Travelogue 579 – September 12
Panizzi in London
More than two hundred years after Ashurnasirpal, his empire was still pre-eminent in the region. The capital of the empire was now in Nineveh. His throne had been inherited by one Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal was not his father’s first son, and so he was not raised as heir to the throne. He had been raised as gentleman and courtier. He was taught to read. When he succeeded to the throne, ahead of even a surviving elder brother, he became the first – according to legend – Assyrian king who was able to read. Being literate at that time meant reading the cuneiform scripts of Akkadian and Sumerian. It so happened the young scholar was also a leader of some skill, popular with his people and effective as a military man, and extraordinarily cruel with enemies, it seems. He ruled for almost fifty years, and was the last great king of the Assyrians, perhaps being all too effective and too cruel as a conqueror, reducing his enemies to a state in which they had little left for tribute or tax. Within a generation of the great king’s death, the empire teetered and fell, over-extended, broke, and victim of an alliance among the many harshly-treated subject races, close to home, including Babylonians and Medes and Chaldeans. Is this the consequence of knowledge from books? Perhaps it’s the hubris of the third brother, smarter than the rest, given the world?
More lasting than empire was perhaps the great library founded by Ashurbanipal, who was proud of his scholarship as he was of his conquests. It was the first systematically collected royal library in history, the great king having devoted himself to owning all great tracts of history and legend and science. The library might have survived for centuries. Alexander is rumored to have seen it and been inspired. He had a vision of an Alexandrian library. The vision was taken up by one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, who would become king of a revived Egypt, centered in the new city of Alexandria. The library of Ashurbanipal was re-discovered in 1849 by young Henry Layard. About thirty thousand texts were dug from the ruins.
The Reading Room at the British Museum is closed for repair and inspection when I visit. That’s a great disappointment. My first visits to the great library remain vividly in my memory, like visits to a holy place, and I want to see it again. There is something magnificent about the great libraries of the world, a sense of arrival when one walks in. Even when one allows how much has been written and catalogued that might have been better forgotten, the prospect of encountering all surviving recorded thought in one place is awe-inspiring. And the circular space was been designed with suitable reverence by the architect Sydney Smirke and the librarian Antonio Panizzi, opening in 1857, its walls lined with books under a dome painted sky blue, sober brown reading desks radiating like spokes around the room’s center. The room served for 150 years, serving such luminaries as Marx and Gandhi, Woolf and Wilde.
Panizzi was librarian for the British Museum from 1831-1866. He was a controversial figure, vain and strong-willed, but extraordinarily committed to the task of administering the library. He is thought by some to have been the greatest in this occupation in history. He wrote a set of ninety-one rules for cataloguing that have formed the basis for all subsequent systems.
Panizzi had started as a lawyer in northern Italy, and as a supporter of Italian unification and democracy. His politics won him few friends among the powerful, and eventually he had been forced to flee. Arriving at last in London, he survived as a language teacher until he won the friendship of the future Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham. Brougham was able to find placement for Panizzi at the University of London and then the British Museum.
The British Museum itself began life as a collection, a collection without a home, a collection that included more than forty thousand texts. This was the collection of one Dr, Hans Sloane, physician and happy eccentric, who willed his collection to King George II. The king okayed the creation of the British Museum, and Sloane’s library was joined with several other venerable collections, including, in 1757, the Royal Library. The Museum was settled in the Montagu House by Russell Square, bought by the government for twenty thousand pounds, and opened to the public in 1759.
One of the rights granted to the Royal Library, and transferred to the British Library, was the right of legal deposit. Newly published books were to be deposited into the national collection. Panizzi revived this principle during his tenure, and pursued the library’s right to books relentlessly, building the collection to become the world’s largest, at more than half a million volumes.
The website of the British Museum tells us, rather starkly, that ‘the Museum is now consulting widely about the future use of the Reading Room.’ Obviously the library survives, having been transferred to its new site at St. Pancras. And the world’s knowledge seems more secure than ever, stored in dozens of great libraries around the world that would make Ashurbanipal’s jaw drop, stored electronically, deeply among the circuits and cables strung across the surface of the planet, and backed up in drive after drive. So secure that we are led to question the purpose of the Reading Room.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Travelogue 578 – September 11
Ozymandias and the Law Clerk
Even mighty Ashurnasirpal must be dug from under the sands of unforgiving earth. And the dig is a story in itself.
It’s the time of Britain’s supremacy. Only a few decades earlier, Lord Elgin has arranged to rescue the marbles of the Parthenon from the Turks. (Read ‘rescue’ where there might be pages of controversy. Be grateful.)
In the 1840s a young man named Henry Layard is bumming around the Middle East. He had been on his way to Ceylon, a young man with promise, born into a family of civil servants, lawyers, and physicians. He had spent six years in his uncle’s London law office, and now he was breaking away, looking to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Ceylon civil service. But he never makes it past Mesopotamia and Persia, where he wanders and explores, at one point coming upon the excavations of one Paul-Émile Botta, French consul at Mosul, appointed to the post in order to carry on the explorations for Nineveh for the French crown, at one point coming across the ruins of Nimrud, which Botta didn’t think much of.
He returns to Istanbul, and works a few years for the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, one Stratford Canning, trading his knowledge of the Middle East for work that keeps him traveling around Turkey and the Middle East. Eventually, he persuades Canning to support an expedition to dig at Kuyunjik and Nimrud. He spends several years there, living in camps, directing the massive digs. There is no budget to finish, to do everything, collect everything.
He returns to London and publishes his findings. He leverages his preliminary discoveries into a commitment from the British Museum to support a new dig. It will be this trip, in the early 1850s, that produces much of the work that we see in the museum today, the work from Ashurnasirpal’s capital, the great winged guardians and the wall sculptures in relief.
Again, Mr. Layard devotes several years of his life to the desert, to the work, to his little ad hoc town he raises near the Tigris River, dedicated to digging. There are sketches and paintings that survive from Layard’s expeditions. There was an artist assigned to him to document, and Layard himself produced many drawings. One sees in the drawings the mechanics of excavation, the tunnels dug among the ruins, the local laborers standing beside statues, and even Layard himself, posing in costume or sitting and sketching. There are hopeful reconstructions of Nimrud and Nineveh, Roman cities with Oriental detail.
This time, sculptures are carried away. The winged guardians, each nearly ten tons, are loaded onto a wheeled cart towed by 300 men. They are loaded onto a barge, padded with 600 goatskins and sheepskins to keep it afloat, and sent down the River Tigris.
By 1855, Botta and Layard had found all they were going to find. Layard returned to England, where he launched a political career, serving as member of Parliament and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Botta went on to serve in Jerusalem and Tripoli, only returning to France at the end of life. There have been no Assyrian discoveries on that scale since.
For 150 years, the winged guardians have stood sentry in the halls of the museum, perhaps as long as they watched over Ashurnasirpal and his family. IN 722 BC, Sargon II moved the capital away from Kalhu. A generation later, another king moved it to Nineveh, where one of the last kings, one Ashurbanipal, would build a great library.
History moved on, leaving the guardians with little to protect but the reputation of one bearded conqueror.
Ozymandias and the Law Clerk
Even mighty Ashurnasirpal must be dug from under the sands of unforgiving earth. And the dig is a story in itself.
It’s the time of Britain’s supremacy. Only a few decades earlier, Lord Elgin has arranged to rescue the marbles of the Parthenon from the Turks. (Read ‘rescue’ where there might be pages of controversy. Be grateful.)
In the 1840s a young man named Henry Layard is bumming around the Middle East. He had been on his way to Ceylon, a young man with promise, born into a family of civil servants, lawyers, and physicians. He had spent six years in his uncle’s London law office, and now he was breaking away, looking to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Ceylon civil service. But he never makes it past Mesopotamia and Persia, where he wanders and explores, at one point coming upon the excavations of one Paul-Émile Botta, French consul at Mosul, appointed to the post in order to carry on the explorations for Nineveh for the French crown, at one point coming across the ruins of Nimrud, which Botta didn’t think much of.
He returns to Istanbul, and works a few years for the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, one Stratford Canning, trading his knowledge of the Middle East for work that keeps him traveling around Turkey and the Middle East. Eventually, he persuades Canning to support an expedition to dig at Kuyunjik and Nimrud. He spends several years there, living in camps, directing the massive digs. There is no budget to finish, to do everything, collect everything.
He returns to London and publishes his findings. He leverages his preliminary discoveries into a commitment from the British Museum to support a new dig. It will be this trip, in the early 1850s, that produces much of the work that we see in the museum today, the work from Ashurnasirpal’s capital, the great winged guardians and the wall sculptures in relief.
Again, Mr. Layard devotes several years of his life to the desert, to the work, to his little ad hoc town he raises near the Tigris River, dedicated to digging. There are sketches and paintings that survive from Layard’s expeditions. There was an artist assigned to him to document, and Layard himself produced many drawings. One sees in the drawings the mechanics of excavation, the tunnels dug among the ruins, the local laborers standing beside statues, and even Layard himself, posing in costume or sitting and sketching. There are hopeful reconstructions of Nimrud and Nineveh, Roman cities with Oriental detail.
This time, sculptures are carried away. The winged guardians, each nearly ten tons, are loaded onto a wheeled cart towed by 300 men. They are loaded onto a barge, padded with 600 goatskins and sheepskins to keep it afloat, and sent down the River Tigris.
By 1855, Botta and Layard had found all they were going to find. Layard returned to England, where he launched a political career, serving as member of Parliament and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Botta went on to serve in Jerusalem and Tripoli, only returning to France at the end of life. There have been no Assyrian discoveries on that scale since.
For 150 years, the winged guardians have stood sentry in the halls of the museum, perhaps as long as they watched over Ashurnasirpal and his family. IN 722 BC, Sargon II moved the capital away from Kalhu. A generation later, another king moved it to Nineveh, where one of the last kings, one Ashurbanipal, would build a great library.
History moved on, leaving the guardians with little to protect but the reputation of one bearded conqueror.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Travelogue 577 – September 10
Ashurnasirpal in London
The street market is in in full bloom by the time Jonathan is escorting me away from Angel. The cafes along White Conduit Street pump bits of music out onto the street to accompany us in our progress.
Jonathan knows all the crooked ways of North London. We are going to bypass King’s Cross; we are going to stop beside Russell Square and part ways. The next time we see each other, it may be in Ethiopia. From Russell Square, I’m going to make my own way to the British Museum.
The South Entrance of the museum inspires me in exactly the way it was designed to, grandly drawn in Greek Revival, drawn almost two hundred years ago by Sir Robert Smirke. It also inspires in a more prosaic way, stirring a nostalgia for London and for the peregrinations of my early Tesfa years. The last time I visited the British Museum, I was little more than a homeless wanderer, camping out at the Tsegereda school in Ethiopia, camping out on Thomas’s floor when I stopped through London.
I enter. I wander around the Grand Court a while, browsing among the shops and the people, reading directions and looking at museum maps. I find out the Reading Room is closed for inspection and repairs. That’s a disappointment.
I set out for the Elgin Marbles. Just like the last time I visited, I am waylaid by the mighty Assyrians. There is something so arresting in the sight of the huge guardians of the gates, human-headed and winged creatures, one with the body of a lion, one with the body of a bull. I am drawn into the Assyrian exhibit again, all of it sculpture from the walls of palaces. Much of it dates to the reign of one Ashurnasirpal II. Much of it, according to the little museum cards, dates to the years 865-860 BC. That is a prodigious amount of work in five years, the type of work that only a conquering monarch can order.
Assyria was ascendant during the reign of Ashurnasirpal. Ascendant again. Even by Ashurnasirpal’s time the Assyrians had been around long enough to have been through a few cycles of expansion and contraction. This cycle is destined to be their greatest, though. In the coming two centuries, the Assyrians will overrun much of the Middle East, including Egypt. And then, 250 years after Ashurnasirpal, it will all crumble very suddenly, the empire falling before the Medes, who will sweep the board for young Cyrus.
The sculpture speaks with the confidence of empire. The stylistic formulae had been worked out centuries earlier, and it’s clear from later examples in the museum they persisted until the end of Assyria’s dominance. But there’s a vitality in the work from Ashurnasirpal’s reign that mesmerizes. It’s all carved in relief, as nearly all surviving Assyrian sculpture is, but the outlines are so sure, the lines cut into the gypsum so deep, that the work strikes with more force than most relief sculpture. The guardians, in particular, have more dimension because they are curved into two surfaces of a corner stone. Interestingly, one of the front legs standing firm in the front view is portrayed in motion on the side. This works out to five legs carved out for the same beast.
The best of ancient and medieval figure work has a way of rising just above the tenuous line of cartoon and into dignity. It’s a fascinating trick, and one that occupies a lot of my museum musings. How is that effect achieved? It has something to do with the calculated combination of realism and the stylized. See how the musculature of the lions in the hunt, or the lion and bull bodies of the guardians, combine and contrast with the huge staring eyes of the human figures, the precise rows of curls in the men’s beards, the interchangeability of all human figures, who can be identified only by clothing and the weapons or instruments they carry. And, except for the chaos of a few battle scenes -- in which fallen soldiers float in the sky and the king stands with his guardian angels towering over the rest of the rabble, good Renaissance perspective being left for the fastidious barbarians beyond the civilized shores of the Levant, -- the composition of their sculpted scenes always suggest the pageantry of procession, procession through territory, geographic and temporal.
Everything is power and conquest. Boasting is a royal duty, almost a diplomatic duty, as a tactic to keep the peace, perhaps something like all the American films portraying infallible CIA agents and Special Forces supermen.
Portraits of the king are inscribed with long lines of cuneiform, scrolling right across the middle of the stone, describing in standard form his titles and conquests – many battles, many peoples subjugated, not too many orphanages.
Seeing the dates for the artwork, seeing that it was produced in five years, makes me think of the artists themselves. I want to picture one maestro supervising the work in massive workshops somewhere in Ashurnasirpal’s new capital of Kalhu (dubbed ‘Nimrud’ some time later, conflating the god of the temple and the city). The consistency of style over the course of centuries and the sheer amount of work produced don’t really support the vision of one person’s guiding genius. But there is something identifiable about the work from Kalhu, the slightest touch that is unique.
There are plenty of examples in history of genius bringing an idiosyncratic touch to the art of its day, still bound by exacting strictures. Donatello casts one more bronze of David. Buonarroti carves one more statue of David. Here at the British Museum, I’m confronted by work executed by human hands removed at more than five times the distance than Buonarroti’s time. There is no artist’s stamp or signature. I can’t help wishing I knew just one small thing about the sculptors. But whose name do we know beyond the king’s? It’s a society of radical anonymity. Even the portraits of the king reveal little personal character. The sculptors were likely to be considered as part of the priestly caste, trained to serve the state cult. I suppose one might say, with only some exaggeration, that the same applies to the apprentices of Renaissance Italy, detailing the Virgin’s blue robe over and over. But the free-lance model guiding their work eventually made for dangerous eccentricities.
In another four hundred years, after Ashurnasirpal is a forgotten legend, it will be the turn of the Greeks. If the Assyrian king is even aware of the Greeks, I’m guessing it is as an annoying bunch of hillbillies at the fringes of the known world. But in the following century, the poet or poets we call Homer, will compose or record one of the foundational texts of world literature. The Persians certainly became aware of the Greeks, and it could be said that their several expeditions to bring the Greeks to heel were the defining acts of their time, the trigger that freed forces of history, that launched what we used to like to call Western Civilization.
Something will be different with the Greeks. There will still be memorials to battle. The palaces and the temples and will still be tributes to violence. The Elgin Marbles lined the temple of the Parthenon. They featured more processions, more battles. But now there is an artist with a name, Phidias. There is movement, and the figures seem to breathe.
Ashurnasirpal in London
The street market is in in full bloom by the time Jonathan is escorting me away from Angel. The cafes along White Conduit Street pump bits of music out onto the street to accompany us in our progress.
Jonathan knows all the crooked ways of North London. We are going to bypass King’s Cross; we are going to stop beside Russell Square and part ways. The next time we see each other, it may be in Ethiopia. From Russell Square, I’m going to make my own way to the British Museum.
The South Entrance of the museum inspires me in exactly the way it was designed to, grandly drawn in Greek Revival, drawn almost two hundred years ago by Sir Robert Smirke. It also inspires in a more prosaic way, stirring a nostalgia for London and for the peregrinations of my early Tesfa years. The last time I visited the British Museum, I was little more than a homeless wanderer, camping out at the Tsegereda school in Ethiopia, camping out on Thomas’s floor when I stopped through London.
I enter. I wander around the Grand Court a while, browsing among the shops and the people, reading directions and looking at museum maps. I find out the Reading Room is closed for inspection and repairs. That’s a disappointment.
I set out for the Elgin Marbles. Just like the last time I visited, I am waylaid by the mighty Assyrians. There is something so arresting in the sight of the huge guardians of the gates, human-headed and winged creatures, one with the body of a lion, one with the body of a bull. I am drawn into the Assyrian exhibit again, all of it sculpture from the walls of palaces. Much of it dates to the reign of one Ashurnasirpal II. Much of it, according to the little museum cards, dates to the years 865-860 BC. That is a prodigious amount of work in five years, the type of work that only a conquering monarch can order.
Assyria was ascendant during the reign of Ashurnasirpal. Ascendant again. Even by Ashurnasirpal’s time the Assyrians had been around long enough to have been through a few cycles of expansion and contraction. This cycle is destined to be their greatest, though. In the coming two centuries, the Assyrians will overrun much of the Middle East, including Egypt. And then, 250 years after Ashurnasirpal, it will all crumble very suddenly, the empire falling before the Medes, who will sweep the board for young Cyrus.
The sculpture speaks with the confidence of empire. The stylistic formulae had been worked out centuries earlier, and it’s clear from later examples in the museum they persisted until the end of Assyria’s dominance. But there’s a vitality in the work from Ashurnasirpal’s reign that mesmerizes. It’s all carved in relief, as nearly all surviving Assyrian sculpture is, but the outlines are so sure, the lines cut into the gypsum so deep, that the work strikes with more force than most relief sculpture. The guardians, in particular, have more dimension because they are curved into two surfaces of a corner stone. Interestingly, one of the front legs standing firm in the front view is portrayed in motion on the side. This works out to five legs carved out for the same beast.
The best of ancient and medieval figure work has a way of rising just above the tenuous line of cartoon and into dignity. It’s a fascinating trick, and one that occupies a lot of my museum musings. How is that effect achieved? It has something to do with the calculated combination of realism and the stylized. See how the musculature of the lions in the hunt, or the lion and bull bodies of the guardians, combine and contrast with the huge staring eyes of the human figures, the precise rows of curls in the men’s beards, the interchangeability of all human figures, who can be identified only by clothing and the weapons or instruments they carry. And, except for the chaos of a few battle scenes -- in which fallen soldiers float in the sky and the king stands with his guardian angels towering over the rest of the rabble, good Renaissance perspective being left for the fastidious barbarians beyond the civilized shores of the Levant, -- the composition of their sculpted scenes always suggest the pageantry of procession, procession through territory, geographic and temporal.
Everything is power and conquest. Boasting is a royal duty, almost a diplomatic duty, as a tactic to keep the peace, perhaps something like all the American films portraying infallible CIA agents and Special Forces supermen.
Portraits of the king are inscribed with long lines of cuneiform, scrolling right across the middle of the stone, describing in standard form his titles and conquests – many battles, many peoples subjugated, not too many orphanages.
Seeing the dates for the artwork, seeing that it was produced in five years, makes me think of the artists themselves. I want to picture one maestro supervising the work in massive workshops somewhere in Ashurnasirpal’s new capital of Kalhu (dubbed ‘Nimrud’ some time later, conflating the god of the temple and the city). The consistency of style over the course of centuries and the sheer amount of work produced don’t really support the vision of one person’s guiding genius. But there is something identifiable about the work from Kalhu, the slightest touch that is unique.
There are plenty of examples in history of genius bringing an idiosyncratic touch to the art of its day, still bound by exacting strictures. Donatello casts one more bronze of David. Buonarroti carves one more statue of David. Here at the British Museum, I’m confronted by work executed by human hands removed at more than five times the distance than Buonarroti’s time. There is no artist’s stamp or signature. I can’t help wishing I knew just one small thing about the sculptors. But whose name do we know beyond the king’s? It’s a society of radical anonymity. Even the portraits of the king reveal little personal character. The sculptors were likely to be considered as part of the priestly caste, trained to serve the state cult. I suppose one might say, with only some exaggeration, that the same applies to the apprentices of Renaissance Italy, detailing the Virgin’s blue robe over and over. But the free-lance model guiding their work eventually made for dangerous eccentricities.
In another four hundred years, after Ashurnasirpal is a forgotten legend, it will be the turn of the Greeks. If the Assyrian king is even aware of the Greeks, I’m guessing it is as an annoying bunch of hillbillies at the fringes of the known world. But in the following century, the poet or poets we call Homer, will compose or record one of the foundational texts of world literature. The Persians certainly became aware of the Greeks, and it could be said that their several expeditions to bring the Greeks to heel were the defining acts of their time, the trigger that freed forces of history, that launched what we used to like to call Western Civilization.
Something will be different with the Greeks. There will still be memorials to battle. The palaces and the temples and will still be tributes to violence. The Elgin Marbles lined the temple of the Parthenon. They featured more processions, more battles. But now there is an artist with a name, Phidias. There is movement, and the figures seem to breathe.
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Travelogue 576 – September 9
Wake the Angel
London
Angel is awakening. Along White Conduit Street, an early riser is making his way to the Tube. He is wearing a blue suit. He hangs his head pensively. He has a man-bag slung over one shoulder. The same shoulder’s hand is holding up a paper cup of coffee. It looks to be from one of tiny local cafes. White Conduit Street is a street of tiny shops, most of them still closed, the steel drawn down over their windows. The storefronts project from the tan and old, three-storey brick all the way down the little street. The McDonald’s is open. It’s open twenty-four hours. And so is the Euphorium Bakery across the street. They play soul in the Euphorium Bakery on Tuesday mornings.
I’m enjoying the Euphorium Bakery. It has an old but clean wooden floor, set in small planks in herring-bone pattern. There is a one long table of thick wood in the center, and few flimsy circular tables set around it. The display case is lit. The goods inside are unreasonably appetizing.
The morning papers are carrying on with yesterday’s cants: polls are showing the Scots ready to split, and the Princess is pregnant with a second heir to the throne. The Scottish poll has inspired pages of analysis, how the economy will reel, what manner of responses the politicians are dreaming up. And further news has it that I am in England just as Angel is awakening. That is time’s uncanny power, to place you suddenly in spots like the Euphorium Bakery. And even as you say, ‘I am here,’ you realize how little reason there is for it.
I’m the worst house guest. I was not able to lie still once I had seen the blue of the sky through the shutters. I needed the chilly and fresh air of the morning. I tapped on Jonathan and Olivia’s bedroom door, timidly, and there is nothing worse than a timid house guest. ‘Sorry, guys.’ I am abashed, but I didn’t want to leave without being able to turn the lock behind me.
A bearded man in sandals is pushing a tall wheeled cart filled with rolled up Turkish –style carpets. They are stood on end in the cart, so that what he is pushing is twice as tall as he is. There is a man whose sparse deadlocks are gathered in a small pony tail. He is slamming the trunk of his black car as I pass. He sets boxes of wares upon his sturdy table on wheels. He has rolled the table to the side of White Conduit Street, placing it the white lines that designate slots for the stalls in the daily street market. He is selling plastic kitchen ware, little bins and buckets and trays. The carpet vendor and the man with the plastics seem to have the jump on the rest of the vendors.
Next to McDonald’s is a tiny optician’s shop. Next to that a Subway, and next to that a chemist. He has a sign set between the two windows on the top floor, a sign that reads, ‘Prescriptions’. The foot traffic has picked up. They head south, they head north, their heads down in what looks like a kind of meditation.
‘Looks like another love TKO’ is coming across the speakers here at the Euphorium. I’m about halfway through my pain au raisin. It could be that Jonathan and Olivia are up by now. I’m thinking they’re not. And I’m about to lose all power on my netbook. I remembered to pack the charger for the computer, but I forgot to pack the adapter. Yesterday I had to search the shops of the
I ask the ginger-haired Polish girl behind the counter if there are any plugs at the Euphorium. She sadly points back to one sad set behind the counter, set into the wall above her back counter.
Wake the Angel
London
Angel is awakening. Along White Conduit Street, an early riser is making his way to the Tube. He is wearing a blue suit. He hangs his head pensively. He has a man-bag slung over one shoulder. The same shoulder’s hand is holding up a paper cup of coffee. It looks to be from one of tiny local cafes. White Conduit Street is a street of tiny shops, most of them still closed, the steel drawn down over their windows. The storefronts project from the tan and old, three-storey brick all the way down the little street. The McDonald’s is open. It’s open twenty-four hours. And so is the Euphorium Bakery across the street. They play soul in the Euphorium Bakery on Tuesday mornings.
I’m enjoying the Euphorium Bakery. It has an old but clean wooden floor, set in small planks in herring-bone pattern. There is a one long table of thick wood in the center, and few flimsy circular tables set around it. The display case is lit. The goods inside are unreasonably appetizing.
The morning papers are carrying on with yesterday’s cants: polls are showing the Scots ready to split, and the Princess is pregnant with a second heir to the throne. The Scottish poll has inspired pages of analysis, how the economy will reel, what manner of responses the politicians are dreaming up. And further news has it that I am in England just as Angel is awakening. That is time’s uncanny power, to place you suddenly in spots like the Euphorium Bakery. And even as you say, ‘I am here,’ you realize how little reason there is for it.
I’m the worst house guest. I was not able to lie still once I had seen the blue of the sky through the shutters. I needed the chilly and fresh air of the morning. I tapped on Jonathan and Olivia’s bedroom door, timidly, and there is nothing worse than a timid house guest. ‘Sorry, guys.’ I am abashed, but I didn’t want to leave without being able to turn the lock behind me.
A bearded man in sandals is pushing a tall wheeled cart filled with rolled up Turkish –style carpets. They are stood on end in the cart, so that what he is pushing is twice as tall as he is. There is a man whose sparse deadlocks are gathered in a small pony tail. He is slamming the trunk of his black car as I pass. He sets boxes of wares upon his sturdy table on wheels. He has rolled the table to the side of White Conduit Street, placing it the white lines that designate slots for the stalls in the daily street market. He is selling plastic kitchen ware, little bins and buckets and trays. The carpet vendor and the man with the plastics seem to have the jump on the rest of the vendors.
Next to McDonald’s is a tiny optician’s shop. Next to that a Subway, and next to that a chemist. He has a sign set between the two windows on the top floor, a sign that reads, ‘Prescriptions’. The foot traffic has picked up. They head south, they head north, their heads down in what looks like a kind of meditation.
‘Looks like another love TKO’ is coming across the speakers here at the Euphorium. I’m about halfway through my pain au raisin. It could be that Jonathan and Olivia are up by now. I’m thinking they’re not. And I’m about to lose all power on my netbook. I remembered to pack the charger for the computer, but I forgot to pack the adapter. Yesterday I had to search the shops of the
I ask the ginger-haired Polish girl behind the counter if there are any plugs at the Euphorium. She sadly points back to one sad set behind the counter, set into the wall above her back counter.
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
Travelogue 575 – September 2
The Never Waiting
Here the river turns south, and so does the bike path beside it, and one has for the space of five minutes a privileged perspective of the city. The river Maas itself is very wide here, and the surface placid. A boat or two will be plying the waters, ferrying goods or ferrying tourists. Scanning west, one sees the buildings of downtown on either side of the river. One sees the tower and strings of the Erasmus Bridge. Looking south, the city continues along the banks, on the far bank down to the tall minarets of the Essalam Mosque and the lights of the Feyenoord Stadion. On the north bank, there is the green grass of a park beside the river. And there is the Woudestein campus of Erasmus University.
During the summer the campus was a peaceful place, warm stone set around a reflecting pool. The streets nearby were shaded by rows of full trees. There was a feeling of space and air.
But this is a week of terrible consequence. Vacations are over. Workers have streamed back into town. Students are back. They have gathered in lively crowds at schools and university buildings all over town. The streets are crowded. The bike paths are dangerous.
This evening, the Erasmus campus is full of heat and noise. A temporary stage has been erected on the terrace above the pool, and anonymous bands are covering pulsing pop songs. Crowds are concentrated in formations in front of booths set up to vend food and beer. I have to thread a slow progress through these crowds to reach my appointed place.
I am meeting with the theatre group. We are working on a play. Many of the actors are instructors at Erasmus or next door, at the Hogeschool. I’m directing the play. It’s a silly farce by an American, about a disastrous production of Macbeth. We started rehearsals in the spring, and now we pick them up again. We have two months until show time.
We retire to one of the two student bars on campus after rehearsal. The chaos has not abated. The music acts are still pounding out their beats on the temporary stage. The bar is full, mobbed by young people devoting the evening to drink. They are on a mission to blot out the native intelligence that brought them to this prestigious university. They bring a commendable singe-mindedness to the task. I’m reminded of many of my own performances during university days. I had a talent for this activity myself, back in the day. The kids are shouting and singing songs and laughing. None of it is remotely original. And that is the beauty of ritual: to the participants it all feels new.
I am going to have a dream later. In this dream, I travel in time, back to my freshman year in college. I’m attending a meeting, but I’m far too distracted to participate. Traveling in time is much like traveling in space. One is far too engaged by the sights, sounds, and smells of, say, Rome, to attend to the everyday. In the dream, I’m aware that I’ve traveled in time, so I’m hypnotized by the familiarity of everything, and I’m marveling at the possibilities.
The dream arises from my visit to the university campus during the students’ revels, during the start-up of the school year. But it will also be encouraged by the movie before bedtime. Menna and I watch Terminator II, Arnold returning to the 90s as the redeemed and redeeming hero, Linda Hamilton all buff and muscling her way out of a mental hospital to save her son. The three of them are chased by a new class of Terminator, the melting man who runs like a machine.
Time as a pliable medium, a substance we swim through, perhaps with some individual volition: it doesn’t seem to have been a concept general to the human imagination. Time travel as a device seems, but for a few strange early exceptions, a nineteenth-century invention. Maybe it required a more mobile society. Shakespeare, model of social mobility in his era, had nothing to say about time machines. The frame of a time machine provides unique opportunities for satire and edification. It can warn us (Wells & Dickens), lampoon the past or the present (Twain).
But modern narratives tend to focus on the power dynamic in time travel. Owning time is owning an advantage, at least if the hero/villain has traveled backward, (as opposed to the lonely prospect of traveling forward into the unknown.) Power seems to be the keynote to nearly every production of pop culture these days. Is that because America more or less owns pop culture, just at a time when America suffers a crisis of faith in its own power?
In my own static and unyielding time, I set out for home from the Erasmus campus. Now the city along the river is outlined in lights against the night sky. It’s a new city, a night city. The same lights are dancing among the waters of the river, like reflections in a dream. Returning students are roaming in packs. I have to dodge the front wheel of one zealous novitiate, who is impressing the ladies in his group by riding only on his back wheel. Theirs is the power of timelessness. They have burst free from anxious chronologies. They trample pasts and futures underneath the tires of their vrijwielen.
The Never Waiting
Here the river turns south, and so does the bike path beside it, and one has for the space of five minutes a privileged perspective of the city. The river Maas itself is very wide here, and the surface placid. A boat or two will be plying the waters, ferrying goods or ferrying tourists. Scanning west, one sees the buildings of downtown on either side of the river. One sees the tower and strings of the Erasmus Bridge. Looking south, the city continues along the banks, on the far bank down to the tall minarets of the Essalam Mosque and the lights of the Feyenoord Stadion. On the north bank, there is the green grass of a park beside the river. And there is the Woudestein campus of Erasmus University.
During the summer the campus was a peaceful place, warm stone set around a reflecting pool. The streets nearby were shaded by rows of full trees. There was a feeling of space and air.
But this is a week of terrible consequence. Vacations are over. Workers have streamed back into town. Students are back. They have gathered in lively crowds at schools and university buildings all over town. The streets are crowded. The bike paths are dangerous.
This evening, the Erasmus campus is full of heat and noise. A temporary stage has been erected on the terrace above the pool, and anonymous bands are covering pulsing pop songs. Crowds are concentrated in formations in front of booths set up to vend food and beer. I have to thread a slow progress through these crowds to reach my appointed place.
I am meeting with the theatre group. We are working on a play. Many of the actors are instructors at Erasmus or next door, at the Hogeschool. I’m directing the play. It’s a silly farce by an American, about a disastrous production of Macbeth. We started rehearsals in the spring, and now we pick them up again. We have two months until show time.
We retire to one of the two student bars on campus after rehearsal. The chaos has not abated. The music acts are still pounding out their beats on the temporary stage. The bar is full, mobbed by young people devoting the evening to drink. They are on a mission to blot out the native intelligence that brought them to this prestigious university. They bring a commendable singe-mindedness to the task. I’m reminded of many of my own performances during university days. I had a talent for this activity myself, back in the day. The kids are shouting and singing songs and laughing. None of it is remotely original. And that is the beauty of ritual: to the participants it all feels new.
I am going to have a dream later. In this dream, I travel in time, back to my freshman year in college. I’m attending a meeting, but I’m far too distracted to participate. Traveling in time is much like traveling in space. One is far too engaged by the sights, sounds, and smells of, say, Rome, to attend to the everyday. In the dream, I’m aware that I’ve traveled in time, so I’m hypnotized by the familiarity of everything, and I’m marveling at the possibilities.
The dream arises from my visit to the university campus during the students’ revels, during the start-up of the school year. But it will also be encouraged by the movie before bedtime. Menna and I watch Terminator II, Arnold returning to the 90s as the redeemed and redeeming hero, Linda Hamilton all buff and muscling her way out of a mental hospital to save her son. The three of them are chased by a new class of Terminator, the melting man who runs like a machine.
Time as a pliable medium, a substance we swim through, perhaps with some individual volition: it doesn’t seem to have been a concept general to the human imagination. Time travel as a device seems, but for a few strange early exceptions, a nineteenth-century invention. Maybe it required a more mobile society. Shakespeare, model of social mobility in his era, had nothing to say about time machines. The frame of a time machine provides unique opportunities for satire and edification. It can warn us (Wells & Dickens), lampoon the past or the present (Twain).
But modern narratives tend to focus on the power dynamic in time travel. Owning time is owning an advantage, at least if the hero/villain has traveled backward, (as opposed to the lonely prospect of traveling forward into the unknown.) Power seems to be the keynote to nearly every production of pop culture these days. Is that because America more or less owns pop culture, just at a time when America suffers a crisis of faith in its own power?
In my own static and unyielding time, I set out for home from the Erasmus campus. Now the city along the river is outlined in lights against the night sky. It’s a new city, a night city. The same lights are dancing among the waters of the river, like reflections in a dream. Returning students are roaming in packs. I have to dodge the front wheel of one zealous novitiate, who is impressing the ladies in his group by riding only on his back wheel. Theirs is the power of timelessness. They have burst free from anxious chronologies. They trample pasts and futures underneath the tires of their vrijwielen.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Travelogue 574 – August 31
The Experience Waiting
There are no more signs today than on any other day that autumn is coming, but the premonition washes through me like a wave of gratitude.
When you leave the house early on a Sunday morning, the sky opens up above in silence. The Dutch sky gives few clues to the experience waiting on the bike ride.
As has been true for weeks, you can’t tell by the Dutch sky whether your lot is to be sun or wind or rain, even during the course of a twenty-minute bike ride. Will it be the patch of blue sky to the north, or will it be the clouds gathered in the south, holding their portions of rain?
As it happens, today I will have both. Even as the sun touches me, as I’m pushing the cycle onto the bike path, there is also a drizzle hanging in the air. As I’m passing beside the peaceful Schie River, I see the stippling effect on the glinting surface of the water.
The lights past the bridge are blinking yellow. They only do that on Sunday mornings, when the city can spare only an indifferent glance for the early risers. It has spent itself on the previous night. You watch for bottle glass on the bike paths.
Farther down the road, the police are blocking off a length of street with quiet lights turning on their car tops. The police themselves are standing together and chatting pleasantly. Their job, it seems, has been to figure out why there’s a little black car perched on the street’s meridian, windshield shattered and wheels wrenched off their axles. There seems to be no urgency to solving the puzzle.
One kilometer more and I’m at the central station. There is one man standing alone in the great plaza facing the station. He is turning slowly with his phone in camera mode held high. I only notice then that the drizzle has resolved into an uncertain haze.
I have been underground. I have locked my bike up in the ramps there, in the echoing concrete chamber dedicated only to bicycles. There are thousands of them, lined neatly on two levels. Somewhere there is one other person parking. I hear the chain rattling against the rack.
There were mornings last week with more of an autumnal chill in the air. Summer has made an unassuming return, slipping quietly back into the city, with a breath that is humid and mildly fragrant with grass and with old fruit.
I am crossing behind the man with the camera, safely outside the scope of his present shot. I’m wishing suddenly for more space than the square can offer. I’m wishing for the space of a cold beach.
It is only the hush of a Sunday morning, maybe most grave, maybe most light of days. Maybe the germ of the week. You hear the cry of a season inside it. It awakens proper gratitude. It is like the glimpse of gears inside a terrible machine. It’s a kind of comfort.
There’s a couple who pass at a brisk pace, a red-haired chihuahua frisking at their feet, always underfoot. The man trails a suitcase on wheels behind him. They are excited to be in motion.
The Experience Waiting
There are no more signs today than on any other day that autumn is coming, but the premonition washes through me like a wave of gratitude.
When you leave the house early on a Sunday morning, the sky opens up above in silence. The Dutch sky gives few clues to the experience waiting on the bike ride.
As has been true for weeks, you can’t tell by the Dutch sky whether your lot is to be sun or wind or rain, even during the course of a twenty-minute bike ride. Will it be the patch of blue sky to the north, or will it be the clouds gathered in the south, holding their portions of rain?
As it happens, today I will have both. Even as the sun touches me, as I’m pushing the cycle onto the bike path, there is also a drizzle hanging in the air. As I’m passing beside the peaceful Schie River, I see the stippling effect on the glinting surface of the water.
The lights past the bridge are blinking yellow. They only do that on Sunday mornings, when the city can spare only an indifferent glance for the early risers. It has spent itself on the previous night. You watch for bottle glass on the bike paths.
Farther down the road, the police are blocking off a length of street with quiet lights turning on their car tops. The police themselves are standing together and chatting pleasantly. Their job, it seems, has been to figure out why there’s a little black car perched on the street’s meridian, windshield shattered and wheels wrenched off their axles. There seems to be no urgency to solving the puzzle.
One kilometer more and I’m at the central station. There is one man standing alone in the great plaza facing the station. He is turning slowly with his phone in camera mode held high. I only notice then that the drizzle has resolved into an uncertain haze.
I have been underground. I have locked my bike up in the ramps there, in the echoing concrete chamber dedicated only to bicycles. There are thousands of them, lined neatly on two levels. Somewhere there is one other person parking. I hear the chain rattling against the rack.
There were mornings last week with more of an autumnal chill in the air. Summer has made an unassuming return, slipping quietly back into the city, with a breath that is humid and mildly fragrant with grass and with old fruit.
I am crossing behind the man with the camera, safely outside the scope of his present shot. I’m wishing suddenly for more space than the square can offer. I’m wishing for the space of a cold beach.
It is only the hush of a Sunday morning, maybe most grave, maybe most light of days. Maybe the germ of the week. You hear the cry of a season inside it. It awakens proper gratitude. It is like the glimpse of gears inside a terrible machine. It’s a kind of comfort.
There’s a couple who pass at a brisk pace, a red-haired chihuahua frisking at their feet, always underfoot. The man trails a suitcase on wheels behind him. They are excited to be in motion.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Travelogue 573 – August 12
The Smithy Revolution
Revolution! Imagine what the ambitious young Peter Abelard might have thought. As popular as he was, followed around the muddy streets of Paris by hundreds of pupils eager for his words, he could only have been a name among theologians and philosophers, who spread his reputation by word of mouth, or occasionally by lending out a precious, hand-copied manuscript.
What if Abelard, king of words, had known Gutenberg, the goldsmith who, some three hundred years later, changed the intellectual world forever? Even that Abelard speaks to us now, after almost a millennium, is largely thanks to Herr Gutenberg. Together, they would have conspired to all sorts of dangerous ambitions.
After Gutenberg’s revolution, humanity speaks across time. Generations pass their wisdom on, and each generation adds to it. The pool of knowledge grows, as does the percentage of humanity that can access it.
Abelard’s revolution, if he had been given access to a printing press, might have looked a lot like Luther’s. Both men were brilliant in debate, and both were intolerant of opposing opinions. There is some paradox in that. It is probably better that the revolution was a tinker’s revolution and not a philosopher’s. There is something analogous to Abelard’s theory of ethics, separating intent and action. Here we separate the medium from the content. As it was, Gutenberg had no more ambitious agenda than to make more Bibles. We should be thankful for his nobility, or for his lack of imagination.
The very neutrality of the delivery system worked toward literacy’s benefit, creating access to literature of every stripe, and providing the incentive to literacy that reformed all society. Reading is not genetic. It must be taught, and -- as we are learning in Ethiopia -- there is little incentive to the task without materials to read. Efficient knowledge transfer needs the raw materials. The printers have provided it. Revolution!
Following in Gutenberg’s footsteps, the printers became workmen, technicians, artisans. They formed firms, formed guilds, and thoroughly commercialized the operation. They prospered. They received commissions from kings. They built urban manors.
There may be no better place to see that than at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. The museum was once a house, a house facing the Vrijdag Market in Antwerp, a house for the Plantijn and Moretus families, and for their family business, a business that survived three hundred years. The firm was founded by Christoffel Plantijn in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was not only a printer-publisher of quality but had a canny instinct for survival during turbulent times, when Belgium was embroiled in the Eighty Years War, when Antwerp, the richest city in Europe, became a pawn in the tug of war between the Dutch and the Spanish. Plantijn managed to become printer for a royal Bible project, and leveraged this into status as Philip II’s ‘Architypographus Regii’, printer of royally sanctioned liturgical books. In the next generation, the business was passed to Christoffel‘s son-in-law, Jan Moretus. It remained in the Moretus family until they gifted the house to the city in the mid-nineteenth century.
The first reason to visit the museum is to see the two oldest surviving printing presses, dating back to around 1600. They are placed in the preserved workshop, where the printing took place, where letters were set and pages printed. It would have been a crowded, noisy, and chaotic room in its time, its centuries of time, having the capacity to print something like 2,000 pages per day. Now it has the silence appropriate to a museum, and it’s left to the imagination to sense the overwhelming roar and stink, among more than a dozen workers, that it took to produce a book.
Equally fascinating are the quieter rooms. One worth mentioning is old Christoffel‘s office, small as a modern closet, and almost as dark, preserved in its sixteenth and seventeenth century atmosphere, with wooden beams and walls lined with rare gilded leather. Here, the money was kept and counted. One can also visit the humble room where the proofreaders worked. There is little to see here but their desks, but learning about their work, one realizes how profoundly deep the reservoirs of intellect that were gathered in these printing houses. The houses may have been organized according to profit models, but there is no doubt that they effectively operated as centers of culture and learning, taking the place of the monasteries of Abelard’s day. The editors had to be prepared to apply themselves to works on a variety of academic topics, in any numbers of languages, modern and ancient. I managed to spot some letters cast from the Ge’ez, or historical Ethiopian, alphabet, among the boxes of preserved letters for the presses.
In a room next to Christoffel’s office, one sees portraits of Lipsius, renowned Renaissance humanist, friend to the founder of the house, and star in the firm’s first stable of published authors. In another room, one sees copper plates for illustrations designed by Mr. Rubens, friend to another, later patriarch of the family, one Balthasar Moretus.
Lastly, there is the patrician house itself, an architectural monument to status among the great business families of Antwerp. There is an interior courtyard, and set among the bricks walls are carvings of the family logo and busts of family notables. The two floors of the house are furnished with the self-indulgent complacency of success, commissioned portraits, fine furniture, tapestries, extensive libraries, a map room with man-sized globes, damask coverings. Goldsmiths as the arbiters of academia, goldsmiths bunking in the manor house; here’s the look of the revolution.
The Smithy Revolution
Revolution! Imagine what the ambitious young Peter Abelard might have thought. As popular as he was, followed around the muddy streets of Paris by hundreds of pupils eager for his words, he could only have been a name among theologians and philosophers, who spread his reputation by word of mouth, or occasionally by lending out a precious, hand-copied manuscript.
What if Abelard, king of words, had known Gutenberg, the goldsmith who, some three hundred years later, changed the intellectual world forever? Even that Abelard speaks to us now, after almost a millennium, is largely thanks to Herr Gutenberg. Together, they would have conspired to all sorts of dangerous ambitions.
After Gutenberg’s revolution, humanity speaks across time. Generations pass their wisdom on, and each generation adds to it. The pool of knowledge grows, as does the percentage of humanity that can access it.
Abelard’s revolution, if he had been given access to a printing press, might have looked a lot like Luther’s. Both men were brilliant in debate, and both were intolerant of opposing opinions. There is some paradox in that. It is probably better that the revolution was a tinker’s revolution and not a philosopher’s. There is something analogous to Abelard’s theory of ethics, separating intent and action. Here we separate the medium from the content. As it was, Gutenberg had no more ambitious agenda than to make more Bibles. We should be thankful for his nobility, or for his lack of imagination.
The very neutrality of the delivery system worked toward literacy’s benefit, creating access to literature of every stripe, and providing the incentive to literacy that reformed all society. Reading is not genetic. It must be taught, and -- as we are learning in Ethiopia -- there is little incentive to the task without materials to read. Efficient knowledge transfer needs the raw materials. The printers have provided it. Revolution!
Following in Gutenberg’s footsteps, the printers became workmen, technicians, artisans. They formed firms, formed guilds, and thoroughly commercialized the operation. They prospered. They received commissions from kings. They built urban manors.
There may be no better place to see that than at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. The museum was once a house, a house facing the Vrijdag Market in Antwerp, a house for the Plantijn and Moretus families, and for their family business, a business that survived three hundred years. The firm was founded by Christoffel Plantijn in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was not only a printer-publisher of quality but had a canny instinct for survival during turbulent times, when Belgium was embroiled in the Eighty Years War, when Antwerp, the richest city in Europe, became a pawn in the tug of war between the Dutch and the Spanish. Plantijn managed to become printer for a royal Bible project, and leveraged this into status as Philip II’s ‘Architypographus Regii’, printer of royally sanctioned liturgical books. In the next generation, the business was passed to Christoffel‘s son-in-law, Jan Moretus. It remained in the Moretus family until they gifted the house to the city in the mid-nineteenth century.
The first reason to visit the museum is to see the two oldest surviving printing presses, dating back to around 1600. They are placed in the preserved workshop, where the printing took place, where letters were set and pages printed. It would have been a crowded, noisy, and chaotic room in its time, its centuries of time, having the capacity to print something like 2,000 pages per day. Now it has the silence appropriate to a museum, and it’s left to the imagination to sense the overwhelming roar and stink, among more than a dozen workers, that it took to produce a book.
Equally fascinating are the quieter rooms. One worth mentioning is old Christoffel‘s office, small as a modern closet, and almost as dark, preserved in its sixteenth and seventeenth century atmosphere, with wooden beams and walls lined with rare gilded leather. Here, the money was kept and counted. One can also visit the humble room where the proofreaders worked. There is little to see here but their desks, but learning about their work, one realizes how profoundly deep the reservoirs of intellect that were gathered in these printing houses. The houses may have been organized according to profit models, but there is no doubt that they effectively operated as centers of culture and learning, taking the place of the monasteries of Abelard’s day. The editors had to be prepared to apply themselves to works on a variety of academic topics, in any numbers of languages, modern and ancient. I managed to spot some letters cast from the Ge’ez, or historical Ethiopian, alphabet, among the boxes of preserved letters for the presses.
In a room next to Christoffel’s office, one sees portraits of Lipsius, renowned Renaissance humanist, friend to the founder of the house, and star in the firm’s first stable of published authors. In another room, one sees copper plates for illustrations designed by Mr. Rubens, friend to another, later patriarch of the family, one Balthasar Moretus.
Lastly, there is the patrician house itself, an architectural monument to status among the great business families of Antwerp. There is an interior courtyard, and set among the bricks walls are carvings of the family logo and busts of family notables. The two floors of the house are furnished with the self-indulgent complacency of success, commissioned portraits, fine furniture, tapestries, extensive libraries, a map room with man-sized globes, damask coverings. Goldsmiths as the arbiters of academia, goldsmiths bunking in the manor house; here’s the look of the revolution.
Thursday, August 07, 2014
Travelogue 572 – August 7
Capital
Part Four
It’s another night in front of the TV. The Rocky series continues. Apollo Creed has retired. Rocky has been a model champ, taking on almost all comers. But there’s a fierce new challenger. He has the eye of the tiger.
There’s an ambivalence to the sky outside my window of the little salon, my refuge in loneliness. The humidity seems ready to turn. It might rain. The steady heat may well leak from the sky. Has the time of rains come? That’s always a decent wager in the Netherlands.
When it rains in movies, it is a call from high in the atmosphere for conflict and introspection. There should be some key exchange of dialogue in the street, characters exposed to the weather. Someone walks home, hands in pockets, in melancholy and uncertainty.
I’m wondering how Stallone sees himself in the history of cinema – as his latest oeuvre, Expendables III, hits theatres in Europe. I often wonder how artists describe their careers to themselves. Are there two camps, gathered round two replies to the critics? ‘It’s a job,’ says one. ‘They don’t get it,’ says the other. Maybe there’s a third, those who disavow grand narratives. The artist tries for greatness, gets there once or twice. The rest if fluff. Maybe Stallone just shrugs and says, ‘Hey, I wrote Rocky.’
And so, on a humid European summer evening, I’m reminded of a stretch of Texas desert, dry space broken open, revealing miles and miles of nature’s lazy design in rock. It’s still, and all is quiet, except for a few spare tones from a slide guitar. The notes don’t emanate from an earthly source, so they aren’t subject to the breezes or the vagaries of dimension. They come from the world of the film-maker, and so they seem part of the arch of heaven. There’s a man walking across the desert. We are given a man in a desert. We are given a story.
It’s a tenuous thread of story, a man wandering the desert, a victim of his passion for a woman. But any story is only as good as its telling. This story was picked up by French and German producers, was captured in a screenplay by Sam Shepard, was directed by Wim Wenders, was accompanied by music by Ry Cooder, and was acted out by a fascinating mix of 80s stars, character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, with model and Polanski protégé, Nastassja Kinski. A young boy named Hunter Carson turns in a great performance as … a young boy.
The film moves slowly, even meditatively. The story is the telling. The story is desert space; it’s an airport in L.A.; it’s downtown Houston. Just like Rocky, the story must succeed in mood as much as in plot. The narrative turns on long, dramatic dialogues between Stanton and Kinski. She’s behind glass and he is shrouded in anonymous darkness.
‘Paris, Texas’ won the Palme d'Or in 1984. In 2014, it’s enjoying an obscure little revival at Le Champo Theatre in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The theatre itself is a small piece of film history, built in 1938 and being a favorite among Parisian students and cinephiles. In its day, it has served for premieres for directors like Marcel Carné and Jacques Tati. Now it is known for its retrospectives.
Stallone has been to France – most recently, riding through Cannes on a Soviet-era tank with his ‘Expendables’ co-stars. So he must know what film means to the French. They have good reason for their affection. Cinema can be said to have been born here, with the invention of the cinematographe by the tinkering Lumiere brothers. The brothers were heirs to a family photography studio in Lyon, freed by their father’s retirement in 1892 to play with moving pictures. In 1895 they presented an exhibition of short films at the Salon Indien in Paris, in an event commonly heralded as the birth of the art form. Ironically, the Lumieres eventually decided there was no future in film and went on to become innovators in color photography.
Until the First World War, France continued to play a leading role in film, led by such characters as Georges Méliès, the Pathé brothers, Léon Gaumont, and Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female film-maker. It was only during the war that American film moved to California, and started picking up the role in production that it would hold through the rest of the century, filling the gap left by the warring Europeans.
After our film, Menna and I stopped at Le Reflet across the street, a humble little bar with some notoriety of its own, an old watering hole for film lovers and film makers. The signs of its history are the film posters on the walls. I’m studying the Bruce Lee above our table. Was he the first Expendable? Would he have ridden a tank into Cannes? Why not?
On TV, Rocky takes his beating, the blood sacrifice of the hero whom destiny has called to win. The summer sky contains itself, holding in its rains for another day. After the victory, I can turn off the TV. I could take a walk. I could stay lying here and watch the color of dusk change outside my window. It’s summer, the season of idylls and daydreams. Maybe I’ll stay and throw my dreams of boxing and theology onto the wall, pacing ghostly Parisian avenues across the deserts of the Lone Star State. It’s all one, the world title belt on a dancing Abelard, Latin perorations intoned by Burgess Meredith, a taste of wine under the timeless sky of the Contrescarpe, the sound of the adversary’s cheek hitting the mat. We have won, and all is right once again.
Capital
Part Four
It’s another night in front of the TV. The Rocky series continues. Apollo Creed has retired. Rocky has been a model champ, taking on almost all comers. But there’s a fierce new challenger. He has the eye of the tiger.
There’s an ambivalence to the sky outside my window of the little salon, my refuge in loneliness. The humidity seems ready to turn. It might rain. The steady heat may well leak from the sky. Has the time of rains come? That’s always a decent wager in the Netherlands.
When it rains in movies, it is a call from high in the atmosphere for conflict and introspection. There should be some key exchange of dialogue in the street, characters exposed to the weather. Someone walks home, hands in pockets, in melancholy and uncertainty.
I’m wondering how Stallone sees himself in the history of cinema – as his latest oeuvre, Expendables III, hits theatres in Europe. I often wonder how artists describe their careers to themselves. Are there two camps, gathered round two replies to the critics? ‘It’s a job,’ says one. ‘They don’t get it,’ says the other. Maybe there’s a third, those who disavow grand narratives. The artist tries for greatness, gets there once or twice. The rest if fluff. Maybe Stallone just shrugs and says, ‘Hey, I wrote Rocky.’
And so, on a humid European summer evening, I’m reminded of a stretch of Texas desert, dry space broken open, revealing miles and miles of nature’s lazy design in rock. It’s still, and all is quiet, except for a few spare tones from a slide guitar. The notes don’t emanate from an earthly source, so they aren’t subject to the breezes or the vagaries of dimension. They come from the world of the film-maker, and so they seem part of the arch of heaven. There’s a man walking across the desert. We are given a man in a desert. We are given a story.
It’s a tenuous thread of story, a man wandering the desert, a victim of his passion for a woman. But any story is only as good as its telling. This story was picked up by French and German producers, was captured in a screenplay by Sam Shepard, was directed by Wim Wenders, was accompanied by music by Ry Cooder, and was acted out by a fascinating mix of 80s stars, character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, with model and Polanski protégé, Nastassja Kinski. A young boy named Hunter Carson turns in a great performance as … a young boy.
The film moves slowly, even meditatively. The story is the telling. The story is desert space; it’s an airport in L.A.; it’s downtown Houston. Just like Rocky, the story must succeed in mood as much as in plot. The narrative turns on long, dramatic dialogues between Stanton and Kinski. She’s behind glass and he is shrouded in anonymous darkness.
‘Paris, Texas’ won the Palme d'Or in 1984. In 2014, it’s enjoying an obscure little revival at Le Champo Theatre in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The theatre itself is a small piece of film history, built in 1938 and being a favorite among Parisian students and cinephiles. In its day, it has served for premieres for directors like Marcel Carné and Jacques Tati. Now it is known for its retrospectives.
Stallone has been to France – most recently, riding through Cannes on a Soviet-era tank with his ‘Expendables’ co-stars. So he must know what film means to the French. They have good reason for their affection. Cinema can be said to have been born here, with the invention of the cinematographe by the tinkering Lumiere brothers. The brothers were heirs to a family photography studio in Lyon, freed by their father’s retirement in 1892 to play with moving pictures. In 1895 they presented an exhibition of short films at the Salon Indien in Paris, in an event commonly heralded as the birth of the art form. Ironically, the Lumieres eventually decided there was no future in film and went on to become innovators in color photography.
Until the First World War, France continued to play a leading role in film, led by such characters as Georges Méliès, the Pathé brothers, Léon Gaumont, and Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female film-maker. It was only during the war that American film moved to California, and started picking up the role in production that it would hold through the rest of the century, filling the gap left by the warring Europeans.
After our film, Menna and I stopped at Le Reflet across the street, a humble little bar with some notoriety of its own, an old watering hole for film lovers and film makers. The signs of its history are the film posters on the walls. I’m studying the Bruce Lee above our table. Was he the first Expendable? Would he have ridden a tank into Cannes? Why not?
On TV, Rocky takes his beating, the blood sacrifice of the hero whom destiny has called to win. The summer sky contains itself, holding in its rains for another day. After the victory, I can turn off the TV. I could take a walk. I could stay lying here and watch the color of dusk change outside my window. It’s summer, the season of idylls and daydreams. Maybe I’ll stay and throw my dreams of boxing and theology onto the wall, pacing ghostly Parisian avenues across the deserts of the Lone Star State. It’s all one, the world title belt on a dancing Abelard, Latin perorations intoned by Burgess Meredith, a taste of wine under the timeless sky of the Contrescarpe, the sound of the adversary’s cheek hitting the mat. We have won, and all is right once again.
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
Travelogue 571 – August 6
Capital
Part Three
And there we were, listening to klezmer. We were having one last coffee for the day, sitting together among the banks of outdoor tables at the café facing the square. We had spent a day wandering among the shadows of centuries past, and we were resting at a café on the Place de la Contrescarpe. We were having a last coffee for the day, as the sun found its place among the western roofs above the Place. We were listening to two musicians who were making the rounds among the hundreds of seats facing the square that is not a square, but the irregular shape described by generations of ancient traffic emerging together from a variety of directions. There were two musicians, dressed with the delicate care of old hobos, one on trumpet and one on clarinet, the cases for the instruments at their feet. The melodies might have played themselves, so well-rehearsed by the long summer days. Occasionally one horn trailed off as the musician behind it made the rounds among the audiences, holding forth his soiled cap for coins. He moved from café to café, among the half dozen or so that encircled the historic square.
And this is what I can daydream about on solitary evenings while my wife is away. The sky in Zuid-Holland is a gentle summer consistency, humid and stirred by mild and cool breezes. I’ve muted the TV while Rocky works up a scene change on a commercial break.
Rocky is muttering in my ear with the sincerity of tireless youth, saying every fight is a good fight. ‘You know, you put up your gloves. Like this. That’s right. You go the distance.’ And I haven‘t even lifted the mute. He is a spirit of fortitude, a companion in solitude.
We have discovered the Place de la Contrescarpe twice. And each time, we have stopped for a coffee at one of the cafes facing the fountain in the square. The first time, we had descended from the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, having emerged from the law students’ gate at the Sorbonne and passed beneath the sad height of the Panthéon, covered as it is these days by a white trash bag and scaffolding, past the celebrated university library and to the lovely and unique façade of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, where Saint Geneviève herself lies buried. We had entered and reviewed the beautiful stained glass. We had moved on, among the narrow streets of the district, stopping in front of the residences of ghost Joyce and ghost Hemingway.
It’s the Latin Quarter, named for the language of poets and lecturers. And the writers have remained loyal through the centuries.
Stallone has forgotten his Italian. His cousins have forgotten their Latin. He’s composed his stories in the language of a new place called Philadelphia. The story is a morality tale, how losing is winning. He wins an Oscar for the screenplay.
The second time we arrived at the Place de la Contrescarpe, we have been walking south, returning along the Rue Mouffetard, famous clutter of shops and market stalls. We have stopped in cheese shops to count the types of cheese, and to swim in the scents. The name Mouffetard comes from mouffle, Old French for stink. But it’s not the stink of cheese. Rather it comes from the work of skinners, tanners, and tripe butchers by the river Bièvre at the foot of the hill.
The jumble of tiny shops – Orwell wrote of the Rue Mouffetard, ‘. . . a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching toward one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse’ – has led Menna to remark, ‘Now I feel like I’m in France.’
And the writers have remained loyal. Hugo and Balzac honor the area in books. If you go back far enough, you find Rabelais drinking at the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, among the university students looking for cheap wine. Rewind further, and you will find the poet Villon engaging in remarkably similar activities, when the Place de la Contrescarpe was no place, but a muddy meadow outside the gates of the city, where teamsters gathered for business and for pleasure.
I reach further, and I imagine it in the time of our tender-hearted intellectual, young Peter Abelard, who described himself as peripatetic, lecturing as he strolled among the open spaces that undoubtedly described the landscape on this side of the montagne. That he taught while he walked is probably as much a fiction as the one that had Aristotle teaching while he strolled the groves of the Lyceum. More likely he found some church or abbey to host his ‘school’. But I bet he did walk, and I bet plenty of wide-eyed pupils did follow him down the road. Maybe they bought him his wine at the roadside tavern that would mark the spot of the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, just to hear him dissect the ideas of the respected scholars at Notre Dame, cruelly and capably discrediting them and their thoughts. Some of the students could probably afford the bar tab, being second and third sons of nobility, seeking their fortunes in the powerful medieval church.
I’m thinking the young scholar Stallone, scribbling away in obscurity in the mid-70s, might have had a ghostly ally in Peter Abelard. In his Ethics, Abelard contends that moral value resided not in the action, but in the intention. This was a novel contention at the time, to judge by the charges of heresy brought against him. How novel is hard to say. What smithies grumble in the taverns often takes centuries to find its way into philosopher’s tracts. Once there, the most prosaic thought become fodder for political battle. Philosophy is a game of contention, and no one knew that better than Abelard, who was a difficult man to live at peace with. He was too sharp, too smart, and much too ready to prove it. He challenged every teacher he had, and often publicly.
Philosophers are fighters. Channel Seven has been airing all the Rocky movies, and then afterward all the Rambo films. I don’t have the stamina for Rocky and Rambo both, but I catch the beginnings of each one of the Rambo stories for nostalgia’s sake. This is the Stallone that we’ve become more familiar with over the years, laconic and sullen. Stallone of the Rocky era was a boy, eager and sentimental and even verbose. He had trusting puppy eyes then, not the staring and judging eyes of the elder prophet.
Both Stallone characters are innocents, and Stallone’s business has been the writing of moral fables. Whether boxing in Philly or shooting bad guys in Burma, the protagonist of any of the fables is an innocent at war with circumstance. The world is intrusive and demanding. It enters into life of the hero in the guise of some relentless antagonist. They aren’t always bad guys. In the older films, they are just people struggling with their petty ambitions, the redneck town sheriff, the vain world champ. The antagonist appears, and the hero responds to the challenge with righteous action: persistence, honest effort, and generosity.
In later movies, the casualties add up. If intention trumps action, I suppose the body count becomes only a detail. That is the story of action films in the 80s. What counts is the moral.
And this is where the hero of ‘Vanilla Sky’ fails. He kills no one, not even himself, as it turns out, but his intentions are muddled. He is weak, and therefore unforgivable. Morality tales require clear decision and resolute action. It’s acceptable to set aside ten minutes in the script for self-doubt, but ultimately the hero’s instincts are sure.
Morality tales are mirrors, and humans love mirrors. Religion serves morality, and religious art depicts angels in human form. The Bible is parable and story. Even the atheist has a strict code, and his clan has heroes. It’s not the after-life that motivates morality. It’s a keen sense of our own fragility. We have always been animals running in groups, measuring our chances at survival by status in the group. Morality is a code for trust. Survival depends on accurate readings of behavior. Behavior is guided by morality. Rambo may be a killer, but we know very well who he’s going to kill.
In any case, killing was on holiday in the Place de la Contrescarpe that day. We felt entirely safe and relaxed in that assembly of hundreds in a Paris square. The code of that group was in service of an idea called ‘summer’. Our behavior conformed to a code called ‘vacation’. It’s perhaps the highest form of civilization yet. God looked down upon us, as He moved His sun into position to set, and He was pleased. We were philosophers. We were free of both intention and action.
Capital
Part Three
And there we were, listening to klezmer. We were having one last coffee for the day, sitting together among the banks of outdoor tables at the café facing the square. We had spent a day wandering among the shadows of centuries past, and we were resting at a café on the Place de la Contrescarpe. We were having a last coffee for the day, as the sun found its place among the western roofs above the Place. We were listening to two musicians who were making the rounds among the hundreds of seats facing the square that is not a square, but the irregular shape described by generations of ancient traffic emerging together from a variety of directions. There were two musicians, dressed with the delicate care of old hobos, one on trumpet and one on clarinet, the cases for the instruments at their feet. The melodies might have played themselves, so well-rehearsed by the long summer days. Occasionally one horn trailed off as the musician behind it made the rounds among the audiences, holding forth his soiled cap for coins. He moved from café to café, among the half dozen or so that encircled the historic square.
And this is what I can daydream about on solitary evenings while my wife is away. The sky in Zuid-Holland is a gentle summer consistency, humid and stirred by mild and cool breezes. I’ve muted the TV while Rocky works up a scene change on a commercial break.
Rocky is muttering in my ear with the sincerity of tireless youth, saying every fight is a good fight. ‘You know, you put up your gloves. Like this. That’s right. You go the distance.’ And I haven‘t even lifted the mute. He is a spirit of fortitude, a companion in solitude.
We have discovered the Place de la Contrescarpe twice. And each time, we have stopped for a coffee at one of the cafes facing the fountain in the square. The first time, we had descended from the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, having emerged from the law students’ gate at the Sorbonne and passed beneath the sad height of the Panthéon, covered as it is these days by a white trash bag and scaffolding, past the celebrated university library and to the lovely and unique façade of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, where Saint Geneviève herself lies buried. We had entered and reviewed the beautiful stained glass. We had moved on, among the narrow streets of the district, stopping in front of the residences of ghost Joyce and ghost Hemingway.
It’s the Latin Quarter, named for the language of poets and lecturers. And the writers have remained loyal through the centuries.
Stallone has forgotten his Italian. His cousins have forgotten their Latin. He’s composed his stories in the language of a new place called Philadelphia. The story is a morality tale, how losing is winning. He wins an Oscar for the screenplay.
The second time we arrived at the Place de la Contrescarpe, we have been walking south, returning along the Rue Mouffetard, famous clutter of shops and market stalls. We have stopped in cheese shops to count the types of cheese, and to swim in the scents. The name Mouffetard comes from mouffle, Old French for stink. But it’s not the stink of cheese. Rather it comes from the work of skinners, tanners, and tripe butchers by the river Bièvre at the foot of the hill.
The jumble of tiny shops – Orwell wrote of the Rue Mouffetard, ‘. . . a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching toward one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse’ – has led Menna to remark, ‘Now I feel like I’m in France.’
And the writers have remained loyal. Hugo and Balzac honor the area in books. If you go back far enough, you find Rabelais drinking at the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, among the university students looking for cheap wine. Rewind further, and you will find the poet Villon engaging in remarkably similar activities, when the Place de la Contrescarpe was no place, but a muddy meadow outside the gates of the city, where teamsters gathered for business and for pleasure.
I reach further, and I imagine it in the time of our tender-hearted intellectual, young Peter Abelard, who described himself as peripatetic, lecturing as he strolled among the open spaces that undoubtedly described the landscape on this side of the montagne. That he taught while he walked is probably as much a fiction as the one that had Aristotle teaching while he strolled the groves of the Lyceum. More likely he found some church or abbey to host his ‘school’. But I bet he did walk, and I bet plenty of wide-eyed pupils did follow him down the road. Maybe they bought him his wine at the roadside tavern that would mark the spot of the Maison de la Pomme de Pin, just to hear him dissect the ideas of the respected scholars at Notre Dame, cruelly and capably discrediting them and their thoughts. Some of the students could probably afford the bar tab, being second and third sons of nobility, seeking their fortunes in the powerful medieval church.
I’m thinking the young scholar Stallone, scribbling away in obscurity in the mid-70s, might have had a ghostly ally in Peter Abelard. In his Ethics, Abelard contends that moral value resided not in the action, but in the intention. This was a novel contention at the time, to judge by the charges of heresy brought against him. How novel is hard to say. What smithies grumble in the taverns often takes centuries to find its way into philosopher’s tracts. Once there, the most prosaic thought become fodder for political battle. Philosophy is a game of contention, and no one knew that better than Abelard, who was a difficult man to live at peace with. He was too sharp, too smart, and much too ready to prove it. He challenged every teacher he had, and often publicly.
Philosophers are fighters. Channel Seven has been airing all the Rocky movies, and then afterward all the Rambo films. I don’t have the stamina for Rocky and Rambo both, but I catch the beginnings of each one of the Rambo stories for nostalgia’s sake. This is the Stallone that we’ve become more familiar with over the years, laconic and sullen. Stallone of the Rocky era was a boy, eager and sentimental and even verbose. He had trusting puppy eyes then, not the staring and judging eyes of the elder prophet.
Both Stallone characters are innocents, and Stallone’s business has been the writing of moral fables. Whether boxing in Philly or shooting bad guys in Burma, the protagonist of any of the fables is an innocent at war with circumstance. The world is intrusive and demanding. It enters into life of the hero in the guise of some relentless antagonist. They aren’t always bad guys. In the older films, they are just people struggling with their petty ambitions, the redneck town sheriff, the vain world champ. The antagonist appears, and the hero responds to the challenge with righteous action: persistence, honest effort, and generosity.
In later movies, the casualties add up. If intention trumps action, I suppose the body count becomes only a detail. That is the story of action films in the 80s. What counts is the moral.
And this is where the hero of ‘Vanilla Sky’ fails. He kills no one, not even himself, as it turns out, but his intentions are muddled. He is weak, and therefore unforgivable. Morality tales require clear decision and resolute action. It’s acceptable to set aside ten minutes in the script for self-doubt, but ultimately the hero’s instincts are sure.
Morality tales are mirrors, and humans love mirrors. Religion serves morality, and religious art depicts angels in human form. The Bible is parable and story. Even the atheist has a strict code, and his clan has heroes. It’s not the after-life that motivates morality. It’s a keen sense of our own fragility. We have always been animals running in groups, measuring our chances at survival by status in the group. Morality is a code for trust. Survival depends on accurate readings of behavior. Behavior is guided by morality. Rambo may be a killer, but we know very well who he’s going to kill.
In any case, killing was on holiday in the Place de la Contrescarpe that day. We felt entirely safe and relaxed in that assembly of hundreds in a Paris square. The code of that group was in service of an idea called ‘summer’. Our behavior conformed to a code called ‘vacation’. It’s perhaps the highest form of civilization yet. God looked down upon us, as He moved His sun into position to set, and He was pleased. We were philosophers. We were free of both intention and action.
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Travelogue 570 – August 5
Capital
Part Two
It’s been another hot and beautiful day, high summer. Lying back into the couch, I can see the sky through the drapes. I’m guessing by the color creeping through the several high clouds that the sun is just now setting. My days are starting early and ending early. Menna is away, and I have little to do in the evenings.
Inside the TV, it’s night in Philadelphia. I’m looking out the window, and I’m thinking, ‘I may be ready for bed, but in Philadelphia it’s just past noon. The same sun is high in the sky there. Maybe it’s humid. Maybe people are sweating through a long and burning day there, in America’s first capital.’
My days are long and too solitary. Menna is far away, just about as far south as Philadelphia is west. She has returned to the capital of Ethiopia, where the strong sun is captive to the year’s rainy season. Without her here, my days are long work sessions, and my nights are long sessions with the TV. Guiding the work are a set of strong fall deadlines. They wake me early in the morning. Guiding my evenings, after my eyes are smoked past any more use at the computer, are the movie agendas of my local channels. As it happens, it’s Rocky week on Channel Seven. They are airing all the Rockies. I’m watching the second one tonight.
Tonight, in old Philadelphia, Rocky just can’t catch a break. Last night, in movie number one, he had the big break, of course, the biggest break there is, a shot at the title. It came to him out of the blue, bestowed upon him in his innocence. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t ask. In fact, there’s no more behind it than the ring of his name; and the lure of the old capital. It’s the country’s bicentennial, so for the extravagant Apollo Creed, it’s the lure of the town itself, grown so ugly by 1976. The champ wants a contest in the birthplace of freedom. Et cetera.
But Rocky’s successes only create more puzzles for him. He’s famous, but he can’t land a job. He doesn’t read so well, so his attempts to escape the docks and the meat factory end in failure.
Rocky has only one thing going for him. Rocky has heart. The world responds to his heart with the warmth of instinct. Even Creed, famous but embittered champ, cannot forget Rocky. The one, inconclusive fight won’t do. He steps into Rocky’s story a second time and Rocky responds with heart. That’s what he does. As a consequence of heart, Rocky II concludes with triumph.
I’m flipping channels. I’m not afraid I’ll lose the thread of Rocky’s story. On Channel Ten is ‘Vanilla Sky’, a movie I had all but forgotten. Hapless Tom Cruise, the actor everyone loves to hate, steps in where other stars fear to tread, once again. He volunteers to portray ugliness. His character makes ugly decisions, and he himself becomes disfigured. Where Rocky’s way is always to respond with heart, David Aames from ‘Vanilla Sky’ has an unerring instinct for selfishness and self-pity. While charmed circumstance follows Rocky through the bleak streets of his 70s slum, with something like the energy of a besotted Tinker Bell, life is never more for Aames than his own creation, something rarely to his benefit. Where Rocky’s heart is the perfect compass, Aames’ instincts point south. He pouts in his high-rent Manhattan flat, his high-walled brick stage set for 90s malaise, and he contemplates the wasteland of Self.
Philosophy is a game for the idle, so idly I ask, ‘what is the TV teaching me tonight?’ Is the lesson that morality is a contest won by the innocent, a sort of Christian formula that apportions blessings for the child-like? Or is it teaching me that choice is best exercised as reaction? I certainly have experienced the sort of Aamesian haplessness that follows upon free choice. The more self-determined, the more miserable. Left to our own devices, we will always spoil circumstance. We will be our own worst enemy. Et cetera.
I’m daydreaming. I’m watching the sky again, through the crack in the drapes. The field of blue is noticeably changing, becoming richer in tone. There are a few wisps of high cloud curling across the color of dusk. I am happy to project my idle thoughts there, to no purpose, to no gain.
I’ve begun to think of Paris. Am I missing Paris or am I missing Menna? We had such a nice time there. I see us strolling the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter on a hot July evening. We are slowly climbing the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, district of philosophers. It’s this tradition that names the quartier ‘Latin’. Latin is the language of church and academia for more than a thousand years.
This side of the hill, facing the Seine, has always been settled, but once upon a time, the hill and the other side are the outskirts of the town, particularly in the early Middle Ages. There is King Clovis’s church for Sainte-Geneviève on the summit. It has a school for young church scholars, though the premier school would have been at Notre Dame on the Île.
It’s at Notre Dame that Peter Abelard studied as a young man, though only for a short time before alienating his famed teacher, William of Champeaux. It was a pattern for young Abelard. He was always contentious, and always victorious. By the time he set up a school on the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève in 1108, they say he was drawing crowds of hundreds of eager students. These were the exciting days that determined the future of the Latin Quarter, when small schools of theology were proliferating, probably to some degree drawing on the star power of young Abelard.
A century later, this constellation of small schools required some structure. Paris was becoming a center of scholarship, and the French royal family derived no small benefit from the reflected glory and the talent pool. So, early in the 13th century, King Philippe Auguste set up the universitas as an overarching community of schools, or colleges, governed by statutes, provided with living quarters for scholars, and offering diplomas to guarantee quality of education. In 1257, a new college was founded by one Robert de Sorbon. His college would set such a high standard in theology that the university would come to be known by its name.
Capital
Part Two
It’s been another hot and beautiful day, high summer. Lying back into the couch, I can see the sky through the drapes. I’m guessing by the color creeping through the several high clouds that the sun is just now setting. My days are starting early and ending early. Menna is away, and I have little to do in the evenings.
Inside the TV, it’s night in Philadelphia. I’m looking out the window, and I’m thinking, ‘I may be ready for bed, but in Philadelphia it’s just past noon. The same sun is high in the sky there. Maybe it’s humid. Maybe people are sweating through a long and burning day there, in America’s first capital.’
My days are long and too solitary. Menna is far away, just about as far south as Philadelphia is west. She has returned to the capital of Ethiopia, where the strong sun is captive to the year’s rainy season. Without her here, my days are long work sessions, and my nights are long sessions with the TV. Guiding the work are a set of strong fall deadlines. They wake me early in the morning. Guiding my evenings, after my eyes are smoked past any more use at the computer, are the movie agendas of my local channels. As it happens, it’s Rocky week on Channel Seven. They are airing all the Rockies. I’m watching the second one tonight.
Tonight, in old Philadelphia, Rocky just can’t catch a break. Last night, in movie number one, he had the big break, of course, the biggest break there is, a shot at the title. It came to him out of the blue, bestowed upon him in his innocence. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t ask. In fact, there’s no more behind it than the ring of his name; and the lure of the old capital. It’s the country’s bicentennial, so for the extravagant Apollo Creed, it’s the lure of the town itself, grown so ugly by 1976. The champ wants a contest in the birthplace of freedom. Et cetera.
But Rocky’s successes only create more puzzles for him. He’s famous, but he can’t land a job. He doesn’t read so well, so his attempts to escape the docks and the meat factory end in failure.
Rocky has only one thing going for him. Rocky has heart. The world responds to his heart with the warmth of instinct. Even Creed, famous but embittered champ, cannot forget Rocky. The one, inconclusive fight won’t do. He steps into Rocky’s story a second time and Rocky responds with heart. That’s what he does. As a consequence of heart, Rocky II concludes with triumph.
I’m flipping channels. I’m not afraid I’ll lose the thread of Rocky’s story. On Channel Ten is ‘Vanilla Sky’, a movie I had all but forgotten. Hapless Tom Cruise, the actor everyone loves to hate, steps in where other stars fear to tread, once again. He volunteers to portray ugliness. His character makes ugly decisions, and he himself becomes disfigured. Where Rocky’s way is always to respond with heart, David Aames from ‘Vanilla Sky’ has an unerring instinct for selfishness and self-pity. While charmed circumstance follows Rocky through the bleak streets of his 70s slum, with something like the energy of a besotted Tinker Bell, life is never more for Aames than his own creation, something rarely to his benefit. Where Rocky’s heart is the perfect compass, Aames’ instincts point south. He pouts in his high-rent Manhattan flat, his high-walled brick stage set for 90s malaise, and he contemplates the wasteland of Self.
Philosophy is a game for the idle, so idly I ask, ‘what is the TV teaching me tonight?’ Is the lesson that morality is a contest won by the innocent, a sort of Christian formula that apportions blessings for the child-like? Or is it teaching me that choice is best exercised as reaction? I certainly have experienced the sort of Aamesian haplessness that follows upon free choice. The more self-determined, the more miserable. Left to our own devices, we will always spoil circumstance. We will be our own worst enemy. Et cetera.
I’m daydreaming. I’m watching the sky again, through the crack in the drapes. The field of blue is noticeably changing, becoming richer in tone. There are a few wisps of high cloud curling across the color of dusk. I am happy to project my idle thoughts there, to no purpose, to no gain.
I’ve begun to think of Paris. Am I missing Paris or am I missing Menna? We had such a nice time there. I see us strolling the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter on a hot July evening. We are slowly climbing the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, district of philosophers. It’s this tradition that names the quartier ‘Latin’. Latin is the language of church and academia for more than a thousand years.
This side of the hill, facing the Seine, has always been settled, but once upon a time, the hill and the other side are the outskirts of the town, particularly in the early Middle Ages. There is King Clovis’s church for Sainte-Geneviève on the summit. It has a school for young church scholars, though the premier school would have been at Notre Dame on the Île.
It’s at Notre Dame that Peter Abelard studied as a young man, though only for a short time before alienating his famed teacher, William of Champeaux. It was a pattern for young Abelard. He was always contentious, and always victorious. By the time he set up a school on the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève in 1108, they say he was drawing crowds of hundreds of eager students. These were the exciting days that determined the future of the Latin Quarter, when small schools of theology were proliferating, probably to some degree drawing on the star power of young Abelard.
A century later, this constellation of small schools required some structure. Paris was becoming a center of scholarship, and the French royal family derived no small benefit from the reflected glory and the talent pool. So, early in the 13th century, King Philippe Auguste set up the universitas as an overarching community of schools, or colleges, governed by statutes, provided with living quarters for scholars, and offering diplomas to guarantee quality of education. In 1257, a new college was founded by one Robert de Sorbon. His college would set such a high standard in theology that the university would come to be known by its name.
Sunday, August 03, 2014
Travelogue 569 – August 3
Capital
Part One
The sun is strong. We love this place in July. The sun is tonic.
We are standing below the grimy walls of the modern, ugly entrance to the beautiful campus. It was added on in the 1970s. We are scanning the political posters plastered everywhere. I am surprised to see so many National Front posters, photos of Marine smiling beside the local candidate in the recent European Parliament election.
An alumni of the Sorbonne is shaking her head. ‘Paris has really changed,’ she affirms. In her day – fifteen years ago at most – she says these posters would never have lasted. She says that French teens – with plenty of options for free university -- chose the Sorbonne because of its tradition of political activism. And that never, never meant activism for the far right. She is struck with horror. She relates stories from 1968, as though she had been there, when the students and workers had allied to shut down the city and country.
Maybe Parisian intellectuals have yet to realize how seductive the reactionary cause can be nowadays. It’s the seductiveness of radicalism. Young people hunger for radicalism, and maybe the left doesn’t provide it. Young people delight in the outrageous. Maybe there is little outrage left in championing the poor and the oppressed. To scorn is now outrageous. To be indelicate is an adventure.
Politics is in the blood of the Parisians. It’s built into the very geography of the place, the contrast between the island and the bank. For so long, the divide of the river was the divide between privilege and the people, perhaps since the Parisii set up command and temple on the island, overseeing the overflow of humanity onto the Left Bank. Certainly that is how it has developed since the Merovingians.
The Romans themselves centered the city in the Latin Quarter, specifically on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. But the Romans never designated the town a capital of any sort. In fact, during its first thousand years after the Romans, Paris was capital of empire or kingdom only occasionally. Its first stint was notably under King Clovis I, convert to Christianity, and his immediate heirs, founders of the historic churches of Germain and Geneviève.
But capitals were creations of caprice and exigency in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, the polis was origin and anchor of civilization. In early-medieval Europe, the city was only convenience. Empire was ruled by families on horseback.
I’m reminded of Ethiopian history. After the ancient era of Axum, the thousand-year stability of the city of Axum, the capital(s) of empire moved according to the whims of rulers and ruling families. Addis Ababa was only the last in a long line of dynastic sites, this one chosen purely for strategic reasons by the great king Menelik. It survived the transition into modernity, into the age of the nation-state and the need once again for rooted governance.
There is little of the ancient that survives in Paris. What inherit is largely a creation of the later Middle Ages. Even the good King Clovis left us little to remember him by, other than a few, rare bits of masonry in the first churches. It remained for later dynasties, in more stable times, to build a city we could recognize, a city of devotion, a city of intellect, and a city of art.
That brings us back again to the dichotomy, the stand-off between the Île and the Montagne, back to where we stand, on the venerable Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, underneath the summer sun, examining the posters of Marine in curiosity and wonder, trying to imagine Parisian students shaking their fists the European Union and heaping calumny on immigrants.
Walking through the doors of the great institute, on this side so humble and ugly, we find, only some several dozen meters farther, the grand gateway historically reserved for the students of law, and we emerge on the summit of the montagne, where stands the Pantheon and the old church of Geneviève.
Capital
Part One
The sun is strong. We love this place in July. The sun is tonic.
We are standing below the grimy walls of the modern, ugly entrance to the beautiful campus. It was added on in the 1970s. We are scanning the political posters plastered everywhere. I am surprised to see so many National Front posters, photos of Marine smiling beside the local candidate in the recent European Parliament election.
An alumni of the Sorbonne is shaking her head. ‘Paris has really changed,’ she affirms. In her day – fifteen years ago at most – she says these posters would never have lasted. She says that French teens – with plenty of options for free university -- chose the Sorbonne because of its tradition of political activism. And that never, never meant activism for the far right. She is struck with horror. She relates stories from 1968, as though she had been there, when the students and workers had allied to shut down the city and country.
Maybe Parisian intellectuals have yet to realize how seductive the reactionary cause can be nowadays. It’s the seductiveness of radicalism. Young people hunger for radicalism, and maybe the left doesn’t provide it. Young people delight in the outrageous. Maybe there is little outrage left in championing the poor and the oppressed. To scorn is now outrageous. To be indelicate is an adventure.
Politics is in the blood of the Parisians. It’s built into the very geography of the place, the contrast between the island and the bank. For so long, the divide of the river was the divide between privilege and the people, perhaps since the Parisii set up command and temple on the island, overseeing the overflow of humanity onto the Left Bank. Certainly that is how it has developed since the Merovingians.
The Romans themselves centered the city in the Latin Quarter, specifically on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. But the Romans never designated the town a capital of any sort. In fact, during its first thousand years after the Romans, Paris was capital of empire or kingdom only occasionally. Its first stint was notably under King Clovis I, convert to Christianity, and his immediate heirs, founders of the historic churches of Germain and Geneviève.
But capitals were creations of caprice and exigency in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, the polis was origin and anchor of civilization. In early-medieval Europe, the city was only convenience. Empire was ruled by families on horseback.
I’m reminded of Ethiopian history. After the ancient era of Axum, the thousand-year stability of the city of Axum, the capital(s) of empire moved according to the whims of rulers and ruling families. Addis Ababa was only the last in a long line of dynastic sites, this one chosen purely for strategic reasons by the great king Menelik. It survived the transition into modernity, into the age of the nation-state and the need once again for rooted governance.
There is little of the ancient that survives in Paris. What inherit is largely a creation of the later Middle Ages. Even the good King Clovis left us little to remember him by, other than a few, rare bits of masonry in the first churches. It remained for later dynasties, in more stable times, to build a city we could recognize, a city of devotion, a city of intellect, and a city of art.
That brings us back again to the dichotomy, the stand-off between the Île and the Montagne, back to where we stand, on the venerable Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, underneath the summer sun, examining the posters of Marine in curiosity and wonder, trying to imagine Parisian students shaking their fists the European Union and heaping calumny on immigrants.
Walking through the doors of the great institute, on this side so humble and ugly, we find, only some several dozen meters farther, the grand gateway historically reserved for the students of law, and we emerge on the summit of the montagne, where stands the Pantheon and the old church of Geneviève.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Travelogue 568 – July 31
And She’s Far Away
It’s Menna’s birthday today, and she’s far away. We will talk on the phone, with any luck. The connection will be poor. Each will only just be able to make out what each is saying. We will have to speak in the shortest sentences, the simplest thoughts. ‘Are you happy?’
Menna’s sister has had a baby, the first of its generation. I can just make out the boy’s cries in the background when Menna and I do talk. “He’s a big baby,’ she says. ‘I’m holding him.’ I ask after her sister. ‘What?’ I ask after her sister. ‘She’s fine. She’s doing well.’ The snowy silences are winning, encroaching on our spare words.
Menna’s sister lives in the outskirts of the city. There is no internet nearby. They’ve canceled old CDMA services in the city, the mobile network services that we have used for years. They’ve canceled her old mobile number. We’re having to call via her Dutch number. We don’t know how long that will last.
I have dropped her off at the airport in Amsterdam, only days ago, at the beginning of this week. We have to wake at 4:30am for an early check-in. The taxi shows up outside the hotel. It’s a van, with seating space for half a dozen in the back. We squeeze together there, against the chill of the morning, against the last darkness of the night. It’s only a few miles to the airport, driving under the yellow spotlights of the big city. At the airport, numbers of summer travelers are already unloading their cars outside the terminal. Daylight is just breaking above us. In the long line for package check-in, there are listless people in shorts, speaking in Dutch, in German, in Polish, in Arabic, in Spanish, in French.
The day is just closing, the light loosening its hold, the sky becoming deeper and richer in its tones of blue. The red remaining in the sky is soaking into the brick of old Amsterdam. We are emerging from the Jordaan district, to the west of the busy centrum. This is our favorite area of the city, where the brick lanes and the tiny bridges are quieter, where the tourist traffic dips just a bit, where a couple might just walk hand in hand along the sweet old pavements and be alone for only a moment.
We have spent an hour of the evening in a fruitless search for the little restaurant where we had had a beautiful meal just over a year ago, when Menna had just arrived. The moment was a shout of joy then, a package of happy chaos, as Menna absorbed the beating light and sharp sounds of a place brightly new, and we walked and walked under a hot summer sun.
We can’t find the restaurant. We settle for a beer at a table set in the Noordermarkt square, quiet pause among the determined little lanes, overseen by the placid old Noorderkerek, almost four hundred years old, looking modest and New England Protestant.
We have walked under the fairy tower of the Wesrerkerk, baby blue crown at the top, and by the somber dissonance of the Anne Frank House, and among the streets of the Jordaan as far west as possible, out past the centuries to where the neighborhoods resign to functional modernity, where the chain markets take over and where the cycle paths re-assert themselves and where the Dutch language resumes its funny rhythms.
We will stroll back toward the train station together as the sun sets, as the reds remaining in the sky tint the brick beside us, like stern church wine, like the gravid shadows that haunted Mr. Rembrandt.
We will awaken at 4:30am in order to take Menna to the Schiphol Airport. We will stand in line with cheerful Europeans on holiday, and we will make our farewells in front of the chambers of airport security. I will watch her unpacking her bag into the bins for the security apparatus. She will be flying soon. I will have spent a day alone in our apartment before she arrives.
Outside the lonely apartment, summer carries on with unabated charm. My summer will consist of long runs. I’ll soak up the sun. I’ll enjoy the waters of the river that way. I’ll enjoy the parks. My autumn training is starting. I have a race in Den Haag. I have a race in Eindhoven.
Menna and I have had our summer. We have visited the beach at Scheveningen, diving into the cold waters and learning how to swim again, lying on our beach towels. Menna is afraid of the sun. She thinks she will burn. She thinks she will be too dark. I’m laughing at her.
We have visited Paris when the sun was hottest.
And She’s Far Away
It’s Menna’s birthday today, and she’s far away. We will talk on the phone, with any luck. The connection will be poor. Each will only just be able to make out what each is saying. We will have to speak in the shortest sentences, the simplest thoughts. ‘Are you happy?’
Menna’s sister has had a baby, the first of its generation. I can just make out the boy’s cries in the background when Menna and I do talk. “He’s a big baby,’ she says. ‘I’m holding him.’ I ask after her sister. ‘What?’ I ask after her sister. ‘She’s fine. She’s doing well.’ The snowy silences are winning, encroaching on our spare words.
Menna’s sister lives in the outskirts of the city. There is no internet nearby. They’ve canceled old CDMA services in the city, the mobile network services that we have used for years. They’ve canceled her old mobile number. We’re having to call via her Dutch number. We don’t know how long that will last.
I have dropped her off at the airport in Amsterdam, only days ago, at the beginning of this week. We have to wake at 4:30am for an early check-in. The taxi shows up outside the hotel. It’s a van, with seating space for half a dozen in the back. We squeeze together there, against the chill of the morning, against the last darkness of the night. It’s only a few miles to the airport, driving under the yellow spotlights of the big city. At the airport, numbers of summer travelers are already unloading their cars outside the terminal. Daylight is just breaking above us. In the long line for package check-in, there are listless people in shorts, speaking in Dutch, in German, in Polish, in Arabic, in Spanish, in French.
The day is just closing, the light loosening its hold, the sky becoming deeper and richer in its tones of blue. The red remaining in the sky is soaking into the brick of old Amsterdam. We are emerging from the Jordaan district, to the west of the busy centrum. This is our favorite area of the city, where the brick lanes and the tiny bridges are quieter, where the tourist traffic dips just a bit, where a couple might just walk hand in hand along the sweet old pavements and be alone for only a moment.
We have spent an hour of the evening in a fruitless search for the little restaurant where we had had a beautiful meal just over a year ago, when Menna had just arrived. The moment was a shout of joy then, a package of happy chaos, as Menna absorbed the beating light and sharp sounds of a place brightly new, and we walked and walked under a hot summer sun.
We can’t find the restaurant. We settle for a beer at a table set in the Noordermarkt square, quiet pause among the determined little lanes, overseen by the placid old Noorderkerek, almost four hundred years old, looking modest and New England Protestant.
We have walked under the fairy tower of the Wesrerkerk, baby blue crown at the top, and by the somber dissonance of the Anne Frank House, and among the streets of the Jordaan as far west as possible, out past the centuries to where the neighborhoods resign to functional modernity, where the chain markets take over and where the cycle paths re-assert themselves and where the Dutch language resumes its funny rhythms.
We will stroll back toward the train station together as the sun sets, as the reds remaining in the sky tint the brick beside us, like stern church wine, like the gravid shadows that haunted Mr. Rembrandt.
We will awaken at 4:30am in order to take Menna to the Schiphol Airport. We will stand in line with cheerful Europeans on holiday, and we will make our farewells in front of the chambers of airport security. I will watch her unpacking her bag into the bins for the security apparatus. She will be flying soon. I will have spent a day alone in our apartment before she arrives.
Outside the lonely apartment, summer carries on with unabated charm. My summer will consist of long runs. I’ll soak up the sun. I’ll enjoy the waters of the river that way. I’ll enjoy the parks. My autumn training is starting. I have a race in Den Haag. I have a race in Eindhoven.
Menna and I have had our summer. We have visited the beach at Scheveningen, diving into the cold waters and learning how to swim again, lying on our beach towels. Menna is afraid of the sun. She thinks she will burn. She thinks she will be too dark. I’m laughing at her.
We have visited Paris when the sun was hottest.
Sunday, July 06, 2014
Travelogue 567 – July 6
The Cup
The people in orange are dancing. There might be a light rain falling, but they are dancing. Menna wants to scream. She lets out a shrill whoop into the night. It’s well after midnight. An ambulance with blue flashing lights speeds past. But the street is blocked ahead, cars lined up in the road, honking their horns. In the intersection, the people in orange are dancing.
We are laughing at them. The people in orange were on TV, too, and they were acting just like people in orange. ‘That’s exactly what they’re like,’ Menna cries. This match was method, so different from yesterday’s between South American titans, in which passion was preferred to method. Tonight, passing and stubborn possession took precedence. The chances came, several shots were magically repelled by the woodwork, and the extra periods passed without score. In the final minutes, the brilliant chieftain replaced the man in front of the goal.
Then they turned out, the men in orange, with dispassion in their eyes, and while the opposition gathered in a stormy circle of intent and affirmation, the men in orange stood by. When it came time to shoot, each one walked directly to the position, placed the ball, and with no hesitation at all charged the ball and shot. Each ball entered. Cold, the men in orange! When the new man at the net repelled the second ball from the opposition, the game was won.
There’s a grim single-mindedness to the performance of the Dutch in this World Cup. They demonstrate no hopes for glory. They were never favorites. They came in with a young team, with no explicit expectation to reach the final game, like they did four years ago. They arrived with only the heart and mind of the grand new chieftain, Mr. Van Gaal. They arrived with the power and impetuousness of Arjen, the nearest embodiment of Dutch passion. Van Gaal has coached Arjen at Munich. After the World Cup, the chieftain will be moving on to Manchester United.
‘They’re so tough,’ says Menna. ‘That’s what I have to deal with every day! That!’ She points at the TV with both amusement and horror. Yes, that’s the Dutch way, the frank stare and the unyielding attitude. When and if they lose, they will clear the field with the same matter-of-fact manner. ‘They were better,’ they will say, if it comes to that. But, until they lose, they will show up on time and ready for quiet and dedicated work.
We need fresh air. We need some blood flow in the limbs. We have been sitting in front of the TV too long. There was the Argentina game, with our neighbors Belgium. There was a movie starring Tommy Lee, and then there was Holland’s unblinking show-down for their place in the final four.
It’s after midnight. The air is alive with car horns and fireworks. The people in orange are dancing in the streets. Menna wants to scream. I say, of course you do, and her whoop echoes from the faces of the apartment buildings lining our street.
The Cup
The people in orange are dancing. There might be a light rain falling, but they are dancing. Menna wants to scream. She lets out a shrill whoop into the night. It’s well after midnight. An ambulance with blue flashing lights speeds past. But the street is blocked ahead, cars lined up in the road, honking their horns. In the intersection, the people in orange are dancing.
We are laughing at them. The people in orange were on TV, too, and they were acting just like people in orange. ‘That’s exactly what they’re like,’ Menna cries. This match was method, so different from yesterday’s between South American titans, in which passion was preferred to method. Tonight, passing and stubborn possession took precedence. The chances came, several shots were magically repelled by the woodwork, and the extra periods passed without score. In the final minutes, the brilliant chieftain replaced the man in front of the goal.
Then they turned out, the men in orange, with dispassion in their eyes, and while the opposition gathered in a stormy circle of intent and affirmation, the men in orange stood by. When it came time to shoot, each one walked directly to the position, placed the ball, and with no hesitation at all charged the ball and shot. Each ball entered. Cold, the men in orange! When the new man at the net repelled the second ball from the opposition, the game was won.
There’s a grim single-mindedness to the performance of the Dutch in this World Cup. They demonstrate no hopes for glory. They were never favorites. They came in with a young team, with no explicit expectation to reach the final game, like they did four years ago. They arrived with only the heart and mind of the grand new chieftain, Mr. Van Gaal. They arrived with the power and impetuousness of Arjen, the nearest embodiment of Dutch passion. Van Gaal has coached Arjen at Munich. After the World Cup, the chieftain will be moving on to Manchester United.
‘They’re so tough,’ says Menna. ‘That’s what I have to deal with every day! That!’ She points at the TV with both amusement and horror. Yes, that’s the Dutch way, the frank stare and the unyielding attitude. When and if they lose, they will clear the field with the same matter-of-fact manner. ‘They were better,’ they will say, if it comes to that. But, until they lose, they will show up on time and ready for quiet and dedicated work.
We need fresh air. We need some blood flow in the limbs. We have been sitting in front of the TV too long. There was the Argentina game, with our neighbors Belgium. There was a movie starring Tommy Lee, and then there was Holland’s unblinking show-down for their place in the final four.
It’s after midnight. The air is alive with car horns and fireworks. The people in orange are dancing in the streets. Menna wants to scream. I say, of course you do, and her whoop echoes from the faces of the apartment buildings lining our street.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Travelogue 566 – June 23
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Four
It’s sundown. It’s rainy season. The evening reads like a vision before sleep. The damp cold makes you sleepy but also keeps you moving.
Just outside the gate to my household compound is the road, made of stones set in mud. The road climbs relatively steeply toward the asphalt road, just below the embassy. Less than two hundred meters up the road from my gate -- clicking it shut makes the girls who have passed look over their shoulder and giggle at the sight of me, -- the road crosses another neighborhood street. The intersecting road is a wide one, laid with cobblestone since last year, when we were visited by one of the crews sweeping through the city, chipping stone and digging, setting the stones like bricks in herring bone patterns.
Just here this cobblestone road crests a small rise, and there is in the intersection a small plateau, a wide and clear space in which one sees four ways. Toward the north, the mountain slope stands in a rainy season mist. The road bows upward in the middle, pushing the houses and their makeshift fences, overladen with climbing greenery, back and down, underscoring the image of road as Road, and underscoring the impression that the road leads right to that mountain slope.
People are passing, ambling slowly down the middle of the cobblestone way. The young men of the neighborhood like to gather here, on one side or the other, sitting on stones or kicking a homemade ball around. They comment, they laugh. There is an old woman who reminds Menna of a witch, who stands in front of one of the gates near the intersection and mutters to herself, glaring at whoever looks at her as they pass.
I can’t help the pause in my step whenever I cross this intersection, slowing to take in the scene, the peace of the mountains and the boys and their cackling. Once across, the stones and their puddles resume. I watch my steps. I make way, where the way narrows to one line of stones among the puddles, for a passing matron carrying groceries. I reflect on the enveloping damp, and on the gathering dusk. The season and the hour combine to create a singular atmosphere, something primeval in its darkness. The stones underfoot are slimy. Everywhere is mud.
How does one mark one’s next step in this season? The next relates to the last, I suppose. It arises in mud and falls in mud. The rocks are slimy. One climbs with one’s head down. At the top of the hill is the street. There the car can sweep me up, raising my shoes from the mud.
There is mud on the cement floors of the classroom. The children are seated at their low tables, heads in hands, some drawing in their notebooks. We are touring, and we are taking video of a few little stars up front. Away from the camera, I’m asking one boy with muddy feet to tell me about his drawing. He swivels his head to grin up at me. He does that a few times before he answers. That’s a house. That’s a ball. That’s a cat. It’s a familiar catalogue of items. It seems to round out the lives of the children table to table. That’s a flower. She swivels her head to look up at me. She has a grin and a giggle. I pick up the stubby and dull pencil, and I draw a quick star on the page, just to see something new. I take her drawing hand in mine, and she finds all this novel.
I climb into the back of the 4X4. I will be sorted there, shaken and filtered layer by layer as we cross the city one side to the other one day, one side to another side the next day. I will be sorted road by road. At each destination, my feet will swing from their perch to be set in mud. We are sorting. We are cataloguing.
We have arrived at muddy Jan Meda early one morning. The coach is standing alone in the damp air, tall and forlorn. He is looking old and so suddenly. He greets us with his natural graciousness. He points out the athletes, a thinning group in the distance, rounding a corner of the field. They will return to do calisthenics drills on the grass. Little Leyla, Ethiopian from America, will want her picture taken with some of the women. Ultimately, she finds herself more interested in the horses grazing in the field.
I have come round to the measure of the visit, and necessarily the steps turn round to the airport. Here, the foot falls on tile, tile laid over concrete. I know this place. I know how desperately depressing it is at night. There is no help for that. The flights home originate from nighttime. The lighting in the cavernous Bole terminal are yellow and perpetually fading into shadows of stale bardo, stretching on like rooms in opposing mirrors.
There is no space, every hall and every corner occupied by lines and clots of the hardy and the rosy-cheeked, the gee-whizzers and the har-har drinkers, dervishes of the arrested moment. Among them thread the intent labor pilgrims to Dubai. When those don’t pace with fierce purpose, they gather in cross-legged crowds on the floor, among their gowns and their piles of wretched luggage to chitter like flocks of birds being circled by predators.
In the final lines, we all become sullen and aggressive. There is a kind of angry hope in line. There might be an end to the yellow night. I have just skimmed an article about a study suggesting we will choose pain over boredom. Maybe that’s all it is, the story behind stories among us children of the mud.
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Four
It’s sundown. It’s rainy season. The evening reads like a vision before sleep. The damp cold makes you sleepy but also keeps you moving.
Just outside the gate to my household compound is the road, made of stones set in mud. The road climbs relatively steeply toward the asphalt road, just below the embassy. Less than two hundred meters up the road from my gate -- clicking it shut makes the girls who have passed look over their shoulder and giggle at the sight of me, -- the road crosses another neighborhood street. The intersecting road is a wide one, laid with cobblestone since last year, when we were visited by one of the crews sweeping through the city, chipping stone and digging, setting the stones like bricks in herring bone patterns.
Just here this cobblestone road crests a small rise, and there is in the intersection a small plateau, a wide and clear space in which one sees four ways. Toward the north, the mountain slope stands in a rainy season mist. The road bows upward in the middle, pushing the houses and their makeshift fences, overladen with climbing greenery, back and down, underscoring the image of road as Road, and underscoring the impression that the road leads right to that mountain slope.
People are passing, ambling slowly down the middle of the cobblestone way. The young men of the neighborhood like to gather here, on one side or the other, sitting on stones or kicking a homemade ball around. They comment, they laugh. There is an old woman who reminds Menna of a witch, who stands in front of one of the gates near the intersection and mutters to herself, glaring at whoever looks at her as they pass.
I can’t help the pause in my step whenever I cross this intersection, slowing to take in the scene, the peace of the mountains and the boys and their cackling. Once across, the stones and their puddles resume. I watch my steps. I make way, where the way narrows to one line of stones among the puddles, for a passing matron carrying groceries. I reflect on the enveloping damp, and on the gathering dusk. The season and the hour combine to create a singular atmosphere, something primeval in its darkness. The stones underfoot are slimy. Everywhere is mud.
How does one mark one’s next step in this season? The next relates to the last, I suppose. It arises in mud and falls in mud. The rocks are slimy. One climbs with one’s head down. At the top of the hill is the street. There the car can sweep me up, raising my shoes from the mud.
There is mud on the cement floors of the classroom. The children are seated at their low tables, heads in hands, some drawing in their notebooks. We are touring, and we are taking video of a few little stars up front. Away from the camera, I’m asking one boy with muddy feet to tell me about his drawing. He swivels his head to grin up at me. He does that a few times before he answers. That’s a house. That’s a ball. That’s a cat. It’s a familiar catalogue of items. It seems to round out the lives of the children table to table. That’s a flower. She swivels her head to look up at me. She has a grin and a giggle. I pick up the stubby and dull pencil, and I draw a quick star on the page, just to see something new. I take her drawing hand in mine, and she finds all this novel.
I climb into the back of the 4X4. I will be sorted there, shaken and filtered layer by layer as we cross the city one side to the other one day, one side to another side the next day. I will be sorted road by road. At each destination, my feet will swing from their perch to be set in mud. We are sorting. We are cataloguing.
We have arrived at muddy Jan Meda early one morning. The coach is standing alone in the damp air, tall and forlorn. He is looking old and so suddenly. He greets us with his natural graciousness. He points out the athletes, a thinning group in the distance, rounding a corner of the field. They will return to do calisthenics drills on the grass. Little Leyla, Ethiopian from America, will want her picture taken with some of the women. Ultimately, she finds herself more interested in the horses grazing in the field.
I have come round to the measure of the visit, and necessarily the steps turn round to the airport. Here, the foot falls on tile, tile laid over concrete. I know this place. I know how desperately depressing it is at night. There is no help for that. The flights home originate from nighttime. The lighting in the cavernous Bole terminal are yellow and perpetually fading into shadows of stale bardo, stretching on like rooms in opposing mirrors.
There is no space, every hall and every corner occupied by lines and clots of the hardy and the rosy-cheeked, the gee-whizzers and the har-har drinkers, dervishes of the arrested moment. Among them thread the intent labor pilgrims to Dubai. When those don’t pace with fierce purpose, they gather in cross-legged crowds on the floor, among their gowns and their piles of wretched luggage to chitter like flocks of birds being circled by predators.
In the final lines, we all become sullen and aggressive. There is a kind of angry hope in line. There might be an end to the yellow night. I have just skimmed an article about a study suggesting we will choose pain over boredom. Maybe that’s all it is, the story behind stories among us children of the mud.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Travelogue 565 – June 19
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Three
At first, it looks just like the café I left last year. Peace Coffee occupies the same brick-lined interior on Minnehaha, midway between Wes’s neighborhood and downtown and a few blocks off Lake Street, in one of those ambivalent zones of Minneapolis, in which subdued (resigned, and beaten?) domesticity mixes with understated hipster lifestyle, mixes with bitter-sweet immigrant stories, and mixes with mild industry, and everyone shares a kind of winter-stunned silence, staring, even in June, from pale and lined faces.
This seems a Midwestern brand, this unregulated threading of survivals into taciturn streets, into an intuitive map among the city blocks, every type of defiance wrapping itself in worn brown flags behind clapboard and brick.
But it’s not the same. For one thing, Andy tells me he’s leaving. Andy has always been there to open the café and start the espresso machine. He has remembered my name, even when I’ve been away for months. He has said hello, asked about things.
Andy has allowed himself the indulgence of ageing, trading over time the slight frame and spry energy of youth for the slower and more sober, gaining a few pounds on his frame and surrendering the luster of his fresh cheeks, trading the long hair for a plug in his ear lobe.
He’s moving on now. He says it’s just for a change of pace. He’s moving to another coffee shop that I haven’t heard of yet. I tell him I’ll stop by some day. ‘Great,’ he says, simply. ‘Though I’m not trying to steer people away from Peace,’ and he’s nodding in that uniquely American way, leaning lazily to one side, smiling easily.
Andy’s moving on, practicing the Minnesota art of sublime humility, making of a life change the most subtle of twists in narrative, as though something more would be vain dramatics. He will shift a mile or two into a new coffee shop, and hope that he hasn’t angered the snow gods with his self-indulgence.
It’s another chilly day. I had been anticipating a taste of Midwestern heat and humidity, but it’s just not to be. There are low clouds instead, and a persistent chill. I start with a long walk in the park, leaving the car in the abandoned lot close to the wall of trees. I follow the paved bicycle path into the forest. I follow the first dirt path that descends quickly away down toward the river and away from the asphalt cycle path. The earth is damp and soft. The trees encircle and hold me, forming a time of their own. I want a perfect dawn silence, but there is no such thing There is only the deceptive stillness of the trees. The never-ending buzz and the song of life are in full throat. There is no silence, only different types of noise.
I’ll catch my first glimpse of this year’s World Cup at Grumpy’s on Washington. Our board meetings are at the Open Book on Washington, just a block away, a perfect meeting for an agency dedicated to literacy. At our lunch break, the board wants Ethiopian food, and I want a Grumpy’s tuna melt. Grumpy’s is a bar committed to changelessness. It’s a comfort. Still the plain tables set amid black space; still the pool table to one side. Still the four TVs in the center set to face outward toward the patrons sitting at the central, rectangular bar. I see Mexico, and I sit. Mexico is playing Cameroon. My loyalties are divided. I feel I should support the African teams. That will be a thankless job in this year’s tournament.
A young Latina will sit next to me after a while. She will be rooting for Mexico, though her first loyalty is to Costa Rica. It’s going to be much more rewarding cheering on the Latin teams this year. She works for an NGO, an NGO that supports NGOs.
It is everywhere. Charity occupies the seat next to you on the plane. Charity drinks whiskey at obscure bars in Addis Ababa. Charity cheers the other team when no one else in the bar cares, when you have only stolen away for a tuna melt. Charity is a stealthy entity, and ravenous, girdling the world, becoming part of the definition of the world it endeavors to help.
I’ll take a quick walk. A few blocks away is the Mississippi River. There is a prospect there, above the Guthrie, from which one can see the Stone Arch Bridge, the 130 year-old railway bridge in tan limestone. There will be an art festival this weekend at the bridge. I’ll be able to see the activity there, as people set up their canvas tents. They will raise an itinerant encampment, artisans spontaneously chartering a new neighborhood. I’ll be reminded of the markets outside of churches on saints’ days in Ethiopia, goods on tarps and blankets along the road, merchants squatting beside each, and the milling crowds in white. It’s a scene that looks like forever, like sculpture, and then it melts away by the end of the day.
Sometimes you long for stillness. A city is made of silent buildings, but there is never silence, only different types of noise.
Below the bridge, the Mississippi will be high with the spring rains. There will be more white water than usual. The river is testing its banks.
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Three
At first, it looks just like the café I left last year. Peace Coffee occupies the same brick-lined interior on Minnehaha, midway between Wes’s neighborhood and downtown and a few blocks off Lake Street, in one of those ambivalent zones of Minneapolis, in which subdued (resigned, and beaten?) domesticity mixes with understated hipster lifestyle, mixes with bitter-sweet immigrant stories, and mixes with mild industry, and everyone shares a kind of winter-stunned silence, staring, even in June, from pale and lined faces.
This seems a Midwestern brand, this unregulated threading of survivals into taciturn streets, into an intuitive map among the city blocks, every type of defiance wrapping itself in worn brown flags behind clapboard and brick.
But it’s not the same. For one thing, Andy tells me he’s leaving. Andy has always been there to open the café and start the espresso machine. He has remembered my name, even when I’ve been away for months. He has said hello, asked about things.
Andy has allowed himself the indulgence of ageing, trading over time the slight frame and spry energy of youth for the slower and more sober, gaining a few pounds on his frame and surrendering the luster of his fresh cheeks, trading the long hair for a plug in his ear lobe.
He’s moving on now. He says it’s just for a change of pace. He’s moving to another coffee shop that I haven’t heard of yet. I tell him I’ll stop by some day. ‘Great,’ he says, simply. ‘Though I’m not trying to steer people away from Peace,’ and he’s nodding in that uniquely American way, leaning lazily to one side, smiling easily.
Andy’s moving on, practicing the Minnesota art of sublime humility, making of a life change the most subtle of twists in narrative, as though something more would be vain dramatics. He will shift a mile or two into a new coffee shop, and hope that he hasn’t angered the snow gods with his self-indulgence.
It’s another chilly day. I had been anticipating a taste of Midwestern heat and humidity, but it’s just not to be. There are low clouds instead, and a persistent chill. I start with a long walk in the park, leaving the car in the abandoned lot close to the wall of trees. I follow the paved bicycle path into the forest. I follow the first dirt path that descends quickly away down toward the river and away from the asphalt cycle path. The earth is damp and soft. The trees encircle and hold me, forming a time of their own. I want a perfect dawn silence, but there is no such thing There is only the deceptive stillness of the trees. The never-ending buzz and the song of life are in full throat. There is no silence, only different types of noise.
I’ll catch my first glimpse of this year’s World Cup at Grumpy’s on Washington. Our board meetings are at the Open Book on Washington, just a block away, a perfect meeting for an agency dedicated to literacy. At our lunch break, the board wants Ethiopian food, and I want a Grumpy’s tuna melt. Grumpy’s is a bar committed to changelessness. It’s a comfort. Still the plain tables set amid black space; still the pool table to one side. Still the four TVs in the center set to face outward toward the patrons sitting at the central, rectangular bar. I see Mexico, and I sit. Mexico is playing Cameroon. My loyalties are divided. I feel I should support the African teams. That will be a thankless job in this year’s tournament.
A young Latina will sit next to me after a while. She will be rooting for Mexico, though her first loyalty is to Costa Rica. It’s going to be much more rewarding cheering on the Latin teams this year. She works for an NGO, an NGO that supports NGOs.
It is everywhere. Charity occupies the seat next to you on the plane. Charity drinks whiskey at obscure bars in Addis Ababa. Charity cheers the other team when no one else in the bar cares, when you have only stolen away for a tuna melt. Charity is a stealthy entity, and ravenous, girdling the world, becoming part of the definition of the world it endeavors to help.
I’ll take a quick walk. A few blocks away is the Mississippi River. There is a prospect there, above the Guthrie, from which one can see the Stone Arch Bridge, the 130 year-old railway bridge in tan limestone. There will be an art festival this weekend at the bridge. I’ll be able to see the activity there, as people set up their canvas tents. They will raise an itinerant encampment, artisans spontaneously chartering a new neighborhood. I’ll be reminded of the markets outside of churches on saints’ days in Ethiopia, goods on tarps and blankets along the road, merchants squatting beside each, and the milling crowds in white. It’s a scene that looks like forever, like sculpture, and then it melts away by the end of the day.
Sometimes you long for stillness. A city is made of silent buildings, but there is never silence, only different types of noise.
Below the bridge, the Mississippi will be high with the spring rains. There will be more white water than usual. The river is testing its banks.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Travelogue 564 – June 18
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Two
I’m drifting along the 55. It’s a diagonal across the map of Minneapolis. It used to be an avenue called Hiawatha. It’s as straight a shot from the airport to downtown as there is. It threads a lot of neighborhoods along the way, including Wes’s neighborhood, quiet rows of houses in the wedge between highways 55 and 62, just behind the massive VA complex with its green lawns behind chain link fences.
The sun rises over Wes’s neighborhood some time before 5:30, sending dim shadows across the TV room, where I’m camping out on the couch-bed. The expectant silence makes me hungry for the day. I lie with it before I move, before I dress and tiptoe across the creaking floorboards of the house. Outside, hot summer has lapsed into chilly spring.
So close to the highway -- already gathering its stormy energy, -- are the quiet banks of the Mississippi. One sees the whole of the spring here, pooling around the base of trees, the waters teased high by the rains, cutting short the paths that follow the banks of the river. Here the birdsong is brisk, and so is the song of the mosquito. I want to partake in the stillness of the morning but I do so at much risk. I turn back to the paths that climb up the bluff, to the old bike path.
This is Fort Snelling State Park, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, where Europeans first settled to build an outpost among the northern reaches of the continent’s great river. They stood above the confluence of the waters in a great silence, waiting for the times.
The times were climbing the steps toward Sacré-Cœur. They were lodging in the hearts of the starving workers of Paris. While the Minnesota pioneers were struggling to channel St Anthony Falls and build their first mills on the river, while they were digging silent roads in the snow, Bismark had united Germany under the martial Prussians and had invaded France. The French emperor had buckled. A Third Republic was declared and its ministers tried desperately to negotiate terms, but when the Parisian mob insisted on continuing the fight, the Germans surrounded the great city, starving it through most of the winter of 1870-1871.
I’m standing on the stairway to Sacré-Cœur, overlooking the city historical and modern, well after the drama of the times have passed. The city is like a museum now. Like any good museum, the exhibits spark the imagination. I’m thinking of somewhere far away. I’m thinking of the hills of Shiro Meda in Addis Ababa, smoke from the ‘village’ wafting up against the eucalyptus green of the mountainside. In November, 2005, these hills were one of the first places in the city to ignite in rebellion against the perceived election fraud of the ruling party. Hundreds were to die in this conflict. I remember how the reports of unrest, and even the drifting sounds of it, moved like waves through the city from north to south, from the hills of Shiro Meda to Faransae, through Piassa, and through Kirkos, on into Bole. There were shots from the guns of federal police. There were screams and wailing. The sounds continued into the night, as police fanned out through the district, gathering sons and husbands for indefinite detention.
In 1871, it was a fight over the cannons remaining from the sad siege of the winter that sparked the rebellion that became the Paris Commune. The fight started on the hill of Montmartre. The hill was something of a slum then. There was no towering white church, no trails of tourists, no stands for itinerant artists selling quick portraits. And in March, there were cannons set to face north toward the invaders. The citizens were determined to keep the cannons as proof against oppression. Women and children rushed to stand between the imperial troops and the mob, and the troops turned on their commanders. Two generals were killed by the mob. There was no turning back. The rebellion spread, and within days, the city belonged to the Commune. The Republic retreated to Versailles. The Commune, which was only to last a couple months, declared a program that seems mild in retrospect, abolition of debt; return of pawned assets to the workers, worker ownership of abandoned businesses, and the separation of church and state. Mild, but people in the countryside could not identify. They distrusted the poor workers and the immigrants of the big city. By the end of May, the revolt had been violently stamped out.
It’s interesting that one legacy of the Commune, adamant about the separation of church and state, would be the beautiful but stern basilica at the summit of Montmartre. Tourists are not likely to know the history, and are even less likely to find it compelling. Every generation has its issues. If anything, we seem to be a generation that would fight to rejoin church and state. We recognize the rage in a man or woman a century and a half ago, but we find the triggers inscrutable.
For my part, I find the links among time fascinating. I calculate that the Commune was far closer in time to the French Revolution than to our own time. It happened only some eighty years after the Revolution, and just over twenty after the revolutions of 1848. The harsh treatment at the hands of the Germans preceded the First World War by only 43 years. The string of violent outbursts tells a story, and some of it is about the rights of men and women. Some of it is crazed nationalism. The lines are blurred, as just the example of the Paris mob in the early months of 1871 demonstrates. I look ahead from the Commune and note that Hemingway and the artists of the 20s were living in a Paris only half a century after the Commune. Again, their time stands far closer to 1871 than it does to our own. Memories of the Commune might have been alive for the writers of the 20s. Paris was a city of revolution.
You see no hills flying into Minnesota. What you see is a flat tabletop of land, trees neatly ordered among their houses, all woven together in a carpet rolled out to the horizon. There is one tight collection of towers, set rather arbitrarily among all the silent neighborhoods. That is downtown. One doesn’t notice the fort on the hill above the river. It throws no shadow from the perspective of the airplane. Reality needs feet on the ground. It requires the cool of the shade.
On the ground, the height is real. That’s why there is a fort there. It commands a view over the confluence of the rivers. In 2014, it stands above park lands. It commands a view over bicycle paths. The walls of the fort, erected stone by stone by lonely army men far from home, cap the steep slope above me as I follow the path back toward the parking lot. My only concerns are following the songs of the morning birds and making it to the café by opening time.
Dreaming Minnesota
Part Two
I’m drifting along the 55. It’s a diagonal across the map of Minneapolis. It used to be an avenue called Hiawatha. It’s as straight a shot from the airport to downtown as there is. It threads a lot of neighborhoods along the way, including Wes’s neighborhood, quiet rows of houses in the wedge between highways 55 and 62, just behind the massive VA complex with its green lawns behind chain link fences.
The sun rises over Wes’s neighborhood some time before 5:30, sending dim shadows across the TV room, where I’m camping out on the couch-bed. The expectant silence makes me hungry for the day. I lie with it before I move, before I dress and tiptoe across the creaking floorboards of the house. Outside, hot summer has lapsed into chilly spring.
So close to the highway -- already gathering its stormy energy, -- are the quiet banks of the Mississippi. One sees the whole of the spring here, pooling around the base of trees, the waters teased high by the rains, cutting short the paths that follow the banks of the river. Here the birdsong is brisk, and so is the song of the mosquito. I want to partake in the stillness of the morning but I do so at much risk. I turn back to the paths that climb up the bluff, to the old bike path.
This is Fort Snelling State Park, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, where Europeans first settled to build an outpost among the northern reaches of the continent’s great river. They stood above the confluence of the waters in a great silence, waiting for the times.
The times were climbing the steps toward Sacré-Cœur. They were lodging in the hearts of the starving workers of Paris. While the Minnesota pioneers were struggling to channel St Anthony Falls and build their first mills on the river, while they were digging silent roads in the snow, Bismark had united Germany under the martial Prussians and had invaded France. The French emperor had buckled. A Third Republic was declared and its ministers tried desperately to negotiate terms, but when the Parisian mob insisted on continuing the fight, the Germans surrounded the great city, starving it through most of the winter of 1870-1871.
I’m standing on the stairway to Sacré-Cœur, overlooking the city historical and modern, well after the drama of the times have passed. The city is like a museum now. Like any good museum, the exhibits spark the imagination. I’m thinking of somewhere far away. I’m thinking of the hills of Shiro Meda in Addis Ababa, smoke from the ‘village’ wafting up against the eucalyptus green of the mountainside. In November, 2005, these hills were one of the first places in the city to ignite in rebellion against the perceived election fraud of the ruling party. Hundreds were to die in this conflict. I remember how the reports of unrest, and even the drifting sounds of it, moved like waves through the city from north to south, from the hills of Shiro Meda to Faransae, through Piassa, and through Kirkos, on into Bole. There were shots from the guns of federal police. There were screams and wailing. The sounds continued into the night, as police fanned out through the district, gathering sons and husbands for indefinite detention.
In 1871, it was a fight over the cannons remaining from the sad siege of the winter that sparked the rebellion that became the Paris Commune. The fight started on the hill of Montmartre. The hill was something of a slum then. There was no towering white church, no trails of tourists, no stands for itinerant artists selling quick portraits. And in March, there were cannons set to face north toward the invaders. The citizens were determined to keep the cannons as proof against oppression. Women and children rushed to stand between the imperial troops and the mob, and the troops turned on their commanders. Two generals were killed by the mob. There was no turning back. The rebellion spread, and within days, the city belonged to the Commune. The Republic retreated to Versailles. The Commune, which was only to last a couple months, declared a program that seems mild in retrospect, abolition of debt; return of pawned assets to the workers, worker ownership of abandoned businesses, and the separation of church and state. Mild, but people in the countryside could not identify. They distrusted the poor workers and the immigrants of the big city. By the end of May, the revolt had been violently stamped out.
It’s interesting that one legacy of the Commune, adamant about the separation of church and state, would be the beautiful but stern basilica at the summit of Montmartre. Tourists are not likely to know the history, and are even less likely to find it compelling. Every generation has its issues. If anything, we seem to be a generation that would fight to rejoin church and state. We recognize the rage in a man or woman a century and a half ago, but we find the triggers inscrutable.
For my part, I find the links among time fascinating. I calculate that the Commune was far closer in time to the French Revolution than to our own time. It happened only some eighty years after the Revolution, and just over twenty after the revolutions of 1848. The harsh treatment at the hands of the Germans preceded the First World War by only 43 years. The string of violent outbursts tells a story, and some of it is about the rights of men and women. Some of it is crazed nationalism. The lines are blurred, as just the example of the Paris mob in the early months of 1871 demonstrates. I look ahead from the Commune and note that Hemingway and the artists of the 20s were living in a Paris only half a century after the Commune. Again, their time stands far closer to 1871 than it does to our own. Memories of the Commune might have been alive for the writers of the 20s. Paris was a city of revolution.
You see no hills flying into Minnesota. What you see is a flat tabletop of land, trees neatly ordered among their houses, all woven together in a carpet rolled out to the horizon. There is one tight collection of towers, set rather arbitrarily among all the silent neighborhoods. That is downtown. One doesn’t notice the fort on the hill above the river. It throws no shadow from the perspective of the airplane. Reality needs feet on the ground. It requires the cool of the shade.
On the ground, the height is real. That’s why there is a fort there. It commands a view over the confluence of the rivers. In 2014, it stands above park lands. It commands a view over bicycle paths. The walls of the fort, erected stone by stone by lonely army men far from home, cap the steep slope above me as I follow the path back toward the parking lot. My only concerns are following the songs of the morning birds and making it to the café by opening time.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Travelogue 563 – June 17
Dreaming Minnesota
Part One
At first, it looks like Paris, a dream of a quiet cité. In this dream, I have traveled. I’m so tired, it’s hard to remember what preceded. I believe there were days in front of my little computer screen, monitoring wild spreadsheets and editing Spartan accounts of children sitting inside their mud-walled classrooms in Ethiopia. Then suddenly I’m emerging from the Metro station at Pigalle. Yes, I seem to have caught the Thalys train from Rotterdam Centraal one Friday midday. That’s how the dream goes.
I’m alone among the tables in front of the brasserie off the Place des Abbesses. The trash truck is idling across the street. The truck has disgorged men in overalls, who are roaming the street. They are sending cleansing water down the gutters. The coffee is right. The croissant is perfect. I am remembering where I am. I am sitting off the Place des Abbesses, where a carousel stands at the base of a hill. The hill leads steeply up to Sacré-Cœur. Facing the carousel is the Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, art nouveau beauty built at the turn of the last century, the façade a comforting set of bubbling arches and intersecting lines, rising together in brick and tile casing. It is a building proud of itself, first church built with reinforced cement, and example of artistic and architectural courage in a time when city officials could call for its demolition. It was not traditional masonry, and so was almost condemned.
I can see the side of the same church from my hotel window. It’s a tiny room, and there is little to do but to look out the window, from which the view takes in grey roofs and the side of Saint-Jean. There is a deep courtyard like a well at my feet. I can’t see the bottom, but I can hear the echoing laughter of children.
Yes, I emerged from the Metro, and I climbed a steep street toward Montmartre. Then I climbed five flights of stairs to my hotel room. Once I had descended again, I found a street grocer, where I bought two mandarin oranges. With those in my backpack, I could then find the stairway up to the strikingly white and austere Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, nineteenth-century monument to order. It was ordered to be built to ‘expiate the crimes’ of the uprising of the Commune of 1871, which had begun in Montmartre. The archbishop of Paris had been martyred during the uprising. His successor had a vision at the summit of Montmartre, a vision of the sacred heart of Jesus.
There is a carousel in the Place des Abbesses. There is another carousel at the base of the stairway to Sacré-Cœur. Here the tour groups pause for photos before they embark on the ascent to the summit. Just below Sacré-Cœur there are prospects where one can see nearly the whole of the city spreading out below. There is a Korean wedding party on the highest flight of stairs. Tourists are applauding the couple’s kiss.
Below is the unyielding hill of my hotel’s street. I am already descending with my backpack full for new travel. I have a long road ahead, even in getting to the gate for my flight, down the steps to the Metro, and from the Gare du Nord a rattling train with many stops, and then along many long hallways inside the airport, numbered and lettered and connected by whispering shuttles.
I have spent many hours sitting next to a delicate and tearfully silent ageing woman, with the golden locks of a thirty year-old, whose bag is full of pill bottles when the spare stretches of Minnesota appear outside the airplane’s windows. Some clouds are scraping along, close to Earth’s surface. They seem like creatures blind and stubborn. The city has not moved. We find it there, peaceful and resigned to the abrasive attention of clouds, stoic today and impassive. It had waited among its trees for me, at the end of a long, long day, sunlit across the Atlantic, a day still spreading its hand ahead toward the west.
It might be one of those dreams one has after periods of sleeplessness, brief and lurid, too vivid and intense and provoking sharp anxieties before abruptly ending, after which one awakens in a new place, though one never does that, really. It was a trip at a blur. I have only formed imperfect impressions of it, between coughing fits left over from the wet trip to Scotland, among sheer veils of exhaustion, among the plaited mists of motion without rest.
But reality wakes where it left off. I am driving north on 55. The late afternoon is a bright wash across the spaces of the American Midwest.
Dreaming Minnesota
Part One
At first, it looks like Paris, a dream of a quiet cité. In this dream, I have traveled. I’m so tired, it’s hard to remember what preceded. I believe there were days in front of my little computer screen, monitoring wild spreadsheets and editing Spartan accounts of children sitting inside their mud-walled classrooms in Ethiopia. Then suddenly I’m emerging from the Metro station at Pigalle. Yes, I seem to have caught the Thalys train from Rotterdam Centraal one Friday midday. That’s how the dream goes.
I’m alone among the tables in front of the brasserie off the Place des Abbesses. The trash truck is idling across the street. The truck has disgorged men in overalls, who are roaming the street. They are sending cleansing water down the gutters. The coffee is right. The croissant is perfect. I am remembering where I am. I am sitting off the Place des Abbesses, where a carousel stands at the base of a hill. The hill leads steeply up to Sacré-Cœur. Facing the carousel is the Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, art nouveau beauty built at the turn of the last century, the façade a comforting set of bubbling arches and intersecting lines, rising together in brick and tile casing. It is a building proud of itself, first church built with reinforced cement, and example of artistic and architectural courage in a time when city officials could call for its demolition. It was not traditional masonry, and so was almost condemned.
I can see the side of the same church from my hotel window. It’s a tiny room, and there is little to do but to look out the window, from which the view takes in grey roofs and the side of Saint-Jean. There is a deep courtyard like a well at my feet. I can’t see the bottom, but I can hear the echoing laughter of children.
Yes, I emerged from the Metro, and I climbed a steep street toward Montmartre. Then I climbed five flights of stairs to my hotel room. Once I had descended again, I found a street grocer, where I bought two mandarin oranges. With those in my backpack, I could then find the stairway up to the strikingly white and austere Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, nineteenth-century monument to order. It was ordered to be built to ‘expiate the crimes’ of the uprising of the Commune of 1871, which had begun in Montmartre. The archbishop of Paris had been martyred during the uprising. His successor had a vision at the summit of Montmartre, a vision of the sacred heart of Jesus.
There is a carousel in the Place des Abbesses. There is another carousel at the base of the stairway to Sacré-Cœur. Here the tour groups pause for photos before they embark on the ascent to the summit. Just below Sacré-Cœur there are prospects where one can see nearly the whole of the city spreading out below. There is a Korean wedding party on the highest flight of stairs. Tourists are applauding the couple’s kiss.
Below is the unyielding hill of my hotel’s street. I am already descending with my backpack full for new travel. I have a long road ahead, even in getting to the gate for my flight, down the steps to the Metro, and from the Gare du Nord a rattling train with many stops, and then along many long hallways inside the airport, numbered and lettered and connected by whispering shuttles.
I have spent many hours sitting next to a delicate and tearfully silent ageing woman, with the golden locks of a thirty year-old, whose bag is full of pill bottles when the spare stretches of Minnesota appear outside the airplane’s windows. Some clouds are scraping along, close to Earth’s surface. They seem like creatures blind and stubborn. The city has not moved. We find it there, peaceful and resigned to the abrasive attention of clouds, stoic today and impassive. It had waited among its trees for me, at the end of a long, long day, sunlit across the Atlantic, a day still spreading its hand ahead toward the west.
It might be one of those dreams one has after periods of sleeplessness, brief and lurid, too vivid and intense and provoking sharp anxieties before abruptly ending, after which one awakens in a new place, though one never does that, really. It was a trip at a blur. I have only formed imperfect impressions of it, between coughing fits left over from the wet trip to Scotland, among sheer veils of exhaustion, among the plaited mists of motion without rest.
But reality wakes where it left off. I am driving north on 55. The late afternoon is a bright wash across the spaces of the American Midwest.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Rosslyn Chapel
It’s a place of magic, located among the shallow valleys heading east among rolling hills toward the North Sea, just south of Edinburgh. The chapel was built by William Sinclair (or Saint Clair), earl and baron, descendant of the Normans, in the middle of the fifteenth century.
This was no trivial project for the earl. He imagined a much larger edifice than we see now, a standard cruciform church with a tower. He spent ten years after winning the charter for the new church just building the village to house the craftsmen. That was before construction ever began. By the time of the earl’s death, they had only managed to erect the choir and the chapel behind the choir, the ‘Lady’ chapel. Foundations were laid for the apse and transepts, but Sir William’s son didn’t have the heart or the funds to continue.
The little chapel’s magic seems to be its power to fire the imagination. Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister, wrote a poem, ‘Composed at Roslin Chapel During a Storm’, published in 1831.
“The wind is now thy organist;--a clank
(We know not whence) ministers for a bell
To mark some change of service. As the swell
Of music reached its height, and even when sank
The notes, in prelude, ROSLIN! to a blank
Of silence, how it thrilled thy sumptuous roof,
Pillars, and arches,--not in vain time-proof,
Though Christian rites be wanting! …"
A young Queen Victoria visited in 1842. She was so impressed by the chapel’s beauty she declared that ‘so unique a gem should be preserved to the country.’ Restoration began, and the chapel had a new lease on life. Centuries had passed with the chapel either abandoned or only marginally in use. The Catholic Sinclairs had moved away once the Reformation had begun in earnest.
Modern times found new inspiration. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it was a post-post-decadent-Gothic taste for the fabulous, for histories that sparkle with meaning and portent. The chapel harbors secrets about Jesus, secrets only our time could solve! These are the kind of mysteries, it should be said, that are not really mysteries. Rather, this is mystery of the type authors build airport novels around, in which we know we will be satisfied in short order, symbols decoded, clues deciphered, and wonders revealed.
I must say I do enjoy post-modern mythologies, like the ones that grew around Rosslyn Chapel, stories that re-fashion Jesus into a Jungian shaman whose profound union with Mary Magdelen merged universal animus and anima and inspired generations of priest-soldier-bankers to stand guard over their heritage. In fact, the holy couple’s heritage leads -- in rather wrenching ways -- right to old Sinclair himself, a descendant by blood!
The tour guides dismiss the stories in a way that strains to be playful, but of course telling the tale is telling the tale, even when you tell it in jest, and visitors can’t help glancing about among the shadows of the little chapel that has inspired such speculations.
The tour guide relates another old tale, the one about the Apprentice Column, one, briefly put, in which the naïve but talented young apprentice pays with his life for having carved the magnificent column during his master’s absence. Behind the story is a suggestive glimpse of old Sinclair himself, who has based a design for the column on something he has seen in Rome. He has been a crusader. Some say he has was more. Some say he reached the shores of North America some half a century before Columbus. The story tells us he sends the master craftsman to see the original column in Rome. Apparently the story itself owes much to one Annie Wilson, landlady of an inn in Roslin, who told the story over and over again to visitors that included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Robert Burns.
Beneath the shimmer of the mythos is the chapel itself, the dusty local sandstone itself, rich in reds and yellows, quarried, carved, and arranged by men more than five hundred years ago. There is the enduring little temple itself, leaving itself as a message, and in truth the kind of message that confounds rather than explains. The building is a manifestation of a man’s and a time’s religion. He built it so that prayers may be said in perpetuity for himself and his family.
The religion of his time is just as confused as philosophies of our own times, philosophies that blithely weave psychoanalytical imperatives with the rigid fibers of ancient religion. In Sinclair’s case, it’s a Christianity that has been grafted onto pagan ritual and traditions. The most obvious and prolific examples are the many ‘green men’ carved into the walls and pillars of the chapel. The green man is a symbol of fertility; he has vines and leaves growing from his mouth and feeding a rich bed of growth surrounding him. There is also the Dance Macabre leading up one of the arches, a solidly contemporary Christian tradition, but one that smacks of the primal and ancient.
One can hardly blame the mythologizers for being attracted to a place like Rosslyn Chapel. The carvings are so elaborate, so careful, so abundant in reference common and arcane and even accidental; the camels and the gargoyles and the grains that look like corn; the square, styled stones set among the arches that inspired one writer to claim they were code for a song; the angels pointing to open books, closed books.
Outside, the meadows are quiet as ever. The Chapel is a short country-road stroll from the high street of the village of Roslin. I’ve arrived at Roslin by city bus. I wasn’t going to cycle the whole way so soon after the race. But I do cycle part of the way. I want to explore a little.
I’ll stop first at my new Caffe Nero, where the mom and her eager daughter stop for sweet fortification, where the girl collects last crumbs of mom’s attention, and so does mom, looking into the compact mirror. I’ll climb the slow hill toward New Town’s summit, skirting Charlotte Square and dodging through workaday pedestrian traffic, across the hectic interchanges and onto the Lothian Road. I’ll continue on to the Meadows, a vast park that lives up to its name, open grasses criss-crossed by pedestrian paths. There I’ll look back at the Old Town from a new perspective, from the south.
I’ll leave the Meadows to pedal south on Morningside Road. A mile or so later, where the road looks like it will indulge in steep hills, I’ll lock up the bike, and I’ll catch the next Number 15 bus, ascending to the second storey in order to enjoy the view. The road does start to roll over and down the rounded hills, taking us through the southernmost stretches of the city, and then beyond, into the countryside beyond, where the hills and meadows roll east toward the North Sea.
Rosslyn Chapel will be a short stroll from the high street of the village of Roslin. The road will be narrow, lined with trees, and I’ll feel like I’m lost in time, partaking of an ordinary Sunday stroll, until the chapel emerges, across its busy parking lot, behind the glass-paned modern entrance, cut into the old stone walls.
Monday, May 26, 2014
Travelogue 561 – May 26
Some New Parts
I have found this bike path near Ferry Road. It cruises for miles under canopies of green leaves, trees and undergrowth so rich and so vibrantly green it is dazzling, even to someone used to green places. I coast along this path on my rented bicycle, and I breathe in the damp, vegetal air in deeply. I absorb the light rains as they come. I absorb the rare sunshine when it comes. Living in this pinwheel of weather can feel like a week passing in the space of an afternoon. The path more or less follows the channel of the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s river that resembles a busy brook. As the channel winds away from the harbor, it picks apart a few quiet Edinburgh neighborhoods, digging into the earth and leaving little rocky gorges to negotiate.
The café hasn’t opened yet. I’m kind of happy to find a Caffe Nero here. This is my favored coffee shop chain in the British Isles. A staff person is bustling inside, putting order to things behind the counter. Lights are on, though not all of them. The sidewalk sign leans against the inside of the door, as though propped against intrusion. But it will open.
There is a light rain falling, but it’s not a discouraging rain. It’s not a rain that drives one under awnings. I cross the street to the park. It’s a park that runs alongside the Water of Leith. I follow it, admiring the steep and rising bank on the other side, admiring the slabs of stone in the shallows of the river. I come upon a nineteenth-century monument, a columned gazebo with a statue of Athena inside. I walk on, as the land and path change pitch, slope upward. I walk until I’m just about under the inspiring heights of the Dean Bridge, finished in 1831, rising in four arches more than one hundred feet above our little river.
The café is open, and life is beginning to stir in Dean Village, Edinburgh. Everyone is making their way somewhere. Some pause in the café. There are a mother and daughter who stop here every morning. The daughter is uniformed in prep school plaid. The mother spends her time touching up her face. The daughter is eight or so. She tells her mother stories with wide-eyed urgency. Some people are making the brisk walk up the hill beside the café already. Turning one’s back on the Water of Leith, one has a choice among a few turning cobbled roads that take steep runs at the hill behind the café. Mounting that hill, one enters New Town from the west, behind Charlotte Square and the Albert Memorial.
I turn around, and I follow the Water of Leith toward its terminus, eventually veering off the bike path to wander among the streets north of Ferry Road until I can discover the waters of the firth. I find them beside an expanse of neglected asphalt and concrete. There are barren piers stretching out beyond chain link fences. There’s one ship moored out there, clean and silent, its tidy lines a testament to life in the abandoned harbor.
I turn circles on the asphalt, parting tiny waters with the rubber of the cycle tires, splashing among the puddles. There are still drops of rain falling, but lightly and randomly, as though they have been fashioned one by one, like bits of tender glass, and dropped as they are finished. The sky has broken open. The clouds are shattered and reeling one way and another, broken by morning sunlight. The delicate rain drops are spun by winds, and then they make their marks on the puddles of the asphalt field. They make their fleeting marks out on the firth, too, grey mass from here, stretching maybe five miles across to the bluffs of county Fife on the other side.
Some New Parts
I have found this bike path near Ferry Road. It cruises for miles under canopies of green leaves, trees and undergrowth so rich and so vibrantly green it is dazzling, even to someone used to green places. I coast along this path on my rented bicycle, and I breathe in the damp, vegetal air in deeply. I absorb the light rains as they come. I absorb the rare sunshine when it comes. Living in this pinwheel of weather can feel like a week passing in the space of an afternoon. The path more or less follows the channel of the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s river that resembles a busy brook. As the channel winds away from the harbor, it picks apart a few quiet Edinburgh neighborhoods, digging into the earth and leaving little rocky gorges to negotiate.
The café hasn’t opened yet. I’m kind of happy to find a Caffe Nero here. This is my favored coffee shop chain in the British Isles. A staff person is bustling inside, putting order to things behind the counter. Lights are on, though not all of them. The sidewalk sign leans against the inside of the door, as though propped against intrusion. But it will open.
There is a light rain falling, but it’s not a discouraging rain. It’s not a rain that drives one under awnings. I cross the street to the park. It’s a park that runs alongside the Water of Leith. I follow it, admiring the steep and rising bank on the other side, admiring the slabs of stone in the shallows of the river. I come upon a nineteenth-century monument, a columned gazebo with a statue of Athena inside. I walk on, as the land and path change pitch, slope upward. I walk until I’m just about under the inspiring heights of the Dean Bridge, finished in 1831, rising in four arches more than one hundred feet above our little river.
The café is open, and life is beginning to stir in Dean Village, Edinburgh. Everyone is making their way somewhere. Some pause in the café. There are a mother and daughter who stop here every morning. The daughter is uniformed in prep school plaid. The mother spends her time touching up her face. The daughter is eight or so. She tells her mother stories with wide-eyed urgency. Some people are making the brisk walk up the hill beside the café already. Turning one’s back on the Water of Leith, one has a choice among a few turning cobbled roads that take steep runs at the hill behind the café. Mounting that hill, one enters New Town from the west, behind Charlotte Square and the Albert Memorial.
I turn around, and I follow the Water of Leith toward its terminus, eventually veering off the bike path to wander among the streets north of Ferry Road until I can discover the waters of the firth. I find them beside an expanse of neglected asphalt and concrete. There are barren piers stretching out beyond chain link fences. There’s one ship moored out there, clean and silent, its tidy lines a testament to life in the abandoned harbor.
I turn circles on the asphalt, parting tiny waters with the rubber of the cycle tires, splashing among the puddles. There are still drops of rain falling, but lightly and randomly, as though they have been fashioned one by one, like bits of tender glass, and dropped as they are finished. The sky has broken open. The clouds are shattered and reeling one way and another, broken by morning sunlight. The delicate rain drops are spun by winds, and then they make their marks on the puddles of the asphalt field. They make their fleeting marks out on the firth, too, grey mass from here, stretching maybe five miles across to the bluffs of county Fife on the other side.
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