Minerva and the Dog

One day during the Easter holiday I watched my youngest granddaughter as, seated on the carpet, she finished the assembly of a kiddy jigsaw puzzle—that is, one with relatively few and distinctly large pieces.  She finished the job pretty quickly, but she had wrongly placed one piece early on, meaning that when she got to the final piece, it didn’t fit the last hole left.  Despite the fact that the earlier misplaced piece stuck out in a sore-thumby fashion, she did her best to jam the last remaining piece into a space not meant to receive it.  This she more or less successfully did at the negligible cost of a couple of semicircles of distressed cardboard.  She looked upon her work and saw that it was good.  Everything seemed to fit.  She had made it fit.  God created the human mind to make sense of things, even if that sense is spurious and contrived.  The results are sometimes amusing.  A good deal of the scholarly life is confidently pounding square pegs into round holes.

My stimulating weekend with experts on the music of the Hispanic Renaissance—previewed in my last post--set me to thinking about all this by way of a kind of textual chain reaction.  One of the most famous works of early Spanish literature is the Celestina, named for one of its central characters.  The Celestina, which styles itself as a tragi-comedy, is a dramatic cautionary tale of the consequences of unbridled sexual passion.  It was written by one Fernando de Rojas at the end of the fifteenth century and enjoyed huge popularity at home and abroad.  I first encountered it in graduate school in the English version of a learned translator of the seventeenth century named James Mabbe—or “Don Diego Puede-Ser” as he styled himself with a joke you’ll get (perhaps) if you know even a little Spanish.  Mr. Maybe’s publisher called the book The Spanish Bawd, as the woman named Celestina is a particularly memorable example of the stock character of the cackling old sexual procurer, go-between, or “madam” made famous by Ovid’s Dipsas and prominent in the Romance of the Rose.

There is some raunchy misogyny in Celestina/Spanish Bawd.  The anti-hero Calisto has fallen madly in love with innocent young Melibea—and I do mean madly.  As a dissuasive, his servant Sempronio hauls out a particularly pungent version of the “all women are sluts” argument, of which the following is one of the gentler parts.  Many ostensibly virtuous women, Mabbe says Sempronio says, “have basely prostituted themselves to the embracement of muleteers and stable grooms, suffering them to breath in their faces, with their unsavory breaths and to embosom them between their breasts.  And other some not ashamed to have companied with brute beasts.  Have you not heard of Pasiphae, who played the wanton with a bull?  And of Minerva, how she dallied with a dog?”

Well, I had certainly heard of Pasiphae.  She is hardly obscure in Greco-Roman mythology, and is memorably treated by Ovid.  With the help of the famous artificer Daedalus, she found an imaginative way to mate with a Cretan bull, and the consequence was—the Minotaur!   But Minerva and a dog?  That seemed a little off, but it did say so right there in black and white.  Like my granddaughter I wanted all the pieces to fit, even if it involved bestiality on the part of the goddess of Wisdom, so I thought no more about it.  I packed it away in the cold storage section of my memory. 

One of the musical lectures I just heard referred to an early passage in the Celestina in which Calisto compares his disordered state of libido to that of an out of tune lute.  Afterward, in tracking down the passage in a Spanish text, it all came back.   I came upon the canine conundrum, which defrosted instantaneously.  There it was again: ¿No has leydo de Pasife con el toro, de Minerva con el can [dog] ?  “Haven’t you read of Pasiphae with the bull, of Minerva with the dog?”  Only this time it was in the footnotes of a learned scholarly edition in the original Spanish in which the editor pointed out that the text was absurd and had to be wrong, a printer’s blunder.  What Rojas must have alluded to was Minerva’s encounter not with a dog (un can) but with Vulcan, the ugly blacksmith god and cuckolded husband of Venus.  The Spanish compositor must have misread uulcan as elcan or uncan because he didn’t know any better.  James Mabbe didn’t know any better either nor, as it turned out, did John Fleming.  Minerva’s unwilling commerce with Vulcan, which obliquely eventuated in the birth of Erichthonius, inventor of the quadriga chariot, is a most obscure mythological event, but it is alluded to by Servius, the learned commentator on Virgil, and the Spanish humanist Fernando de Rojas knew about it.  He also knew that in legend Vulcan was so physically unattractive as perhaps to be commonly regarded as brutish.

I can date my reading of Mabbe’s Spanish Bawd pretty precisely.  It had to be in 1962.  That would mean that for fifty-six years I was lumbering around with the very old and very fake news of Minerva and the dog.  Thankfully it was in the deep freeze drawer of the synapses.  I can’t say I meditated on it much over the years.   But it does make me wonder just how many other mangled jigsaw pieces are resting there beside it.

An Old Song

I am eleven years into retirement.  That’s long enough to allow me to make a provisional judgment of how things are going.  In a word, or rather two words, things are going just fine, if you discount certain medical inconveniences.  And that is because I recognize the fact that I am retired.  I don’t really understand the mentality of retirees who insist on still going into the office each day at the age of ninety or who love to boast that they have never have been so busy as they are now.  I certainly don’t go into the office every day, and I am much less busy than I used to be.  The things I miss about the old professional life are, on the whole, more than compensated for by the greatly expanded opportunities to travel and to spend time with family members, especially grandchildren.

There is nonetheless one aspect of my old regime for the loss of which I occasionally breathe a metaphoric sigh, and that is regular attendance at specialized academic conferences.  I used to participate in several each year, and at some annual meetings I was a regular.  It was a wonderful way to keep up, to some degree, with interesting work in medieval studies, and to keep alive personal relationships with distant friends and colleagues.  It was with real pleasure, accordingly, that I received notice, a few months ago, that a conference was coming to me, so to speak.   A general mailing from the Princeton Latin American Studies program announced its sponsorship, in April of 2018, of a conference called “De Canciones y Cancioneros: Music and Literary Sources of the Luso-Hispanic Song Tradition.”  It invited the submission of abstracts for proposed papers—the academic equivalent of a theatrical audition.

The title uses terms from the early Iberian literary vocabulary.  A canción is a song or lyric poem.  A cancionero is a collection or anthology of such poems, a song-book, generally bringing together pieces by a variety of authors, to be circulated privately among a group of friends.  The concionero was the way that poetry was “published” before the age of printing and in many circles for a century or more into that age.  Now I make no pretense of being a scholar of Latin American Studies, and I know not a single one of the conference’s organizers.  But I did feel that, unbeknownst to said organizers, it had been invented especially if not exclusively for me.  I had after all very recently published a whole book on a song by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, a song that can reasonably claim to be the most famous lyric of the Iberian Renaissance, the first partial text of which appeared in an important sixteenth-century cancionero owned by one Cristovão Borges.

Well, I made the cut in the chorus call, which was good; but it is now suddenly April of 2018, which is slightly worrying in that I have seventy-two hours to finish off a twenty-minute talk to be delivered on Saturday.  I’m just kidding about the worry.  It is really rather exhilarating to be in this situation.  I once wrote a whole twenty-minute paper while sitting on a toilet seat in a San Francisco hotel, and my problem here is not finding enough to say but finding a way of reducing too much to a mere genteel sufficiency.

The Camões poem, often called by its Portuguese incipit “Sobôlos rios, ” is a complicated “version” of and commentary upon the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the waters of Babylon”, number 137 in the King James numeration.)  The psalm Super flumina already had a particularly rich exegetical history.  The tradition held that all the psalms had been written by David.  But this psalm, the obvious setting for which is the Babylonian captivity, hundreds of years after David’s reign, presented difficulties.  The solution of the rabbis was to regard the content of the psalm as proleptic and prophetic, the content of a future event presented as though current.  For European literary history the peculiar and unique literary power of the Psalter lay in the fact that while it was at the center of the corporate prayer life of the universal church, and especially of the corporate life of the religious orders, each individual psalm lent itself to personal and private appropriation.  Not every penitent had orchestrated the death of his own army general in order to cover up his adultery with the man’s wife, as David had; but every penitent could and did sing or say the Miserere (Psalm 51, the most famous of the penitential psalms) in response to his or her own particular moral situation.  “Miserere” is the first word spoken in dialogue by the pilgrim Dante in the Commedia, and no other word could be more appropriate to his situation.  The psalm Super flumina Babylonis likewise has many personal and adaptive remakings in secular and vernacular literature, but no other is so extraordinary as “Sobôlos rios”.  This “pearl of all poetry” does indeed seem almost prophetically written with this conference in mind, for the poem's principal subjects are music and song, and more particularly the Luso-Hispanic tradition of amatory song of which the poet has been one of the great practitioners and acknowledged masters, and which he now in palinode must reject.

For me there will be an additional pleasure quite beyond that I shall doubtless find in the learned musicological papers.  The event will take place in the Taplin Auditorium, a venue frequently used for student music recitals.  Think of it perhaps as the “off Broadway” of the Princeton music scene.  I knew Frank Taplin—a wealthy and generous philanthropist, and a fine pianist—fairly well.  He had been a Rhodes Scholar just before the second World War, and among the many cultural contributions of his later years was his service as President of the Metropolitan Opera, where he was among other things a notable fund-raiser.  I never thought I must one day perform in his auditorium.

Disappearing Deviance

We spent last Sunday afternoon at my son’s place in the country where, as usual, I delighted in some age-inappropriate country labors for which my body was punishing me by Monday morning.  But we did not stay into the evening, as we were eager to return home in time to watch a television program at seven o’clock.  The situation was most unusual.  We are not what you would call television people.  We watch the PBS “News Hour” fairly regularly, but that is about it.  We had to give up on the later-hour programming some time ago, since we are by then in the Land of Nod.

So maladroit a television watcher am I that I had some difficulty locating the right channel for CBS.  In fact, for a while I feared I would never find it, since what was appearing on the screen were the last ten minutes of a tense basketball game between the Kansas Jayhawks and the Duke Blue Devils.  I later realized that this was due not to a technical glitch but to the welcome fact that there must still be a few people somewhere in the country who have their priorities straight.  At length the program that I was so eagerly anticipating—apparently along with many millions of my fellow citizens—eventually did come on.  It was “Sixty Minutes,” and it consisted of an interview of a businesswoman whose nom d’artiste is Stormy Daniels conducted by the well-known TV “personality” Anderson Cooper.

The question that arises in this essay—or at least I hope would arise from it—is why an elderly professor of medieval literature, and a person of conservative instincts, would eagerly and without conscious embarrassment listen to the testimony of an entrepreneurial pornographer concerning her sexual commerce with the man who is now the President of the United States.  In the ballyhoo preceding the interview it had been promised that Ms. Daniels would reveal the details of an “affair” with the future president, but we heard no such thing.  A witticism came back to me from the time I worked very briefly in the capital the summer after I graduated from college.  It was pointed out to me that while the House of Representatives has a Committee on Foreign Affairs the Senate, whose members are on the whole older than those of the House, has to make do with a Committee on Foreign Relations.  What Ms. Daniels described, with a matter-of-fact candor that it would be most difficult to disbelieve, was a single incident of sexual relations, as would be consistent with Mr. Trump’s senatorial age at the time of the event.

But back to the question of why I, along with twenty-one million other folks, rushed to my television set to watch all this.  It is obvious, is it not, that our whole public culture has undergone a coarsening and a debasement that has been relatively rapid and may prove to be irreversible.  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now….”  About twenty-five years ago, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the rare intellectuals to be elected to high public position, coined a catchy phrase: Defining Deviancy Down.

The phrase described the phenomenon of attempting by cultural fiat to “normalize” obviously aberrant and socially destructive behavior.  This has usually been done with the best of good intentions and the highest of liberal principles.  The specific issue addressed by Moynihan at the time was the passive acceptance of an astronomically high crime rate, especially in New York City.  But there were many other examples that he touched upon, including “single mothers” or “one-parent families”.  Moynihan had a particular interest in the pathology of the American inner-city, which he related, among other associations, to the large number of effectively fatherless youths being raised solely by their mothers or other female relatives.  Even then he got in trouble for advancing the suggestion that there was something unhealthy in the phenomenon.  The idea, that by now has now become political orthodoxy in certain quarters, is that widespread unmarried maternity or “single motherhood” is simply one form of family organization among several others—and certainly not a form of “deviancy”.  Palpable social problems can thus be eliminated by linguistic manipulation.  “Treason cannot prosper—what’s the reason?  For if it prosper none dare call it ‘treason’.”

There’s something wrong when nobody any longer thinks it’s wrong that twenty million Americans go out of our way to hear a professional pornographer describe playfully spanking the bare backside of what we call (inappropriately in these particular circumstances) our sitting president.  What has brought us to this pass?  Can we ever retreat from it?

To Be a Pilgrim

 on the Way of Santiago

Tomorrow night in the Princeton University Chapel the celebrated singing group “Tenebrae” will perform the “Path of Miracles” by the English composer Joby Talbot, an extraordinary choral sequence inspired by the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  The head of the sponsoring body, the Princeton University Concerts, has asked me and Joan to give a brief introductory talk.  Joan has some real credentials.  In addition to being a musician, she actually walked the roughly thousand miles from Le-Puy-en-Velay to Compostela.  Such knowledge as I have is more professorial, but I have welcomed the opportunity to think about the subject and the many happy memories with which it is associated.

Tenebrae singers

  

 Pilgrimage, or travel undertaken at least ostensibly to satisfy spiritual obligation or desire, characterizes all the world’s leading religions.  Pilgrimage played a particularly important role in pre-Reformation European Christianity.  Statistics show that it is by no means a spent force even today.  280,000 pilgrims picked up their certificate of completion at the Compostela Pilgrims Office in 2016.  Many more visited pilgrimage sites in Israel and Italy.  The Holy Land and Rome, indeed, as the ancient sites of the earthly ministry and Passion of Jesus Christ and the founding martyrs of the Roman church, had been the principal goals of the medieval pilgrims.  It was interference with the pilgrims’ routes that was the presenting cause of the first Crusade.   By the year 1300 there were hundreds of small, local pilgrimage sites and dozens of larger ones, including Cologne, Canterbury, Paris, Mont Saint-Michel, Monte Gargano in Apuleia, and Trondheim in Norway.  Pilgrims came to Compostela by sea and by at least four major land routes or viae, “ways”, including the famous one from Paris that began in the Latin Quarter on the rue Saint Jacques—Saint James Street.

  

Pilgrimage was often enough a taxing and even dangerous undertaking.  The word journey means the distance a healthy walker could cover in a day (un jour).  In the English word travel we see the French travail, work or labor, the direct reflex of which, “travail” is used mainly of the pains of childbirth.  Canon law required that long-distance pilgrims prepare their testamentary wills before departure, as there was a significant chance they would not return.  Illness, accident, local food scarcities, military activity, highway robbers—the potential dangers were many.

The remarkable music of Joby Talbot, a modern artistic response to pilgrimage, has many artistic antecedents.  For forty years I had the pleasure of teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at Princeton.  I never tired of the task, nor ever felt I had exhausted the richness of a text that remains uniquely informative in its incidental testimony concerning medieval pilgrimage.  The poet instinctively grasped the almost natural allegory that forced comparison between the journey of a life’s course and that of a slog along a dusty road.  But he captured much more, especially a sense of the extraordinary diversity of pilgrims and their motivations that is no less striking in the twenty-first century than in the fourteenth.  In any random pilgrim band, all ostensibly bound by the same vow, one might find mixed together the deeply devout, the curious, the adventurous, and those who simply had to get out of town for reasons best unmentioned.  One might be traveling with a criminal whose pilgrimage had been court-ordered.  Chaucer’s Pardoner is one of the greatest con-men in world literature.  His Wife of Bath would better described as cruising than as traveling.  Like so much in Christianity, a deeply sacramental system in which the material and the visible betokened unseen spiritual reality, the truth of any pilgrim heart could be known by God alone.

Santiago Matamoros

The Compostela pilgrimage was fabulous in its origins and uniquely bellicose in its historical development.  All pilgrimage sites cherished their relics, but he gold standard for sacred corpses was the body of one of the Twelve Apostles.  By the ninth century, they had practically all been claimed by major basilicas throughout Europe, but Saint James the Greater (son of Zebedee and brother of John the Beloved) was still surprisingly available.  He is the only Apostle whose martyrdom is recorded in the Bible.  In the ninth century his remains washed up in a stone boat, or perhaps a stone coffin, on the rugged Galician headlands; and almost immediately the saint was seen on horseback and in full armor traversing the night sky at the head of a Christian army on his way to a place called Clavijo, where he aided in the defeat of a large Saracen army and began the slow southward progress generally known as the “Reconquest,” which finally culminated in 1492 with the total defeat of Muslim power on the Iberian peninsula.  In Spanish the bright part of the galaxy we call the Milky Way is called the Camino de Santiago, and the saint himself is known by the terrifying name of Matamoros, “Moor-slayer”.  The peculiar tenor of militant Spanish Catholicism, which in the Americas would have some unhappy results, was encouraged by the military order of Saint James.  The saint’s more pacific doppelgänger, the horseless pilgrim with walking staff, gourd water-bottle, and above all the scallop-shell or “cockle” hat—that is, the saint on his way to his own shrine--is more familiar and more reassuring, or perhaps more haunting.  Recall the “mad song” of Ophelia in Hamlet:

How should I your true love know
    From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
    And his sandal shoon.

Santiago peregrinus

Russian Meddling

 Special Counsel Mueller has brought a number of indictments against some Russian cyber-villains.  Like many of my fellow citizens I found some satisfaction in this news.  After all, speculations about Mr. Mueller’s investigations, animated in equal parts by righteous indignation and wishful thinking, have claimed many square inches of type on many front pages for many months without revealing much more news than that Washington political apparatchiks often tell lies, and sometimes under oath.  It is good to see that something is happening.  But what, exactly?

The Russians are accused of meddling in the American electoral process by introducing, through fraudulently employed social media sites, false and misleading reports intended to cause political confusion, and to foster or exacerbate social, racial, and political divisions and animosities.  What makes this “meddling” is the fact that its perpetrators are foreigners without political standing as American citizens, and that by fraud they disguise their true identity and motives.  The actual content of the injurious “information” is often very similar to that of the hugely expensive television attack ads that form such an important part of many if not most of our congressional, gubernatorial, and presidential campaigns.

There have been some pretty sensational instances of phony information.  In the final months of the presidential campaign there emerged among a not insignificant section of the electorate a belief in a pseudo-scandal involving a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., named Comet Ping Pong.  The claim was that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and perhaps other high-ranking members of the Clinton campaign were using the cover of this stromboli-emporium to run a pedophilia operation.  There was documentary proof of the criminal enterprise in Podesta’s  pirated emails, where he and/or members of his staff sometimes wrote of ordering “pizza,” this word, along with certain other alimentary denominators, being code for child sex slaves.  The manifest implausibility of this story reaches the threshold of the insane.  Nonetheless it was duly believed by a sector of the American electorate.  A righteous vigilante, rifle in hand, came up to Washington from somewhere in the South and strode into the premises of Comet Ping Pong to sort things out.

This episode was immediately named “Pizza Gate”.  Perhaps some linguist has already written the essay explaining why all scandals must now be “gates,” but I hope we might soon get beyond it.  Neither do I know whether the origins of Pizza Gate have any definite connection with Russian cyber-meddlers.  The limited research I have been able to devote to it suggests good old-fashioned home cooking.  But the conclusion that I reach is not that we have met the enemy, and it is Russian cyber-meddling; rather we have met the enemy, and we are it.

Chasing malicious foreign pranksters from Facebook cannot possibly safeguard “the integrity of the American electoral system” if a large number of American electors are invincibly ignorant.  And they are.  I refer not exclusively or even primarily to voters who are prepared to believe that the Comet Ping Pong Pizza Parlor is actually an infantile brothel—and then act upon their belief.

We too often forget just how radical is the idea behind our democracy: that every American citizen is equal in political rights to every other American citizen.  The fact that an ideal may seem to be blatantly contradicted by social reality does not mean it ceases to be an ideal, but it does invite us to examine the historical and intellectual context out of which the ideal emerged.  The Founders greatly expanded the idea of the electoral franchise as it existed in eighteenth-century England, but it was still by our current lights very narrow.  After the Civil War racial restrictions were abolished.  Early in the twentieth century the sex barrier fell.  Much more recently the age limit was lowered from the traditional twenty-one to eighteen.

There is no constitutional educational requirement for voters, and the “literacy tests” once common in southern states were actually bad-faith instruments of voter suppression.  But there was an assumption, and one upon which the health of the system depended, of the “reasonably informed” citizen.  In informal fact the level of “reasonable information” was taken to be that provided by the primary level of public education about the middle of the nineteenth century.  This included sound training in the two basic skills of literacy, and some mathematics, history, and “civics”.

There has always been a considerable gap between the ideal and the reality when it comes to a “reasonably informed” citizenry; but the fact is that these days about half of the American electorate is not merely somewhat deficient but appallingly ignorant.  At the height of the Iraq War, only sixteen percent of high school seniors were able to locate Iraq when presented with a map.  A few years ago Rick Shenkman, of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We?  Statistics answer the question.  Huge number of voters cannot name a single right from the Bill of Rights, cannot identify the three branches of government, cannot distinguish between the Senate and the House of Representatives, do not know that “Congress” has anything to do with either, cannot name their own senators or representatives, cannot define the word “judiciary”, and have not read a serious news article or analysis within the last year.  This is at a time when larger and larger numbers of young people are immersed in the Internet, often for hours a day.  According to David Brooks’s current column one sixth of the nation, across age lines, would approve of a military government for America.  Under these circumstances to identify “Russian meddling” as the great threat faced by American democracy seems just slightly myopic.   "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” Jefferson once wrote, “it expects what never was and never will be."

Some Family History

James Alexander Davidson, ca. 1945

 

 Ambiguity characterized our return from the Renaissance Weekend in Santa Monica on Wednesday last.  On the one hand we had been exhilarated by a rich diet of lectures, panels, discussion groups and simple high class schmoozing among the remarkably able thought-leaders gathered in a luxury beach hotel.  One of my own talks touched upon the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which at the beginning of the seventeenth century had modestly announced itself with the publication of a plan “for the comprehensive and thorough-going reformation of the whole wide world” addressed to “all the learned people and leaders of Europe.”  Though far less megalomaniacal, the Renaissance Weekends, festivals of ideas, do have a little of this spirit.  “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,” writes Browning, “Or what's a heaven for?”  For all of fifteen minutes I convinced myself that I understood Bitcoin.  No less enjoyable, in a somewhat different register, were two days spent with a dear old friend in his stunning Hollywood condo.  Thanks to Larry we had our first visit to the Getty Museum: magnificent art in a magnificent setting.   The “ambiguity” part began to appear on the return flight.  With each eastward mile I was getting sicker and sicker.  A nasty flu, showing utter contempt for my prudential inoculation months ago, laid me low and delayed this essay by a week.  However, resurgo, and let the deed shaw.

The Renaissance Weekends are not the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracies that the Czarist police spies once attributed to any meeting of the learned people and leaders of Europe, but they do observe an informal, consensual off-the-recordness designed to ease the candid, open and respectful exchange of experimental and sometimes conflicting ideas.  One of the most fascinating things I learned at the weekend was in the category of personal family history, and hardly politically controversial; but in identifying the midwife of my enlightenment I shall say only that she is an eminent expert in environmental law and the one-time majority leader of the Colorado House of Representatives.

My maternal grandfather, James Alexander Davidson, was born just before the Civil War and died in his nineties in the late 1950s.  He was a true Colorado pioneer, most of whose life was spent as an engineer of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, an instrument of cardinal importance in the economic history of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico.  For a time in the first decade of the last century he was a member of the Colorado legislature.  He lived in the railroad town of Salida, where my mother and her three older siblings were all born. This tale concerns her oddly named sister, my aunt Evangeline Heartz Davidson.  My brothers and I spent the War years living with my grandparents in Denver, where they had retired.  Heartz (the Evangeline part was for documentary use only) lived with her retired husband amid spacious undeveloped fields toward the edge of the city, then just about half its current size.

This man Jodie Stewart, nearly two decades her senior—he had actually been in the first war--had about him an air of mournful mystery.  He was a Mississippian, a retired Army chaplain with the rank of colonel.  He had briefly served as a Presbyterian minister in a parish, but he never talked about his civilian life, which had been indelibly stained by divorce—a huge social disgrace for his time and place and calling.  Later, when I became a reader and came upon Faulkner’s Light in August, I thought: “Uncle Jodie.  Gail Hightower!”  Aunt Heartz had no children of her own, but tried to play beneficent stepmother of Jodie’s son Gerry, another career Army officer (captain) and his wife Virginia.  This was a little awkward, given that Heartz, Gerry, and Virginia were approximately the same age.

The Stewarts had spent their married life on army bases in the Philippines.  Their furniture seemed exotic, practically all of it being made of blond palm fibers and strips of bamboo, what Heartz called “our rattan work”.  The social perceptions of a lad of seven or eight are unlikely to be authoritative, but I believe that Jodie had reached mandatory retirement in 1937 or 1938, and that his resentment at having to “miss” the war was exacerbated by the certain knowledge that his former American friends and colleagues in Manila were suffering horrors in a Japanese death camp.

Mrs. Evangeline Heartz, Populist of Arapahoe County, ca. 1915

Heartz, when asked about her name, always answered that she “had been named by an act of the legislature”.  This was true, and thanks to the help of my dynamic Renaissance contact from Boulder, I am now in possession of the details.  It’s a charming story, and rather inspiring, as it reminds us of the vibrancy of American democratic ideals long since smothered by carpets of money.  Around 1900 it was not merely possible but unexceptional for a workingman to be a citizen-legislator in a western state house.  It was more exceptional, but still possible, that one of his distinguished colleagues might be a woman not yet enfranchised to vote in Federal elections.  This would describe the situation of my grandfather (Democrat, Chaffee County) and Mrs. Evangeline Heartz (Democrat-Populist, Arapahoe County).

My source for the following is the House Journal of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Colorado, for the session of March 7, 1902.  (Colorado of course became a state in 1876—hence the Centennial State—but the relevant documentary archive has this title.)

H.R. No. 13, by Mr. Burwell:

“Whereas, The wires announce the arrival of a little princess at the home of our esteemed fellow member, James A. Davidson, of Chaffee; be it

“Resolved, That we extend to our fellow member, the mother and the child, the good wishes of the House of Representatives of the Thirteenth General Assembly.

“May happiness light the life of this little one as our almost cloudless Colorado sun does our beloved state.

“Resolved, That the clerk be instructed to furnish the little one with a copy of these resolutions.”

The resolution was adopted.

It was further moved and seconded that the little one be named Evangeline Heartz Davidson

The motion prevailed.

The House adjourned.

A wonderful bit of true family lore, but before I wax too euphoric about the egalitarian spirit of the old republic, I do note that these same documentary records clearly show that on the day of my Aunt’s birth in Salida my grandfather was present and voting in the State House in Denver.  The easier part of childbirth is probably the handing out of the cigars.

Headwaters of the Arkansas River at Salida CO

Town and Country

In the digital Times magazine I recently came upon an engaging essay by Wesley Morris entitled “The Cost of Being ‘Savage’ in a Supposedly Civilized World.”  It’s not exactly about philology, but it’s not exactly about politics either.  It perhaps illuminates some of the problems of what I call politology—the study of social abrasions exacerbated by a want of linguistic sophistication.  I ran into an interesting politological instance in my scholarly reading a few months ago.  In one of his numerous dedicatory sonnets to the Faerie Qveene (aka Fairy Queen)—this one addressed to the Earl of Ormond and Ossory—Spenser invites the dedicatee to accept his offering of “a simple taste of the wilde fruit which saluage soyl hath bred.”  What I take this to mean, in simpler English, is this: I wrote this poem in Ireland, and it shows.  A critical book I happened upon draws from the postured language of this obscure poem a plenary indictment of Spenser’s imperialism—indeed of three centuries of English foreign policy.  And the adjective savage is “racist.”

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner as they (supposedly) say in France. To understand all is to forgive all.  I don’t believe that, but I do want to suggest that even full-throated condemnation is more plausible when founded in a certain degree of linguistic comprehension.  When it comes to city slickers and country bumpkins such comprehension might begin with an acknowledgement of our tongue’s undisguised bias against the country, also known as the sticks, the boonies, the backofbeyond, flyover country, rural idiocy, etc., etc.

At first blush our old literature often idealizes rustic life.  Cicero celebrates what modern sociologists call the “twilight farm”—that place that most of us dream of retiring to.  Rural simplicity trumps urban complexity in several of Horace’s poems.  One of the most famous meters of Boethius extolls the human felicity of the Golden Age—a mythic time prior not merely to urbanization, political organization, and commerce, but even before the first plow had cut the first furrow.  But if we look to philological history, all that is exposed as philosophical posturing.  Cities are good, the countryside—not so much so.

Let us briefly revisit savage.  It would be hard to find unambiguously benign uses of that word in today’s English.  But Spenser, who loves to write in pseudo-ye-olde half Latin, has the form saluage.  The U is in there because in written Latin there was no distinction between the vocalic and the consonantal (V) graphemes.  We still write double-V (W) but call it double-U.  But the intrusive L shows you that Spenser knew that what was savage was characteristic of the silva, that is, the forest or woodland.  Now it seems to me that living in a forest is not, in and of itself, evidence of moral turpitude.  Yet aside from some Romantic authors from Rousseau to Fenimore Cooper, most folks would seem to think so.  Live in a city (civitas) and you are civil and enjoy civilization.  Live in the woods and you are a savage practicing savagery.  Live on a rural route in the country (rus, ruris) and be a rustic.  Live in a town (urbs) and be urbane.

The examples of this sort of thing in English are very numerous.  An annotated glossary could easily make a volume.  Here I have time for but a few, beginning perhaps with villain.  This word in modern American English is limited to literary usage, meaning the bad guy (almost always masculine) in a work of dramatic or narrative fiction.  From there we derive the general metaphoric sense of “the villain of the piece,” meaning the bad actor in any number of situations.  But if you watch enough British cop shows on Netflix you will hear the word used of actual criminals.  Yet a “villain” was originally simply a person living in or associated with a villa, or farmhouse.  Thence came the associations of low social status characteristic of indentured agricultural labor in the medieval feudal system and also, of course, of all the vile characteristics of such persons as viewed through the eyes of their social superiors.

Farmers have gotten a particularly bad linguistic rap.  The German word for “farmer” Bauer, is still relatively neutral, though it is not entirely free of the negative social implications of peasant and other Romance terms derived from Latin pagus (a rural area), which also gives us pagan.  The old Germanic root seems to have meant simply a “dweller” or “inhabitant”, and in old agrarian societies the dwelling place was the country-side.  But the Dutch version, boer (as in the Boer War) hints at what happened in English.  If you came from down on the farm you were likely to be a boor, pick your nose, eat your gruel with your fingers, fart in church, and do other unpleasant, boorish things.  What is uncouth can also be comical.  This fact perhaps explains the semantic development of the word clown.  Though more linguistically obscure than the other examples I have given, clown was another term for countryman or farm hand.  Ben Jonson wanted to connect the word with Latin colonus, a dweller in a particular region, but I have my doubts.  From its first early modern appearances it seems to invite the associations of risible contempt that come with yokel, which first appears in sporting lingo of the nineteenth century.  This word, says the great philologist C. T. Onions, is “identical in form with the dialectical yokel green woodpecker, yellowhammer, of which it may be a figurative application.”  Who knew?  But better a peckerwood than a savage.

My next post will probably be delayed, once again, as we shall be for a spell in indisputably urban Santa Monica.  Harry Shearer, a very funny guy whose weekly show I used to listen to on NPR, called Santa Monica “the home of the homeless.”  We have social problems in this country so severe that you’ve got to laugh if you are going to keep from weeping.