Delightful Distractions

 John Henry Putney Fleming at the age of thirteen hours

My usual blogging routine, along with such lesser distractions as the Olympic Games, presidential campaigns, wars and rumors of war, the further melting of the icecap, and the incipient buzz about Hilary Mantel’s appearance on the long list for the Booker Prize must give way to the important news of John Henry Fleming’s arrival, about one thirty in the morning at Beth Israel hospital in New York, on July 30.  He is big.  He is beautiful.  And while as of yet he has not leapt a tall building with a single bound, that is doubtless only because he is so content to be hanging out with his radiant mother and beaming father, and to bask in the adoration of two sets of tip-toeing grandparents.

            John Henry has already proved himself a rebel against social expectation.  He was “supposed to” be born in the middle of the month—indeed on Bastille Day.  His apparent reluctance to enter the world, while perhaps understandable to anyone who reads newspapers, caused a little anxiety and maternal distress.  But that vanished soon enough.  “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come” says the Book;  “but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.”  And joy is certainly the right word for this beautiful young family.

           

           We are already blessed with three wonderful granddaughters.  John Henry is our first grandson.  There is a certain atavistic pride in the “continuation of the family name.”  My father was one of three sons, and the only one to produce offspring.  I was one of three sons, and the only one to produce offspring.  At last, a male heir!  I have to admit a certain amount of proto-Victorian pride.  I watched something like thirty hours of Downton Abbey without ever really understanding what an “entailment” was.  I don’t have to worry about it any more, and I can focus on the unfortunate fact that I possess no estate, entailed or otherwise.  Blessings upon this beautiful babe and his worthy parents!

           
 But that ain’t all.  I’ve always thought the phrase “family planning” somewhat curious.  It is actually a euphemism designed to dignify or obfuscate the artificial techniques used to frustrate the natural results of sexual intercourse.  What “family planning” ought to mean, and what it does mean in this paragraph, is the way families plan things.  Our recent family planning has been terrible.  The idea was to schedule the prospective wedding (next Saturday) of Number One child in such a way that Number Two child and her family, who have been on an extended tour in Europe, would be able to attend.  So great was our confidence in modern obstetrics and its unwavering predictions concerning the mid-month birth of John Henry that it never occurred to us that we might be risking a possible surfeit of blessed events.  The granddaughters now face the excitement of gaining a new first cousin and a new aunt within the space of a single week!  The situation is one that has created a certain breathlessness in the Fleming household, but it gives me the nearly unique satisfaction of knowing a whole week in advance what I’ll be writing about in these pages next.  It probably won't be book binding.

the  brawn

and the brains

 

A Binding Proposal

Finding topics for weekly blog posts should not be much of a problem in a country in which political folly is continuous, public turpitude habitual, and really sensational gun slaughter reliably occasional.  The trick is to find a topic that one would actually enjoy writing about.  Such a topic has occurred to me, but I am not sure it has reader appeal, also known as “legs”.  So I turned to my son Richard for advice.  Some of you will perhaps remember that Richard’s blog “A Brooklynite on the Ice”, or “Antarcticiana,” inspired me to begin in the first place, a hundred and fifty-seven essays ago.  In recent weeks “Antarcticiana” has been a little thin—a circumstance explained by the fact that its bloguiste is quite busy preparing to get married.  But he was able to find a little time to give me some advice.

            His encouragement to proceed with my proposed topic was emphatic though oblique.  He actually didn’t have much interest in the topic one way or the other.  But that was his point.  In the kindest possible way he explained to me the vulgar error of thinking that any blog could actually be  written for an audience.  Clearly, it is written for the bloguiste.

The author, John Milton (Francis Hayman pinxit)

            In the last decades of my active career I spun various fantasies about how I would spend my time in retirement.  I have spent it in fact writing books, hanging out with my grandkids, travelling to pleasant places, and watching several seasons’ episodes of “Breaking Bad”; but I had various other schemes in imagination.  One of them was that I could return with a focused application to some amateur interests in the graphic arts—letterpress printing and book-binding in particular.  With this vague goal in mind I bought up over the years on eBay, in the good old days when it was still interesting, a certain number of noble but humiliated old books, volumes rendered cheap because of their sad physical condition.  I would set up a retirement book hospital in which I might nurse them back to health.  I carefully stored them in crates, put them into the deep storage of the press’s lumber room, and generally forgot about them.

The editor, the Rt. Rev Thomas Newton

            Well, this summer, as regular readers will know, I set out on some deep cleaning of the pressroom—an initiative that remains “in progress” as I write.  Part of the progress was to get down to a fairly early archaeological level in the lumber room.  There I re-discovered some of the crates of old books alluded to above.  An impulse stirred within my breast; I feel moved to try to rescue at least a few of them.  It then occurred to me that I might write a little about it as I did it, since the unusually cultivated readers of “Gladly Lerne” were bound to be fascinated by the project.  It was this irrelevance that was gently exposed by my son Rich.  All that matters is that I am fascinated by it.

The original owner (Sir John Ingilby)

            The first volumes I encountered—abusively misplaced among a crate of reglet—are a once famous edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Specifically they are the two volumes of the seventh edition (1770) of the great “Thomas Newton’s Milton”, the first edition of which appeared in 1749.  Like most editions of Newton’s work, this one is beautifully printed.  The text of the poem is generously leaded for easy reading, though it generally takes up only about a third of the lavishly and learnedly annotated pages.   The beautiful old full calf binding is ruinous.  Each volume has a detached front board and a dangling back one.  The boards look pretty good, but the backs of both volumes are seriously decayed, particularly that of the second.  The text block of the second volume is broken through about midway (between pages 306 and 307, near the end of Book Ten).  I am now proposing to dismantle the books, separate and repair the signatures, resew them on tapes (they are now on cords), and rebind them in leather.  The backs must be scrapped entirely.  It is just possible that I can save and reuse the original calf boards.  We’ll have to see.  Not everybody knows how books were made, and the old techniques are intrinsically interesting.  So I plan now and again to post an illustrated essay showing the evolving process which, with luck, I might complete in a leisurely fashion over a year.

The challenge (volume 2)

            There are plenty of rich incidental topics here: Milton, Paradise Lost, the learned editor Thomas Newton, George Vertue (the engraver of the portrait in the first volume),  Hayman and Müller (the painter and engraver, respectively, of the splendid illustrations), Sir John Ingilby (the original owner of the books).  Occasional posts concerning them are sure to fascinate you me.  I can express the same hope that Milton had for his epic: that I fit audience find, though few.

Such prohibitions bind not. But if death
Binds us with after-bands, what profits then
Our inward freedom? (Paradise Lost, IX, 760-762)

Family Crisis

I stepped out into the early Sunday morning gloom, already ominous with the threat of the impending humid heat that I could feel coming up from the blacktop driveway, to pick up the paper, and immediately retreated to the cool of the kitchen.  I made myself a mug of tea and sat at the kitchen table with the front page spread before me.  The large article that caught my eye was “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’.”  The article is about two mothers of young children in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  The women are work colleagues and friends.  The author, Jason de Parle, has written very ably about issues of poverty in this country.  In this article he uses the two women to exemplify some general patterns of contemporary society.

            The gist of the piece is easily summarized in the following two points: (1) stably married mothers of young children tend to enjoy marked financial and social advantages over unmarried mothers of young children, and (2) the children of stably married parents have many advantages that the children of single mothers often lack.  Now as a “news” story this one strikes me as ranking somewhere between the revelations that the Pope is Catholic and that bears have hair.  Nonetheless, the Times seems to present it as a kind of discovery that parallels, on the sociological level, the isolation of the Higgs boson particle.  Its central claims are attested to by “studies”, and blessed with the confirming opinion of a credentialed academic—a colleague in the Princeton Sociology Department, as it happens.

            There is very little that is amusing about the crisis of the contemporary American family or in the hardships inflicted on so many of our children and no small number of our women.  And certainly there is nothing amusing about the difficulties faced by the unmarried mother in this story.  But I do find it a little funny, or at least quirkily odd, that the most obvious kind of moral and economic common sense should be treated as a sociological “discovery”.

            Modern society is complex, and many of the grave problems we face in this country are interrelated in complicated and sometimes subtle ways.  Blanket suggestions for their remedy are often justly criticized for their simplism.  But there is another kind of simplism practiced by many of our policy gurus and academic intellectuals when they refuse to recognize home truths that have been the common wisdom of generations.  The old home truth that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage has not been abrogated by the disappearance of equine transportation.

            According to Mr. DeParle the illegitimacy rate in this country is now 41%.  He does not use the word “illegitimacy,” of course, which has been banned from the vocabulary as politically incorrect and “judgmental”.  In fact, it is simply an old legal term reflecting the fact that marriage has traditionally been one of society’s most fundamental legal contracts.  If you prefer “out-of-wedlock”, that’s fine.  The rate of out-of-wedlock births for black Americans in 2010 was 71%!  That is staggering, but according to the article the white lower middle class is rapidly catching up.  The unmarried (white) woman in the Times story had three children with her unmarried partner before they split.  The author laconically reports that she “has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting”.  Well, the question does occur to one.

            To judge and to criticize are actually cognate terms, as we see in the phrase “literary criticism”.  A very great deal of our moral and mental lives consists in judging one thing to be better or worse than another.  Whatever reluctance there may be to discuss unwed motherhood and deadbeat paternity in a moral context, let alone in a context illuminated by traditional religious values—that is, to be (dreaded word!) judgmental--certain other judgments are inevitably being made.  The one chiefly advanced by the Times article is economic.  Single mothers and their offspring are often comparatively, or even absolutely, poor.   We say that two heads are better than one; two incomes certainly are.  So the widening national “income gap,” already extremely troubling, is closely related to the phenomenon of single motherhood.

            What is frequently called “cultural capital” is scarcely less important for a young child’s nurture than is material sufficiency.  The huge advantage that comes from spending one’s early years in a stable family, with two parents cooperatively engaged in the parenting enterprise, is almost impossible to exaggerate.  Such parents read to and with their children, eat with them, take them on cultural expeditions small and grand.  Comparatively few of us have trust funds.  Most people face financial necessity to greater or lesser degree, but a stable married couple has the option of dividing the labors of breadwinning and of homemaking in the ways most effective for their personal circumstances.  All of this takes time, imagination, and a sacrificial effort motivated by love.  The challenge of addressing the ravages of what amounts to early cultural bankruptcy is one that has so far been hardly recognized, let alone engaged.  A serious national discussion of such topics as the moral and social responsibilities of having children is so inimical to our reigning me-firstism that it is difficult to imagine how it might so much as be set in motion.  But I regard it as one of the great social follies or delusions of our time to think that any government program or any public school curricular innovation can provide an effective solution.

Antalya & Istanbul

Some friends wrote this week to suggest—in the nicest possible way, of course-- that fascinating though my political ideas might be, they would prefer to hear a little more about the trip to Turkey.  Well, I can take a hint, especially when offered with all the subtlety of the bubonic plague.  It gives me an opportunity to display a few of Joan's gorgeous photographs.

            I believe I left off the travelogue suspended in a balloon over some weird geological formations in Cappadocia.  But life is not all beer and skittles, and we had to work in some hard-core lotus-eating at Antalya, the seaside resort on the southwest coast where we spent a few days between Cappadocia and Istanbul.  From most points of view Antalya seems a very conventional fun-in-the-sun sort of “tourist destination,” the Turkish Riviera.  From the architectural point of view it bears the burden of any town of 30,000 transformed over a few decades to a city of a million.  In Turkey that seems to mean an artificially preserved old town surrounded by many acres of high rise apartments--buildings ranging in architectural appeal from the merely unprepossessing to the positively hideous--and absolutely God-awful traffic.  It is anything but off the beaten track.  Last year, apparently, it had more international arrivals than New York City.   But they keep the barbarians out of the old town with traffic gates, and there are many nifty old streets to wander about and get lost in.  Antalya’s seafront is gorgeous, and the collections in its archaeological museum, housing numerous treasures from such stunning nearby sites as Perge and Aspendos, are stunning.

 In the Antalya Museum

            We had intentionally saved Istanbul for last.  What a magnificent city!  Whether viewed from the point of view of sacred architecture, of walkability, of commercial vitality, or of gastronomy, it claims a place in the very highest category.  We aren’t the only people who think so.  There is in operation in many places in Turkey a kind of tourist’s version of the Heisenberg Principle.  An intense desire to see something is so widely shared as to guarantee that it cannot precisely be seen through the swarms of other would-be seers.  The National Parks Syndrome threatens a number of the most prominent sites, especially Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and the Topkapi Palace, which at peak hours are simply saturated with visitors.  Even at our own favorite monument, the Chora Museum, once a church, it was a near thing.  But there one is mainly looking up at the fantastic and splendidly preserved mosaics and wall paintings, which include a copious cycle on the life of the Virgin based in some Byzantine text I had never before encountered in Western form.

 At the Chora Museum

            But there are literally dozens of old mosques from the classic period in the city, many of them exquisite and sparsely visited.  To set off in search of them on foot guaranteed a certain amount of adventure.  It was moreover very valuable for me personally to see them, and to be able to contemplate their spiritual grandeur in relative solitude; for they are a rebuke to any confidently negative response to Islam possibly invited by recent world events.

  

Looking through the grille into the old cemetery, Mehmet Pasha mosque

           
Our son Rich and his fiancée Katie were in the city to greet us when we arrived.  Quite apart from the pleasure of hanging out together, their expertise was of great practical value.  Rich is a really savvy, intrepid, can-do kind of world traveler and international gourmet.  He had scouted out a good deal of terrain by the time we got there, including numerous places we never would have so much as thought of.  He saved me from numerous indiscretions.  I really needed a guardian given the fact that I was rube enough to fall for the old dropped-shoe-cleaning-bush-scam.

 recorded for posterity

            The “old town” of Istanbul, and its touristic center, is Sultanahmet: a thousand hotels, two thousand restaurants, and 28,439 carpet-salesmen loose on the streets.  (Well, I’m just estimating the numbers; but you get the idea.)  We stayed there, of course, and you probably should too when you go.  But just as Greenwich Village is not New York, Sultanahmet is not Istanbul.  Rich and Katie are Brooklynites who know that Manhattan is so yesteryear.  So one of our richest cultural and gastronomic forays was across the water to happening Kadikoy. There we wandered about a bit before lunching at Çiya Sofrasi, not long ago declared by the New Yorker to be practically a foretaste of Heaven—if they believed in Heaven at the New Yorker, that is.  The restaurant's speciality is the profusion of little dishes known as meze, the Anatolian answer to Iberian tapas.  Don John of Austria may have won the battle of Lepanto, but in my opinion the Turks come out on top this time.

            All this New York stuff, incidentally, is inevitable.  Anyone familiar with the two metropolitan areas can hardly escape making certain comparisons.  Both cities are all about large numbers of people and lots of water.  There are three practical ways to move large numbers of people across water: bridges, tunnels, and boats.

New York does amazingly well with its overtaxed bridges and tunnels, but the only ferry you’ve ever heard of, to and from Staten Island, moves a measly 60,000 people a day.  Imagine ten or twenty big passenger ferries in continuous movement across the East River, and another dozen or so in non-stop service from the West side across the Hudson into New Jersey.  That was my impression of the water traffic in Istanbul.

            When it was time to leave, I didn’t want to go; and no sooner had we returned home than we began thinking about another trip.  Maybe for the hundredth anniversary...

A Printer's Omelet

 The destination....
                                                                                                              ....and the journey


 “What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs,” writes Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock; “What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things!”  He could count on his classically educated audience to “get” the allusion to the opening of Virgil’s Æneid where we learn—if we take the old poet seriously—that practically everything that happened to Æneas, not to mention most of the rest of ancient history, came about because the queen of the gods was snubbed by an Arcadian shepherd in a beauty pageant.

            Well, I myself have spent a week of unintended consequence laboring in the Augean stables of my back press room.  I cannot call the genesis of this mighty Contest  trivial, though it undoubtedly springs from am’rous Causes.  You must understand that in my library-study there are, among other things, three printing presses, three type cabinets holding about seventy cases of metal type, two large composing tables, an industrial paper cutter, and various lesser accoutrements of the letterpress printer.  In a small storage room behind that, mercifully kept out of sight behind a closed door, are eight more type cabinets, two galley cabinets, a large store of paper, and everything else that must find a “temporary” home on the rare occasions when I really clean up the study.

            Returning to the am'rous Causes part: to our great delight our number-one son Richard recently declared matrimonial intention.  I will save for a dedicated essay my praise of the delightful and accomplished daughter-in-law elect; but it's safe to say that Rich is marrying up.

            But if you’re going to have a wedding you have to have wedding invitations; and if you want classy and distinctive invitations, you’d better apply at my study.  So Rich, who is himself a typophile, came down from Red Hook.  After a day of unintentional comedy—something like the Lower Two-Thirds of the Three Stooges—our collaboration emerged with a masterpiece of understated elegance.  The stock is a high quality mellow yellowish cream, the ink appropriately named “Brick Dust”.  But we—or rather I-- also emerged with a royal mess in the pressroom, which, I realized, I hadn’t properly cleaned up after the last wedding invitation.  That was number-two son’s (Luke’s), two years ago.

            Rich returned to New York, leaving me with a fatal thought, which was this: “You know, you could actually clean this mess up if you were really willing to work at it for half a day.”  That was ten days ago.  On none of those ten have I worked less than eight hours at my task, and on one of them I had the fully engaged help of my son Luke.  The results  of nearly a hundred work hours so far approach those of a controlled explosion in the demolition of an abandoned factory.

            You know that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.  It is, however, quite easy to break eggs without achieving an omelet.  Letterpress is a technical term denoting the technology that defined printing for the first five centuries following Gutenberg.  Its principal process involves pressing paper down against the inked surfaces of carefully arranged movable types, which are pieces of cast heavy metal of varying surface size but always just under ninety-two one- hudredths of an inch in height--.9186 of an inch, to be exact.  In the second half of the twentieth century letterpress technology rapidly became obsolete.  For commercial purposes it was almost completely replaced by other methods (usually called “offset”) based in photography and photo-lithography.  More recently computer technology has effected a second revolution.  The products of letterpress remain, however, the gold standard of the graphic arts.  Happily, fine letterpress work continues among arty or eccentric amateurs.  I am happy to see that the Boy Scouts of America still include what they call “relief printing,” if only as an afterthought, as a possible path to the “Graphic Arts” (formerly “Printing”) merit badge.

Some letterpress tools: Kinko's, eat your hearts out!

            There are a few salient features of letterpress equipment, as viewed from the perspective of one who would set out to clean it up.  (1) it tends to be very heavy; (2) it gets very dirty; (3) there are thousands of little pieces that need precisely accurate sorting and storing; (4) it is the easiest thing in the world to scramble these pieces.  (5) When you are tired or in a hurry there is an invincible temptation to postpone sorting and storing.  Hence (6) it is laughable to think you will get anywhere in half a day!

            One way to make progress is simply to throw things away.  I’ve used that technique to the extent of twelve wheel barrow loads.  It is now possible, if I suck my gut in, to move (sideways) from one end of the storage room to the other. But Luke and I also spent one whole day simply sorting reglet—the thin, precisely cut pieces of maple wood used for line spacing.  I’ve spent three days at the wire wheel of a bench grinder cleaning the rust off steel furniture—the larger and even more precisely cut spacing material needed to surround the blocks of composed type in the chase, the steel frame that holds the printing form.  All the while I have to try to convince my spouse that beneath the mounting midden of eggshells, not yet quite visible, a scrumptious omelet is taking shape.

            Let me wish my fellow patriots a most happy celebration of the anniversary of the publication, in letterpress, of the declaration of our national independence.

Constitutional?

Any readers hoping for a continuation of the travelogue of our Turkish travels—supposing that there might be any such—will have to wait a while.  I must this week answer the siren’s invitation to join with a couple million of my fellow bloguistes in the great bloviation contest called “The Health Care Debate”.  For as I write this, much of the nation is on tender hooks, as a neighbor of mine used to call them, awaiting the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the “constitutionality” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

            I do have ideas concerning health, health care, individual mandates, interstate commerce, the social contract, broccoli, the lameness of our Congress as exemplified by the names assigned to pieces of legislation and numerous other topics of potential relevance.  However, worry not; I have no intention of inflicting them upon you.  They are utterly lacking in originality or authority.  My more neglected topic is “constitutionality” on its own, or would be if constitutionality ever traveled on its own.  In fact its hermeneutical sibling, “unconstitutionality,” never leaves its side.  So what are constitutionality and unconstitutionality?

            Much of the lightless heat of the Health Care Debate arises from an imperfect understanding of that question, and therefore necessarily of its correct answer, the correct answer being that constitutionality and unconstitutionality are the solemnly stated majority views of the Supreme Court at any particular time.  It matters not a whit whether such opinions “defy common sense,” “reflect flawed thinking,” “find no support in the plain language of Article Whatever,” or any of other characterizations of them to be found in the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

            According to one effusive Democrat “Obama Care” (the popular sobriquet for the PP&ACA of 2010) must be regarded as a “national glory”.  Well, Lewis Carroll knows all about that.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant ‘there's a nice knock-down argument for you’!”

“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” 

That’s sort of how it is with constitutionality and unconstitutionality.  We hope that the justices will avoid the more flamboyant indeterminacies of contemporary literary criticism and will abstain from the “jouissance” of the “free play of signifiers” and that sort of thing.  Indeed if their judgments were found by a large majority of the citizenry to be consistently wacky—if for example they confused the noun tenter (an obsolete device used in stretching fabric) with the adjective tender—we might soon enough have riots in the streets.  But that hasn’t happened yet.

            If you agree to play a game according to rules, you are stuck with the decisions of the duly constituted arbiter of the rules—Hoyle, the Marquis of Queensbury, the American Chess Federation, the line-judge, the first-base umpire, or whatever.  You have to do that even if from your first-row seat you had a clearer view of the play than he did.

            If what the arbiter is arbitrating is a written document, differences of opinion are practically inevitable, and probably even desirable.  What is the more interesting game—back to baseball—the one in which the score is 9-0, or the one in which the score is 5-4?  The more certain one is of the meaning of the controlling document, the more certain there will be controversy.

            The Constitution is our secular Holy Writ, and what is “constitutional” is very like what is “scriptural”.  Briefly consider the Roman doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation.  (If you find the analogy bizarre, think broccoli.)  This doctrine maintained, and sometimes still does, that the priest’s intentional words effect a supernatural transformation of the “elements” of the Eucharist—that is, the bread and the wine.  Although the bread and the wine continue to manifest their familiar “accidents” (taste, touch, smell, visual appearance) their “substance” (what they really are) has been changed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  Note in passing that even to engage with the doctrine you must accept the Aristotelian metaphysical vocabulary of substance and accident.  But is the doctrine scriptural?  Well, Jesus is reported in Scripture as saying, while distributing bread and wine to his friends, “This is my body…This is my blood…”

            “So what?” said some of the Reformers.  Jesus also said in Scripture that he was a light, a door, a vine, and a pathway, among several other things.  He was not talking Aristotelian metaphysics; he was using figurative language.  One of the Anglican articles of religion (1562) says this:  “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.”  The arguments on this issue could be quite sanguinary, leading to unpleasant trips to stake or gibbet.  In time, fortunately, they softened.  Not too long ago a commission of Roman Catholics and Anglicans published a joint statement of shared belief in the Eucharist that contained elements for the espousal of which both Roman Catholics and Anglicans been executed in the sixteenth century.

            Queen Elizabeth I decided the issue thus, in an internal vote of 4.6 to 4.4:

Christ was the Word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it. 

"It says in the Bible..."

           

 Most of the problems of the world have been caused not by uncertainty but by certainty.  Our politics are full of very certain people, and these people seem to have a huge appetite for power.  Great power animated by absolute certainly can be an awful thing.  The framers of the Constitution, knowing this to be true, did as much as possible to delimit political power.  When asked whether she was certain that her PP&ACA of 2010 was “constitutional”, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was incredulous that anyone could so much as ask the question.  Are you serious? I fear there was nothing rhetorical or disingenuous about her shock.  She honestly couldn’t believe that an intelligent person could fail to share her own certainty—a certainty so compelling that she seems never before even to have entertained the question.  I myself am uncertain.  I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Cappadocian Alterity

As we were planning our Turkish trip, we knew that the offerings were so rich that we would have to make a list of priorities; and we quickly agreed on a few destinations that we regarded as musts.  The first of these was Cappadocia, though in retrospect I realize I didn’t know the half of it.  I wanted to see the ancient Christian remains there.  The three great “Cappadocian fathers” of the fourth century (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) are famous figures in late antique intellectual history, and each played an important role in the efflorescence of monasticism.  I wanted to see where they hung out.  With the help of some of Joan’s splendid photographs, and one or two others, you can see too.

            For one of the central subjects of my life’s work as a scholar is the cultural significance of Christian asceticism in pre-Reformation Christendom.  For something like a thousand years monks and nuns had a near monopoly on the means of literary and artistic production.  For example, there is but one writer of Anglo-Saxon whom we can name who was not a monk, and that one, King Alfred, was the lavish patron of monks and monasteries.  The monastic vision naturally left a spiritual imprint on all they did.  Medieval women in particular would have practically no artistic history were it not for the religious houses that, in confining them, gave them a protected arena for the exercise of their talents.

            Monastic life in the ancient Near East was rigorous, dramatic, and to the later European imagination lurid.  The Egyptian anchorite Anthony, whose biography remained a bestseller for several centuries, inspired generations of desert-dwellers (the meaning of the word hermits) who competed with each other in physical austerities, living among the rocks, in caves, in the abandoned lairs of wild animals, atop the pillars of ruined temples.  Hundreds, thousands followed his example.  The old monks had a motto: The desert a city!  That was not a bad description of the Thebaid in Egypt, of parts of the Palestinian desert, or of Cappadocia.  There is in the Uffizi in Florence a charming painting by Gerardo di Jacopo Starnina (ca. 1400) imagining the busy desert of the Thebaid.

The desert a city (Starnina's "Thebaid")

             We like to see our world in terms of sharp distinctions and differences.  So-and-so, we hear said “must be living on a different planet.”  In fact, from a historical-cultural point of view the differences between Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman are minute and those between Barak Obama and Mitt Romney nonexistent.  Historians and anthropologists have had to shape a technical term to talk about real cultural difference.  It is alterity (differentness), based in the Latin alter, something really other, so other that it’s hard to imagine: the religious troglodytes of ancient Cappadocia, perhaps.

            The ancient monks thought of their enterprise as a quest for moral perfection, but so other was their way of thinking that the great nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky (high on my list of Victorian sages) could write thus concerning Antonine eremitism in his History of European Morals:

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind, of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of muddy water; another, who lived in a hole and never eat more than five figs for his daily repast; a third, who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin "like a pumice stone," and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be unable to recount.

What Homer cannot recount it would be unwise of Fleming to attempt.  But I can tell you that in my experience internal Turkish air travel is inexpensive and efficient.  The flight from Izmir to Kayseri, where we arrived in the dusk, was brief but pleasurable.  Kayseri (ex-Caesarea, Basil’s hometown) is from what I could see in the gathering dark a large, dingy, modern city.  We were met by a driver, who immediately took off for Göreme, the “cave” city that is the tourist heart of Cappadocia.  It’s called a “cave” city because it is set among about a thousand caves carved out in ancient times from the geologically weird pinnacles and pillars that give the place its lunar appearance.  Everything in this place is cave-like.  There are “cave houses,” “cave restaurants,” and “cave hotels”.   Some of these actually once were, at least partially, caves; others were the products of cave-envy.  This proved problematical, since we were theoretically booked in something called the “Göreme Cave House Hotel”. The driver could not find it, because it did not exist.  There was a “Göreme Cave” Hotel, and there was a “Cave House” Hotel.  After quite a bit of increasingly spooky driving around inthe dark we found the “Göreme House Hotel” where the proprietor, having been rousted by loud bells, cheerfully explained that (a) we were indeed expected, and (b) only a fool would confuse his handsome Ottoman mansion with a cave.

 Bloguiste caving

            The village of Göreme is practically overwhelmed by its touristic vocation.  There is a superfluity of souvenir shops, travel agencies, balloon agents (I’ll explain in a minute), Internet cafés, restauranteurs, and rug salesmen.  The latter two categories are pretty aggressive, though mere pikers by Istanbul standards.  The streets are clogged with backpacking youth and rented motorcycles.  It nonetheless was not without its charm, and the hotel breakfasts were to die for—probably literally, could I have stayed longer.  But the great thing about Göreme is its situation, at the center of the surrounding cave churches and monastic remains.  The place is rightly a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  At the “Open Air Museum”—a short walk from the town, though everybody seems to travel by minivan—one can visualize what the motto “the desert a city” really meant.

 Karanlik Church: Give 'em a fish, or teach 'em to fish?

            Many of the churches have preserved at least some of their wall paintings--the guides invariably call them “frescoes,” which some indeed seem to be--and in a couple they are spectacular.  In general I was surprised by evidence of the comparative moderation of Muslim vandalism in the post-Christian centuries.  Yet more interesting for me than the ecclesiastic art was the evidence of the intimacy of the “domestic” and the “sacred” parts of the desert city, an intimacy so marked as in essence to negate the distinction.  How long this treasure can be preserved is anybody’s guess.  The crowds are huge and oppressive—a kind of “national parks syndrome” in an acute form.  I may be generalizing on the basis of insufficient evidence, but I did get the impression wherever we went that the Turkish government was more interested in the maximization of the tourist revenue stream than in protection and preservation of the monuments.  The “Open Air Museum” is gradually being worn away by its admirers.

           

      In a brief blog essay I can barely touch upon the cultural richness of the place, or give an account of our truly heroic hike, at risk to septuagenarian life and limb, through some volcanic wilderness; but I must mention one other highlight.  I earlier alluded to “balloon agents”.  In fact ballooning is another great tourist activity in Cappadocia.  On our final full day there, a Saturday, we got up at the crack of dawn to join many dozens of other enthusiasts in a great balloon flotilla that sailed out at rooftop height over the strange “chimneys” of the Göreme plain.  For about an hour we enjoyed a perspective on the old desert city that its original inhabitants never could have had.  The balloons are so large and sturdy that my normal fear of heights was easily contained.  Each gondola held sixteen people, four in each of four separate compartments.  Our travel companions were a couple of young Bulgarians who seemed less into monastic rubbernecking than necking of the more conventional, adolescent sort, but to each his own.  I found myself thinking with renewed admiration of old Saint Basil, and a scriptural verse from the Basilian liturgy: “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”  Poor old Lecky, for all his brilliance and erudition, missed that part.