The sensed presence is some-times described as a "guardian angel" that appears in extreme and unusual environments.14 Particularly in life-and-death struggles for survival in these exceptionally harsh climes, or under unusual strain or stress, the brain apparently conjures up help for physical guidance or moral support. The descriptive phrase third man comes from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land":
Who is the third who always walks beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded.
In his footnotes to these lines, Eliot explained that they "were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted." In fact, in Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's account it was a fourth man who accompanied the remaining three in the party: "It seemed to me often that we imwere four, not three." No matter, whether it is a third man, fourth man, angel, alien, or extra man, it is the sensed presence that interests us here because this is yet another example of the brain's capacity for agenticity; I shall refer to such companions as sensed presences and the process as the sensed-presence effect. In his book The Third Man Factor, John Geiger lists the conditions that are associated with the generation of a sensed presence: monotony, darkness, barren landscapes, isolation, cold, injury, dehydration, hunger, fatigue, and fear.' To this list we can add sleep deprivation, which probably accounts for Charles Lindbergh's sensed presence during his trans-atlantic flight to Paris. During the historic journey, Lindbergh became aware that he had company in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis: "The fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences—vaguely out-lined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane. I feel no surprise at their coming. There's no suddenness to their appearance." Most critically, these were not aberrations of the cockpit environment such as fog or reflected light because, as Lindbergh recounts, "Without turning my head, I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision." Lindbergh even heard "voices that spoke with authority and clearness," yet after the flight reported, "I can't remember a single word they said." What were these phantom beings doing there? They were there to help, "conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unat-tainable in ordinary life."
Friday, April 22, 2016
Manet's style from King
Early in 1863 Manet had begun arranging for another showing in the Boulevard des Italiens, this time a one-man exhibition. By the time his exhibition opened, Manet had virtually completed Le Bain following at least four months of work. The canvas had proved as defiant in execution as it had been in conception, since he continued to experiment with the "strange new fashion" that had so astonished onlookers at the 1861 Salon. Manet may have taken the poses for Le Bain from Raphael's The Judgment of Paris, but his admiration for the Old Masters did not extend to their intricately modulated painting techniques. In working toward a new style better suited to capturing the energy and spirit of the modern age, he abandoned chiaroscuro, a technique perfected by Leonardo da Vinci and exploited by successful Salon painters as part of their stock-in-trade. The art of chiaroscuro (Italian for "clear" and "dark") involved giving the appearance of depth and relief to a painting by means of carefully graduated contrasts of light and shade. These soft and subtle nuances in the tonal range may have been adequate for portraying winged angels and toga-clad heroes, but ordinary Parisians on a day's outing to Asnieres required, Manet seems to have decided, quite a different treatment. He therefore did away with most of his half-tones—the transitions between highlights and shadows—such that his figures, particularly the nude Victorine, looked harshly lit. In contrast to her counterpart in The Judgment of Paris, where the contours of the water nymph's body were suggested through skillful hatching, Victorine appeared strangely two-dimensional. Manet also explored his new style by experimenting with his canvases them_ selves. Since an optical illusion makes light colors advance and dark ones re-cede, most artists painted on a dark undercoat in order to enhance the impression of depth and, therefore, the "realistic" appearance of their chosen scene. This undercoat, sometimes referred to as la sauce ("gravy"), was a translucent mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and often bitumen, a tarry hydro-carbon made from distilling crude oil and used in, among other things, the pro-duction of asphalt. Manet had abandoned these dark undercoats after The Absinthe Drinker, working instead on canvases treated with off-white primers. This lighter ground gave Le Bain a greater luminosity—desirable in an out-door scene—but at the expense of the appearance of spatial recession that could be achieved by a painter working on a darker undercoat. Manet was not interested, however, in such illusions of depth, or in creating on his canvas a wholly persuasive fictional space. Painting had other purposes, he clearly be-lieved, than such clever trickery. He further broke with artistic tradition as he worked on Le Bain, once again in a way that seemed designed to shatter the centuries-old obsession with per-spectival space. Painters were usually trained to create a subtle relief on the surface of their canvases by applying their darks and lights in contrasting styles. Dark colors, such as those used for shadows, were spread very thin while highlights were "loaded" or "impasted"—applied, that is, in thick layers. This procedure was employed, together with the darker undercoat, to de-vise a subtle illusion whereby the whites would advance and the darks retreat. Yet Manet boldly disregarded this practice in Le Bain, loading his dark colors—the blacks of the men's coats—as well as the lights. Though a few other painters, such as Gericault and Courbet, had already experimented with this technique, the boldness of Manet's application witnessed his pursuit of a new direction in art.4 Le Bain was completed in good time for Manet to send it for appraisal to the Palais des Champs-Elysees. His other two entries were Mlle V V. . . in the Costume of an Espada and yet another Spanish-style portrait, Young Man in the Costume of a Majo. This latter work, painted early in 1863, featured as its model not a real-life majo, or Spanish dandy, but the youngest of Manet's two brothers, twenty-seven-year-old Gustave, who posed for him in a bolero and white sash taken from Manet's trunkful of Andalusian costumes—an exotic costume for a young man who was, in fact, a lawyer. By the time the three canvases went before the jury, however, Manet's new style of painting had begun receiving a truly ominous reception. A one-man exhibition at the Galerie Martinet was a great honor for Manet, and he offered to public view some of the finest paintings he had completed over the previous few years, including The Street Singer—his first painting of Victorine Meurent—and a number of Spanish-flavored works, including another portrait of Victorine, Young Woman Reclining in a Spanish Costume. He also showed, for the first time in public, Music in the Tuileries (plate 3A), a scene, painted in i86o, of a dense mob of Parisians, including Baudelaire and Gautier, leisurely disporting themselves among the chairs and trees of the Jardin des Tuileries. In the finest tradition of Renaissance frescoists such as Perugino and Raphael, Manet had included his own self-portrait: a bearded and frock-coated figure standing on the left. As a bid to garner public attention, the exhibition was a success. As a bid to sway votes on the painting jury, however, it was a disaster.
Status in painting from King's Judgment
Many members of the Academie were quite literally, men from a different age, ten of the fourteen painters having been born in the eighteenth century. Their average age was sixty-eight, with the venerable and vituperative Ingres their elder statesman at eighty. A good number had spent large chunks of their careers on ladders and scaffolds, like Michelangelo and Raphael, executing murals on the walls and ceilings of churches and government buildings. In nineteenth-century France, murals were still what they had been during the Italian Renaissance, the most exalted form of painting. Their difficulty of execution as well as their obvious grandeur of design—what one writer called their "gravity" and "elevation"--made works painted on walls and vaults far more prestigious than oil paintings done on canvas.' "It's to the decoration of churches," Ingres had once declared, "of public palaces, of halls of justice, that art must dedicate itself. That is its true and unique goal." Or as Gericault more bluntly expressed it: "Real painting means working with buckets of color on hundred-foot walls."' The career of Meissonier did not come close to matching this profile. He had not studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; he had not competed for, much less won, the Prix de Rome; he had not spent years honing his skills in Rome; he had not worked in fresco; and his little bonshommes and cavaliers, however popular with the public, hardly answered the Academie's call for classical sub-jects of profound moral earnestness. His artistic compass was oriented toward the north, to the work of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meissonier's candidacy in 1861—when his main rival was sixty-six-year-old Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, yet another alumnus of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and winner of the Prix de Rome—must therefore have seemed no more likely to succeed than his bid the year before. Any artist failing to conform to the standards of the Academie could be sure of a rough ride whenever the votes were cast to elect a new member of this self-perpetuating elite. A case in point had been the fate of Delacroix, the leading exponent of Romanticism. A movement specializing in depictions of storms and massacres, Romanticism produced canvases that were a far cry from the staid forms and austere style favored by most painters in the Academie. Ingres had derided Delacroix as a "drunken broom," a reference to how he subordi-nated fine detail to bright color and emotional effect. This challenge to the artis-tic orthodoxy meant Delacroix was elected only at the seventh attempt, having been rejected a total of six times between 1839, when his name was first put for-ward, and 1857, when he finally claimed his chair at the age of fifty-nine. Meissonier was good friends with Delacroix, who used to visit the Grande Mai-son, together with Adolphe Thiers, for games of boules. Meissonier was also a great admirer of Delacroix's work, claiming never to pass through the Gallery of in the Louvre, on whose ceiling his friend had painted Apollo Slaying Apollopython, without doffing his hat as a mark of respect for what he called a "dream of genius!' Delacroix may have seemed an unlikely artistic ideal for Meissonier, since the shipwrecks and slaughters of Delacroix's paintings were the antithesis of Meissonier's sedate, well-dressed bonshommes. Yet Meissonier was also capable of producing the kind of violent and impassioned scenes of revolutions and massacres for which Romanticism was both renowned and reviled. He had witnessed bloodshed at close hand long before the Battles of Solferino, since in 1848 he saw active service as a captain in the National Gurd, the citizen militia that was the duty of every able-bodied man between twenty and fifty-five. He fought on the side of the newly formed republican government during the "June Days," an insurrection in Paris by thousands of unemployed workers in June 1848. Stationed near the Hotel de Ville, Meissonier witnessed, he later recalled, "all the horror of such warfare. I saw the defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground strewn with corpses, the earth red with blood." In the end, some 1,5oo men died on the barricades or in reprisals afterward. Meissonier was chilled by the words of an officer in command of the National Guard who, when asked if all the men shot without trial were guilty, casually replied: "I can assure you that not more than a quarter of them were innocent.' With the "terrible impression" of this spectacle still fresh in his mind, Meissonier had painted a harrowing vision of the tragic aftermath of civil strife—a work that in its shock tactics and ghastly realism was different from anything else in his body of work. A remarkable painting, Remembrance of Civil War was an unblenching piece of pictorial reportage that showed dead bodies heaped together beneath a shattered barricade. Shown at the Salon two years later, it attracted admiring reviews but also attention from the political authorities, who had it removed from the wall before the exhibition closed. However, the canvas made a deep impression on Delacroix, the "master of massacres" to whom Meissonier gave a watercolor study for the work.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Existentialists continued
In 1949, Francois Mauriac put Sartre forward for election to the Academie francaise, but Sartre refused it. `My life and my philosophy are one and the same', he once wrote in his diary, and he stuck to this principle unflinchingly. This blending of life and philosophy also made him interested in other people's lives. He became an innovative biographer, publishing around two million words of life-writing, including studies of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Genet and Flaubert as well as a memoir of his own childhood. Beauvoir too collected the minutiae of her own experience and that of friends, and shaped it all into four rich volumes of autobiography, supplemented by one memoir about her mother and another about her last years with Sartre. Sartre's experiences and quirks found their way even into his most serious philosophical treatises. This could make for strange results, given that his personal take on life ranged from bad mescaline flash-backs and a series of embarrassing situations with lovers and friends to bizarre obsessions with trees, viscous liquids, octopuses and crustaceans. But it all made sense according to the principle first announced by Raymond Aron that day in the Bec-de-Gaz: you can make philosophy out of this cocktail. The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it.
Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life's vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety. In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.
..
As the centuries went by, philosophy increasingly became a profession conducted in academies or universities, by scholars who some-times prided themselves on their discipline's exquisite uselessness. Yet the tradition of philosophy as a way of life continued in a sort of shadow-line alongside this, often conducted by mavericks who had slipped through the gaps in traditional universities. Two such misfits in the nineteenth century had a particularly strong influence on the later existentialists: Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither was an academic philosopher: Kierkegaard had no university career, and Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Roman philology who had to retire because of ill health. Both were individualists, and both were contrarians by nature, dedicated to making people uncomfortable. Both must have been unbearable to spend more than a few hours with. Both sit outside the main story of modern existentialism, as precur-sors, but had a great impact on what developed later. Soren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813, set the tone by using `existential' in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence. He included it in the unwieldy title of a work of 1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation: an existential contribution. This eccentric title was typical of him: he liked to play games with his publications, and he had a good eye for the attention-grabbing phrase: his other works included From the Papers of One Still Living, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard was well placed to understand the awkwardness and difficulty of human existence. Everything about him was irregular, including his gait, as he had a twisted spine for which his enemies cruelly mocked him. Tormented by religious questions, and feeling himself set apart from the rest of humanity, he led a solitary life much of the time. At intervals, though, he would go out to take 'people baths' around the streets of Copenhagen, buttonholing acquaintances and dragging them with him for long philosophical walks. His companions would strug-gle to keep up as he strode and ranted and waved his cane. One friend, Hans Brochner, recalled how, when on a walk with Kierkegaard, 'one was always being pushed, by turns, either in towards the houses and the cellar stairwells, or out towards the gutters'. Every so often, one had to move to his other side to regain space. Kierkegaard considered it a matter of principle to throw people off their stride. He wrote that he would love to sit someone on a horse and startle it into a gallop, or perhaps give a man in a hurry a lame horse, or even hitch his carriage to two horses who went at different speeds— anything to goad the person into seeing what he meant by the 'passion' of existence. Kierkegaard was a born goader. He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of every-thing. He wrote: 'Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.' He applied the same argumentative attitude to the personnel of philosophical history. He disagreed, for example, with Rene Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the start-ing point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes' 'I' is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard's 'I' is the 'I' of an argumentative, anguished misfit. He also took issue with G. W. F Hegel, whose philosophy showed the world evolving dialectically through a succession of 'forms of con-sciousness', each stage superseding the one before until they all rise up sublimely into 'Absolute Spirit'. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit leads us to a climax as grand as that of the biblical Book of Revelation, but instead of ending with everyone divided between heaven and hell, it subsumes us all into cosmic consciousness. Kierkegaard countered
Hegel with typically awkward questions: what if I don't choose to be part of this 'Absolute Spirit'? What if I refuse to be absorbed, and insist on just being me? Sartre read Kierkegaard, and was fascinated by his contrarian spirit and by his rebellion against the grand philosophical systems of the past. He also borrowed Kierkegaard's specific use of the word 'existence' to denote the human way of being, in which we mould ourselves by making 'either/ or' choices at every step. Sartre agreed with him that this constant choosing brings a pervasive anxiety, not unlike the vertigo that comes from looking over a cliff. It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can't trust yourself not to throw yourself off. Your head spins; you want to cling to something, to tie yourself down— but you can't secure yourself so easily against the dangers that come with being free. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom', wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre's. There were other aspects of Kierkegaard's thought that Sartre would never accept, however. Kierkegaard thought that the answer to `anguish' was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there. This was a plunge into the Absurd' —into what cannot be rationally proved or justified. Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and stand-ing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist. The faith never came back, so he remained a stalwart atheist for the rest of his life. The same was true of Beauvoir, who rejected her conven-tional religious upbringing. Other thinkers followed Kierkegaard's the-ological existentialism in various ways, but Sartre and Beauvoir were repelled by it. They found a philosophy more to their taste in the other great nineteenth-century existentialist precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Rocken in Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche set out on his brilliant career in philology, but turned to writing idiosyncratic philosophical trea-tises and collections of aphorisms. He directed these against the pious dogmas of Christianity and of traditional philosophy alike: for him, both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life. What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or 'genealogy' that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history. He believed that every great philoso-pher actually wrote 'a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir' rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend our-selves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence. There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him. It is now up to us alone. The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, con-ducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate. Nietzsche was unable to put his ideas into much effect in his own life, not because he lacked the courage, but because his body betrayed him. In his forties, he fell victim to a disease, possibly syphilis or a brain tumour, which destroyed his faculties. After a distraught episode on the streets of Turin in January 1889, during which (the story goes) he weepingly threw his arms around the neck of an abused horse, he fell into irreversible dementia and spent the rest of his life an invalid. He died in 1900, having no idea of the impact his vision of human exist-ence would one day have on the existentialists and others. Probably it would not have surprised him: while his own time failed to under-stand, he always felt his day would come. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existential-ism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself — the life of an individual.
..
Having absorbed these older influences, the modern existentialists went on to inspire their own and later generations in a similar way, with their message of individualism and nonconformity. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, existentialism offered people reasons to reject convention and change their lives.
Roquentin, in Nausea, stares at the root of a chestnut tree which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being. I loved all this and was intrigued to learn that this story was Sartre's way of communicating a philosophy called 'existentialism'. But what was all this about 'being'? I had never been overwhelmed by the being of a chestnut root, nor had I noticed that things had being. I tried going to the public gardens in my own provincial town of Reading and staring at one of the trees until my eyes blurred. It didn't work; I thought I saw something move, but it was just the breeze in the leaves. Yet looking at something so closely did give me a kind of glow. From then on, I too neglected my studies in order to exist. I had already been inclined to absenteeism; now, under Sartre's influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. I became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 198os, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstruction-ists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they pulled out odd words from each other's texts to make the whole edifice collapse. They searched for ever more refined and unlikely wisps of signification in the writers of the past. Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dis-missive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was 'shop-girl metaphysics'. The goal of the human sciences was 'to dissolve man', he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era. For decades after my second dropping-out I dipped into philoso-phy books occasionally, but lost the knack of reading them with the deep attention they needed. My old favourites remained on the far reaches of my bookcase, making it look like a spice shelf in a demi-urge's kitchen: Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Of Time and Being, Totality and Infinity.
—Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.
—They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free —
—and therefore I'm responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes
—an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown.
—Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. —Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by bor-ders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.
So now let us return to 1933, and to the moment when Sartre went to Germany to learn about those new philosophers who called on him to pay attention to the cocktail on the table, and to everything else in life — in short, to the things themselves.
from Sarah Bakewell's terrific book, At The Existentialist Cafe
Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life's vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety. In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.
..
As the centuries went by, philosophy increasingly became a profession conducted in academies or universities, by scholars who some-times prided themselves on their discipline's exquisite uselessness. Yet the tradition of philosophy as a way of life continued in a sort of shadow-line alongside this, often conducted by mavericks who had slipped through the gaps in traditional universities. Two such misfits in the nineteenth century had a particularly strong influence on the later existentialists: Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither was an academic philosopher: Kierkegaard had no university career, and Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Roman philology who had to retire because of ill health. Both were individualists, and both were contrarians by nature, dedicated to making people uncomfortable. Both must have been unbearable to spend more than a few hours with. Both sit outside the main story of modern existentialism, as precur-sors, but had a great impact on what developed later. Soren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813, set the tone by using `existential' in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence. He included it in the unwieldy title of a work of 1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation: an existential contribution. This eccentric title was typical of him: he liked to play games with his publications, and he had a good eye for the attention-grabbing phrase: his other works included From the Papers of One Still Living, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard was well placed to understand the awkwardness and difficulty of human existence. Everything about him was irregular, including his gait, as he had a twisted spine for which his enemies cruelly mocked him. Tormented by religious questions, and feeling himself set apart from the rest of humanity, he led a solitary life much of the time. At intervals, though, he would go out to take 'people baths' around the streets of Copenhagen, buttonholing acquaintances and dragging them with him for long philosophical walks. His companions would strug-gle to keep up as he strode and ranted and waved his cane. One friend, Hans Brochner, recalled how, when on a walk with Kierkegaard, 'one was always being pushed, by turns, either in towards the houses and the cellar stairwells, or out towards the gutters'. Every so often, one had to move to his other side to regain space. Kierkegaard considered it a matter of principle to throw people off their stride. He wrote that he would love to sit someone on a horse and startle it into a gallop, or perhaps give a man in a hurry a lame horse, or even hitch his carriage to two horses who went at different speeds— anything to goad the person into seeing what he meant by the 'passion' of existence. Kierkegaard was a born goader. He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of every-thing. He wrote: 'Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.' He applied the same argumentative attitude to the personnel of philosophical history. He disagreed, for example, with Rene Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the start-ing point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes' 'I' is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard's 'I' is the 'I' of an argumentative, anguished misfit. He also took issue with G. W. F Hegel, whose philosophy showed the world evolving dialectically through a succession of 'forms of con-sciousness', each stage superseding the one before until they all rise up sublimely into 'Absolute Spirit'. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit leads us to a climax as grand as that of the biblical Book of Revelation, but instead of ending with everyone divided between heaven and hell, it subsumes us all into cosmic consciousness. Kierkegaard countered
Hegel with typically awkward questions: what if I don't choose to be part of this 'Absolute Spirit'? What if I refuse to be absorbed, and insist on just being me? Sartre read Kierkegaard, and was fascinated by his contrarian spirit and by his rebellion against the grand philosophical systems of the past. He also borrowed Kierkegaard's specific use of the word 'existence' to denote the human way of being, in which we mould ourselves by making 'either/ or' choices at every step. Sartre agreed with him that this constant choosing brings a pervasive anxiety, not unlike the vertigo that comes from looking over a cliff. It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can't trust yourself not to throw yourself off. Your head spins; you want to cling to something, to tie yourself down— but you can't secure yourself so easily against the dangers that come with being free. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom', wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre's. There were other aspects of Kierkegaard's thought that Sartre would never accept, however. Kierkegaard thought that the answer to `anguish' was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there. This was a plunge into the Absurd' —into what cannot be rationally proved or justified. Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and stand-ing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist. The faith never came back, so he remained a stalwart atheist for the rest of his life. The same was true of Beauvoir, who rejected her conven-tional religious upbringing. Other thinkers followed Kierkegaard's the-ological existentialism in various ways, but Sartre and Beauvoir were repelled by it. They found a philosophy more to their taste in the other great nineteenth-century existentialist precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Rocken in Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche set out on his brilliant career in philology, but turned to writing idiosyncratic philosophical trea-tises and collections of aphorisms. He directed these against the pious dogmas of Christianity and of traditional philosophy alike: for him, both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life. What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or 'genealogy' that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history. He believed that every great philoso-pher actually wrote 'a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir' rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend our-selves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence. There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him. It is now up to us alone. The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, con-ducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate. Nietzsche was unable to put his ideas into much effect in his own life, not because he lacked the courage, but because his body betrayed him. In his forties, he fell victim to a disease, possibly syphilis or a brain tumour, which destroyed his faculties. After a distraught episode on the streets of Turin in January 1889, during which (the story goes) he weepingly threw his arms around the neck of an abused horse, he fell into irreversible dementia and spent the rest of his life an invalid. He died in 1900, having no idea of the impact his vision of human exist-ence would one day have on the existentialists and others. Probably it would not have surprised him: while his own time failed to under-stand, he always felt his day would come. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existential-ism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself — the life of an individual.
..
Having absorbed these older influences, the modern existentialists went on to inspire their own and later generations in a similar way, with their message of individualism and nonconformity. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, existentialism offered people reasons to reject convention and change their lives.
Roquentin, in Nausea, stares at the root of a chestnut tree which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being. I loved all this and was intrigued to learn that this story was Sartre's way of communicating a philosophy called 'existentialism'. But what was all this about 'being'? I had never been overwhelmed by the being of a chestnut root, nor had I noticed that things had being. I tried going to the public gardens in my own provincial town of Reading and staring at one of the trees until my eyes blurred. It didn't work; I thought I saw something move, but it was just the breeze in the leaves. Yet looking at something so closely did give me a kind of glow. From then on, I too neglected my studies in order to exist. I had already been inclined to absenteeism; now, under Sartre's influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. I became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 198os, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstruction-ists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they pulled out odd words from each other's texts to make the whole edifice collapse. They searched for ever more refined and unlikely wisps of signification in the writers of the past. Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dis-missive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was 'shop-girl metaphysics'. The goal of the human sciences was 'to dissolve man', he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era. For decades after my second dropping-out I dipped into philoso-phy books occasionally, but lost the knack of reading them with the deep attention they needed. My old favourites remained on the far reaches of my bookcase, making it look like a spice shelf in a demi-urge's kitchen: Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Of Time and Being, Totality and Infinity.
—Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.
—They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free —
—and therefore I'm responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes
—an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself. On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown.
—Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. —Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by bor-ders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.
So now let us return to 1933, and to the moment when Sartre went to Germany to learn about those new philosophers who called on him to pay attention to the cocktail on the table, and to everything else in life — in short, to the things themselves.
from Sarah Bakewell's terrific book, At The Existentialist Cafe
Saturday, April 16, 2016
The Existentialists
`If you were twenty, in 1945, after four years of Occupation, freedom also meant the freedom to go to bed at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morn-ing.' It meant offending your elders and defying the order of things. It could also mean mingling promiscuously with different races and classes. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel heard a lady on a train saying, `Sir, what a horror, existentialism! I have a friend whose son is an exis-tentialist; he lives in a kitchen with a Negro woman!' The existentialist subculture that rose up in the 194os found its home in the environs of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres church on the Left Bank of Paris — an area that still milks the association for all it is worth. Sartre and Beauvoir spent many years living in cheap Saint-Germain hotels and writing all day in cafes, mainly because these were warmer places to go than the unheated hotel rooms. They favoured the Flore, the Deux Magots and the Bar Napoleon, all clustered around the cor-ner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Bonaparte. The Flore was the best, for its proprietor sometimes let them work in a private room upstairs when nosy journalists or passers-by became too intru-sive. Yet they also loved the lively tables downstairs, at least in the early days: Sartre enjoyed working in public spaces amid noise and bustle. He and Beauvoir held court with friends, colleagues, artists, writers, students and lovers, all talking at once and all bound by rib-bons of cigarette or pipe smoke. After the cafes, there were subterranean jazz dives to go to: in the Lorientais, Claude Luter's band played blues, jazz and ragtime, while the star of the club Tabou was the trumpeter and novelist Boris Vian. You could undulate to a jazz band's jagged parps and bleats, or debate authenticity in a dark corner while listening to the smoky voice of Cazalis' friend and fellow muse, Juliette Greco, who became a famous chanteuse after her arrival in Paris in 1946. She, Cazalis and Michelle Vian (Boris' wife) would watch new arrivals at the Lorientais and Tabou, and refuse entry to anyone who did not look suitable — although, according to Michelle Vian, they would admit anyone 'so long as they were interesting— that is, if they had a book under their arm'. Among the regulars were many of the people who had writ-ten these books, notably Raymond Queneau and his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who both discovered the nightclub world through Cazalis and Greco. Greco started a fashion for long, straight, existentialist hair — the `drowning victim' look, as one journalist wrote and for looking chic in thick sweaters and men's jackets with the sleeves rolled up. She said she first grew her hair long to keep warm in the war years; Beauvoir said the same thing about her own habit of wearing a tur-ban. Existentialists wore cast-off shirts and raincoats; some of them sported what sounds like a proto-punk style. One youth went around with 'a completely shredded and tattered shirt on his back', according to a journalist's report. They eventually adopted the most iconic exis-tentialist garment of all: the black woollen turtleneck. In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations... everything that was dangerous and provocative was good. Everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
SPQR
The Battle of Cannae and the whole history of the Second Punic War have mesmerised generals, pundits and historians ever since. Probably no war has been refought so often in so many studies and lecture rooms or been scrutinised so intently by the military men of the modern world, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Field Marshal Montgomery and Norman Schwarzkopf. Its causes remain as clouded in speculation and second-guessing as they ever were. Retrospectively it became for the Romans another clash of superpowers, and the stuff of epic poetry. Virgil’s Aeneid even gives it a mythic origin in Roman prehistory, when the Carthaginian queen Dido, abandoned by her lover Aeneas (on his way to found Rome), throws herself to her death onto a funeral pyre – cursing him and his whole race. In reality, it is hard to fathom either the Roman or the Carthaginian aims. Carthage, in its prime position on the North African coast, with impressive harbours and a grander cityscape than contemporary Rome, had wide trading interests in the western Mediterranean and might well have had reason to distrust the growing power of its Italian rival. Ancient and modern writers have pointed, in varying degrees, to Rome’s provocation of Hannibal in Spain and Hannibal’s grudge against Rome for its victory in the First Punic War. At the latest count, there are more than thirty versions of what really lay behind the conflict.
For many analysts, the strategic choices of the Romans and Carthaginians have been particularly intriguing, and revealing. On Hannibal’s side, these go far beyond the favourite puzzles about what elephant route he might have taken across the Alps or whether his reported trick of breaking open Alpine rocks by pouring vinegar on them could ever have worked (probably not). The main issue has always been why on earth, after the stunning victory at Cannae, he did not go on to take the city of Rome while he had the chance but instead gave the Romans time to recover. Livy imagines one of Hannibal’s officers, by the name of Maharbal, saying to him: ‘You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you don’t know how to exploit it.’ Montgomery is only one of the many later generals who have agreed with Maharbal. Hannibal was a brilliant soldier and dashing adventurer who had the final prize within his grasp, but for some unfathomable reason (loss of nerve or some flaw of character) he failed to take it. Hence his tragic glamour.
The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style, between on the one hand Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator – the last three names, ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism – and on the other Scipio Africanus. Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’). For some observers, this canny strategy largely won the day. Despite his close association with Africanus, Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy, and even the British left-wing Fabian Society adopted his name and example – the message being, ‘if you want the revolution to be successful, you must, like Fabius, bide your time’. But there have always been those who have thought Fabius a slowcoach or a ditherer rather than a clever strategist, in contrast to the much more dashing Scipio Africanus, who eventually took over the command and persuaded the senate to allow him to move the war into Africa and finish Hannibal off there. In describing that senate meeting, Livy scripts a largely imaginary debate between the cautious, elderly Fabius and Africanus, the energetic rising star. It polarises not only their different approaches to the war but also different ways of understanding Roman virtus. Did ‘manliness’ necessarily mean speed and vigour? Could it be heroic to be slow?
Retrospective generalship can be misleading, however, especially when it comes to re-creating what happened in any individual battle. Talk of tactics, and all the splendid military diagrams that usually accompany it, offers a highly sanitised version of Roman warfare and suggests that we know more about the face of Roman battle than we do – even about such a momentous engagement as Cannae. It is true that there are lengthy accounts in Polybius (who may have consulted eyewitnesses), Livy and other historians, but these are incompatible in details, hard to follow and in places almost nonsensical. We do not even know where exactly the battle took place, and the different proposed sites are the result of trying to match up conflicting versions in ancient writers with the layout of the land, as it might have been then, not forgetting the changed course of the nearby river. What is more, despite the almost mystical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae, which are still on the syllabus of military academies, they amounted to little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy. This was the one trick that ancient generals always tried if they could, for it offered the best chance of encircling the opposition and the only reliable way of killing or capturing them in large numbers.
Indeed, it is hard to see how more sophisticated tactics could have been deployed in an ancient battle with more than 100,000 men on the field. How the commanders could have issued effective instructions to their armies or how they could even have known what was going on in different areas of the fighting are almost complete mysteries. Add to that the polyglot forces, whether multinational mercenaries or non-Latin-speaking allies of the Romans, strange star turns (some of the Gauls apparently fought naked), cavalrymen trying to manoeuvre and fight without the benefit of stirrups (a later invention) and, in some engagements (though not at Cannae, as Hannibal’s had all died by then), wounded elephants running wild and charging back into their own lines, and the picture is chaos. Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.’ He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.
Nevertheless, Cannae was indeed a crucial turning point in the Second Punic War, and in the longer history of Roman military expansion, precisely because the Romans lost so many men there and nearly ran out of cash. The basic bronze coin – the as – was reduced in weight over the course of the war, from almost 300 grams to just over 50. And Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis. Almost any other ancient state in that position would have been forced to surrender. Nothing underscores better the importance of Rome’s enormous reserves of citizen and allied manpower than the single fact that it continued to fight the war. To judge from Hannibal’s actions after Cannae, he perhaps saw this point too. It may not have been a loss of nerve that dissuaded him from marching on Rome. Realising that allied manpower sustained Rome’s strength, he directed himself to the slow process of winning over the Italian allies – with some success, but never in sufficient numbers to undermine Roman durability.
That must also have been in Polybius’ mind when he chose to insert into his Histories a long digression on the strength of the Roman political system, as it was at the time of Cannae. His overall aim was to explain why the Romans had conquered the world, and part of that explanation lay in the strength and stability of Rome’s internal political structures. His account is the first more or less contemporary description of Roman political life to survive (Polybius was looking back fifty years or so but also mixing in observations of his own time); and at the same time it is the first attempt at a theoretical analysis of how Roman politics worked, one that sets the agenda even now.
and
The empire’s new horizons also helped to create – or at least to define with much sharper edges and ideological significance – the image of the ‘old-fashioned Roman’. That down-to-earth, no-nonsense, hardy, warts-and-all character plays his part in our stereotype of Roman culture even now. The chances are that he was largely a creation of this period too.
Some of the most outspoken voices of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular; their targets ranged from literature and philosophy to naked exercise, fancy food and depilation. In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for Greek ‘sophistication’ was no more than insidious ‘softness’ (or mollitia in Roman jargon), which was bound to sap the strength of the Roman character.
Was this a simple conservative backlash against newfangled ideas being brought into Rome from outside, a bout of ‘culture wars’ between traditionalists and modernisers? In part, perhaps, it was. But it was also more complicated, and interesting, than that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.
The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.
That is exactly what we see, in a particularly vertiginous form, in the story Livy, among others, tells of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE, towards the end of the Second Punic War. This was a very Roman occasion. A book of Roman oracles that was supposed to go back to the reign of the Tarquins recommended that the goddess Cybele, as she was also known, be incorporated into the Roman pantheon. The range of deities worshipped in Rome was proudly elastic, and the Great Mother was the patron deity of the Romans’ ancestral home – Aeneas’ Troy – and so, in a sense, belonged in Italy. They sent a senior deputation to collect the image of the goddess and transport her back, and they chose, as the oracle had insisted, ‘the best man in the state’ to receive her in Rome – who turned out to be another Scipio. He was accompanied in the welcoming party by a noble Roman woman, in some accounts a Vestal Virgin, and the image was taken from the ship and passed from the coast to the city, hand to hand, by a long line of other women. The goddess was temporarily lodged in the shrine of Victory until her own temple was built. It would be the first building in Rome, so far as we know, constructed using that most Roman of materials, and the one on which so many of the Romans’ later architectural masterpieces relied: concrete.
Nothing could have pleased Cato more – except that not everything was quite as it seemed. The image of the goddess was not what the Romans could possibly have been expecting. It was a large black meteorite, not a conventional statue in human form. And the meteorite came accompanied by a retinue of priests. These were self-castrated eunuchs, with long hair, tambourines and a passion for self-flagellation. This was all about as un-Roman as you could imagine. And forever after it raised uncomfortable questions about ‘the Roman’ and ‘the foreign’, and where the boundary between them lay. If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it was to be Roman?
and parenthetically
Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.
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For many analysts, the strategic choices of the Romans and Carthaginians have been particularly intriguing, and revealing. On Hannibal’s side, these go far beyond the favourite puzzles about what elephant route he might have taken across the Alps or whether his reported trick of breaking open Alpine rocks by pouring vinegar on them could ever have worked (probably not). The main issue has always been why on earth, after the stunning victory at Cannae, he did not go on to take the city of Rome while he had the chance but instead gave the Romans time to recover. Livy imagines one of Hannibal’s officers, by the name of Maharbal, saying to him: ‘You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you don’t know how to exploit it.’ Montgomery is only one of the many later generals who have agreed with Maharbal. Hannibal was a brilliant soldier and dashing adventurer who had the final prize within his grasp, but for some unfathomable reason (loss of nerve or some flaw of character) he failed to take it. Hence his tragic glamour.
The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style, between on the one hand Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator – the last three names, ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism – and on the other Scipio Africanus. Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’). For some observers, this canny strategy largely won the day. Despite his close association with Africanus, Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy, and even the British left-wing Fabian Society adopted his name and example – the message being, ‘if you want the revolution to be successful, you must, like Fabius, bide your time’. But there have always been those who have thought Fabius a slowcoach or a ditherer rather than a clever strategist, in contrast to the much more dashing Scipio Africanus, who eventually took over the command and persuaded the senate to allow him to move the war into Africa and finish Hannibal off there. In describing that senate meeting, Livy scripts a largely imaginary debate between the cautious, elderly Fabius and Africanus, the energetic rising star. It polarises not only their different approaches to the war but also different ways of understanding Roman virtus. Did ‘manliness’ necessarily mean speed and vigour? Could it be heroic to be slow?
Retrospective generalship can be misleading, however, especially when it comes to re-creating what happened in any individual battle. Talk of tactics, and all the splendid military diagrams that usually accompany it, offers a highly sanitised version of Roman warfare and suggests that we know more about the face of Roman battle than we do – even about such a momentous engagement as Cannae. It is true that there are lengthy accounts in Polybius (who may have consulted eyewitnesses), Livy and other historians, but these are incompatible in details, hard to follow and in places almost nonsensical. We do not even know where exactly the battle took place, and the different proposed sites are the result of trying to match up conflicting versions in ancient writers with the layout of the land, as it might have been then, not forgetting the changed course of the nearby river. What is more, despite the almost mystical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae, which are still on the syllabus of military academies, they amounted to little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy. This was the one trick that ancient generals always tried if they could, for it offered the best chance of encircling the opposition and the only reliable way of killing or capturing them in large numbers.
Indeed, it is hard to see how more sophisticated tactics could have been deployed in an ancient battle with more than 100,000 men on the field. How the commanders could have issued effective instructions to their armies or how they could even have known what was going on in different areas of the fighting are almost complete mysteries. Add to that the polyglot forces, whether multinational mercenaries or non-Latin-speaking allies of the Romans, strange star turns (some of the Gauls apparently fought naked), cavalrymen trying to manoeuvre and fight without the benefit of stirrups (a later invention) and, in some engagements (though not at Cannae, as Hannibal’s had all died by then), wounded elephants running wild and charging back into their own lines, and the picture is chaos. Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.’ He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.
Nevertheless, Cannae was indeed a crucial turning point in the Second Punic War, and in the longer history of Roman military expansion, precisely because the Romans lost so many men there and nearly ran out of cash. The basic bronze coin – the as – was reduced in weight over the course of the war, from almost 300 grams to just over 50. And Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis. Almost any other ancient state in that position would have been forced to surrender. Nothing underscores better the importance of Rome’s enormous reserves of citizen and allied manpower than the single fact that it continued to fight the war. To judge from Hannibal’s actions after Cannae, he perhaps saw this point too. It may not have been a loss of nerve that dissuaded him from marching on Rome. Realising that allied manpower sustained Rome’s strength, he directed himself to the slow process of winning over the Italian allies – with some success, but never in sufficient numbers to undermine Roman durability.
That must also have been in Polybius’ mind when he chose to insert into his Histories a long digression on the strength of the Roman political system, as it was at the time of Cannae. His overall aim was to explain why the Romans had conquered the world, and part of that explanation lay in the strength and stability of Rome’s internal political structures. His account is the first more or less contemporary description of Roman political life to survive (Polybius was looking back fifty years or so but also mixing in observations of his own time); and at the same time it is the first attempt at a theoretical analysis of how Roman politics worked, one that sets the agenda even now.
and
The empire’s new horizons also helped to create – or at least to define with much sharper edges and ideological significance – the image of the ‘old-fashioned Roman’. That down-to-earth, no-nonsense, hardy, warts-and-all character plays his part in our stereotype of Roman culture even now. The chances are that he was largely a creation of this period too.
Some of the most outspoken voices of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular; their targets ranged from literature and philosophy to naked exercise, fancy food and depilation. In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for Greek ‘sophistication’ was no more than insidious ‘softness’ (or mollitia in Roman jargon), which was bound to sap the strength of the Roman character.
Was this a simple conservative backlash against newfangled ideas being brought into Rome from outside, a bout of ‘culture wars’ between traditionalists and modernisers? In part, perhaps, it was. But it was also more complicated, and interesting, than that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.
The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.
That is exactly what we see, in a particularly vertiginous form, in the story Livy, among others, tells of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE, towards the end of the Second Punic War. This was a very Roman occasion. A book of Roman oracles that was supposed to go back to the reign of the Tarquins recommended that the goddess Cybele, as she was also known, be incorporated into the Roman pantheon. The range of deities worshipped in Rome was proudly elastic, and the Great Mother was the patron deity of the Romans’ ancestral home – Aeneas’ Troy – and so, in a sense, belonged in Italy. They sent a senior deputation to collect the image of the goddess and transport her back, and they chose, as the oracle had insisted, ‘the best man in the state’ to receive her in Rome – who turned out to be another Scipio. He was accompanied in the welcoming party by a noble Roman woman, in some accounts a Vestal Virgin, and the image was taken from the ship and passed from the coast to the city, hand to hand, by a long line of other women. The goddess was temporarily lodged in the shrine of Victory until her own temple was built. It would be the first building in Rome, so far as we know, constructed using that most Roman of materials, and the one on which so many of the Romans’ later architectural masterpieces relied: concrete.
Nothing could have pleased Cato more – except that not everything was quite as it seemed. The image of the goddess was not what the Romans could possibly have been expecting. It was a large black meteorite, not a conventional statue in human form. And the meteorite came accompanied by a retinue of priests. These were self-castrated eunuchs, with long hair, tambourines and a passion for self-flagellation. This was all about as un-Roman as you could imagine. And forever after it raised uncomfortable questions about ‘the Roman’ and ‘the foreign’, and where the boundary between them lay. If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it was to be Roman?
and parenthetically
Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.
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SPQR
Second, the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps. What this implies for how they, or any other ‘precartographic’ people, conceived the world around them, or just over their horizons, is one of history’s great mysteries. I have tended to write of the spread of Roman power through the peninsula of Italy, but no one knows how many – or, realistically, how few – Romans at this date thought of their homeland as part of a peninsula in the way we picture it. A rudimentary version of the idea is perhaps implied by references in literature of the second century BCE to the Adriatic as the Upper Sea and the Tyrrhenian as the Lower Sea, but notably this is on a different orientation from ours, east–west rather than north–south.
These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory. Of course, Rome’s growing power did dramatically transform the landscape of Italy. There was little that was more obviously transformative than a brand-new Roman road striking out across empty fields, or land being annexed and divided up among new settlers. It continues to be convenient to measure Roman power in Italy in terms of geographical area. Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion.
There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.
The results may well have been unintended, but they were ground-breaking. For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory. Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war. Or as one Roman poet put it in the 130s BCE, ‘The Roman people has often been defeated by force and overcome in many battles, but never in an actual war on which everything depends.’
There were, however, other far-reaching implications of the way the Romans defined their relations with other peoples in Italy. The ‘allies’, who were committed to no more than supplying manpower, were the most numerous, but they were only one of the categories concerned. To some communities over wide areas in central Italy, the Romans extended Roman citizenship. Sometimes this involved full citizen rights and privileges, including the right to vote or stand in Roman elections while also continuing to be a citizen of a local town. In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio. There were also people who lived on conquered territories in settlements known as colonies (coloniae). These had nothing to do with colonies in the modern sense of the word but were new (or expanded) towns usually made up of a mixture of locals and settlers from Rome. A few had full Roman citizenship status. Most had what was known as Latin rights. That was not citizenship as such but a package of rights believed to have been shared since time immemorial by the Latin towns, later formally defined as intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement and so on. It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis.
How this complicated mosaic of statuses had originated is again hard to know. Roman writers of the first century BCE, followed by modern legal scholars, tended to treat them as part of a highly technical, carefully calibrated system of civic rights and responsibilities. But that is almost certainly the product of later legal rationalisation. It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a ‘Latin’ colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity.
The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.
These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory. Of course, Rome’s growing power did dramatically transform the landscape of Italy. There was little that was more obviously transformative than a brand-new Roman road striking out across empty fields, or land being annexed and divided up among new settlers. It continues to be convenient to measure Roman power in Italy in terms of geographical area. Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion.
There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.
The results may well have been unintended, but they were ground-breaking. For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory. Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war. Or as one Roman poet put it in the 130s BCE, ‘The Roman people has often been defeated by force and overcome in many battles, but never in an actual war on which everything depends.’
There were, however, other far-reaching implications of the way the Romans defined their relations with other peoples in Italy. The ‘allies’, who were committed to no more than supplying manpower, were the most numerous, but they were only one of the categories concerned. To some communities over wide areas in central Italy, the Romans extended Roman citizenship. Sometimes this involved full citizen rights and privileges, including the right to vote or stand in Roman elections while also continuing to be a citizen of a local town. In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio. There were also people who lived on conquered territories in settlements known as colonies (coloniae). These had nothing to do with colonies in the modern sense of the word but were new (or expanded) towns usually made up of a mixture of locals and settlers from Rome. A few had full Roman citizenship status. Most had what was known as Latin rights. That was not citizenship as such but a package of rights believed to have been shared since time immemorial by the Latin towns, later formally defined as intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement and so on. It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis.
How this complicated mosaic of statuses had originated is again hard to know. Roman writers of the first century BCE, followed by modern legal scholars, tended to treat them as part of a highly technical, carefully calibrated system of civic rights and responsibilities. But that is almost certainly the product of later legal rationalisation. It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a ‘Latin’ colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity.
The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
William S Burroughs... advice
I think I have $60 left. That's $2 per day for this month. Wouldn't be so bad if I didn't need junk. I spend $2 per day on junk alone. And I give Kiki 500 per day pocket money, and I have to feed him. He found work for three weeks, but the job gave out. His mother is sick and she can't work so he has to support her. My 500 goes, usually, to his mother. Then he will want another 500 to see a football game or a movie. Well enough of all this dreary ledger so inexorably in the red. [ . . . I have started writing a Chandler-style, straight, action story about some super Heroin you can get a habit on one shot with it or something similar. I'm not even sure yet. But it starts out 2 detectives come to arrest me. I know I am to be used in experiments with this drug. (They don't know this.) To save myself I kill them both. That is where I am now. On the lam. Waiting to score for 1/2 ounce of junk to hide out with, the alarm is going out right now; to every precinct, every prowl car, etc., etc. Don't ask me what is going to happen I just don't know. May turn allegorical or even sur-realist. A ver.9 I read interesting case. England. 2 naval Lieutenants. Good friends. Drinking. One hits a shot glass every time at six feet with his pistol. The other picks up a hat and holds it in his hand, and says "shoot it." The Lieutenant shot a hole in it. Later on the 2nd party puts the hat on his head and says, "Now try it." Then, at a distance of six feet, the Lt. in the first part takes careful aim at the very top of the hat and fires (there were witnesses) hitting his friend in the head. Friend may live, though. I am amazed by exact similarities. I am quite a good shot and accustomed to handle guns. I aimed carefully at distance of 6 feet for the very top of the glass. Do you know the story of Mike Fink? He'd been shooting shot glasses off the bar all afternoon. Finally a young friend of his put a shot glass on his head and Mike missed and killed the boy. The bartender did not believe it was an accident because Mike was known as a good shot. He got his own gun and shot Fink dead. (Another case in Durango, Mexico. Politico in whore house tried to shoot glass off whore's head. Killed her.) I mean there is something odd here. The Lt. saying just like me "But how could I miss at that distance?" I don't understand it. May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan's death. I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am afraid. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent. It's more complex, more basic and more horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it. Did I tell you Kells' dream the night of Joan's death? This was before he knew, of course. I was cooking something in a pot, and he asked what I was cooking and I said "Brains!" and opened the pot showing "what looked like a lot of white worms." I forgot to ask him how I looked, general atmosphere etc. To summarize, I pass along one of my specialized bits of wisdom like "always use poultry shears to cut offfingers": "Never participate in active or passive role in any shooting things off of, or near one, or knife throwing or anything similar and, if a bystander, always try to stop it." I told you of horrible, nightmare depression and anxiety I had that whole day, so that I asked myself continually: "What in God's name is the matter with me?" One more point. The idea of shooting a glass off her head had never entered my mind, consciously, until, out of the blue so far as I can recall—I was very drunk, of course —I said: "It's about time for our William Tell act . . . Put a glass on your head, Joan." Nothing led up to the idea. From then on I was concentrating on aiming for the very top of the glass. Note all these precautions as though I had to do it like the original William Tell. Why, instead of being so careful, not give up the idea? Why indeed? In my present state of mind I am afraid to go too deep into this matter.
Friday, March 18, 2016
More Manet
The second, begun the previous November and painted on a canvas almost six feet high by five feet wide, was a biblical episode entitled The Dead Christ with Angels. Manet had painted a few religious scenes in his career, though these were done not out of any special feelings of piety or devotion so much as from a love of the works of Italian Renaissance artists like Titian and Tintoretto. Manet had a particular affection for Tintoretto, a sixteenth-century Venetian, some-times known as Il Furioso, who was renowned for his fa presto {"work quickly") style of painting in which he applied his pigments with brush-popping vehemence. Tintoretto's Self-Portrait, which featured the mournful
face of the gray-bearded, baggy-eyed artist hovering against a pitch-dark face background, was one of Manet's favorite paintings. He made a copy of the work in the Louvre and thereafter, as if paying court to a wise old sage, never failed to seek out the original on his visits to the museum. Tintoretto was predominantly a religious artist who, among his many scenes from the New Testament, depicted several of the dead Christ. Likewise, Manet's Dead Christ with Angels depicts precisely what its title describes—the figure of the dead Christ slumped between two winged, female figures. One of the angels has lifted the muscular, half-naked body of the crucified Christ into a sitting position, while the other weeps as in a Lamentation or a Pieta. Still, despite its allusions to Tintoretto and other Renaissance painters, Manet's work included touches that were unconventional to the point of eccentricity: one of his angels sported orange robes and unfolded a pair of blue wings, while—strangest of all—Christ's loincloth was pink.* The Dead Christ with Angels was idiosyncratic for reasons beyond its unique choices in color. For some reason Manet placed the wound from the spear on Christ's left side rather than, as the Scriptures record, his right. Furthermore, an inscription in the foreground referred viewers to the verse in the Gospel of Saint John that recounts how the grief-stricken Mary Magdalen, having told the disciples that Christ's body is missing, returns to the tomb to see "two an-gels in white sitting where the body of Christ had lain." Yet Manet's work, with its curious disjunction between the text and the painting, cannot be taken for a straightforward presentation of the Resurrection, since the body of Christ, slumped lifelessly on the shroud, has neither gone missing from the tomb nor been resurrected. Was Manet simply confusing a Lamentation scene with a Resurrection? Or was he making a more abstruse and controversial point about religion and Christianity? The jurors would evidently have much to ponder.
face of the gray-bearded, baggy-eyed artist hovering against a pitch-dark face background, was one of Manet's favorite paintings. He made a copy of the work in the Louvre and thereafter, as if paying court to a wise old sage, never failed to seek out the original on his visits to the museum. Tintoretto was predominantly a religious artist who, among his many scenes from the New Testament, depicted several of the dead Christ. Likewise, Manet's Dead Christ with Angels depicts precisely what its title describes—the figure of the dead Christ slumped between two winged, female figures. One of the angels has lifted the muscular, half-naked body of the crucified Christ into a sitting position, while the other weeps as in a Lamentation or a Pieta. Still, despite its allusions to Tintoretto and other Renaissance painters, Manet's work included touches that were unconventional to the point of eccentricity: one of his angels sported orange robes and unfolded a pair of blue wings, while—strangest of all—Christ's loincloth was pink.* The Dead Christ with Angels was idiosyncratic for reasons beyond its unique choices in color. For some reason Manet placed the wound from the spear on Christ's left side rather than, as the Scriptures record, his right. Furthermore, an inscription in the foreground referred viewers to the verse in the Gospel of Saint John that recounts how the grief-stricken Mary Magdalen, having told the disciples that Christ's body is missing, returns to the tomb to see "two an-gels in white sitting where the body of Christ had lain." Yet Manet's work, with its curious disjunction between the text and the painting, cannot be taken for a straightforward presentation of the Resurrection, since the body of Christ, slumped lifelessly on the shroud, has neither gone missing from the tomb nor been resurrected. Was Manet simply confusing a Lamentation scene with a Resurrection? Or was he making a more abstruse and controversial point about religion and Christianity? The jurors would evidently have much to ponder.
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Beauty in 1920 by A Huxley
three beauties of the eighteen-eighties and three of the nineteen-twenties. The comparison was most instructive. For a great gulf separates the two types of beauty represented by these two sets of photographs. I remember in If, one of those charming conspiracies of E. V. Lucas and George Morrow, a series of parodied fash-ion-plates entitled "If Faces get any Flatter. Last year's stand-ard, this year's Evening Standard." The faces of our living specimens of beauty have grown flatter with those of their fashion-plate sisters. Compare the types of 1880 and 1920. The first is steep-faced, almost Roman in profile; in the con-temporary beauties the face has broadened and shortened, the profile is less noble, less imposing, more appealingly, more alluringly pretty. Forty years ago it was the aristocratic type that was appreciated; today the popular taste has shifted from the countess to the soubrette. Photography confirms the fact that the ladies of the 'eighties looked like Du Maurier drawings. But among the present young generation one looks in vain for the type; the Du Maurier damsel is as extinct as the mesozoic reptile; the Fish girl and other kindred flat-faced species have taken her place. Between the 'thirties and 'fifties another type, the egg-faced girl, reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the Ladies' Keepsake this invariable type prevails—the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates are terribly aban-doned and provocative. And because one expects so much in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier' age, one is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty's, "Youth on the Prow and Pleas-ure at the Helm." The naiads are of the purest egg-faced type. Their hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and their faces are impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on. It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into the world complete with flowing draperies. It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the ovi-form girl have vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The contemporary hand, with its two mid-dle fingers held together and the forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product. Above all, the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no fashion-plate had more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely
haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those provocative feet in Suckling's ballad: Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out.
It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. Today the fashion-plate is always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more radically. On the text, "the feet of the young women," it would be possible to write a profound philosophical sermon. And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to men-tion another curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside, decrescendo, toward the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf was an even crescent, with its greatest pro-jection opposite the middle of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf is forced upon one's atten-tion by almost every minor picture-maker of the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for in-stance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don't hold much with the beau ideal. The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot, the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any chemical change.
haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those provocative feet in Suckling's ballad: Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out.
It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. Today the fashion-plate is always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more radically. On the text, "the feet of the young women," it would be possible to write a profound philosophical sermon. And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to men-tion another curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside, decrescendo, toward the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf was an even crescent, with its greatest pro-jection opposite the middle of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf is forced upon one's atten-tion by almost every minor picture-maker of the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for in-stance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don't hold much with the beau ideal. The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot, the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any chemical change.
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Making Gays the Enemy from Blumenthal
Under Reconstructionist rules of engagement, lying, deception, and stealth are considered legiti-mate tactics and are even encouraged. There is no requirement for Christians to be truthful "in acts of war?' Rushdoony wrote. "Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics?' Indeed, deception has proved essential to the success of the Ahmansons' campaign to undermine mainline churches. The National Council of Churches—the governing body of the mainline Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches—is one of America's most effective progressive institutions. During the past fifty years, the NCC has advanced civil rights, environmentalism, and peace movements. The NCC's symbolism as a liberal bulwark made it a natural target. Progressive Methodist minister Andrew Weaver explained three years before his death in 2008, "NCC church members' influence is dispro-portionate to their numbers, and [they] include remarkably high
numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment?' In 1981, when the Reagan administration ratcheted up military support for anti-Communist juntas in Central America, a group of anti-Communist Democratic operatives and right-wing moneymen responded by organizing a Washington think tank called the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) to mount an "inside-outside" at-tack on the mainline churches' social activism. In short order, the new outfit shopped material to the mainstream press alleging that the NCC was diverting collection plate donations to Communist guerrillas. In 1982, this propaganda and pressure translated into two devastating and false reports in Reader's Digest and on CBS's 60 Minutes about NCC's purported Communist links. (Twenty years later, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt described the broadcast on the NCC as the greatest regret of his long and illustrious career. "The next morning I got a congratu-latory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, `Oh my God, we must have done something wrong last night and I think we probably did,'" Hewitt told CNN's Larry King in 2002.) In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue. The group's shift of focus from the red menace to the lavender one was made possible by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Ahmansons throughout the 1990s and by a grant of over $1 million in 2000 and 2001—the same year Roberta Ahmanson told me she was "inveigled" into joining the IRD's board of directors. The Ahmansons' money was promptly funneled into a smear campaign against the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop by the Episcopal Church. The IRD cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast in August 2004, generating a column by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes titled "The Gay Bishop's Links?' Barnes, who neglected to mention his membership on the IRD's board of directors in his column for the neoconservative magazine, falsely alleged that the website of a gay youth group Robin-son founded contained links to "a pornographic website," and he claimed without independent sourcing that Robinson "put his hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting "several years ago." The IRD circulated the column to various cable news networks, but only Fox News (which also employed Barnes as a regu-lar pundit and host of a talk show) agreed to broadcast it. Although a panel of bishops investigating the charges discredited Barnes's smear, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and divide it from its global affiliates. In May 2007, eleven ultraconservative congregations from Northern Virginia bolted from the Epis-copal Church and joined forces with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by the demagogic Archbishop Peter Akinola. In a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Akinola has managed to grow his congregation while replacing tradi-tional church concerns about social justice with hysteria about homo-sexuality. Akinola spent much of 2006 lobbying Nigeria's legislature to pass a bill meting out five-year prison terms to any gay people who dared to gather—or even touch one another—in public. As the IRD pressed its exploitation of homosexuality to divide Episcopal congregations, it initiated a parallel campaign accusing the mainline Presbyterian Church of anti-Semitism for its protests against Israel's continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The IRD complemented this new tactic by mailing out 100,000 copies of Likud-nik Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh's tract "Islamic Imperialism" to pastors. With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian Right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era. For Ahmanson, the quest to transform the United States into Calvin's elitist "church of the elect," or what Rushdoony called a "spir-itual aristocracy," is not solely a political endeavor. Before Ahmanson and his wife were galvanized into funding conservative advocacy groups, mainline church schisms, and Far Right moral crusades, they had been paralyzed by their own social handicaps and unresolved psychological issues. Emotional fulfillment was unattainable for the Ahmansons until they embraced Rushdoony's inverted vision of free will: "The flight from freedom is always first of all the flight from God, who created man to be responsible and to exercise dominion over the earth under him. The choice is always God or slavery." By exchanging
free will for Reconstructionist mandates—by "doing what God wants him to do," as Roberta Ahmanson told me her husband does—Ahmanson ironically experienced his first sense of liberation. Ahmanson's identification with Tolkien's hero, Frodo, illuminates his sensibility. Both Frodo and Ahmanson were socially withdrawn boys who lost their parents at an early age. Just as Frodo found the childless Bilbo Baggins to nurture him, teach him Elvish, and pass along to him the One Ring that would ultimately have to be de-stroyed to save the world, Ahmanson found Rushdoony. Like Frodo, who gained a sense of camaraderie from the Fellowship of the Ring that was formed to protect him, Ahmanson gathered around himself a wife, a social network, and a community by throwing down the gauntlet against an evil secularism. Without the drama that flowed from their respective missions to save civilization, Frodo and Ah-manson would have never fulfilled many of their most basic needs. In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to Howard Ahmanson, he attempted to show his independence and demonstrate his own reasoning by placing special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often as-sumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ah-manson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, linger-ing, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead." For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Chris-tian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style.
numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment?' In 1981, when the Reagan administration ratcheted up military support for anti-Communist juntas in Central America, a group of anti-Communist Democratic operatives and right-wing moneymen responded by organizing a Washington think tank called the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) to mount an "inside-outside" at-tack on the mainline churches' social activism. In short order, the new outfit shopped material to the mainstream press alleging that the NCC was diverting collection plate donations to Communist guerrillas. In 1982, this propaganda and pressure translated into two devastating and false reports in Reader's Digest and on CBS's 60 Minutes about NCC's purported Communist links. (Twenty years later, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt described the broadcast on the NCC as the greatest regret of his long and illustrious career. "The next morning I got a congratu-latory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, `Oh my God, we must have done something wrong last night and I think we probably did,'" Hewitt told CNN's Larry King in 2002.) In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue. The group's shift of focus from the red menace to the lavender one was made possible by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Ahmansons throughout the 1990s and by a grant of over $1 million in 2000 and 2001—the same year Roberta Ahmanson told me she was "inveigled" into joining the IRD's board of directors. The Ahmansons' money was promptly funneled into a smear campaign against the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop by the Episcopal Church. The IRD cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast in August 2004, generating a column by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes titled "The Gay Bishop's Links?' Barnes, who neglected to mention his membership on the IRD's board of directors in his column for the neoconservative magazine, falsely alleged that the website of a gay youth group Robin-son founded contained links to "a pornographic website," and he claimed without independent sourcing that Robinson "put his hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting "several years ago." The IRD circulated the column to various cable news networks, but only Fox News (which also employed Barnes as a regu-lar pundit and host of a talk show) agreed to broadcast it. Although a panel of bishops investigating the charges discredited Barnes's smear, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and divide it from its global affiliates. In May 2007, eleven ultraconservative congregations from Northern Virginia bolted from the Epis-copal Church and joined forces with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by the demagogic Archbishop Peter Akinola. In a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Akinola has managed to grow his congregation while replacing tradi-tional church concerns about social justice with hysteria about homo-sexuality. Akinola spent much of 2006 lobbying Nigeria's legislature to pass a bill meting out five-year prison terms to any gay people who dared to gather—or even touch one another—in public. As the IRD pressed its exploitation of homosexuality to divide Episcopal congregations, it initiated a parallel campaign accusing the mainline Presbyterian Church of anti-Semitism for its protests against Israel's continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The IRD complemented this new tactic by mailing out 100,000 copies of Likud-nik Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh's tract "Islamic Imperialism" to pastors. With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian Right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era. For Ahmanson, the quest to transform the United States into Calvin's elitist "church of the elect," or what Rushdoony called a "spir-itual aristocracy," is not solely a political endeavor. Before Ahmanson and his wife were galvanized into funding conservative advocacy groups, mainline church schisms, and Far Right moral crusades, they had been paralyzed by their own social handicaps and unresolved psychological issues. Emotional fulfillment was unattainable for the Ahmansons until they embraced Rushdoony's inverted vision of free will: "The flight from freedom is always first of all the flight from God, who created man to be responsible and to exercise dominion over the earth under him. The choice is always God or slavery." By exchanging
free will for Reconstructionist mandates—by "doing what God wants him to do," as Roberta Ahmanson told me her husband does—Ahmanson ironically experienced his first sense of liberation. Ahmanson's identification with Tolkien's hero, Frodo, illuminates his sensibility. Both Frodo and Ahmanson were socially withdrawn boys who lost their parents at an early age. Just as Frodo found the childless Bilbo Baggins to nurture him, teach him Elvish, and pass along to him the One Ring that would ultimately have to be de-stroyed to save the world, Ahmanson found Rushdoony. Like Frodo, who gained a sense of camaraderie from the Fellowship of the Ring that was formed to protect him, Ahmanson gathered around himself a wife, a social network, and a community by throwing down the gauntlet against an evil secularism. Without the drama that flowed from their respective missions to save civilization, Frodo and Ah-manson would have never fulfilled many of their most basic needs. In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to Howard Ahmanson, he attempted to show his independence and demonstrate his own reasoning by placing special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often as-sumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ah-manson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, linger-ing, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead." For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Chris-tian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style.
Travels With My Aunt
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I asked her what her boy-friend's project was. 'He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment — say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity — do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate —you wouldn't break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in 'another.' The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supple-ment came back to me. I said, 'Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?' `Not Heinz, Campbell's,' Tooley said. 'That was Andy War-hol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. "Of course," I said, "Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell's are long like English pillar-boxes." I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn't the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn't put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn't an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age — only he didn't call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn't have been any use at all. It wouldn't have been noticed.'
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Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer. I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek. 'I didn't mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,' I said. 'You resemble your father more than your mother. He be-lieved no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.' 'And my mother?' I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue. 'She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.'
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He was not singing and I doubt whether he was praying. `Mark my footsteps, good my page,' the sergeant sang lustily, `Tread thou in them boldly,' and the voices in the gallery rose ardently to the unexpected competition from below. At last the proper service began, and I was glad when the Athanasian Creed, which they invariably inflict on us at Christ-mas, was safely over. 'As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three' uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.' (Sergeant Sparrow coughed several times in the course of it.)
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The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Corrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge was continually heaving the lead. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ship's draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further. I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stone's throw — or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who having once known prison enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl. His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, 'I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straw for cold drinks. Not in the Argen-tine. I thought I'd make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldn't sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they won't drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you,' he said happily. `So what do you do now?' He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, 'I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.'
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Mussolini's Abyssinian Adventure
From the Dark Valley
MUSSOLINI had long dreamed of setting the "Dark Continent" alight. As a youth he had been shocked by the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when the Emperor Menelik administered the most dev-astating rebuff ever suffered by a European power in Africa. The figures—"ten thousand dead and seventy-two cannon lost"—hammered in Mussolini's head for years afterwards.' Like D'Annunzio, he regarded this disaster as a "shameful scar,"2 a stigma on the Italian body politic that could only be washed away with blood. Revenge would be sweet, righting a cosmic wrong whereby black savages had defeated the forces of white civilisation. Revenge would also be compensation, in the shape of the last independent African country, for the meagre pickings Italy had obtained at Versailles. An empire would bring dignity to the State, virility to the regime and glory to the Duce. As it was, Italy had only a few tattered colonies, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, Libya and the Dodecanese, which bore no comparison to the splendid possessions of Britain and France. Mussolini felt the hurt deeply. Only an imperial power could be great, Mussolini considered, and as early as 1932 he laid out four large relief maps in the Via del Impero showing how Rome had once embraced territory stretching from Hadrian's Wall to the first cataract of the Nile, from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules. Aggression was the fulfilment of Fascism, in Mussolini's view, the proof that it had not become as decadent as the democracies, and Italian newspapers soon began to laud "the poetry of hatred and the beneficent hygiene of war."3 Finally African conquest would be a Roman triumph worthy of Augustus, a dazzling monument to Mussolini's personal prestige. These were the visceral motives inspiring him to embark on what King Victor Emmanuel was to call "the greatest colonial war in history."4 But Mussolini was also prompted by more immediate considerations. In 1932, when he secretly commissioned General Emilio De Bono to prepare for the Abyssinian adventure, the Duce was preoccupied by the Depression.
Faced with the example of Libya, Italy's largest colony, which repaid only a tithe of what it cost to have and to hold, he could hardly hope that a conquered Ethiopia would come to his rescue economically. Poor, remote and landlocked, Ethiopia could by no means fulfil the classic role of a colony—to be a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods. On the other hand, in an era of protectionism Italians could easily be persuaded of the advantages of having an exclusive economic domain in Ethiopia, just as the Japanese had been convinced about Manchuria. Mussolini, indeed, resented the flourishing Japanese trade with Ethiopia and scotched a royal dynastic marriage which would have strengthened this Afro-Asian axis. Furthermore he had every incentive to divert the attention of Italians from the parlous state of their own country by reviving their long-felt fas-cination for the "lure of Africa."' He appreciated the possibilities of channelling internal frustration into external violence. He saw the chance of mobilising patriots behind the regime and he reckoned that militant nationalism could invigorate moribund Fascism. In 1932 he declared that Fascism carried "the anti-pacifist attitude into the life of the individual. 'I don't give a damn'—the proud motto of the fighting squads . . . sums up a doctrine which is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit which accepts all risks." Mussolini visualised that Ethiopia would provide living-space for a population he was encouraging to expand and which could no longer find an outlet in the United States. He may also have hoped to relieve unemployment by his call to arms and men. At any rate many Italians saw an escape from the rigours of the Depression in the fer-tile cotton-growing regions of Gojjam and Jimma, among the rich coffee plantations of Kaffa and Sidamo, amid the gold and platinum of Yubdo and Birbir.
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Moreover, when the Crown Prince and future Emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Makonnen (otherwise known by his bap-tismal name, Haile Selassie, which means "Power of the Trinity"), visited Europe a couple of years later he had been greeted more cordially in Italy than anywhere else. A tiny figure, only five feet four inches tall, Ras Tafari made up in dignity what he lacked in stature. As one of his American advisers put it, "he invariably looked out upon the world as from an inner eminence."n Aloof, arrogant, austere, he modelled his public behaviour on that of the Emperor Hirohito. Even abroad he acted like a deity receiving homage, preserving an Olympian calm not least in the face of racist slights. Most foreigners were struck, however, by the refinement of Ras Tafari's appearance: close-cropped curly hair, high brown forehead, trim crisp beard, long hawkish nose and large black eyes which alone betrayed his moods, sparkling with humour, glittering with disdain, suffused with melancholy. Though he spoke jerkily in a low, grating voice and his minute, exquisitely-shaped hands sometimes toyed with a jewelled ring or a gold fountain pen, Ras Tafari possessed the imperial gift of immobility. In the words of the journalist George Steer, he appeared "at all times, even in the middle of war, completely detached and poised above the melee, pursuing his quiet, rather delicate and well-dressed life without noting overmuch the noise which surrounded him."" What went on behind this impassive exterior was a mystery. Ras Tafari had learned French from his tutor and imbibed more than a smattering of Western culture at mission school. But his most formative experiences had been in securing the succession to an empire where the norm was intrigue, murder and civil strife. He understood something of the modern world, favoured progressive schemes including the building of model prisons and was the first Ethiopian to fly. But he stemmed from the legendary world of Prester John, dispensed medieval punishments such as mutilation and identified himself with a people who believed that war-planes could be made to crash by spells. He encouraged the introduction of modern medi-cine but took precautions to protect his family from witchcraft. Dressed in a black, gold-embroidered silk cloak, white suit and solar topi, and carry-ing an elegant ebony walking-stick, he went to church in his red Rolls-Royce, but also presided over feats at which squatting warriors hacked from bleeding oxen carcasses carried in on a pole.
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The war which we have begun on African soil is a war of civilisation and liberation. It is a war of the people. The Italian people feels it as its own. It is the war of the poor, of the disinherited, of the proletariat. Against us are ranged the forces of conservatism, of selfishness, and of hypocrisy. We have taken on a hard fight against these forces. We shall continue this fight to the end.55 The rhetoric may have been catchpenny but Italians backed it with gold. On the same day they participated in one of the most successful ceremo-nies ever dreamed up by the Fascists—the donation of wedding rings to the war effort.
Mussolini's Abyssinian Adventure
4W'
The statuesque Queen Elena, unkindly said to be twice the size of the pocket monarch she had married, initiated this "Day of Faith." Shortly before 9:oo A.M. she entered the crowded Piazza Venezia, where she was greeted by Party Secretary Starace, supreme architect of pageants. Hud-dled against the rain squalls in a trilby-style hat, fox-fur wrap and long black velvet coat, she mounted the broad white steps of the massive Victor Emmanuel monument, which was guarded by young Fascists. She threw her own ring and her husband's into one of three smoking bronze urns—the suggestion being that the metal was melted down for instant use. Then she was given two dark steel bands, each inscribed with the motto "Gold to the Fatherland," which were blessed by Monsignor Bartolomasi. The Queen next laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and, hold-ing a lighted taper, delivered a short speech which was broadcast to the nation. In a low, clear voice, which at times trembled with emotion, she said:
In ascending to the Sacrarium of the Altar of the Fatherland, together with the proud mothers and wives of our dear Italy, to lay on the Altar of the Unknown Warrior the wedding ring, symbol of our first joys, and of the greatest renunciations, as the purest offering of devotion to the Fatherland, bowing ourselves down to the earth as if to commune in spirit with our glorious sons who fell in the Great War [here she gave a Fascist salute which was imitated by all present], we invoke together with them before God, "Victory" Young sons of Italy, who are defending her sacred rights and are opening new paths for the brilliant march of the Fatherland, we wish that you may bring about the triumph of Roman civilization in the Africa which you have redeemed.
The crowd cheered ecstatically: "Long live the Queen," "Long live the House of Savoy."56 Led by Rachele Mussolini, 250,000 Romans followed the royal example. Mostly women, all wearing black, some in fur coats but many in tattered clothes and hatless, they queued for hours to pay their solemn tribute. In Milan, in Naples, in Trieste, all over the country the same patriotic scene was acted out. Correctly interpreting the Pope's Del-phic utterances as tacit support for the Catholic "colonisers of Africa,"57 clergy gave their gold crosses and chains. Jews surrendered their own holy artifacts, including the' gold key of the ark of the law from their synagogue in Rome. Pirandello handed over his Nobel Prize gold medal. Old opponents of Fascism were reconciled and even Benedetto Croce contributed his senatorial emblem. When Prince Doria's Scottish wife refused to give up her ring, she was assaulted; it became difficult to wear anything but a band of steel. Some of those were doubtless acquired in exchange for cheap rings... jewelers were stripped of their stock.
MUSSOLINI had long dreamed of setting the "Dark Continent" alight. As a youth he had been shocked by the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when the Emperor Menelik administered the most dev-astating rebuff ever suffered by a European power in Africa. The figures—"ten thousand dead and seventy-two cannon lost"—hammered in Mussolini's head for years afterwards.' Like D'Annunzio, he regarded this disaster as a "shameful scar,"2 a stigma on the Italian body politic that could only be washed away with blood. Revenge would be sweet, righting a cosmic wrong whereby black savages had defeated the forces of white civilisation. Revenge would also be compensation, in the shape of the last independent African country, for the meagre pickings Italy had obtained at Versailles. An empire would bring dignity to the State, virility to the regime and glory to the Duce. As it was, Italy had only a few tattered colonies, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, Libya and the Dodecanese, which bore no comparison to the splendid possessions of Britain and France. Mussolini felt the hurt deeply. Only an imperial power could be great, Mussolini considered, and as early as 1932 he laid out four large relief maps in the Via del Impero showing how Rome had once embraced territory stretching from Hadrian's Wall to the first cataract of the Nile, from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules. Aggression was the fulfilment of Fascism, in Mussolini's view, the proof that it had not become as decadent as the democracies, and Italian newspapers soon began to laud "the poetry of hatred and the beneficent hygiene of war."3 Finally African conquest would be a Roman triumph worthy of Augustus, a dazzling monument to Mussolini's personal prestige. These were the visceral motives inspiring him to embark on what King Victor Emmanuel was to call "the greatest colonial war in history."4 But Mussolini was also prompted by more immediate considerations. In 1932, when he secretly commissioned General Emilio De Bono to prepare for the Abyssinian adventure, the Duce was preoccupied by the Depression.
Faced with the example of Libya, Italy's largest colony, which repaid only a tithe of what it cost to have and to hold, he could hardly hope that a conquered Ethiopia would come to his rescue economically. Poor, remote and landlocked, Ethiopia could by no means fulfil the classic role of a colony—to be a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods. On the other hand, in an era of protectionism Italians could easily be persuaded of the advantages of having an exclusive economic domain in Ethiopia, just as the Japanese had been convinced about Manchuria. Mussolini, indeed, resented the flourishing Japanese trade with Ethiopia and scotched a royal dynastic marriage which would have strengthened this Afro-Asian axis. Furthermore he had every incentive to divert the attention of Italians from the parlous state of their own country by reviving their long-felt fas-cination for the "lure of Africa."' He appreciated the possibilities of channelling internal frustration into external violence. He saw the chance of mobilising patriots behind the regime and he reckoned that militant nationalism could invigorate moribund Fascism. In 1932 he declared that Fascism carried "the anti-pacifist attitude into the life of the individual. 'I don't give a damn'—the proud motto of the fighting squads . . . sums up a doctrine which is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit which accepts all risks." Mussolini visualised that Ethiopia would provide living-space for a population he was encouraging to expand and which could no longer find an outlet in the United States. He may also have hoped to relieve unemployment by his call to arms and men. At any rate many Italians saw an escape from the rigours of the Depression in the fer-tile cotton-growing regions of Gojjam and Jimma, among the rich coffee plantations of Kaffa and Sidamo, amid the gold and platinum of Yubdo and Birbir.
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Moreover, when the Crown Prince and future Emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Makonnen (otherwise known by his bap-tismal name, Haile Selassie, which means "Power of the Trinity"), visited Europe a couple of years later he had been greeted more cordially in Italy than anywhere else. A tiny figure, only five feet four inches tall, Ras Tafari made up in dignity what he lacked in stature. As one of his American advisers put it, "he invariably looked out upon the world as from an inner eminence."n Aloof, arrogant, austere, he modelled his public behaviour on that of the Emperor Hirohito. Even abroad he acted like a deity receiving homage, preserving an Olympian calm not least in the face of racist slights. Most foreigners were struck, however, by the refinement of Ras Tafari's appearance: close-cropped curly hair, high brown forehead, trim crisp beard, long hawkish nose and large black eyes which alone betrayed his moods, sparkling with humour, glittering with disdain, suffused with melancholy. Though he spoke jerkily in a low, grating voice and his minute, exquisitely-shaped hands sometimes toyed with a jewelled ring or a gold fountain pen, Ras Tafari possessed the imperial gift of immobility. In the words of the journalist George Steer, he appeared "at all times, even in the middle of war, completely detached and poised above the melee, pursuing his quiet, rather delicate and well-dressed life without noting overmuch the noise which surrounded him."" What went on behind this impassive exterior was a mystery. Ras Tafari had learned French from his tutor and imbibed more than a smattering of Western culture at mission school. But his most formative experiences had been in securing the succession to an empire where the norm was intrigue, murder and civil strife. He understood something of the modern world, favoured progressive schemes including the building of model prisons and was the first Ethiopian to fly. But he stemmed from the legendary world of Prester John, dispensed medieval punishments such as mutilation and identified himself with a people who believed that war-planes could be made to crash by spells. He encouraged the introduction of modern medi-cine but took precautions to protect his family from witchcraft. Dressed in a black, gold-embroidered silk cloak, white suit and solar topi, and carry-ing an elegant ebony walking-stick, he went to church in his red Rolls-Royce, but also presided over feats at which squatting warriors hacked from bleeding oxen carcasses carried in on a pole.
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and
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The war which we have begun on African soil is a war of civilisation and liberation. It is a war of the people. The Italian people feels it as its own. It is the war of the poor, of the disinherited, of the proletariat. Against us are ranged the forces of conservatism, of selfishness, and of hypocrisy. We have taken on a hard fight against these forces. We shall continue this fight to the end.55 The rhetoric may have been catchpenny but Italians backed it with gold. On the same day they participated in one of the most successful ceremo-nies ever dreamed up by the Fascists—the donation of wedding rings to the war effort.
Mussolini's Abyssinian Adventure
4W'
The statuesque Queen Elena, unkindly said to be twice the size of the pocket monarch she had married, initiated this "Day of Faith." Shortly before 9:oo A.M. she entered the crowded Piazza Venezia, where she was greeted by Party Secretary Starace, supreme architect of pageants. Hud-dled against the rain squalls in a trilby-style hat, fox-fur wrap and long black velvet coat, she mounted the broad white steps of the massive Victor Emmanuel monument, which was guarded by young Fascists. She threw her own ring and her husband's into one of three smoking bronze urns—the suggestion being that the metal was melted down for instant use. Then she was given two dark steel bands, each inscribed with the motto "Gold to the Fatherland," which were blessed by Monsignor Bartolomasi. The Queen next laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and, hold-ing a lighted taper, delivered a short speech which was broadcast to the nation. In a low, clear voice, which at times trembled with emotion, she said:
In ascending to the Sacrarium of the Altar of the Fatherland, together with the proud mothers and wives of our dear Italy, to lay on the Altar of the Unknown Warrior the wedding ring, symbol of our first joys, and of the greatest renunciations, as the purest offering of devotion to the Fatherland, bowing ourselves down to the earth as if to commune in spirit with our glorious sons who fell in the Great War [here she gave a Fascist salute which was imitated by all present], we invoke together with them before God, "Victory" Young sons of Italy, who are defending her sacred rights and are opening new paths for the brilliant march of the Fatherland, we wish that you may bring about the triumph of Roman civilization in the Africa which you have redeemed.
The crowd cheered ecstatically: "Long live the Queen," "Long live the House of Savoy."56 Led by Rachele Mussolini, 250,000 Romans followed the royal example. Mostly women, all wearing black, some in fur coats but many in tattered clothes and hatless, they queued for hours to pay their solemn tribute. In Milan, in Naples, in Trieste, all over the country the same patriotic scene was acted out. Correctly interpreting the Pope's Del-phic utterances as tacit support for the Catholic "colonisers of Africa,"57 clergy gave their gold crosses and chains. Jews surrendered their own holy artifacts, including the' gold key of the ark of the law from their synagogue in Rome. Pirandello handed over his Nobel Prize gold medal. Old opponents of Fascism were reconciled and even Benedetto Croce contributed his senatorial emblem. When Prince Doria's Scottish wife refused to give up her ring, she was assaulted; it became difficult to wear anything but a band of steel. Some of those were doubtless acquired in exchange for cheap rings... jewelers were stripped of their stock.
Wednesday, March 02, 2016
From the Times
On Shinto by Nicholas Kristoff
Japan is usually described as a Buddhist or Shinto nation, but most Japanese adhere to a sort of folk religion that mixes Buddhism and Shintoism. The Okuyama family, for example, keeps a Buddhist altar in the living room and makes daily offerings, but in the next room is a Shinto altar to other gods.
Japan is usually described as a Buddhist or Shinto nation, but most Japanese adhere to a sort of folk religion that mixes Buddhism and Shintoism. The Okuyama family, for example, keeps a Buddhist altar in the living room and makes daily offerings, but in the next room is a Shinto altar to other gods.
Like most women in Omiya, Mrs. Okuyama wore a supposedly divine sash from the fourth month of her pregnancy. Typically, the gynecologist writes a few lucky words on the sash, and helps pick an auspicious "day of the dog" on the traditional calendar to begin to wear it. The sash has pictures of dogs on it, and the idea is that it will allow the woman to give birth as easily as dogs do. ...
Shintoism has been the traditional faith of Japan since ancient times. Buddhism arrived from China in the sixth century. Christianity followed in the 16th century, but after making inroads was brutally suppressed in the 17th century and has never recovered.
Under the military rulers in the early part of this century, Shintoism was the formal state religion and centered on venerating the Emperor as a living god. But Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity after World War II, during the American occupation, and there is now no official religion in Japan.
Today Japanese turn to Buddhism mainly at times of death; Shintoism is more evident in marriages and daily life.
When Mrs. Okuyama's elder daughter was taking high school entrance examinations last year, the family took her to the nearby Shinto Head Shrine. When residents want to improve their brain power -- or simply ease a headache -- they pat the holy boulder at the Head Shrine and then touch their heads. Or they drink the holy water. ...The Head Shrine is an example of the practicality of Shintoism, which focuses on venerating the gods of nature.
To Japanese farmers, every natural feature can contain a spirit: a big rock, a tall tree, a creek, a hill, a rice paddy. A bad harvest or unexplained death may mean the gods are angry, so Shinto priests are often summoned to conduct purification rituals. ....Folk religion also has a darker side. Older people in Omiya say they remember decades ago when people would put hexes on one another.
The idea was to go out in the middle of the night with a straw doll representing the person to be hexed. Then one pounded a long nail through the doll into a tree, and the victim would suffer terrible misfortune.
According to one elderly resident, frustrated wives sometimes used to put hexes on their husbands. Divorce was inconceivable, and talking back to their husbands might result in a beating, so a hex was the most satisfying way of getting even.
To Americans who have a vague notion of Zen Buddhism, Mr. Kondo may come as a surprise. He has never heard of the Zen riddle of "the sound of one hand clapping." And he chuckles when asked how often he meditates in a Zen position.
"I hardly ever sit in the Zen position," he said. "I'm overworked. I don't have time to meditate."
Buddhist temples are often criticized for being businesses almost as much as religious institutions, especially for the hefty sums they charge for funerals. Some also run businesses on the side; one runs a night club.
"People say those monks are so greedy and charge so much that no one can afford to die," admitted Mr. Kondo. "But we have an expression: that we will accept just a blade of grass as payment."
When pressed, Mr. Kondo quickly conceded this was just an expression. His fee for a funeral is $1,000 for himself, plus an expected $1,000 donation to provide a Buddhist name for the deceased, plus numerous other charges. All told, the bereaved family typically pays $4,000 or more.
The Japanese tendency to mix religions sometimes puzzles Westerners, some of whom who have trouble seeing how one can believe in more than one faith at a time. Likewise, the distinction between the human and spiritual worlds is hazy, so it is possible to believe that Mr. Hiraiwa died of kidney disease -- and also that he was done in by a fox devil.
The zone between the human and divine spheres is filled with a moral gray area. Christianity, Judaism and Islam use moral imperatives, albeit subject to wide interpretation, to inspire in believers a sense that something is right or wrong. In contrast, Japanese religion is more reluctant to reach a judgment.
Japan is not torn by great moral arguments -- over abortion, for example -- that are often fought by people elsewhere with a passionate sense of moral conviction.
To some social critics, this implies the lack of a moral compass, the absence of an ethical core. Yet Japanese religion can be described as a broad tolerance in matters of ethics and spirituality.
Pressed on whether they really believe in a tree spirit or rice-paddy god, younger Japanese often have trouble answering. Intellectually they may doubt it, just as Americans doubt the existence of ghosts, at least in daylight. But young Japanese may still feel uncomfortable about living in a home with a door at its "devil's gate" -- a direction from which evil can enter.
Some Japanese point out that Shinto and Buddhist beliefs can be effective -- in building a sense of community, in comforting the bereaved -- even if they are not literally true. Mr. Kondo, the Zen monk, said he did not believe in the Head Shrine -- but does not doubt its effectiveness.
"If a son sees his mother go a long way to the Head Shrine to pray for him, then maybe he'll think, 'Mom really cares for my future; gee, I better study really hard,' " Mr. Kondo said. "Then that may lead to the boy passing his college entrance examinations."
Most people in Omiya say that a soul is in a Buddhist waiting period for 50 years, and that it then becomes a Shinto god. But Mr. Nishi says his wife became a goddess almost immediately after death.
"These offerings," he said simply, "are to the goddess that my wife has become."
Mr. Nishi, like many older people in Omiya, frets that young people are not as pious as their elders. Religion is no longer as important a part of village life, and there is the risk that future generations will not sweep the gravestones, pour water over the headstones to slake the spirits' thirst or even make the daily offerings to the shrines in the home.
"Young people have a less religious mind," complained Yasuichi Funase, a Shinto priest at the Fire Prevention Shrine in Omiya. "That may be one reason why people commit more crimes now. And why there are cases like Aum Shinrikyo."
Aum Shinrikyo, the cult accused of organizing the nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March, is often mentioned among elderly people in Omiya as a symbol of the declining faith in traditional Shintoism and Buddhism.
For Mr. Nishi, changing attitudes mean there is no guarantee that when he has become a god, his descendants will offer him food and drink at the altar each day.
"I have this great worry about the future," Mr. Nishi sighed. "I'm pretty confident of my son. But his wife is a Jehovah's Witness, and when she comes here she won't pray at this altar."
Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians are rare in Japan, numbering just 1 percent of the population. But other new faiths are present -- one of them, Tenrikyo, even has a small temple in Omiya -- and the pressures of urbanization mean that many Japanese are no longer in touch with the natural world that is the backdrop of Shintoism.
Also an article on Chechens being deported from Stalin's Russia to Central Asia in 1944 for collective collaboration with Nazis. Khrushchev allowed them to return 13 years later but a third of their original 450,000 were dead.
On the reverse an editorial (1/28/96) on George HW Bush avoiding turning over a diary requested by a special counsel for 6 years- contrasting that with the uproar over the Clintons complying with a request for billing records from the Rose Law Firm with all due diligence.
Also an article on Chechens being deported from Stalin's Russia to Central Asia in 1944 for collective collaboration with Nazis. Khrushchev allowed them to return 13 years later but a third of their original 450,000 were dead.
On the reverse an editorial (1/28/96) on George HW Bush avoiding turning over a diary requested by a special counsel for 6 years- contrasting that with the uproar over the Clintons complying with a request for billing records from the Rose Law Firm with all due diligence.
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