Birds and Words

 

Last Saturday night we attended a choice concert presented by a small group called the Princeton Singers.  I suppose that this ensemble is typical of the probably hundreds of very impressive amateur and semi-professional musical groups to be found scattered throughout the country.  Such manifestations of serious musical talent are to be found not merely in most small urban centers but also, and perhaps especially, in even smaller college and university towns.  In Princeton, NJ, there are several, some with more or less formal ties to academic institutions and others simply the logical corollaries their sociology: the kinds of people who tend to live in academic communities.  The current director of the Princeton Singers, under the title of Artistic Director, is Steven Sametz an impressive and versatile composer in his own right.

 

 

The venue was Trinity Church, our old parish, full of family memories, including baptisms and the wedding of our daughter.  And though the greatly increased traffic in the center of town has led us to a more easily accessible parish church, I always enjoy being in the old building and frequently revisit it.  It is a beautiful neo-Gothic construction from the classic period of the nineteenth century.  It has a long, slender nave with two stubby transepts at the crossing, a layout hospitable to hearing music.  One special attraction of the evening was that an old friend, Jennifer Borghi, was singing with the group.  We came to know Jen more than twenty years ago when she was an undergraduate and have remained friends ever since.  Great wits to madness sure are close allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide—Dryden, I believe.  Same goes for the sublime and the ridiculous.  I never know when philology will mislead me into an indelicacy possibly offensive to my esteemed readers, but I feel one coming on now.  

 

Jennifer Borghi 

The Princeton Singers of course sing songs, and the songs chosen and in part created for this occasion were short lyric poems, several of them by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of the true geniuses of our American poetic tradition.  Lyric poetry takes its name from the stringed musical instrument from which it was once inseparable.  Dickinson’s short poems are songs that practically cry out to be sung.  And if she had never written anything else than “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” with its haunting line Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone, she would claim her place in our American Parnassus.  (That poem did not feature in the evening’s program, but you can’t have everything.)  And though Dickinson dominated the program, the evening’s structural highpoint, and perhaps also emotional climax, came with its powerful treatment of one of the best-known poems of one of her eminent English contemporaries, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): “The Windhover.”  The central conceit of this poem, dedicated “to Christ our Lord” surprisingly compares Christ to a bird, a small raptor of the kestrel family.  The comparison is typically arresting, and as with most of Hopkins’s poems the linguistic gymnastics are quite dazzling.

 

 “The Windhover” was a fitting climax to the program, and it was greeted with audience enthusiasm.  I enjoyed the whole evening, but I have to express a heretic’s view about this one piece.  Hopkins occupies a unique place in the poetry of the English language, and the uniqueness is largely to be found in his deeply original rhythms.  What he called “sprung rhythm” was a prosodic invention based in part on his understanding of the prosody of Old English—that is, the English of before the year 1000, the English of Beowulf’s readers.  But I wonder whether the name of the bird—windhover—was chosen for reasons of euphemism.  The old word for this bird was windfucker.  There is no doubt that the bird is one of a variety of small kestrels.  Here the Oxford English Dictionary can help us out.  Thomas Nashe, the Elizabethan poet and dramatist of the end of the sixteenth century, writes of the kestrel as follows: “one of these kistrell [kestrel] birds, called a wind-fucker…”  I am not an expert in the history of English obscenity and have no wish to become one, but as the word windhover makes a somewhat later but still early appearance, the usage may or may not imply a discomfort with the older popular term.  The Elizabethans on the whole were a linguistically franker group than were the Victorians, that’s for certain.  The older term reflects the rapid rhythmic flapping that can make the bird appear to the distant eye to be floating nearly motionless in the air—that is, to hover there--as it surveys the fields of its prey below.

 

The ”f-word” as it is now ludicrously called has in the meantime become the all-purpose gap-filler for those who cannot think of anything better to say.  It is sort of like, well, like like.  It has nominative and adjectival forms.  I have even heard an adverbial form!  It has infected all educational and social classes.  Of course what is ubiquitous and commonplace soon loses its power to shock.  What was among the very most vile and unspeakable obscenities of my youth now goes unnoticed, having after four or five centuries lost most if not all of its obloquy.  In fact neither sexual nor scatological terms excite much attention for their obscenity.  The only sure route to obscenity these days will be found in the political vocabulary.

 

 

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- 

  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding 

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding 

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding 

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! 

 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 

 

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion 

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

 

 

 

Shadowy Goundhog

 

 

This is the year that I have had to admit quite openly that I no longer enjoy winter—if I ever did in the first place.  In fact, you might say that I have come to hate winter.  The weather for the past week has not been extreme—most days had stretches that were barely freezing, with at least an hour or two that got to forty degrees Fahrenheit.  The precipitation, which was never very copious, was also mainly nocturnal, leaving a thin patina of morning ice or snow that melted slowly and messily by midafternoon.  On one day, Saturday, I was even able to take a passable walk in a longish dry spell.  But the sun made only the briefest of cameo appearances during several days, and when it did appear seemed tentative and reluctant.

 

The audience of this blog is mostly domestic, but I do enjoy a small international readership, mainly though not exclusively in England.  On a couple of occasions I have received private communications from this sector complaining that this or that thing I have said is of such exclusively parochial American interest or expression as to be opaque to them.  Since I myself have had to learn to cope with Brits talking about “Boxing Day” and other such mysteries—it turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with pugilism—I shall try to be sensitive concerning the very American parochialism of Groundhog Day, the second of February.  But of course explaining Groundhog Day supposes that one knows what a groundhog is.  That is an unsafe assumption.  A groundhog is an unappealing rodent animal closely akin to if not identical with the animal more widely known in England as a woodchuck.  Both of these names—ground hog and woodchuck, especially the latter—are a little strange.  The strange element is the chuck part.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology has four disparate listings for this word, and two more for the possibly related chuckle.  None of them seems connected to the idea of tossing or throwing, incidentally.  The sense of the word in the classic tongue-twister beginning “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” is actually uncertain.    No other use of the word chuck to denote an animal is known to me.  However, a myth or social witticism developed among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch—who of course were not of Netherlandish but of German (Deutsch) ancestry—to the effect that the weather on one particular day, February 2, was a sure harbinger of the comparative brevity or protraction of the winter weather still ahead.  It all depended upon whether the groundhog (woodchuck), peeking his head out of his subterranean fastness on that day, could see his own shadow.  Well, Groundhog Day passed unnoticed by me a week or ten days ago, and I don’t know whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow.  In fact, I have trouble remembering  whether it is good or bad news if he does see it.  It is all rather “counter-indicative” as my students say.  That is, a sunny day casting shadows presages more rather than less cold weather ahead.   But I don’t need strange signs or portents.  I can feel in my bones that winter is not receding any time soon.

 

 

There are some thousands of small towns scattered throughout the American heartland, many of which strive mightily to claim some element of distinctiveness if not uniqueness.  I don’t know by what circumstance Punxsutawney, an otherwise obscure village in central Pennsylvania, became the national arbiter of the important matter of predicting the annual advent of spring, but it did.   Punxsutawney is a small town just about three hundred miles due west from here.  I have never been there, but I am very familiar with its type.  There are literally thousands of such places in America, each with its own unique distinction—well advertised, usually by a large faded painted sign at either end of the Main Street: America’s Frog Capital, Home of the world’s largest living cave, Birthplace of pinochle champions, Life-Sized tableau of the Battle of Mud Flat, etc., etc.  Some of these places have managed to claim a place in the national annals of world-class kitsch.  One thinks of the giant peach water tower of Gaffney, S.C., or any one of Paul Bunyan’s several blue oxen bringing fame to hamlets on the Minnesota tundra.  But with its meteorological groundhog, Punxsutawney really hit the jackpot.  There was even a fairly amusing film featuring it a few years ago. Unfortunately, as diverting as all this can be, it does little to make more tolerable the unpleasantness of winter, which becomes more oppressive to me with advancing age.  I must console myself with the true fact that in all of the years in the nearly nine decades of my lengthening experience spring has never failed to arrive (eventually), so that I have solid reasons for hoping for this year as well.  But the wait threatens to be tedious.   

 

 

Rear Window

 

I’ve been coming through a rather bad patch.  For more than two weeks I was dogged by some bronchial infection that grew worse rather than better and eventually turned alarming.  Wheezing and gasping for breath, I had to be hauled off to the hospital in the night.  It was a pretty scary episode for others as well as for me.  But at the hospital they quickly stuck little oxygen tubes into each nostril, effecting instant relief.  The not entirely satisfactory diagnosis was “pneumonial something,” which responded rapidly to large intervenous infusions of antibiotics.  That was the good news, and very good news it was.  But of course once you are actually in the hospital with the little yellow plastic band around your wrist, you are in a world in which you have surrendered all agency, and in which about the only possible demonstration of volition available to you is to wait with dignity.  I was anxious to get home.  The hospital authorities were eager to have me leave as soon as possible, but that would be prudent only after certain numbers went up or down, when then wheezing became tolerable, when the sputum changed color, and when other disconcerting physical signs and portents had realigned in a more medically approvable fashion.

 

The Princeton-Penn Hospital to which I was admitted is a wonderful facility probably less than two miles from my house.  It was built featuring only spacious single rooms.  That was about fifteen years ago, but very soon its capacity was being stretched to the limit.  Now there are two beds in most of the rooms—perhaps all of them.  The rooms are so laid out that only one bed enjoys a widow view.  The tradeoff for the advantage of the window view, which I enjoyed, is marginalization between a curtain in a narrow section of the back of the room.  You hear all the comings and goings of the hallway, but you feel squeezed into what seems like the breadth of a corridor.  So you spend a lot time exploiting your privilege: looking out the window.  As I had a lot of time on my hands, I made a good deal out of this task.  The visual materials, though abundant, were dull and commonplace with virtually no possibility for scoping out a homicide, which was the model that came uninvited into my mind.

 

I don’t have a great memory for movies, but one I do remember, in parts vividly, is  Rear Window.  It dates from my senior year in high school, 1954.  This thriller is one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces.  It stars Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly.  The Stewart character is a photojournalist (Jeff Jefferies) temporarily confined to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment by a serious injury—maybe a car accident.  From his window he has a constricted view of the world, though one that turns out to be amazingly crowded and dramatic.  He actually thinks he sees, and indeed had seen, clues to a murder.  A man in a neighboring apartment building has murdered his wife!  It takes Jeff a while to develop his theory of what has happened, suppositions he shares with a girlfriend who drops by from time to time.  Needless to say, perhaps, the homicidal hubby eventually comes to realize that Jeff is on his case and sets out to remove this inconvenience in the same way he has already removed his missus.  No plot summary can do justice to a Hitchcock film.  If you haven’t seen Rear Window you’ll simply have to take my word for it that it’s witty, scary, and very suspenseful.  For starters, we don’t have too many Stewarts or Kellys on our silver screens these days.  And the villain-guy is wonderfully villainous.

 

From my window all I could see in the foreground were the flat roofs of various hospital buildings, small portions of the huge hospital parking lot, and beyond that some scruffy winter-barren trees.  Although I knew where each individual item belonged in the landscape, I still was uncertain as to where I was positioned in terms of my view. But I knew I had to be facing northeast.  The moving traffic glimpsed through the trees was on Scudder’s Mill Road, the large artery linking the village of Plainsboro to Route One.  Directly across that road, facing me frontally square on was a large building prominently marked at its top in large majuscule letters: LIFE TIME.  That was, indeed, the only written sign I could see in that large and expansive view.

 

LIFE TIME.  I am too much of a medievalist not to respond to the little pinches and gentle pushes that Providence serves up for me from time—and has been doing on an infrequent but reliable schedule for more than eighty years.  I knew of course that Life Time is a large public gymnasium on the Plainsboro Road.  And while “Life Time” is a possibly ambiguous phrase—one would not want to hear it in a court sentence, for sure—it seemed to me in this instance a wholly benign portent, the exact meaning of which, though unclear, was still comforting.  And there it was beckoning me from my hospital bed.

 

It is amazing what even a hum-drum landscape may reveal upon close observation.  I saw a pair of foxes slithering through the brush, a few hundred yards at most from heavy car traffic.  The sky was full of bird life, flocks of darting, choreographed starlings, and a plodding convoy of heavy Canada geese overflying the busy traffic of US 1.  Such are the strange accommodations the hidden world of the struggling wild must make to our human-cluttered landscape.

 

 

Henry Frowde, OUP

 

 

I am emerging from a bad week during which some nasty virus drove me to my bedroom.  The actual bedroom is surrounded by books, one of which I grabbed more or less at random.  It turned out to be the “Oxford Dante”—the third edition of this work (1904) first published in 1898.  It was edited by one great Dante scholar, E[dward] Moore, and with an appended index by an even greater one, Paget Toynbee.  This is a no-nonsense book, 490 pages in small type, every word that Dante was known to have written either in Italian or in Latin, but not a word of English anywhere.  The popularity of the great Italian poeta in Edwardian England can perhaps be judged by the publication history; this daunting volume was a best seller.  I still need a crib in reading Dante; but Victorian matrons dived right in.  I didn’t even try to read in it, but flipped through its pages, marked only in a few places in the Latin treatise “On Monarchy,” but there very crudely in ink and a sloppy hand.

 

The other personal name in the front matter of the Oxford Dante (in addition to those of the two learned editors) is that of Henry Frowde, “whose name will long be remembered as the one who by sterling character, untiring energy, and conspicuous ability, made ‘Oxford University Press’ world famed.” His name may ring a faint bell for anyone who has consulted an old OUP volume, for it is in so many of them.  It offered me the necessary tangent to avoid any serious reading.  Frowde joined the Press in the 1870s, and he was for many years its production manager.  In this volume this name is actually given as Enrico Frowde, but a less “Enrico” sort of a fellow would be hard to imagine—presuming that name leads you to think of a famous opera tenor or an infamous Florida murderer.  Mr. Frowde was a reserved, very old-fashioned and erudite English Pietist who followed the practices of the Plymouth Brethren.  Only incidentally was he a genius at the book trade. 

 

His particular expertise was the Bible business; and Bibles and prayer books were an important part of the early university press’s bread-and-butter production.  It was this expertise that got him hired by the Oxford University Press. In his first year he supervised the production of a half a million copies, an output he more than doubled over the years.  The OUP retains to this day an important segment of this market, though far better known for both its large “trade book” business and the aura of the highest possible academic prestige.  American academic presses can but wish.  Maybe they ought to consider selling quality Bibles.  As a very young man Frowde was hired at Oxford.  Even at the turn of the twentieth century, the best-seller of best sellers was still the Bible, and Frowde was taxed with this side of the university press’s business.  The tenor of British publishing in those years can be judged by a couple of extraordinary events.

 

The book world of 1877 was enlivened by the quatercentenary celebrations of Caxton’s introduction of printing to England.  For this bibliophilic festivity Frowde supervised the exhibitionist production of the “Caxton Bible”.  That is, he oversaw the creation of a whole substantial book—printing, collating, sewing, binding , the whole works--in a single day.  Printing began on the Oxford presses at 2 a.m.   (The type of course had been set in advance).  The printed sheets were rushed by train to London, where expert workers stood ready to do the folding, rolling, collating, gilding and binding in Morocco leather.  By 2p.m. gleaming copies were at the headquarters of the Caxton festivities in Kensington!  Mr. Gladstone declared this the most stupendous event in the history of printing!  I have never been able to find an affordable copy.

 

But this was merely a warm-up for the high-jinx attendant upon the printing of the Revised New Testament in 1881.  Its printing was conducted with military secrecy and security.  The frenzy to get an advance copy was intense, not to say insane, with offers reaching the equivalent in today’s money rumored to approach $300,000 for a copy!  Americans were particularly importunate.  But the sacred security of the publication of the sacred text triumphed.  Long lines awaited the opening of bookshops on the appointed day—a sort of bibliophilic Filene’s Basement on Black Friday.  The exact number of copies sold on the first day is unknown, but it was obviously huge.

 

The type blocks were sent on locked galleys to America by the fastest ship available.  During the trip typesetters continued working.  But of course that got the text only as far as New York Harbor.  The whole of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistle to the Romans (totaling 118,000 words) were telegraphed from New York to Chicago at a vast cost, and appeared in the Chicago Times of 22nd May, 1881.  Similar frenzies attended the later publication of other parts of the Revised Bible.  Mr. Frowde presumably looked on with approval and pleasure, appropriately restrained of course. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mandator in Chief

 

I am beginning this essay on Inauguration Day, which by co-incidence happens this year to fall on the day when the nation honors the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King.  King’s  parents named their son after one of the world’s most famous protesters, who is often credited indeed with being the wellspring of the tremendous and consequential movement we call the Protestant Revolt or Reformation.  This history is perhaps particularly relevant for us Americans, whose national origins are intimately connected with the activities of principled Christian protesters.  In any event, one senses contradictory hopes and fears gripping the nation.

 

In many parts of our nation, including this one, a serious winter chill has descended.  The current outdoor temperature is 18 F (about minus 8 Centigrade, or as the translations of Russian novels I read used to say, “fourteen degrees of frost”.  The temperature will probably fall lower over the next two nights.  The New York Times has given up on even trying to deliver our copy; they kindly sent me an email with the news.  I had an odd experience, possibly relevant to the moment,  in the middle of the night, around 3:00 a.m.  When I went to bed snow was falling.  When I arose briefly about 1 a.m. out of necessity, the snow had ceased, but I could see from my window that there were two or three inches.  About an hour later, having returned to the arms of Morpheus,  I became aware of faint scraping sounds from the patio region behind the house.  My first reaction was that it must be an animal.  If so, it was a very persistent one.  In fact, it was a young Hispanic man, M. S., who does regular yard-work for us.  He was removing snow from parts of the blue-stone patio.  I later discovered that he had already also cleared the driveway, the street fronting, and the path from the street to the front door.  The snow was not deep, and it was easily enough removed I suppose; but even that much shoveling would have tested me to the limit—if I could have done it at all.  I deduce that his absurdly early appearance could be explained because he had several others on his list.  He’s an entrepreneur, a go-getter.

 

From time to time I have friendly but superficial conversations with this young man, whose work ethic I admire.  I think he may be an American citizen, though I don’t actually know.  If a non-citizen, he is probably a “documented” one, but again I do not know.  I do know that the idea that anyone would not want such a person in this country seems to me mad.  I have been sufficiently unfortunate over the past several years to have several hospital visits, some with short hospitalizations.  On the other hand, I have been fortunate enough to be near an excellent hospital offering excellent care.  My experiences suggest to me that our much-vaunted medical services would probably come to a grinding halt without the often inglorious work done by dozens of people who look more or less like M. S. working in our heath facilities.

 

I was writing these desultory paragraphs while sort of watching the preliminaries to the presidential inauguration ceremony.  It is now another day, and I move on to the Inauguration ceremony itself.  I was rather moved by the semi-operatic rendition of the “Battle Hymn.”  As a child I heard it frequently, sung by my three aunts and their mother, my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Union veteran and an old-fashioned kind of American patriotic woman.  It is not called a hymn for no reason. But it certainly is a sombre hymn.  The coincidence that this year brought together the inauguration of a new president and the memorialization of Martin Luther King was striking and worthy of a second thought.  The “beauty of the lilies” hardly describes what we for so many months have seen on our screens.  Furthermore the poetic ideal of the efficacy of sacrificial death is of course paradoxical, puzzling.  But as a call to something higher, nobler, better—it seems to me magnificent.  I had allowed myself to at least entertain hopes for a more irenic presidential speech, but the hope was too tentative to be dashed when it failed realization. That made me a little sad, but what I thought was sadder was Mr. Biden’s plausible belief that he had to shower his kinfolk with preemptive pardons to protect them from a distempered revenge.

 

In the recent election, in which Donald Trump prevailed over Kamala Harris—an election in which we were repeatedly admonished that “democracy is on the ballot”—only about two thirds of eligible voters actually cast ballots.   This was a higher proportion than in some earlier years, but hardly a demonstration that more voters than usual thought that democracy was on the ballot.  Another way of saying this is that a third of eligible voters did not vote.  The total popular vote, though unambiguously in Mr. Trump’s favor, was not a landslide.  It was pretty close.  In the terms of election criteria established by the Constitution—electors distributed among the individual states—Trump’s victory was more resounding. But the President is the president of all the states, and all the people in them—a fact that he has from time to time acknowledged.  He may need frequent reminders.  He apparently spent the afternoon issuing directives, at least one of which (concerning birthright citizenship) appears to my unlawyerly eye illegal.

 

Much of the world, including parts of our own land, is under duress.  But amidst all the troubles there are reasonable hopes and real opportunities.  The American president—and I mean whoever holds the office of the presidency—faces truly awesome challenges and responsibilities.  Our democracy operates through professional politicians not philosopher-kings.  Once in a while, almost accidentally, we get something close.  Abraham Lincoln could say and mean “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”  That “all” conspicuously included those who had shattered the republic and made war against it.  You might say they had weaponized the weapons system.

 

 We cannot hope for another Lincoln just now, but we can hope that what needs to be checked will be checked and what needs to be balanced, balanced.  Presidents have not infrequently been told they cannot do things they want to do.  American presidents have over the years tried to claim and exercise more and more power.  Schlesinger’s The Imperial Presidency dates from 1973, from the time of Nixon.  Well before that, Franklin Roosevelt spent a good deal of time in his first term being told by the Supreme Court that this, that, or the other of his desires was unconstitutional.  That is why he proposed, unsuccessfully as it turned out, expanding (or as others called it packing) the court’s membership in order to achieve an accommodating majority.  The idea was much more recently floated by various Democrats, and is likely to reappear again.  In the meantime, the law on how we make laws is this:  Congress proposes legislation, requiring the agreement of both houses; the proposed legislation is then either agreed to by the president, who must sign it, or rejected (vetoed) by him/her.  A presidential veto can be overcome by a super majority of two thirds in both houses of Congress.  My real fear is that Mr. Trump’s cavalier executive order doing away with birthright citizenship is based less in tyrannical appetite than in ignorance.  I fear he may not have known such citizenship is established by the Constitution, but perhaps he does by now.

 

 

Los Angeles, Burning

 

 

On Saturday our excellent friend Frank drove us into New York to visit the Sienese painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.  The exhibition will be up for only a couple more weeks, so that it was perhaps a little more crowded than I would have liked, but of course the paintings were magnificent.  It is a matter of wonders.  The paintings themselves are individual treasures, and it is wonderful to me that, even in old age, I am still privileged to see such beautiful things entirely new to me.  Ordinarily, a visit like this would inspire me to write a little essay about them.  Even so this week my attention has to be directed elsewhere.  It must be comparatively rare for a couple of octogenarians living in a quiet corner of an east-coast college town to be privy to fairly earth-shattering events playing out some twenty-five hundred miles to the west, but that is the situation we are in.  I am referring to the destructive wildfires, fanned by strong winds, that have been hop-scotching through some of the tonier areas of northwest Los Angeles, and particularly the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades.  They have captured the whole world's attention, but we perhaps have a special interest.  Immediately to the east of some of the incinerated mansions is the Getty Museum, which is distinct from though obviously related to the Getty Villa, a huge waterfront house that back in the day was the tycoon’s private residence.  After additions and modifications the Villa now houses most of the institution’s significant holdings in ancient Greek and Roman artefacts.  Our daughter Katherine is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and among the most fundamental of her responsibilities, and certainly an awesome one, is the guardianship of these world treasures.  Both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa have been threatened—indeed continue to be threatened—by the fires.  Naturally these circumstances have given us a particular interest in the ongoing national calamity playing out in and around Los Angeles.

 

Between the classical holdings of the Villa and the much larger and eclectic ones in the Getty Museum on the main campus—an enormous museum surrounded by specialized libraries, conservation ateliers, etc.—a serious fragment of the artistic heritage of our human species has been under threat by wildfire.  One can hardly imagine the urgency and anxiety that Katy and her colleagues have been facing—so far with good success, thank God.  And speaking of the deity, the concept of the act of God—that is, a disturbing event for which no specific individual human responsibility can be plausibly assigned—seems to be waning in the collective litigious consciousness.  The mayor of Los Angeles is facing finger-wagging for having been in Ghana at the time disaster struck, though it is not clear to me that her absence exacerbated an eighty-mile-per hour firestorm, let alone was its cause.  Cnut couldn’t control the tides, and he was a king.  We hope for demonstrable competence in our elected officials, but too many of them are satisfied with the first and indispensable ability: to get elected.  Even so I would hope that the rancor of our recent election season might end, and that we might sympathize with, perhaps even grieve for, our fellow countrymen in such manifest distress.

 

But this cataclysm has set me on a trip down memory lane, for as a kid I lived briefly in various places in California—including Los Angeles, though not in one of its classier quarters.  We lived in the neighborhood called Westchester, at the time one of the city’s modest but salubrious areas, though very near the airport which even then (circa 1950) seemed to have large, noisy planes coming or going every five minutes.  It was a simpler world.  I remember that my father bought a new Chevrolet—the only brand new car I had ever seen up close—for what seemed to me the astronomical price of a thousand dollars!  At that time I had no first-hand experience of the gold coast neighborhoods that have been in the news on account of their actual or prospective incineration.  The O. J. Simpson trial brought the prophetically named Brentwood to the world’s attention.  And I had a distinguished medievalist colleague and friend who taught at UCLA and whom I visited a couple of times at his fabulous house on toney Outpost Drive where, I learned, several of his near neighbors were movie stars and celebrity “adjacents”.  There was a later episode that for a while had the fancy houses of fancy people in that part of L.A. featured in the national press: that of the “Bling Ring”.  A group of overprivileged young people valiantly battled against their existential ennui by breaking into the houses of rich and famous people, more or less incidentally stealing valuable garments and other gaudy upscale souvenirs.   As I recall, they made a particular victim of Paris Hilton, confusing me, as I at first thought that was a hotel but was actually a person.  Indeed, I believe I saw just yesterday a report that Ms. Hilton’s house has burned to the ground, though it might not have been the same residence as that of the Bling Ring era.

 

The social, cultural, and economic prestige of a comparatively small number of the fire’s victims has attracted the attention of the popular press; but that should not disguise the fact that this terrible event is a true national human disaster affecting many thousands of our fellow citizens.  Indeed, it may take a good deal of time to absorb the implications for one of the world’s great cities.  And while it may not be a second Lisbon earthquake—the terrible event that challenged the bourgeoning optimism of the heirs of the European Enlightenment—it is necessarily a lugubrious reminder of enduring human limitation and fragility in a world we only pretend to own.

 

 

 

 

 

Words and Things

Costa Arms 

Many of the most stimulating books I have ever read were written more than a millennium ago, but in thinking about old books, and especially in trying to teach them to undergraduates, I often found they benefit from some introductory explication.  This essay will have a modest topic—words and things and some of the relationships between words and things.  I want to start with a book written by Saint Augustine at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries.  Augustine’s book has a simple and possibly misleading title, De doctrina christiana, On Christian Doctrine.  A better title might be Teaching in a Christian Manner.  Its subject, to use a very fancy word, is hermeneutics, or the interpretive principles that should inform reading, in this instance the study of the Bible.  You might describe it is as a preparatory handbook for people trying to read, understand, and teach the Bible.  But its general principles are relevant even to my light-hearted subject: rebus puzzles.

 

This little book of  Augustine’s theories was produced in his role as a Christian theologian—meaning, for him as a student of the Bible—but it has been admired by students of linguistics in general.  The terms “semiotics” is a catch-all term for the various kinds of sign systems with which we are familiar, among which  human language is obviously prominent.  With regard to sign systems in general, Augustine makes a distinction between natural and conventional signs.  His book begins with the assertion that all teaching (doctrina) is necessarily about one of two subjects: things and signs, res and signa in Latin.  By very rough analogy you might think of res/things as the world of science, and of signa/signs as the humanities.  He makes a second binary distinction.  There are two categories of signs, natural signs and conventional signs.  There is no smoke without fire—that is, smoke “signals” fire in all places in the world.  It is a natural sign of fire.  But the word fire which, signals the same reality as smoke does, is a word in the English language, its meaning agreed to by convention among English-speakers but by no means “naturally” obvious to those who do not speak English.   Other words “for” fire include ignis, pyr, fuego, ogień, brand, and so forth, but they “mean” fire only within the delimited range of conventionally agreed upon shared languages.  Despite what many Americans seem to think, simply raising the decibel level of English to a shout does not make it universally comprehensible.  Nobody "naturally” knows what the word “fire” signifies.

 

                       “Gift” is a pleasant word in English.  In German the 

lexically identical word means “poison”.  So if somebody gives 

you a gift, hope it is in Birmingham rather than Berlin.  For 

there are many distinct human languages.  The common 

domestic animal we call in English a dog is called a chien 

in French, a perro in Spanish, and a hund in German.  There 

is no universally understood word for dog, not even “bow-

wow”—though there is an actual “bow-wow theory” that

posits the origins of human language in the imitation of

birdsong and animal noises!  Human language is a sign 

system.  

 

                  But as someone interested in pictorial as well as linguistic signs, my mind just now turns to a genre of signs in which the pictorial and the verbal are intentionally  yoked.  I refer to rebus constructions.  The word rebus is in Latin the dative or ablative plural of res (meaning things).  So a rebus is a verbal construction in, by, or with things  The following is a dictionary definition of a rebus: “a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; also, a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols”

 

Of course, rebus puzzles are founded not merely in language, but in particular languages.  Many old aristocratic families in Europe, who often had Latin mottoes, also constructed rebuses as well.  Some of these will seem far-fetched to us now.  But in theory a rebus can be constructed in any written tongue.  In English many common words are homophones—that is, words which, whatever variations they may display in their written forms are indistinguishable in their pronunciation: for example, the first person singular pronoun (I) and the ocular organ (eye).  If you wish, you may add the now mainly obsolete expression of assent or agreement, as in “the ayes have it.”

 

On the south coast of Long Island is the old town of Islip.  Its European settlers arrived early, and it claims its civic foundation in 1683.  In Old England the Islips were a many-branched family, and there is at least one village of that name I have visited (in Oxfordshire) and some others recorded on maps.  The Islip family had several notable branches.  I believe that an Islip was one of the last abbots of Westminster Abbey before the dissolution, for example.  Today the people who live on Long Island are more likely to call the place “Iz-Lip” rather than “I-Slip,” but check out the official town coat of arms.  You do need to know that as a technical botanical term the word slip denotes to a small plant cutting, or leafy twig, especially one made for purposes of grafting. 

                                               

 

There is endless fascination, most of it pretty light-hearted, in rebus constructions, which might fairly be described as visual puns, and this thought can bring me to my slightly digressive conclusion.   The words name, nomen, and noun are first cousins, and many rebus constructions exploit the relationship.  According to the poet Pope puns are the lowest form of humor, but some very witty people have not hesitated to play around with their own names in serious ways.  The heraldic shield at the top of this essay is that of the very extensive clan of Mediterranean families called “Costa,” a word with several meanings in several Romance languages.  But the primary meaning in Latin is rib.  The possibly strange marks on the shield are meant to signify the residual bones of cleanly picked beef or pork ribs!  The name was frequently adopted by or forced upon Spanish and Portuguese conversos—Jewish families converting to Christianity by election or by coercion!  The English “metaphysical” poets of the seventeenth century are so-called because of the sometimes extravagant “wit” of their linguistic formulations.  The greatest of them, John Donne, in what one might call a “rebus-adjacent” poem wrote one of his deepest theological meditations in a deceptively simple three-stanza poem built upon his own surname as past participle, with an implicit pun on the Latin word perfectus. meaning complete, finished, or done.

 

John Donne: A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.