The Tudors have always captured the imagination. They have been especially popular in recent decades. Because we are so familiar with the characters and events, Mantel is free to abbreviate her descriptions and background. We don’t need one more full-length portrait of big King Henry bursting at the seams. We don’t require more descriptions of ruffles and hose. Mantel has the freedom to indulge her tightly circumscribed narrative voice: most of us don’t stop to marvel at the details of our world as we move through it. We don’t start every encounter with a mental description of our colleague, boss or mate. Reading Mantel’s book, we are free to assume many of the details that Thomas Cromwell would naturally neglect and instead focus on our immersion, through his eyes, in the conflicts of the age.
A disadvantage to this method, in my opinion, is that the work is rather cool and detached. The world we explore, the world of this worldly man, is rather shadowy. A character as colourful as Henry VIII is rather muted in the circle of chiaroscuro drawn among Cromwell’s thoughts.
It makes sense that this sort of book about the Tudors was necessary, a book in which the passions are relegated to the royal chambers and to distant battlefields, while we listen in on the discussions of the adults left in charge. In this depiction of events, the events themselves must be positioned at a remove. Our attention will be on the dread and the remorse that attend history. In tumultuous times, the people with intellect just do their best, and they suffer.
The consequence, in my opinion, is a portrayal of a man of action that is comfortably devoid of action. The “Wolf Hall” books describe a writer’s world, don’t they? It’s a world of reflection and refraction, a world I well understand. This is certainly how I am most comfortable describing action, from a vantage point afterward, examining the quiet ripple of effects, surveying the wreckage. It’s something in the character of the writer, this impulse to quietly tread from still stone to still stone in the stream. That’s fine, and it makes for a provocative depiction of a historical figure who, by most accounts, was rather brutal.
A writer likes to see him or herself in the mirror of history, seeing the same fragile light of intellect in the eyes of Holbein’s portrait. But does that serve as a true guide to the age? Isn’t it likely that Cromwell was only what he seemed, a very capable and willing administrator, and a man who was, in fact, content with his duties and free of the impulse to philosophize? Isn’t it possible that people of action, in an age of action, are quite happy with the life of action, like football players who live from game to game without needing justification?
I enjoy Mantel’s work, and, believe me, I’m personally much more at home in her worlds than in many alternatives. But I do feel at times as though the “Wolf Hall” books were written by a book club as a kind of philosophical proof that the world has always been a Platonic dialogue. Mantel’s Cromwell spends a lot of time in discussion, sitting in gardens, strolling with colleagues and family, meditating over an aperitif. Is it Cromwell’s London we are invited to see, or the author’s? There’s little question which is comfier. But ultimately, I do think we need to be put a little more on our guard; we need a dose of the alien that lurks in history.
Whether we like it or not, it’s action that moves history. Commonly, historical fiction builds sympathy by access to thoughts and emotions, which we assume, rightly or wrongly, are constant. Then the narrative turns to action in order to break the bond of sympathy. Why is that? What is alien about action? It’s the concrete expression of difference. It’s true that Mantel doesn’t hide it. We are drawn close to blood and violence. There are heads on pikes; there is the beheading of Anne. But they are primarily offstage. And they become aesthetic pieces, in the final analysis. Exposed to the moments of shock, we withdraw into the breathable atmosphere of mood and thought for many subsequent pages.
Saturday, July 17, 2021
Thursday, July 15, 2021
The Present Perfect
Part Six
I’ve returned to Wolf Hall, finally reading the third book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy. I came to it with great anticipation. The two previous volumes had revolutionized my thinking about historical fiction. They were intelligent and insightful. Events of the Tudor era, usually portrayed in breathless style, were humanized and lent some gravity. Sure, it’s fun to indulge in the scandal of the time, but the issues were serious, and the stakes were high, not only for the players in the Henry VIII’s drama, but for all the souls affected by the tumults of the Reformation, down to the present-day Irish. It was refreshing to enter into the quieter moments of the time and to be convinced of the dread that pervaded King Henry’s court.
I’ve had time to build up anticipation, so it would be natural that I felt some disappointment once I started reading. Moreover, Mantel’s style is not the type to stun or overwhelm in the first pages. It builds in its effect. As I started reading, I had to accustom myself again to her cadence, slow and stately. I had to get used to the narrator’s point of view. Mantel adopts that unsettlingly intimate third person, according to which Cromwell is rarely referred to by name. Instead, ‘he’ is so often the subject of sentences that it can become confusing. Every so often, the voice shifts into ‘we’, as though voicing Cromwell’s thoughts. Quotes begin in quotation marks and then continue without them, as though narrative about Cromwell becomes Cromwell’s notes. There is consistency in it; Mantel is precise. It creates a sense of seeing through Cromwell’s eyes while still maintaining the detachment of a third-person narrative. The question isn’t about Mantel’s execution but whether the effort was worth the effect. It’s always interesting; it’s occasionally annoying. I’m not ready to judge it yet.
My questions are broader. What does the point of view tell us about Mantel’s goals? What is she revealing about Cromwell and his times? Is her focus on Cromwell or his times? Is her focus more on the specific or the general? Are we meant to finish the book feeling satisfied with what we learned about Cromwell and Tudor England or satisfied with story and character and the wisdom between the book’s covers? (Both, of course! and all of the above. But most books do tilt in one direction or another.)
Mantel chose a dimly perceived figure from a dramatic time. Thomas Cromwell, the king’s troll and executioner, who has had so little to say to us across the distance of time, suddenly has a voice. It turns out to be a finely modulated voice, giving shape to surprisingly refined thoughts and feelings. Mantel’s goal to humanize this obscure historical figure is achieved: Cromwell emerges as a sympathetic and coherent human being. It turns out he’s surrounded by people with adult voices. The past is not so alien. We might be surprised, as though most of what we read makes children of the people in the past.
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Whatever I may say about medievalism as a concept, the actual ages we call medieval were populated by real individuals. And the shades of interpretation I’m applying to evolutions in grammatical usage pale in the light of that simple fact. It’s fun to play out thought experiments that no one lives long enough to see validated. It’s another thing when we discuss history itself. Accuracy means something when dealing with real people and real events. We owe that much to the human beings, the great and the unsung alike, who have shared our greater story. They themselves are not thought experiments.
Historical fiction seeks to bring people from other ages alive again. There are a variety of impulses motivating authors to do that, some motives at odds with others. Do we want to honour historical figures or to entertain ourselves? Do we look to increase our understanding of those people or to stress-test versions of ourselves in extreme circumstances? We might understand our motives better by answering the question, how alien do we find characters from the past? It’s a profound question. It’s one thing, for example, to understand in an academic sense why the slave trade flourished in the seventeenth century. It’s another to place yourself within the skin of a slave trader. When we revile the slave trader, what are we expressing? It’s the easiest sort of moral statement, of course. At a deeper level, isn’t it an expression of our alienation from the past? An honest answer to the question of alienation can tell us a lot about ourselves.
In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Hilary Mantel is one of those who find sympathy with historical figures. She’s been open in lectures and interviews about her agenda, wanting to explore the common humanity of figures in history. A figure like Thomas Cromwell presents a special challenge. He’s a man who emerges from the historical record as something of a riddle, a commoner who came to rule in Henry VIII’s name and rule quite astutely. He was reviled by many for his low birth and for his ruthlessness (which differed little from others’) and for his part in England’s breach with the Catholic Church. Contemporary portraits are not flattering and tend to be caricatured. We’re left with little but the bare facts of his policy and official acts. How to draw a human portrait?
How do you make someone real to a modern reader without compromising authenticity? How to emphasize similarities among human beings while honouring the difference of their culture and time? We start with small things: point of view, speech patterns, and scene construction. The tough decisions about details will have a lasting impact on the portrait.
Sunday, July 11, 2021
What is unique about my terracotta artist at the Oude Sluis, or about my local bits of folk art and decoration, the things that seem to make their walls, corners or plazas so special? Why, not so very much, of course. It’s folk art, and it looks an awful lot like folk art everywhere. The irony is how special they make us feel, these small flourishes by generous souls. As art – the way critics may judge art, – they don’t amount to much. As creations, or as gestures, they are great. What does that say about art? Does the refinement that separates individual pieces from the majority also separate them from our sentiments?
It might seem like the moderns had exactly that program in mind. At the least, sentiment was to be flouted. At most, the entire artistic program had to go. Central to the old program was the individualism that defined Renaissance thinking. It had to go, the baby in the bathwater. Might not, then, if that is so, have modern art been the harbinger of a new medievalism?
In its anonymity, my local art may have more in common with medieval art than with the productions of the Renaissance, during which artworks sought to distinguish themselves from the rest. Realism and individual character were the currency that Renaissance artists traded in, and they strove to create unique identity in themselves as much as in each creation. As a new type of culture hero, they launched a five-hundred-year quest for glory.
It took the eccentric twentieth century to challenge the hegemony of Renaissance priorities. Look at Bauhaus as one influential example. It stood for style over statement. Or the statement was the style. Or the idea stood over the art, or the group aesthetic over the individual. In just about any sort of analysis, it turned the model of art that they had inherited on its head. The Romantic-era heroic artist was benched. Name a Bauhaus hero.
The medieval artist, similarly, worked in anonymity. Art was produced collaboratively in workshops, master with apprentices. Art was created on order, and creating art was a job.
Returning to my grammar question, having considered the withering away of forms that cater to abstraction and speculation, that serve conditional and causal thinking, that facilitate the flow of logic and longer utterances, might we just conclude that these are the language geek’s parallel signs of a shift? Have we determined that in this brave, new world experience will be flattened and individualism (of circumstance as well as person) will be stripped of priority?
I’m seeing phantoms. This is my conspiracy theory. While other loonies complain about being Fauci’d; I see monks moving into the libraries and priests installed in the multiplexes. We are discovering some new medieval state, I postulate, just to scare the children, something hinted at by the Chinese experiment, perhaps: a strange model of market autocracy that requires the absolute submersion of the individual circumstance.
My conspiracy theory turns up signs in superhero motifs, where every character is a type. Types are a characteristic of medieval thinking (castle, knight, bishop, queen, and ... pawn). It shows up in television series, where characters are often types. And, yes, it shows up in literature, too. Genre works are particularly susceptible to the new world view of types over individuals. Scifi, westerns, romance and thrillers could hardly exist without typing. Then there’s historical fiction.
Friday, July 09, 2021
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.
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.