Mixed Messages

A mixed message

I must begin with an important message. Last week’s post was rushed because of unexpected intrusions into my midweek schedule. This week’s is rushed because I am spending most of my Wednesday driving in the direction of Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth (MA), where at 5 pm I intend to deliver a lecture entitled “Luís de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete”. The lecture is open to the public, and I shall hope to see in the audience several of my numerous fans based in the Greater Falls River Co-Prosperity Sphere.

That’s my message, but hardly the end of my musings about messages in general. Messages are becoming practically epidemic. According to most of the political commentators I read, the world’s movers and shakers do little else than send “messages”. The actions of legislatures, the venues chosen for political speeches, the names given to presidential pets—all these things are actually “sending a message”. The more opaque the law, the speech, or the onomastic activity, the more certain it is to be a judged “a very clear message”, or perhaps a “message heard loud and clear”. If the commentator doesn’t like what he heard, or thinks he has heard, it is a “terrible” message. But the very worst sort is the “mixed message”.

Actually, mixed messages are by far the most interesting ones. Anyone who doesn’t like a mixed message better not read a Shakespeare sonnet. My long departed mother was the queen of the mixed message. “Have fun,” she would say, “and be careful”—before releasing me for any activity of the sort designed to encourage a carefree spirit. What might be called the mixed messages of history are among the most interesting of all. I’d call them message of historical irony if the word “irony” hadn’t been so thoroughly debased by popular journalism.

One interestingly mixed message of history seems to be that nothing fails like success. Everyone knows Wordsworth’s marvelous “Tintern Abbey”. If by chance you do not, seek it out. There are few more beautiful expressions of the powers exercised by the beauty of Nature on our moral and psychological constitutions. But how many have wondered how such a huge ecclesiastical ruin ever came to be stuck so far out in the boondocks?

"Tintern Abbey", by J.M.W. Turner (1792)

In the twelfth century a group of zealous French monks, dissatisfied with the comfortable slackness that had overcome so much of the Benedictine establishment of their age, launched a rigorously ascetic reform of religious life. They did not think of themselves as a new order, but they came to be thought of as one by others. They were (and are) called Cistercians after their prominent “mother house” at Cîteaux in Burgundy. In their search for renewed simplicity of life they sought to imitate the ancient monks of Egypt and Palestine, who had made their remote dwellings in the deepest reaches of the desert. The “deserts” of medieval Western Europe were for the most part woodlands and scruffy, uncultivated moorland, lands whose agricultural value was limited to free-range grazing.

It was an age that admired sanctity, and considered it socially useful. Land-rich nobles, eager to score a few pious works for their often-alarming moral balance sheets, gave the Cistercians large tracts of their worthless land, which for the monks might be a kind of spiritual Lebensraum in which they might pursue their austere life of votive poverty undisturbed. Then in the thirteenth century something unexpected happened, something having to do with textiles. A lot of people wanted clothes. Clothes were made of wool. Wool came from sheep. Sheep ate grass. People who owned a lot of grass were suddenly rich. They needed stuff like barns, storehouses, stables, indentured agricultural workers, and the complex structure necessary for industrial enterprise. I have in the past had occasion to cite the Michael Corleone Theorem: "Just when I think I am out, they pull you back in." This happened to the Cistercians in spades, and one result was what might be called the architectural mixed message. It is a phenomenon without which the world would be a less interesting place.

Above : Monastic Tithe Barn, Great Coxwell, Oxon. (Photo: John Waine, 2004)

Below: Assisi's multi-million dollar monument to Franciscan Poverty

Sometimes the mixed message demands a certain amount of literary education for its full impact. I have a young friend in Paris, Bill Thompson, who is something of a genius at discovering brilliant mixed messages. Bill is a polyglot Texan expatriate, a one-time Marshall Scholar and British academic. He is a trained Soviet expert, but now works in Paris for the OECD. The OECD (ostensibly the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) may be one of those shadowy, NGOish, Matrix-type entities that are secretly running the world, but if so, they haven’t let me in on the secret. I met him through the adult education program, of which he was the director, at the American Cathedral in Paris. Most recently Bill sent me the following mixed message, in the form of a photograph taken by his friend Bob in Barcelona:

Oxford Reunion

Jesus College, Oxford: my old room was on the ground floor in the corner

This weekend past Joan and I attended a “North American Oxford Reunion” at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It is not without its irony that I have in fact become pretty enthusiastic reunioneer, since I spent the first three decades of my professional career making light of the annual Princeton class reunions. The Princeton reunions, which take place just before Commencement each year, are famous for their exuberance, and especially for the wackiness of the “P-rade”, the hours-long parade of the costumed alumni in their chronological phalanxes.

For many years we lived at the very edge of the campus, in a vast Victorian house that had belonged to the Class of 1914. One eminence of that class was Allen Dulles, an early head of the CIA, and legend has it that during reunions he would erect a temporary radio tower in the back yard of 39 University Place to facilitate the execution of his spooky duties. By the time we moved in, the classmates were nearly sixty years out and too thin on the ground to make use of the house; but its sprawling basement was full of poignant memorials. They included a half dozen maple wood tables of a rathskeller sort, and a luxurious twenty-foot mahogany bar with brass railing. There was one very moving trophy: a huge photograph, probably five feet across, of the youthful class gathered before Nassau Hall in June, 1914. How many of them would be claimed by the great slaughter announced by the guns of August only two months later?

The world of Princeton reunions seemed fascinating to me, but also anthropologically distanced. In fact, I thought it was fairly ridiculous. Then two things happened. I became active in APGA (the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni), and for the Centenary of the Graduate School in 2000-2001 the graduate alumni themselves started getting serious about participating in the P-rade. Shortly thereafter (2004) I attended the fiftieth reunion of my high school class in Mount Pleasant, Texas, and then (2008) my fiftieth class reunion at Sewanee. Both of these were terrific events, and I emerged from them a convert. Thus “fools who came to scoff, remain’d to pray,” as Goldsmith says in a slightly different context.

The venue for the reunion: the Waldorf Astoria

The Oxford North American Reunion is a very classy affair, and it is appropriately located in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. For me this has a private significance. My parents, neither of whom ever saw New York, were nonetheless sufficiently aware of its fabled luxuries that they regularly referred to the outdoor privy as “the Waldorf”.

The Waldorf, Baxter County, Arkansas

We ourselves are now half a century away from our undergraduate days in Oxford and could hardly expect to run into many—or any—of our contemporaries. But we did have a chance to meet and talk at some length with the “new” heads of our two colleges. The current principal of Jesus College is Lord Krebs, an eminent civil servant, and about as cool and unhaughty a peer as one is likely ever to encounter. Joan’s college, St. Anne’s, an all-girls band in her day, is now headed by one of Britain’s great journalism experts, Tim Gardam.

The British universities have been going through a bad patch. So far as the two ancient universities go—I mean of course Oxford and Cambridge—there has been a particularly bruising confrontation of ancient evolution and contemporary fiscal challenge. There is unquestionably a process of “Americanization” going on, but I had just about concluded that the Brits seemed to be adopting all the worst aspects of the American academic model and none of our best ones. If such things interest you, you will probably want to search out the recent essay in the New York Review of Books by my colleague and friend Anthony Grafton. It’s entitled “Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities.” In this context the reunion proved very reassuring. The Oxford presented by the reunion struck me as confident and energetic, its spiritual eye fixed on the challenges of the future rather than the hoary comforts of the past.

Perhaps as many as a third of the Oxford faculty and administrators whose names had been printed in the program were unable to travel, victims of the abrasive clouds of Icelandic volcanic ash. This meant that those who had escaped in time had to do double duty. One such was the new Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Hamilton. He pretty well typifies the new Oxford outlook. He is a distinguished chemist, British born, but with a rich experience in North American institutions, most recently as provost of Yale. He was very impressive, though in one respect rather annoying to a Princetonian. I heard him in two venues, and in both he did go on and on about how Oxford had just successfully lured Andrew Wiles, who may be the most famous of living mathematicians, back to his native England. This would be Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS, the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem. The annoying part, of course, is that the place he lured him from is Princeton. Yes, I know, this guy proved Fermat’s last theorem. But remember—mathematicians are over the hill by age twenty-three.

The new V-C against the Dreaming Spires

The Rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain

Effects of the wind in a nearby village

Once years ago in England I had to fill out a form on which it was required that in addition to my name I list my “titles and appellations”. This demand was traumatic, as of course I had no titles and, as for appellations, only ones that were informal and unflattering if not unprintable. I thought about claiming to be "the rightful Duke of Cordova, in Spain", but thought better of it. I date the beginnings of my acute “title envy” to that experience. I revel in what I can get. For example, as I recently boasted on this page, I am the Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America. That’s pretty good, but everything is relative. The subject of one of my brief obituary orations this year was the recently defunct Corresponding Fellow Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler. Cardinal Stickler was “Pro-Librarian of the Holy Roman Church and Titular Bishop of Bolsena”. Now that’s a real title, though still not the object of my most intense envy, which is reserved for one of the titles and/or appellations of my old friend and Oxford classmate Michael Nicholas. Nicholas is among the most distinguished church musicians in the world, having held such posts as “Organist of Norwich Cathedral” and “Chief Executive of the Royal College of Organists.” But in the earliest years of our acquaintance he held a title more imposing yet: “The Organ Scholar of Jesus”. If you can’t get no respect with that title, you can’t get no respect, period.

Downed trees on the Common Ground

But the title of the moment, and the one that just blew up in a storm of trouble for me, is “Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association”. The Gray Farm is a faculty housing development in Princeton, New Jersey, that dates from about 1960. It consists of about seventy houses nicely distributed along three curving roads on an old lakeside farm. In its center is a large plot (probably fifteen or twenty acres) of permanently undevelopable fields and woods called the Common Ground. Many of the houses back onto the Commons, and all have easy access to it along well-established paths.

Daffodil cultivation raised to an entirely new level

The original Gray Farmers had something of the spirit of kibbutz pioneers, and they cultivated a strong sense of community cooperation and participation in joint projects, especially the maintenance of the Common Ground. But practically all of the founders are dead or in nursing homes, and “newcomers”—meaning now most people in the neighborhood—have little or no sense of the original vision, which was already mostly a tribal memory when I myself moved in a little over twenty years ago. During the last two decades the Commons—originally carefully planted with flowering trees, evergreens, and shrubs—has been doing its best to revert to the semi-jungle conditions that characterize untended woodland in central New Jersey. Under these circumstances the Grounds Committee—meaning yours truly and one or two other septuagenarians—have mainly concentrated on trying to keep the paths cleared of arboreal debris and rampant vines, though I am proud to say that under “my” regime we have started a fairly ambitious bulb-planting program.

Some of the new daffodil plantings survived

Georges Lefebvre described the state of the French peasantry at the dawn of the Revolution with a striking image. The peasant, he wrote, was like a man standing in water up to his lower lip. So long as things remained absolutely calm he could continue to subsist, barely, but the slightest perturbation of the water was for him fatal. That roughly describes the condition of the Grounds Committee about March 10, 2010. On the immediately following weekend a violent windstorm, accompanied by flooding rains, ripped through our area. There were protracted power cuts over a very large terrain. In the Common Ground of the Gray Farm Association more than a dozen large trees, most of them shallow-rooted pines, were flattened. The main path through the woods was completely blocked. Our so-called “picnic area” was particularly devastated although, miraculously, the actual picnic table and benches were spared. I note that all the trees fell in the same direction—westward—suggesting that a blast of hurricane strength had come out of the coast.

Until yesterday, this tree was blocking the main path

Mr. Pedro Chavez and his crew of landscapers have made amazing progress with the first part of the necessary cleanup. But the costs of addressing the devastation far exceed our modest committee resources, and this means that I, too, have been out there with a chainsaw and will be again, off an on, probably through the winter. It is, as they say, an ill wind that blows no good. Mr. Chavez is smiling, and even the co-Chairman of the Grounds Committee has a unique opportunity to play a poor man’s version of Capability Brown. At least I might be able to plant a couple of dogwoods. But I have to say that the pain being inflicted on the Grounds Committee dwarfs any faint exhilaration of possibility. Just at the moment I’d give anything to be the Organ Scholar of Jesus, instead. Even “Titular Bishop of Bolsena” would be a huge promotion.

Spring Break

Yesterday's blog has been temporarily rusticated for technical reasons while the blogger himself is temporarily at an academic conference in Tennessee, where, I am happy to report, the dogwood and the redbud is everywhere in bloom.

From Bundren to Bodoni and Back

The French revolutionaries found it easier to overthrow the political arrangements of the Old Regime than to transform by legislative decree the old rhythms of life. From time immemorial they had been linked to the liturgical cycle of Christian experience. To change that would require a new calendar. They made one, and it had the virtues one would expect from a document composed by a committee of the Enlightened: logic, tidiness, coherence. The orderly decade trounced the mystical heptad. There would be twelve months of awesome regularity, each with three weeks of ten days each. The committee chucked out the old names of the months—admittedly a rather incoherent hodge-podge—and replaced them with a rational system of dull meterological and agricultural stereotypes. So you got Winey Month, then Foggy, Frosty, Snowy, Rainy, Windy, etc. As the earth’s revolutions around the sun did not perfectly coincide with the mathematics of the revolutionaries, there were five days left over for secular festivities of an uplifting and politically correct sort. Today would I think be Septidi, the 17 Germinal (Seedy) of the year CCXVIII. Except that fortunately Napoleon made a deal with the Pope about the year XII; and they decided to return to the Christian calendar, which had the advantage of relating not merely to the seasons of the year but to the seasons of human life, and to spiritual and mythic as well as meteorological and agrarian experience.

Last week, Holy Week, for those who enter it imaginatively a kind of calendrical roller-coaster, culminating this year in one of the most beautiful Easter Sundays in my memory, has put me to thinking about times and seasons and cycles. So has another circumstance, which will eventually become the subject of this blog. That might be defined as the special contours of love among family members. To be a little more specific, the subject will be our parental joy at the approaching marriage of our younger son Luke and his wonderful fiancée Melanie.

Luke and Melanie

Half a dozen extraordinary books read in my teen years were enough to encourage me to contemplate a life devoted to the study of literature. Among the American writers I knew, I thought Faulkner was the greatest. He was then still alive, still writing, still living just across the river from my own state.

His first book to hook me was As I Lay Dying. I didn’t exactly understand it. I felt better much later, after years of professordom, when I came to realize that nobody else exactly understands it either. But I knew it was great. As I Lay Dying is about a seriously Faulknerian outfit called the Bundrens. The Bundren who lies dying is Addie, the mother. Insofar as there is a plot, it is the story of her death and the grotesque and heroic effort of her children to cart her body by wagon to a town named Jefferson for burial. The oldest child, a man named Cash, is an expert carpenter. The reader hears him before meeting him. The first sound recorded on the first page is the rasp of sawing, then the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze.” Cash is constructing a coffin for his dying mother, as she listens from her sickbed.

There are times, perhaps, when true depth of love can be best expressed through the medium of careful craftsmanship. Cash Bundren had a Good Friday task. Thank God there are also Easter ones. For Luke and Melanie had asked me to print their wedding invitations—a task I completed yesterday.

As they lay drying...

I have been an amateur letterpress printer for forty years, though precious little has come off the presses recently. Luke and I have had a few joint printing projects in our time, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to find the most important printing I had ever done for him. It took a fair amount of rummaging around in half-forgotten files of child-memorabilia. One advantage of such rummaging, perhaps the only advantage, is that one uncovers stuff one didn’t know existed. In this instance, I uncovered quite a cache of Luke’s artwork. He was, and is, a talented artist, as is obvious in this miraculously preserved piece from his affreuse period. The exact date is uncertain, but most art historians place it in the second term of the Reagan presidency.

C.L.O. Fleming (1979- ) untitled Mother's Day Card--affreuse period

At last I did find what I was looking for—to wit, the announcement I had printed in 1979, to share our parental joy with friends and relations throughout the world. Joan and I wanted to name him Christopher—hence the technicality of the birth certificate and the iconography of the birth announcement—but we had already been told in no uncertain terms by his sister that she had no intention of honoring any “sissy” names like Christopher. (You know, as in Columbus, Marlowe, and other sissies of that ilk.)

Does he look like a "sissy" to you?...

I had set the birth announcement in the beautiful, large, fresh fourteen-point Bodoni I had acquired for the printing of the Latin texts in Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore. I clearly remember the look and feel of the pristine types in their cases. I can also remember, though barely, that thirty years ago I could without difficulty or magnifying glass set the six-point type of the psalm text! That old Bodoni type, considerably reduced by service in several book runs, and even at the cost of tolerating a dinged letter or two, I simply had to use for the wedding invitations!

There are a few passages in the Bible that might be called “Bible Passages for People Who Haven't Actually Read the Bible.” Perhaps the most famous of these is the third chapter of Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…a time to love…” Well, this is indeed the time for love. I love you. That's why I gave you this.

I placed the finished text of the invitation cards out on the dining table to dry for a few moments—it doesn’t take long—and returned to the press to work on the much easier task of the envelopes. With each revolution the old Chandler and Price makes a distinctive, rhythmic sound. I would be hard pressed to give it graphic representation—but “Chuck…chuck…chuck” is at least in the ballpark. So as the sheets lay drying, I thought of As I Lay Dying, and of times and seasons and cycles, and of the great wonder and mystery of it all.