Ill Wind Blows Bloguiste Off Course

Irregularities in the rhythm of my blog posts rank low in the hierarchy of the world's current concerns, but one must make the best one can of the material at hand. The hurricane struck while your bloguiste was in Tennessee.  We may be here for an indefinite stay, as air travel to the New York area has become difficult.  I put matters thus only because I rarely find such a  splendid occasion to employ the classical  figure of speech called litotes.  What the sentence actually means is that there is no air traffic from Nashville to any airport in the New York area, and no idea when it might resume.  So while our hearts and minds go out to friends and neighbors in the northeast, our bodies must remain here in Murfreesboro, enjoying the beautiful bright autumnal weather and the unstinting southern hospitality of John and Betty Dixon, the parents of our daughter-in-law.

Sad Stories of the Deaths of Kings

          

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

          All hail, Thane of Cawdor

 Macbeth’s first step toward self-destruction is to be named as Thane of Cawdor, a position that becomes available at just the right moment when the current incumbent is executed for treason.  It is in this context that Malcolm, in describing to Duncan the death scene of the outgoing Cawdor, utters a couple of lines endlessly plundered by later British historians to characterize the final exits of a thousand hapless historical characters:

                                    …nothing in his life

                        became him like the leaving of it…

            This might be said to apply to Macbeth himself (Shakespeare’s stage direction reads “Re-enter MACDUFF, with MACBETH's head”) and indeed is generally relevant to numerous exemplars of Brittanic majesty since times immemorial.  It would be easy to begin the Royal Death Trip in Anglo-Saxon times, but as the Norman dynasty seems more interestingly accident prone, let’s pick it up with William of Normandy, the Conquerer.  About twenty years after the Conquest William, now back on the Continent, when riding about being evil one day, had the misfortune to be thrown by his stumbling horse not upon the ground but upon the pommel of his saddle.  If you have ever seen one of these things, you might imagine that it would smart should it penetrate your groin or abdomen.  Few things are more unpleasant than being stabbed by a sharp object, but one of them is being stabbed by a blunt object.  Such was the end of William the Conqueror.

            William II, son of the Conqueror, was a real chip off the old block.  He was known as William Rufus (“Red” William), a sobriquet that, needless to say, derived from the color of his beard rather than the tenor of his politics.  He shed this mortal coil in 1100 in the following somewhat undignified circumstances.  Accompanied by some friends and relations, including a younger brother, he had gone hunting, or rather chasing deer in the New Forest. (Remember none of these English kings could actually speak English, so it was all about la chasse.)  Unfortunately one of his fellow chasseurs sent an arrow through his upper body.  It is not clear that this was entirely accidental, since the presumed shooter immediately took off for France while the younger brother (destined to be Henry I) rushed off to grab the throne before yet another brother, the rightful successor, could get back home to claim it.  William Rufus was left to die in misery on the forest floor.  Some rustics eventually hauled the bleeding royal remains back to Winchester “in a rude farm cart”, as one of the sources put it.  What a comedown for a king!  Sick transit, indeed.

            Friendly fire was something of a specialty among the Norman aristocracy, who were even more accomplished at shooting their companions of the chase than Vice-President Cheney.  Of course the friendliness of the fire that ended the career of Richard the Lionheart may be doubted.  He was shot through the shoulder by a surly teen-ager, thus allowing the witticism that “The Lion was killed by an Ant”.  Actually it wasn’t the arrow that killed him, but the gangrene.  It’s never so much the original scandal as the coverup, in this instance a filthy bandage.

            In a family blog such as this one it would be indelicate to mention, except somewhat obscurely, the painful end of Edward II in 1327.  It involved a red-hot poker and—well, anyone familiar with Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” will grasp the Begriff.  The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker puts it thus: “cum ferro plumbarii incense ignito trans  tubam ductilem ad egestionis partes secretas applicatam membra spiritalia post intestinas combusserunt.”  Ouch.

            But it is worth noting that aberrant gastronomy played a not insignificant role in the morbidity of the Anglo-Norman royalty.  Indeed the demise of Henry I himself was itself notable, for it is he who famously died of a surfeit of lampreys.  That is the canonical historical expression.  It wasn’t an excess of lampreys, or a superabundance of lampreys, or even simply too many lampreys; it was a surfeit of lampreys.

 Lampreys (a hemi-demi-surfeit thereof)

            Now as you undoubtedly know a lamprey is sort of a combination of a mollusk and a water moccasin, to wit, “any of an order (Hyperoartia) of aquatic vertebrates that are widely distributed in subarctic regions in both fresh and salt water and resemble eels but have a large suctorial mouth.”  I have to tell you that lampreys really suck, and if you study the iconographic evidence you might well conclude that a single lamprey could constitute a surfeit, indeed rather more than a surfeit.  We have reasons to suspect, however, that Henry I’s fatal surfeit consisted in no less than two dozen of them.  This would seem to be a world record unsurpassed even in Erasmus’s immortal colloquy called “On Fish-Eating” (Ιχθυοφαγια), to which I refer the interested reader.

           

           lampreys really suck

 Under the unifying rubric of suicidal gluttony we should probably include the demise of John Lackland (Jean sans Terre) in 1216, brought on by binging on unripe peaches and sweet wine.  As his name will forever be associated with Runnymede (where he reluctantly signed the Great Charter) it is seems entirely condign that he should expire of a vinous flux.  Death by alcohol was of course not always voluntary, as is illustrated by the celebrated circumstances of George, Duke of Clarence (1449-1478).  Although the brother of two kings (Edward IV and Richard III), the duke never quite made it to the throne.  It was not for lack of trying, as he was a sordid conniver of the lowest order (“false, fleeting, perjured Clarence” is what we find in Shakespeare’s Richard III.)  Attaindered on a charge of treason, he was allowed to choose his own mode of execution.  He is believed to have been drowned in a butt of Malmsey in the Tower of London.  Way to go, Clarence!

Anecdote and Argument

            Social scientists, and especially economists, are disdainful of “anecdotal evidence,” generally preferring “wide-ranging studies,” statistical tables, graphs, charts, and other quantitative evidence designed to tame the eccentric and the exceptional.  This first came to my explicit attention when Ronald Reagan was widely criticized for “anecdotalism” for talking about “welfare queens with Cadillacs.”  Yet however exceptional a vivid personal experience may be, its vivacity will likely outstrip that of a statistical essay in a learned journal.

            A few years ago I stepped into a convenience store near Jamesburg, in semi-rural New Jersey, and found myself in a short queue behind a foul-mouthed teen-aged girl who was trying to buy lottery tickets with food stamps.  The store clerk would not allow the transaction, of course, but the episode left me with a vivid impression.  I have not constructed upon it a generalized theory of “food stamp culture,” but I think of it whenever I hear “food stamps.”

            I need to feint at a defense of anecdotal evidence in order to engage briefly with the dismal subject of national health insurance.  I am goaded to do so by back-to-back op-ed essays by two influential columnists in the New York Times.  On one day Nick Kristof published a piece called “A Possibly Fatal Mistake,” which was followed the next by Paul Krugman’s “Death by Ideology”.  One of Kristof’s implicit points, which becomes explicit in Krugman’s essay, is that those who oppose Obama care (as, for instance, the Republican presidential candidate does) are wishing death upon a sizeable portion of the American population.

            I suppose it would be futile at this dreadful stage of this dreadful presidential campaign to hope for sweet reasonableness or rhetorical moderation from any quarter.  I suppose that by this point Mr. Romney has become as inured to being called a murderer by Democrats as the President has become inured to being called a socialist by Republicans.

            Kristof’s piece is not merely anecdotal; it is a single extended anecdote, some of it in the very words of its subject, the columnist’s one-time roommate at Harvard (class of ’82).  One doesn’t usually categorize Harvard graduates among the wretched of the earth; but this man has fallen victim to a scourge that is no respecter of persons or educational backgrounds, prostate cancer, which had already reached a very serious stage by the time of first diagnosis.  He failed to discover the cancer at an early stage, despite tell-tale symptoms, because he consciously eschewed medical examination.  He had given up his job-provided health insurance when he quit his job in a “midlife crisis”, did not want to buy private insurance (“very expensive”), and declined to pay out-of-pocket.  You would have to read the column to adjudicate for yourself whether and where fault is to be assigned.  No reader of the column, least of all your bloguiste, will fail to sympathize with Kristof’s friend.  Many, I think, will doubt that the anecdote is a definitive demonstration of the wisdom of Obamacare.

            A serious intellectual error flaws a good deal of the discussion on this topic.  Many supporters of Obamacare write of health insurance as a terminal good in and of itself.  But health insurance is a means, not an end.  A health insurance card never made a single diagnosis, wrote out a single prescription, or administered a single electro-cardiogram.   Those things are done by medical professionals.  This is not a distinction without a difference or an exercise in casuistry.  The aim of a policy of “affordable” health care is to allow people to get needed or prudent medical attention.  The Affordable Health Care Act meets this standard only if your definition of “affordable” is “paid for by somebody else”.

            I return to a personal anecdote.  I enjoy the best socialized medicine on earth—namely, American Medicare.  The last time I was in an emergency room I actually had to talk the doctor out of ordering a cat scan of my head to rule out some exotic one per cent possibility.  But for good chunks of the last several years I was living in Paris, effectively on my own without medical insurance.  I hadn’t put myself in that situation without some forethought.  Nonetheless I was most anxious when I suddenly developed an obvious heart problem—which turned out to be atrial fibrillation.  I might on my own have made the stupid decision to try to wait until I got home to check it out, but my daughter would not allow it.  She had me in the office of an expert academic cardiologist within twenty-four hours.

            There were many amazing aspects of my experience as a fee-paying private patient in France.  It overturned numerous false pre-conceptions.  I think I have written about the experience elsewhere, though I cannot at the moment find where.  This was not a personally pleasant episode, but it had its instructive elements.  So far as I can tell the care I received was excellent.  It was certainly prompt and thorough.  It involved altogether four consultations with two cardiologists, one of whom administered an echo-cardiogram.  (Both men, incidentally, had happy memories of time spent in training at Mass General in Boston.)  But above all it was affordable--not free, not even cheap, but affordable.  There is not a lot that is cheap in Paris, certainly not housing, food, or clothing.  A few years ago some higher-end Parisians were flying to New York for a weekend’s shopping.  They said the savings on the consumer goods paid for the airfare.  They would never fly there for a doctor’s appointment.  But the cost for my entire cardiac drama, including prescribed medicines and continuing blood tests, was less than a month’s rent, and not all that much more than a blowout family meal at a fancy Parisian restaurant—not that I have ever actually had such a thing.

            Rainy days are unlikely to cease merely because we have quit saving for them.  That a person of moderate means could absorb the costs of a medical emergency without bankruptcy is of course no argument that everyone else could.  But what my own anecdotal experience suggests to me is that Americans need to talk about the costs of our medical care as well as our undoubted need for it.

It's History, Dig It?

 

           

About twenty years ago, transported in a rented car, we took a family vacation in some of the more out-of-the-way parts of Spain and eastern Portugal.  I experienced a curious event in the ancient town of Medina-Sidonia, a name previously known to me only as the seat of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the unfortunate admiral of the Spanish Armada.  As we approached the town on a rising road, there was a church on a hillock to the right.  One could see from a distance that there had been a major subsidence of the churchyard sloping toward the road, with much of its ancient stone retaining wall collapsed.  I could see that beside the road at its base a group of young boys were languidly kicking around a soccer ball.  Or so it seemed.  As we came beside them and passed them I could see that the “ball” was actually a human skull.  It had obviously come out of one of the collapsed graves in the eroding churchyard.

            An English professor naturally had to think of the graveyard scene in Hamlet (V, I, “Alas, poor Yorick…”) in which two of Shakespeare’s really splendid stage directions are to be found: Throws up a skull and Throws up another skull.  Comparatively few of the “final resting places” of the Christian faithful of old Europe were all that final, actually.  The average grave site seems to have had a half-life about fifty years.  There were always fresh cadavers, like Ophelia’s, needing the space.  Out with the old; in with the new.

            All this returned to memory this week through my random reading, which led me to a writer previously unknown to me, one P. H. Ditchfield, an Edwardian cleric and prolific amateur historian.  I was immediately drawn to the title of one of his works: Books Fatal to Their Authors (1903).  Its ambiguous attractions for anyone who writes books will be obvious.  In the event, the title was the best part of the book; but he has several others that are proving real winners, including The Old-Time Parson (an anecdotal history of the rural English clergy) and The Parish Clerk (1907).

            The parish clerk has nearly vanished from the earth, but he played a significant if supporting role in the Old World.  The words clerk, cleric, and clergy belong to the same family, the unifying idea being that of the literacy once the near monopoly of the clerical state.  In medieval Europe the parish clerk was a sort of hyper-acolyte and general utility infielder for the parish priest, leading liturgical responses at services, attending at baptisms, etc., who might actually himself be an ordained person.  Among the greatest comic characters of world literature is Absalon, the parish clerk of Chaucer’s immortal “Miller’s Tale”, a fellow who knew his way around the town bars as well as around the churchyard.

    In al the toun nas brewhous ne taverne   there was not

     That he ne visited with his solas,

     There any gaylard tappestere was.         jolly barmaid

      But sooth to seyn, he was somdeel squaymous   a little squeamish

      Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous.      hoity-toity

In post-Reformation times, when there was less elaborate liturgical activity in the churches, the parish clerk often assumed the various manual tasks involved in the upkeep of the church and the maintenance of its buildings.  He continued to lead the “Amens” and to read lessons and psalms, but he often doubled as sexton (keeper of grounds and buildings and usually the grave-digger to boot).

            Ditchfield’s book introduced me to Old Scarlett of Peterborough (Cambridgeshire), surely one of history’s more memorable parish clerks.  Robert Scarlett earned the honorific “Old”.  He was born in 1498 and died in 1596.  His clerical career thus spanned the major phase of the English Reformation.  He will have started out chanting his Amens in Latin and continued saying them in English.

            History destined Old Scarlett for greatness in the Annals of Sepulture.  Catherine of Aragon, whom Henry VIII divorced in 1533, lived until 1536.  Her death was treated with considerable solemnity and off course a certain amount of diplomatic embarrassment.  Beautiful Peterborough Cathedral, out in the Tudor boondocks, seemed like an excellent place to deposit the remains.  Bob Scarlett got the contract.   In 1587 Queen Elizabeth was faced with a similar problem.  What to do with the politically sensitive, decapitated body of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots?  Answer: Peterborough Cathedral, with Bob Scarlett, now eighty-nine years old and still at his post.

            His unique role as Celebrity Grave-Digger earned Old Scarlett a unique ecclesiastical monument.  Any visitor of old churches is used to finding more or less elaborate marble monuments erected to the memory of the high and mighty, but in Peterborough Cathedral there is a memorial likeness of Old Scarlett, parish clerk.  Like a medieval saint, he is associated with his proper material “attributes”: the sexton’s keys, the pick and shovel of the grave-digger and (just to make sure you get it) a human skull at his left foot.  Beneath the image are the following funerary verses:

You see old Scarlitt's picture stand on hie,
But at your feete here doth his body lye.
His gravestone doth his age and Death time show,
His office by thes tokens you may know.
Second to none for strength and sturdye limm,
A Scarebabe mighty voice with visage grim.
Hee had interd two Queenes within this place
And this townes Householders in his lives space
Twice over: But at length his own time came;
What for others did for him the same
Was done: No doubt his soule doth live for aye
In heaven: Tho here his body clad in clay.

There is one “token” in Old Scarlett’s picture that is particularly curious: from his belt, on the right-hand side, hangs a whip.  This, Ditchfield convincingly suggests, refers to yet another role of this multitasking parish clerk.  He was probably also the official Peterborough dog-whipper, whose job was to discourage religion among canines.  The architectural innovation of the altar rail probably also has canine associations, the pooper-scooper not yet having been invented.

A sculpted dog-whipper in a corbel, St. Bavo's Church, Haarlem (The Netherlands)

From the Mouths of Babes

 Grandfather and granddaughter--the Norman Rockwell version

           Most chronological adults have probably experienced disquieting episodes of what I will call reverse pedagogy in which young children ostensibly under their care or tutelage suddenly turn the tables on them.  Certainly every parent will know what I am talking about.

            Forty years ago and more, when I was a young father, I thought there was way too much violence in the world, and that I would offer my widow’s mite toward the healing the of planet by forbidding my own children from playing the kind of “war games” that had been a staple of my own childhood and that of every other child I knew during the first couple of decades of my life.   The term “political correctness” had not yet become canonical.  I was practicing “social awareness”.  I didn’t want to raise a brood of warriors.  Surely, I reasoned, a young lad could amuse himself in some way more edifying that pretending to shoot and be shot at by his peers.  So there was a blanket prohibition on all toy guns.

            This seemed to work well enough, though it sometimes caused awkwardness when he encountered playmates of the more primitive kind.  One day, quite by accident, I overheard my son, aged perhaps five, explaining the ludic rules of the house to a new friend.   He explained why he could not play with toy guns.  “You see,” he said apologetically, and with pity rather than indignation, “my Daddy can’t tell the difference between a toy gun and a real gun.”  That is now ancient history; and my son will himself soon enough have the opportunity of viewing reality from the other end of the telescope.  A generation later my infantile instructors are now my two young granddaughters, Lulu and Cora.

            What is often terrible about the censures from the very young is that they come in simple, unemotional, declarative sentences.  Two or three years ago I was walking up the Avenue Desaix in Paris with Lulu and Cora.  In fact I was walking them home from their nearby schools--a fact that may gain relevance as my story progresses.  We were heading for their apartment two or three blocks away.  I paused to make a purchase at one of the mom-and-pop shops that are so numerous in the French capital.  My daughter had asked me to pick up an item or two, a liter of milk and something else, I don’t quite remember.  Fond grandfather that I am, I also got some small treat for the girls intended for immediate consumption.  The entire commercial episode cannot have taken more the ninety seconds.

            As we stepped out of the shop and continued on our way up the road, my granddaughter Lulu (then aged six, I think) said to me, “You don’t speak French very well, do you, Granddad?”  This was said in a most neutral, matter-of-fact way.  It was not a reprimand and not an accusation, simply an observation.  Perhaps there was even a note of cheerful sympathy in it.  Its devastating effect derived entirely from the ineluctable fact that I don’t speak French very well. 

            It was not after all such a terrible indictment.  I would risk the generalization that most people from Arkansas don’t speak French very well.  But then most people from Arkansas are not supposed experts in medieval French literature.  But this was one scrape that tenure could not get me out of.  I instinctively realized that my many publications were unlikely to redeem me in my granddaughter’s eyes.  “O yeah, kid?   Well just read my book on the manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose.”

            Fast forward two or three years to early yesterday morning.  I am now in my daughter’s apartment on Washington Square in New York City.  It turns out that, work schedules being tight, I could offer the household a signal service were I to be the girls’ designated escort on the walk to their school just up in the Twenties on the East Side.  Furthermore such an arrangement would be highly convenient for me as well, for by continuing on in a northwesterly direction at an unforced pace for another mile I would arrive at Penn Station in time to catch the 9:01 express for Princeton.

            I heard my daughter explaining to Lulu and Cora that, exceptionally, neither she nor their father Zvi would be walking with them on this particular day.  Not to worry, however—“Granddad will take you.”  Lulu’s entirely disingenuous response to this proposal could be heard from three rooms away.  “By himself?” she asked incredulously.  My daughter did defend me—vigorously.  She pointed out that in my time I had walked to many a school, as likely as not bare-footed, uphill, through snow-drifts high as a steer’s forelock.  In fact I had several times walked to this very school with these very granddaughters.  But that was last year.  Lulu’s question clearly reflected her current assessment of her grandfather’s deteriorating cognitive and/or motor skills, which apparently approached those of his Francophony.