Ethiopia, when I would awkwardly try to explain the America that I knew. The America they knew from afar was a place of shining optimism and possibility. I told them my America was a place of sadness and grief. We were a people who were haunted by our crimes and history and politics. We were violent, and we were haunted by fear. I told them I had travelled a lot, and I had never encountered a people as sad as the Americans.
My impression may be wrong-headed, but it does explain a lot. Look at the Republican party. It’s the party of distraction. Imagine a person avoiding all feelings of guilt or remorse, and you might have a recognizable profile. It’s not Trump; he is relatively soulless and incapable of remorse. That’s why he serves as a good fantasy figure for Republicans. No, it’s the Republican voter.
Fantasy is the party’s product now. It offers no policy. It offers no ideas for governance. It offers a cult’s creed and world view for people who want escape into addictive rages and grandiose futurescapes. QAnon – the fever dream of a porno merchant – was tailormade for the modern dystopic Republican Party.
This is the dark side of democracy. When people are bored by or distracted from the business of self-governance, then proto-fascists enter with their opiate dreams for sale. Oddly enough, the country does continue to run, like the auto whose driver has fainted, even when the people of a democracy have fall into weird reveries, even when they vote for parties according to the cults they represent, rather than the policies they will implement.
I think McCarthy would agree that the country is a sad place. His book, “Blood Meridian” seems a kind of shorthand compilation of all the crimes and perversions that have made American history what it is. His characters are animated by something very different than idealism. All of them, that is to say, except the weird archon, Judge Holden.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
I started this month’s rambling lit rants with an objective in mind, which was simply to discuss my December reading, particularly the two books that fired my imagination most. One was “Julian”, and the other was “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy. Combining Vidal and McCarthy was not easy. As I commented somewhere on social media, the combination made for a case of indigestion. That’s all right. We pay a price gladly for our indulgences and feasts in times like these.
I’ve commented at length about “Julian”, but have neglected Mr McCarthy. And I will have to delay my comments on “Blood Meridian” once more because I can’t stop thinking about GK Chesterton’s introductory chapter in “Charles Dickens”. No one will mind. It’s somehow fitting – (the vague evasion in ‘somehow’ very McCarthy-like) – that I suspend McCarthy this way, between two wide horizons, the one left behind in December and the one ahead, undefined and ever-receding.
There’s something so appealing about Chesterton’s thought process that I can’t quite let it go. Chesterton suggests that Dickens is misunderstood. Dickens had lost much of his popularity in the several generations preceding Chesterton’s book, and GK tries to explain it by applying his theory about the essential optimism of the times following the French Revolution. The gloomy Realists and Post-Romantics of the second half of the century found Dickens’s exuberance jarring.
He goes further. To write fiction is to exaggerate, he claims. The character of the exaggeration will seem naturalistic or unrealistic depending simply on the author’s choice of qualities to exaggerate. Dicken’s characters seemed comical and enjoyable to his peers and grotesque to later generations, simply because joy became a less ‘natural’ quality to exaggerate in contrast with sorrow. There is something very rational in this idea, and it might even be true. GK goes on to predict that Dickens’s comeback will depend on a revival of his values. It may well have been that Dickens’s popularity did rebound, say, in the post-war years of the 50s and 60s. I don’t know enough to comment. But it does seem likely to me that his status now rides high whatever the mood.
I think this little exposition appeals to me as an older parent of young children, tending, when left alone, toward the darker moods of autumn, and then amazed and heartened by the bright hues of spring that my little girls bring into the room with them.
I can also identify as a writer of farce. He hints at a notion that I had been entertaining myself when he comments that “exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow,” and when he likens Dickens’s impulse to farce with Shakespeare’s. “We understand a devout occultism, an evil occultism, a tragic occultism, but a farcical occultism is beyond us.” There is definitely something to all this, and my intuition that it was so led me into researching the Commedia dell’Arte and the roots of Renaissance farce in medieval passion plays and troubadours.
Sunday, January 17, 2021
I always liked Mr Gilbert Keith Chesterton. GK seemed like a genial spirit among his jaded Edwardian and interwar contemporaries, who were busy exploring the bleaker corners of modernism. He was a professed Catholic and a prolific author. He wrote about his faith, and he seemed an unshakeable voice of optimism. That’s not something to be dismissed too lightly, as I think we can agree upon during these dark days of lockdowns and rogue presidents.
I picked up his book on Dickens second-hand a while ago, and with a moment free for pleasure, I dove into it this weekend. Right away, I was transported … no further than the mind of GK Chesterton.
I enjoy the magisterial pace of the writing of this era, probably a Victorian hangover from when writers were paid by the word and when readers had lots of time on their hands. He doesn’t start with Dickens at all but with an obscure question of the definition of terms. “Much of our modern difficulty,” he writes, and immediately finds a place for his favourite subject in the first sentence of a book about Dickens “in religion [of course] and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word ‘indefinable’ with the word ‘vague’.” This is how he starts the book! I was laughing already. I can really enjoy this kind of writing, when it’s done with some panache, this high flight over the subject at hand, among clouds of rhetoric.
He sets up one faux controversy to lead us to another: why are there no modern ‘greats’, when we can all agree that there were a complete set of them in the nineteenth century? It surprised absolutely no one, I imagine, that he answered the question with a moral comparison between the two epochs, claiming that among the generation or two after the French Revolution, there was a passionate belief in equality and an exhilarating atmosphere of possibility.
Fine, the pragmatic reader is thinking, happy to yield on all points, all founded on precious little but fine-sounding abstractions, just to get to the first concrete detail about Charles Dickens. I can fairly hear the grinding of teeth among my contemporaries launching into this book. No one has patience for this style anymore. I’m marketing a book now. I know very well that we have no liberty to start a book this way in our day and age. It’s our loss, like our impatience with small talk. “It’s so false,” we say dismissively, revealing more about our brittle mental architectures than about age-old conventions.
What GK is doing, of course, is setting the stage for a meditation of who Dickens was and what he did, providing historical context and a mood, and doing so in a relatively economical way, if you think about it. The light, absurd, and unanswerable questions GK starts with are just riddles to tease the mind gently into a perspective, like leading a guest to the window with the fairest view. I read GK’s introduction, and I’ve taken on board a sense of the zeitgeist of his times rather comfortably. I’m ready for the entrance of the ‘great’ man.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
I took a minute on the Metro to read from the book I had packed, handy because it was small, a memoir-style travel book by John Banville called “Prague Pictures”. I hadn’t gotten far before I came to an interesting comment on scene-setting in stories.
Banville was reflecting on a description of Prague he had penned before he had ever seen the city. Some time later, he was visiting the city and comparing his description to the real thing. “Yes, I had got it right,” he writes, “to a startling degree. Why was I not pleased? In part because, standing there surveying my handiwork, I was struck yet again by the essential fraudulence of fiction. … It is all a sleight of the imagination, a vast synecdoche.”
I have to assume that Banville isn’t entirely serious here. It’s a light observation, perhaps meant to compliment Prague on its beauty, even as he seems to slight it. Maybe it’s a show of humility, though it reads rather as an indictment of the profession.
“Conjure a winter morning,” he says, “a river and a castle and a traveller disembarking with a book under his arm, and for the space of a page or two an implied world comes to creaky life.”
I’ve had occasion to have similar thoughts: a few brush strokes go a long way in setting a scene. It’s part of the magic of fiction. I’m not quite so dismissive of the technique, though. I don’t claim to do it well myself, but I do believe there’s an art to it.
The implication that scene-setting is easy and formulaic is problematic. For one thing, that assessment drops the reader out of any calculation. You may well be jaded about a writer speaking to him or herself, but that isn’t the case in a published work. When the author sets a scene, s/he connects with existing conceptions of a place and ‘place’ in general. It’s a complex data set that adds up to ‘place’, and all we can hope to do is activate a few evocative points – a vivid colour, shape, scent, sound, quality to the air, etc.
Some of his readers will be have been to Prague, some will not. The ones who haven’t will have a romantic image of it that may be more vivid than the memory of those who have been. Those who have been will have had different experiences. For some American readers, the same data points might evoke Ghent as easily as Prague. But the image awakened is theirs. Does this automatically mean that the author was lazy?
Finally, I have to question Banville’s rather summary judgement of success: “I had got it right to a startling degree.” I’m not sure what that means. He got the river and castle in the right place? He had captured in writing exactly the feeling that he himself was now experiencing? How is that a measure of the reader’s experience?
I wouldn’t want to go too far in the defence of artistry. Laziness in success is a virtue, after all. But this account of it doesn’t add up.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Travelogue 962 – January 13
Grace, Anyway
Grace is an interesting concept, anyway. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea, the divine parent’s kiss on the brow, as it were. Taken out of its controversial context in Christian church history and theological history, it’s a beautiful notion.
Dipping a toe into that embroiled church history, you see that grace plays a defining role. It’s the concept that stands in the middle of most historical doctrinal disputes. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t it bizarre, for example, that reformers broke from the Catholic Church, declaring ‘faith alone’, only to agree in quick order that most of humanity was damned before they were born? That the thread leading there should have originated in a notion as liberal as grace seems odd.
Having children encourages you to meditate on ideas like grace. You wonder at the gift of life and are overwhelmed by parental love. You see the spark of life and the innocence in a baby’s eyes, and you forgive yourself for indulging in sentimental ideas about souls and God. The baby and the love she inspires are gifts. If there is a God, then He/She/It is the giver.
My child has built her small models of dragons from the pieces of her magnet set. She tells a story about these dragons, how we found their eggs outside in the bushes and brought them home. The eggs hatched and now we have to take care of the babies. “But wasn’t this the mama dragon?” I ask. “This is the mama dragon,” my girl assures me, sensing no contradictions.
Baby weaves her stories quite spontaneously, and, though the subject is fantasy, the voice is authentic. How can she do that? It must relate to the innocence I’ve mentioned, the gift of grace. She is the live witness to the events of the story. There is nothing false about her vision nor the description of it. Therefore, it’s true in an essential way.
If I invented a dragon story, I would be weighing plot choices and weighing words, and therefore, aware of a shadow version that might be just as ‘true’, introducing a note of falseness. “It’s just a story,” we tell our kids when they’re scared. But the distinction is false in the eyes of grace. Grace is generous.
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
There are certainly some oddballs in this movement to ‘Stop the Steal’. Apparently, Senator Josh Hawley, the eager beaver who started the rush of conservative senators to challenge the states’ electors in Congress last week, thinks it all started with Pelagius in the fourth century. Pelagius was a monk who led a popular Christian ascetic movement in Rome. Pelagius blamed the moral state of most Christians on an exaggerated idea of the power of grace. He taught that it was good works that won salvation. The monk was authoritatively denounced and abused by the church hierarchy, including luminaries like Augustine and Jerome. And, of course, by every good Protestant since Luther.
Exhibit A in Hawley’s indictment of the liberals’ corrupt Pelagianism is the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. When Justice Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” he was channelling the fourth-century monk and leading us all to perdition.
Yes, there are some odd ducks leading this Parler incel rebellion. This Yale Law School grad who raises a fist to the hillbillies, this awkward adolescent trying too hard to sound hip, this poster boy of bad judgement, this uncharitable pastor to the Proud Boys, our strutting prophet from Missouri, Josh, he is not shy about announcing who is damned and where democracy must be clipped and tailored to meet God’s requirements.
William Barr is quoted as saying, while he was the U.S. Attorney General, that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.” In other words, for a fallen people like liberal America, democracy is no longer an option.
Monday, January 11, 2021
Ultimately, I’d rather spend five hundred pages with Vidal’s Julian than with Gibbon’s. The novel is great entertainment. Vidal’s elegant style, of questionable value in understanding the real Julian, is valuable on its own merits. It’s a novel; it’s a piece of art.
How faithful do we need to be to the spirit of history? In the case of entertainment, we post-moderns have decided: not very. We stray far further from source material than Vidal did, some six decades after “Julian” was published. The farther we go, the more we make excuses. Now our histories are speculative. Our fantasies are written to stimulate thought: what would it be like to be (for example) Julian? Notice I didn’t say ‘would have been like’. We’re not asking what it was like for him, but what it would be like (for us) to be him.
In between family programs on Netflix, during long bathroom breaks, I’ve been indulging in the old Robert Downey Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes. These movies diverge significantly from the Conan Doyle canon and from traditional portrayals of Holmes. (The movies pre-date the Cumberbatch Holmes.) I realize that Sherlock Holmes is no historical figure, but he’s a fictional character with historical significance. Why we loved the new film versions of Sherlock was analogous to why we liked the Vidal version of Julian. We got to dress up and play act.
I’m guessing that a hundred years ago the primary enjoyment people derived from Holmes as a character was amazement. That was probably the first response to superheroes in post-war pop culture. “Imagine if there were someone like that!” Things changed, and amazement wasn’t enough. We wanted to be amazing. “Imagine if I could do that!” And when we needed to play the part of our heroes, the narrative style changed. We needed psychological access, and we needed fantasy adventures that were manufactured in contemporary, recognizable formats and settings. Holmes’ London became a steampunk theme park, glowing, larger than life, sinister.
Entertainment’s approach to history, ransacking the cupboards on a long and boring weekend, is essentially an act of cannibalism. We’re mincing up the human experience for a tasty snack. It’s no harsh indictment to say so; I’m a remorseless consumer of all of it. But I do think it pays to be self-aware. As much as we’d like to tell ourselves that, say, Steampunk Sherlock is a kind of thought experiment that challenges us to see narratives and characters in new ways, and so on … no; it’s brain candy for the culture cannibal.
We need to think once in a while about how culture candy contributes to tooth decay; how people raised on a diet of superhero cosplay grow up to see vandalizing the Capitol building as the moral equivalent of revolution. Dressing up makes it real. The drama justifies itself, and all damage is collateral. Think of the dummies who were shocked they were tear-gassed on January 6. This is my Experience, they bluster.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
The thing is, there is no neutral voice. That’s especially true in historical fiction. An author may decide on his or her own voice as the most neutral platform for story-telling, but it’s never thoroughly neutral. Every vernacular communicates its own place and values. There is at the core of Vidal’s Julian an east coast boarding school alum, wry and earnest in equal measures, jaded, smart and ineffectual. This accent starts to shed authenticity as the character matures, becomes powerful, and becomes successful, successful not as an intellectual, but as a general and politician.
Finally, Vidal’s voice finds its biggest obstacle when it comes to religion. Julian may have become the patron saint of anticlerical liberals, but he was far from being one himself. Being anti-Christian did not make him anti-religion. Vidal does address this in his book, largely in marginal notes by his philosopher characters. But the characterization begins to break down, just when Julian grows into the character that history knows best, the Apostate. I believe it’s the effect of the voice, seeming such a natural fit in earlier passages but becoming more restrictive. The fact is, if the Apostate is the most popular version of Julian, he is also the most difficult Julian for moderns to understand. He was a product of his times, a believer in magic and omens and gods who required blood sacrifice.
In crafting a more ‘authentic’ voice for Julian, I think we would be forced to strike a pose less likeable. This was a man bound by and feeling deep sympathy for tradition, hierarchy and authority – and the Roman principle of auctoritas, – and a man who became a very effective wielder of power. We’re already miles from Vidal’s Julian as genial genius.
Examining narrative voice begs an interesting question about the motivation for historical fiction. Is it (1) to live out the events and bear witness? Or is it (2) to inhabit the consciousness of a historical figure? If ‘inhabitation’ sounds creepy, let’s reframe it as a privileged moment with the historical celebrity, breaking bread with someone fascinating, conversing with them, gaining a glimpse into their thinking? Vidal’s voice is appropriate for the latter task, but at the expense of the former task, bearing witness. Vidal did his research. His account of events can generally be trusted, but I’m not sure we have gained much more understanding about those events than we could have had from Gibbon. What we gained was the chance to dress up and play act.
Saturday, January 09, 2021
“On 22 May, 337, Constantine died at Nicomedia, to his apparent surprise, since he had just taken the water cure at Helenopolis and all the omens suggested a long life.” This is Vidal’s Julian, early in the faux memoir that comprises most of Vidal’s novel. If it sounds like the kind of light and cutting commentary you might have overheard at a New York cocktail party in the 60s, well, there is a reason for that. It sounds an awful lot like the author himself. Vidal was always one for delicious ironies, like the Christian emperor disappointed in his pagan omens.
One of the challenges in writing historical fiction is choosing the right voice. Do you make an effort to sound ‘authentic’? And how would you then define ‘authentic’? The attempt to sound, in this case, like a fourth-century Roman (Greek is closer to the mark) might have been more distracting than helpful. And it would have been only partially effective in any case. It would be hard enough to sound like, say, a contemporary French person while writing in English, let alone to sound like an ancient man speaking an ancient language. And how do we ‘sound like’ another culture in prose? I don’t think we awkwardly imitate an accent or sprinkle the text with anachronisms. I think we try to echo the cadences of thought. It’s highly unlikely that Julian would ever have framed the observation about Constantine’s death in just that way, in Vidal’s casual elegance. And it’s far less likely that it would have seen its way to the written page (parchment), particularly in a diary-like record of an emperor’s feelings.
Vidal made a choice. He wanted an accessible story, and an accessible character. The language is familiar, in a kind of affirmation that people haven’t changed that much, that we can imagine the experience of this remarkable historical figure. It works well through the narration of Julian’s youth, when he was, in essence a student and philosopher. We sense the innocence, the earnestness, and the erudition. (Of course, Julian was meant to be writing the story as a mature man, already emperor of the Romans, but the trick works.)
It’s when Julian is elevated to Caesar and sent to Gaul that we begin to perceive a few false notes. This is why I wonder if Vidal lost track of his original goal in telling the story. The project of writing a novel is a long one, and I don’t think it’s at all uncommon that authors evolve in their thinking as the story itself evolves, subtly changing course. Vidal, for example, may have begun the novel in anticipation of Julian’s showdown with the Christians, only to be distracted by the prince’s personal journey.