Medieval Orientalism

 

 

I rarely compare myself to Ovid, and must presume that most of my readers share that virtue with me.  But I must bow to circumstances—said circumstances being the following.  Because I try to mix things up in this blog, I am reluctant to deal with scholarly and “medieval” topics in successive weeks.  That’s how Ovid felt about his own literary effusions.  Apparently worrying that he was in danger of getting the reputation of a Johnny OneNote erotic poet, he sat down to write a martial epic—you know, like the big boys, Homer and Virgil.  You probably also know that the verse form required of the Latin military epic is the hexameter, a line of six metrical feet, as opposed to love poetry, in which hexameter and pentameter (five-foot) lines alternate in couplets.  But the moment he wrote his first hexameter lines, Ovid tells us, diabolical Cupid, who was watching over his shoulder, reached down and plucked away one of his meters.  So he had to write the Amores instead.  The devil made him do it.

 

Well, I was already mulling this over during my recent experience  in some very unkempt local woods where I sometimes walk, when I stumbled (figuratively, fortunately) upon the fallen fruits of two osage orange trees I had not before noticed. That probably would have led to my Uncle Wayne’s tales of tank warfare in the hedgerows of Normandy.  But just then there arrived in the post from my friend John Raimo, inveterate reader and pusher of good reading, the gift of something good to read, a very slim volume entitled Double Portrait: Saint Francis in Dante and Giotto.*  Dante was a great writer, Giotto a great painter, and both were Florentines, possibly born within a year of each other.  Francis is perhaps the most famous male saint in the Roman Church.  So it is an inevitable topic, and hardly new, though here treated in an engaging way by Massimo Cacciari, an ex-Communist philosopher, prolific public intellectual, and former mayor of Venice.  I read most of this book in a couple of sleepless hours of the night, and knew immediately that I would have to put the osage oranges back on ice.  Which is indeed what you do have to do with osage oranges if you want to stratify the seeds.  But it just so happens that the subject of visual and literary treatments of Francis by medieval painters and writers has been one of my long-standing interests.  That is doubtless why John sent me this little book, and it explains why it was at least plausible that the Franciscan Institute should award me their Francis Medal a few years back.

 

The linkage of both Giotto and Francis with Dante is almost inevitable, and there have been many essays inspired by it.  Cacciari’s own emphasis is that, in his view, the visual “take” of Giotto and the literary one of Dante present two very different Francises.  This is a little less surprising than Cacciari tries to make it. 

 

                 Massimo Cacciari 

Indeed it was nearly required by what must certainly have been Giotto’s closely invigilated commission to do the famous Assisi sequence.   Francis had been a challenging and controversial figure since his arrival on the historical scene at the end of the twelfth century.  There are probably twenty versions of Saint Francis current even now, the most popular in this country being the peacenik animal lover and supervisor of bird baths.  In the time of Dante and Giotto—both of whom were born decades after Francis’s death—differing visions about the meaning of Francis were still not entirely resolved within the Church.  Was he simply the remarkable founder of a remarkable new religious order?  Or was his proclamation of a doctrine of absolute “evangelical” poverty a unique and apocalyptic intrusion of sacred history?  Certainly that doctrine was a challenge and a threat to many—particularly people who were financially comfortable, beginning with Francis’s own father.

 

Conflict between these two visions brought strife into the Order, and to a degree the whole Church, throughout the later thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.  In the 1260s there was an attempt to suppress all the earliest accounts of Francis and supplant them with one officially sanctioned biography by Saint Bonaventure, the head of the Order.  This book is a literary masterpiece that comes very close to reconciling two irreconcilable visions, and it is the main textual source for most paintings dealing with the narrative content of Francis’s life, including Giotto’s.  Dante’s “word pictures” are much more daring and adventurous.  In a short essay one example will have to serve.

 

        Giotto di Bondoni

 

 Giotto's Francis

 

In the Divine Comedy Dante’s treatment of Francis is part of a “double portrait” different from the one of which Cacciari writes.  It is balanced by a portrait of Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans).  In Dante’s poem Francis is praised through the voice of Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Dominican theologians; Dominic is praised by Bonaventure, greatest of Franciscan theologians.  Many contemporaries believed that the two founders were divine messengers sent by God to renew the Church.  They found many signs in the Bible to encourage their belief.

 

For example, there are between ten and twenty thousand species of birds known to ornithologists.  And since Noah is supposed to have had seven pairs of each, the sound track of his navigation must have been symphonic.  Yet the Bible singles out only two birds for designated roles.  To scout out whether the Flood is truly receding he sends off first a raven and then a dove.  The allegorical meaning of this initiative was obvious to thirteenth-century apocalyptics.  For the renovation of the Church following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 God had sent into the world two great new missionary armies: the black friars (Dominicans) and the gray friars (Franciscans)--the colors of the habits of the principal mendicant orders.  But if you are going to be truly apocalyptic, your best bet is not Genesis but the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) itself.

 

Dante and his book

 

Here are some of the words (the English of which no two translators share) with which Dante introduces Francis.  “[In Assisi] was born into the world a sun, as sometimes it arises from the Ganges.  But he who speaks of this place should not say Ascesi, which would be speaking short, but Oriente, if he would speak properly.”  Ascesi, a far-fetched pun on the Italian name of Francis’s birthplace, is a Latin preterit from ascendo—to rise.  Oriente comes from another verb of similar meaning—orior—but one that very early took on the job of denoting the sunrise.  For people everywhere that was a phenomenon that appeared in the east—that is, the Orient.  So Francis is not merely a solar riser, but an oriental solar riser.  The evangelist Luke, weaving together a medley of old Hebrew prophecies, wrote thus of the prophetic mission of John the Baptist to announce the coming of Jesus  “to give knowledge of salvation unto [Israel] by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:77-78)  It is obvious what Dante had in mind.  The most radical of the poverty fanatics insisted that Francis of Assisi, Francis of the Arising, was the Sixth Angel of the Apocalypse.  And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God…(Rev. 7:2).  That “seal” was the markings of the stigmata, the very wounds of crucifixion transferred to the body of Francis from the body of Jesus Christ, the dayspring from on high and the chief of all Risers.  Francis was an alter Christus, a “second Christ”.  It’s mind-boggling, but that is what Dante is actually saying (Paradiso 11:49-54).

 

Many historians continue to insist that there is an “unchanging human nature” that enables us to feel considerable confidence about writing of past societies very different from our own.  But even our own documentable familial, tribal, national, political, religious, and cultural pasts—meaning those well recorded in public and private records—are enough to challenge this assumption.  I am now in my eighties, and when I compare what I know about the lives of my grandparents with what I know about the lives of my grandchildren, I feel I am already halfway to encountering two different species.  And that is before we have even scratched history’s surface.   The differentness—or to use a fancy word, the alterity—even within groups of linguistic hegemony and blood kinship over a period of not more than a hundred and fifty years—is truly astonishing.  And they hardly even rank as “historical” in the way we think about history.  The medieval European materials I touch upon here widen the lens on the totality of human history only very slightly.  The past is truly the most foreign of foreign lands.  And we inevitably tend to try to remake it according to our own contemporary liking.

 

*Massimo Cacciari, Doppio ritratto: San Francesco in Dante e Giotto.  (Milan: Adelphi, 2012), pp. 88. 

 

Making Sense of the Senses

Cluny Museum tapestries: taste

 

During their recent trip to Paris, my spouse and our elder son Richard dropped by the Cluny Museum, housed in one of the city’s most ancient buildings, and featuring one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval European art.  Joan brought back a set of postcards of one of the museum’s renowned holdings: the series of six spectacular tapestries depicting “The Lady with the Unicorn” (La dame à la lincorne).  You are probably aware of them, or of a somewhat similar set in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  I have often stood in awed admiration before the originals.  Now a couple of postcards are enough to set the mind racing.

 

wheel of the senses (14th c.) Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
 

            The principal achievement of the maker(s) of these amazing objects was to give birth to new beauty in the world, but the tapestries  do have an intellectual and scientific theme: five of them exemplify the five corporal senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste).  The sixth, in which the Lady does not seem to be “sensing” anything in particular, has puzzled scholars; but there is a clue to its probable “meaning” in an earlier mural painting discovered almost by accident in Longthorpe Tower, part of a late medieval domestic compound in Peterborough  in East Anglia.  The survival of medieval mural paintings in domestic buildings is comparatively rare.  One of the most interesting of the Longthorpe murals is a wheel of the five senses, in which each of the senses is allegorically represented by an animal: monkey (taste), spider (touch), boar (hearing), smell (vulture), and sight (rooster?).  These correspond to lore textually preserved in The Nature of Things (De natura rerum), the popular encyclopedia of Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar.  In that work, however, the emblem for sight is a lynx or an eagle.  The Longthorpe “rooster” is unfortunately in the only seriously damaged section of the painting.

 

Earlier attitudes toward the bodily senses were complex.  In their brilliant exuberance, the Unicorn tapestries present beautiful and affirmative ideas that seem very different from the gloomy moral attitudes of medieval Christian asceticism, which regarded the pleasures of the senses with the deepest suspicion and sometimes with horror.  Medieval saints’ lives are replete with examples of the perverse warfare holy people waged against the gratification of sense.  They sprinkled ashes on their food, hardly “gourmet” to begin with, to render it a penance.  They wore hair shirts, cultivated body lice, slept on sharp gravels near the stench of orchestrated ordures.  Women went to heroic lengths to mar and conceal their beauty.  Origen castrated himself.  The modern mind recoils.  Learned men explained the story of Ulysses’ survival of the Sirens’ song, bound to the ship’s mast with wax-blocked ears, as a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Jesus, whose sacrificial death was also a triumph over sensual gratification.

                                   

 

wheel of the seven deadly sins

  

The elder Jan Breughel, collaborating with Rubens, did a famous series on the senses.  Four of the five individual panels of a set by Jan junior survive.  They are thematically related to the well-known Bosch “wheel” of the Deadly Sins.  The wheel itself was probably suggested by the very common medieval image of Fortune’s Wheel from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where the figure standing by the wheel—usually Fortune herself—is sometimes Lady Philosophy and sometimes the author Boethius.  (I suggest that the standing supervisory male monarch at Longthorpe reflects this version of the image; the “lady” in the Cluny tapestries may echo some female allegorical authority figure like Lady Philosophy.)

                                     

wheel of Fortune

   

All of this is of particular interest to me because I have long had in my sights a learned Elizabethan poetic mini-epic, or epyllion, by George Chapman—the same Chapman whose translations of Homer so fired the imagination of John Keats.  Chapman’s poem, which nobody has claimed to understand entirely, is entitled “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.”  On the surface this is a fantastical bit of erudite pornography in which a fictional version of the poet Ovid becomes a voyeur who sneaks into a private garden where the beautiful young Corinna is bathing.  His exquisite lust for her is elaborated in more than a thousand lines of exquisite verse.

 

The identification of the five senses is ancient, and so is the moral or philosophical analysis of their operations.  Though it to some extent continued Greek philosophical traditions, Christian theology, with its deep hostility to sexual pleasure in particular, insisted on the dangerously misleading nature of all bodily gratifications.  In this regard, strange to say, the Roman erotic poet played a major pedagogic role, for though popularly regarded as a randy writer, he actually treated sexual passion as a madness and a disease.  His lines are frequently cited in medical and moral writings.  This surprising reputation is encouraged by his authorship of a poem called the Remedia Amoris (Medicines Against Love), a kind of palinode to his Art of Love.  But his epic Metamorphoses is likewise a huge catalogue of erotic disasters and sexual crimes in which the gods of Olympus are often the worst offenders.  The genre of the Latin elegy (overwhelmingly love poetry, often light-hearted) conventionally treated the sexual act as a five-stage process (seen from the male point of view).  The five steps of love (gradus amoris) were seeing the woman (visus), some friendly pick-up lines (adloquium), osculum (kiss), tactus (touch), and finally concubitus or factum (copulation).  This quite artificial scheme appears widely in Latin elegy, and then later in many medieval and Renaissance poems and plays.

 

            Ideas are often born of mixed marriages.  It takes only a little vigorous mental shoehorning—regard a kiss as a taste rather than a touch, concentrate on the auditory part of the spoken word, and punt on smell, of which there is a good deal in Chapman’s poem—and you have a reasonably tidy correspondence of the five senses and the quinque gradus amoris, the five steps of love.  That is the sequence of “Ovid’s” experience in Chapman’s poem.  You are hardly likely to lose the sequential plot of the poem’s progression according to the “steps of love”; but the printer of Chapman’s first edition (1595) makes sure you get the five senses part as well.  In the right margin of the “Argument” (brief synopsis) preceding the poem the senses are listed in order of narrative appearance: auditus, olfactus, visus, gustus, and tactus—hearing, smell, sight , taste, and touch.

 

            The “steps of love” had already become the steps of lechery in medieval moral theology.  Chaucer’s Good Parson, in the nearly endless sermon on penance that concludes the unfinished Canterbury Tales, calls the five-step program the devil’s five fingers.  “The firste finger is the fool lookynge of the fool woman and of the fool man.”  Chapman, a deeply scholarly man of the Renaissance, is both more learned and more subtle than a simple medieval parson, of course, and no one has yet explained to my satisfaction the ambiguities of his poem.  But once again we have the printer to help us.  He has put a rare Renaissance emblem or allegorical picture on Chapman’s title page.  Its motto[Mens] sibi conscia recti (“A mind conscious of its rectitude” from the Æneid 1, 604) does not take us too far.  But the picture itself speaks.  Old philosophers in the Platonic tradition, followed later by the Christian moralists, were deeply skeptical concerning the powers of the human sensory apparatus to deliver truth, which belonged to the world of the spirit, not that of the body.  “We see as through a glass, darkly,” wrote St. Paul.  The sensory world is replete with misleading distortions.  An example often used was the palpable distortion of objects viewed through water.  A straight oar seemed to bend at the junction of its submersion.  That is the principle demonstrated in the rather crude title page emblem.  A straight piling or signal post rising from the sea-bed appears to bend at the water’s surface.  The word rectitude derives from a Latin word meaning straightness, uprightness.  Sibi conscia recti. The mind, in the rectitude of which it is conscious, must not surrender to the distortions of mere corporal sense.

Death of the Author

Roland Barthes (d. 1980)

My chosen career as a professional student of old authors got off to a rocky start in the 1960s.  The author—or I should say the Author, capitalized—was already ailing even during my undergraduate years, and I had barely gotten my Ph.D. when his death was formally announced.  That was in 1967 when Roland Barthes, the famous French literary theorist,  published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”.  Barthes explained brilliantly how authors have always had much less to do with the books they write than you might think.  He extended and amplified the idea already popular among some of the so-called New Critics.  These people, who by now probably ought to be called the Paleolithics, held that an author’s intention was irrelevant to the work of art produced, the meanings of which were out of her hands the moment it left the printing press, if not before.  The arena of works by so-called authors now was the black ice and slippery cobblestones of language itself; the reader must be willing to do the heavy lifting of creating meaning, and be prepared for surprises.  So Randy Newman, author of “Short People Got No Reason to Live,” might in vain claim that his song was a satirical indictment of mindless human prejudices, invoking the indisputable biographical fact that he was himself a short person; he still faced the wrath of the Short Peoples’ Lobby, which turned out to be not merely extant but militant and irate.  But it wasn’t all bad.  If the Author was dead, the critic could be all the more lively.  Instead of talking about how smart Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf were, professors could concentrate on how smart professors are.  What was not to like in English Departments?

I was pretty cool with all this because most of my main authors were writers like Ovid, Augustine, and Chaucer; and whatever else you might want to say about them, these guys were definitely dead.  But then I encountered a dead author—name of Brás Cubas—of a kind I hadn’t thought much about before.  Not much, but some.  I remember mentioning in an earlier blog post the name of William Cooper Brann, also known as Brann the Iconoclast, the publisher of a free-thinking journal of that name, shot in the back by an avenging Baptist in 1898 on the streets of Waco TX.  Brann had offended this man’s group by saying: “I don’t have anything against Baptists except that they weren’t held under long enough”—an allusion, I believe, to baptism by full immersion.  Anyway it was in a sizzling essay of his (“The Mistakes of Moses”), stumbled upon in my grandfather’s house in my tenderest years, that I first encountered the potent productivity of dead authors.  It was in Brann’s day the universal belief of conservative Christians that everything in the Pentateuch (alias “Five Books of Moses”) had in fact come directly from the stylus, quill, or lead pencil of the super-prophet himself.  Brann drew attention to the possible difficulties of applying this belief to Deuteronomy 34:5-6: “Moses…died…and was buried in the ravine opposite Beth-Phogor.”  That is, Moses didn’t just prophesy his death, he recorded it.  I read “The Mistakes of Moses” more than seventy years ago, and hardly thought about it since—until quite recently.

 

My loyal readers will know that during the pandemic I have tried to improve the shining hour, linguistically speaking, by attempting to improve my Portuguese, the vehicle of improvement being an endless on-line Duolingo course.  I am a big fan of Duolingo. But though it does not refuse its gratuitous services to geriatrics, it seems designed for the young.  My grandchildren tell me that the structure is vaguely suggestive of a video game.  Indeed videogame (pronounced videogamey) is a word you learn early.  If your interests are in classical literature, you need to take some initiative on your own.  So a while ago I set out to supplement the youth culture of the Duolingo lessons with some independent readings in major novelists.  Certain historical and linguistic parallels between England and Portugal are striking.  Both are small countries—Portugal almost tiny—whose colonial expansion projected their vernaculars into two very large countries in the Americas.  (Brazil comprises roughly half of South America.)    Two famous authors, contemporaries, were brought to my attention, one European and one American.  The first, whom I have mentioned before, is the Portuguese intellectual and diplomat José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900).  The Brazilian novelist is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908). 

There is a quantum linguistic leap between the level of language needed to order a fish dinner in a Lisbon restaurant or try to pick up a girl in a São Paulo coffee bar and that needed to read a novel of Dickens or Henry James.  I threw myself doggedly into two of Eça’s novels—The Crime of Father Amaro and The Relic.  Very slow going, and I never did get completely through the first novel, though perhaps surprisingly one builds up a pretty big reading vocabulary quickly.  The Relic, on the other hand, finds a place on my top ten.  It didn’t quite change my life; but it certainly inspired me to further reading.  This time I turned to Eça’s South American counterpart, Machado de Assis.

                                    

                                                      Brás Cubas 1.0 (d. 1592)

 

I started with a short story I had seen much discussed—“Missa de Gallo” (“Midnight Mass”), a masterpiece worthy of Henry James at his most ambiguous, but with the apparent simplicity of Hemingway.  Emphasis on the word apparent.  So I then moved on to a novel with an intriguing title: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas).  Perhaps its comparative brevity was also an encouragement.  Both the Eça and the Machado novels are the first-person accounts of scoundrels.  What I will call the original Brás Cubas was a Portuguese nobleman, adventurer and slaver of the sixteenth century, the founder of Santos, now a beachfront city of half a million, sort of at the bottom of the South American “hump” that is the Brazilian coastline.  You are never quite sure who the Brás of Machado’s novel is; but the origins of his branch of the family date from the eighteenth century, and at the supposed time of writing several of his relatives are “still alive”.  Unlike the author himself, who is dead.  He tells us he died in August of 1869.  Indeed one of the first problems facing the dead author in writing his memoirs is whether to begin with his birth or his death.  He opts for the latter.  The novel was published in 1881, a few years before the final abolition of Brazilian slavery.  So if we thought it was perhaps necessary to wait for the arrival of Modernism in order to be post-Modern, we can think again.

                                            Machado de Assis (d. 1908)

The very first paragraph raises the intriguing question of the death of the author.  In reporting his own, as he points out, the narrator has the excellent precedent of Moses, author of the Pentateuch.  But there is still a bit of a conundrum, both metaphysical and linguistic, of distinguishing between an autor defunto and a defunto autor.  I think what this means (and I am consistently in the middle of the cohort of the Diamond League on Duolingo) is a dead author and an author who is dead, a scribbling cadaver, so to speak.  I won’t even try to tell you what is in the rest of the book.

Mozart, Among Others

 The venue for the Princeton University Concerts is the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.  This delightful building, a roofed arena of Byzanto-Romanesque mien, dates from 1894.  The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, here to give a memorable lecture made more memorable by the fact that he delivered it brilliantly despite having had his large box of slides stolen from the Faculty Club while he was having lunch, declared it the most interesting building in Princeton. For decades when the institution was much smaller, it was used for all sorts of solemn ceremonies.  Later, with the large expansion of the university it could no longer serve those purposes.  So the interior underwent a magnificent acoustical upgrading, becoming a superb musical venue: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.  You may have noted that university buildings aspire to as many names as possible.  Plural appellation maximizes the confusion of campus visitors, and helps create one of the absolutely indispensable conditions of academic traditionalism and elitism—the dichotomy between an in-group in the know and an out-group anxiously clutching little indecipherable campus maps.  Furthermore the institution can honor the generosity of two major donors at a single blow.  More bucks for their bang, so to speak.  Be that as it may, we were delighted that relaxing Covid conditions made our trip out to a Sunday afternoon concert seem nearly as unexceptional as in the good old days.

 

Alexander Hall 

 

Though I am now long retired and increasingly removed from campus affairs, having some residual friends in high places continues to prove advantageous to me.  For many years our concert seats were in the upper tier of the elegant semicircle that is the interior of Richardson Auditorium.  These were lofty, nearly avian perches allowing a comprehensive and superior view of the whole of the stage and most of the rest of the audience.  But reaching them involved climbing a spiral staircase that leaves even some student athletes in training breathing hard.  One day a couple of years ago we found that our seats had been silently but impressively switched to the very front row of the ground floor (orchestra).  This unsolicited promotion, a response to visibly advancing age and creakiness, puts us about five feet from the stage and seldom more than twelve feet from the soloists, looking up at them at an angle of about fifteen degrees.  Fantastic acoustics and leg-room.  It’s a little ostentatious, but somebody’s got to sit there.

 

Richardson Auditorium

 

Sunday’s performance was a long and uninterrupted recital (about ninety minutes) by the brilliant Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson.  Mr. Olafsson is a tall, well-built, handsome fellow with a youthful but commanding stage presence.  He is not yet forty but looks as though he were not yet thirty.  He was wearing a quite blue blue suit, tieless, but with a white dress shirt fully buttoned up to the chin, black patent leather shoes, emphatic thick- rimmed glasses, and a wedding ring.  It all added up to what you might call serious, contemporary, minimalist, functional elegance.  Mr. Olafsson was in town because the genius who runs the concert series, Marna Seltzer, is imaginative, well-connected, and entrepreneurial and can sometimes  persuade artists to add a brief trip to Princeton on one side or the other of a scheduled appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York.  The reputation of the programs she has created, working with the law of the conservation of musical energy, has several times paid off for our Princeton audience in this regard.  Carnegie Hall and Richardson Auditorium are now peers.  

 

 

The superb program, which was called “Mozart and Contemporaries,” appears to be similar if not identical to that featured under the same name on one of his hotter Deutsche Grammophon disks.  There were fifteen works—nine by Mozart, two by Baldassare Galuppi, two by Domenico Cimarosa, and one each by Haydn and C.P.E. Bach.  If the performance had been nothing more than an exhibition of the man’s powers of memory, it would have been astonishing.  The very list of names—from the possibly most famous in eighteenth-century Europe to a couple that might send you in the direction of Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians-- highlights the intellectual concept behind Olafsson’s performance.  That is the concept of context.  Artists often preface or supplement the music they perform with a few interesting, illuminating, or annoying remarks.  Olafsson began with what I thought was a brilliant micro-lecture of perhaps seven or eight minutes.  All Scandinavians seem to speak English, just to shame us.  Olafsson, who studied at the Julliard, speaks a virtually unaccented, elegant, educated American English unapproachable by any of the American politicians who have been endlessly talking through the interminable period of our mid-term elections.  “Mixing the celebrated and the obscure, I hope to slightly alter our psychological attunement, removing some of the baggage we all bring with us to Mozart’s music…to approach even the best-known works of Mozart with the same freedom and childlike enthusiasm I felt upon discovering the rare and staggeringly lyrical works from the likes of Galuppi and Cimarosa.”

 

He explained that the overwhelming genius of Mozart flowered in the context of a larger musical efflorescence, some understanding of which actually enriches one’s appreciation of that genius.  If the only thought you have ever given to this—and I fear I here indict myself—is in the cartoonish way that the film Amadeus presents the competition with Salieri, you are likely to have a pretty superficial view of a rather deep subject.  There was something wonderfully generous and expansive behind the pianist’s little talk, a generosity that found its parallel in the scrupulosity with which he addressed the keyboard of the huge Steinway rising from the stage before me, practically within my own reach as it seemed.  One passing remark sticks with me.  It was about Haydn, one of whose sonatas featured in the program.  According to Olaffson, Haydn was one of few of Mozart’s contemporary composers with the breadth of skill and energy of application actually to understand in its fulness the younger man’s achievement.  Haydn applauded that achievement with an open enthusiasm in which there was room only for admiration and thoughtful praise.  “Of course he was himself a very great musician,” said Olaffson.  But he didn’t stop there.  He added: “he was a great human being.”  I do not recall ever before hearing a great artist in any field praised by an expert critic as a great human being.

 

Whose Number Is Not Legion

 

This essay is a new venture for me, requiring a kind of provisional 

abrupt introductory paragraph that must serve as a foundation

for a structure to be erected upon it some hours hence--I hope by

about 3pm EST. That is to say, this post is to be continued. For

it involves matters that will not have happened until about then, 

or at least for which I have no hope of providing some 

photographic evidence of their having happened by then.  This

is as close to "live blogging" as Gladly Lerne is ever likely to 

come.  So with what I must hope is a sufficiently annoying air of

mystery, I leave you until later, or in this instance jusque' à 

plus tard....

        and it is now plus tard.  This is a story about two

 commanding figures, Napoleon Bonaparte and our daughter

 Katherine.  I realize that this may seem a conspicuous yoking

 of unequals of differing character, perhaps even a concordia

 discors like last week’s soiled fish.  But there are major

differences between them.  Our daughter , after all,  is a very 

nice person.  But it was the not-so-nice First Consul Napoleon 

who, two hundred and twenty years ago, established the

 Legion d’Honneur.  The French Revolution went a long way

 towards destroying hereditary aristocracy.  Along with

 titles of aristocratic rank were junked hundreds of

 religious and secular sodalities, fraternal organizations

 and orders of chivalry.  Many of these groups had been

 divided into hierarchical degrees of subgroups with more

 or less fancy titles.  Many had distinctive emblems,

ornaments, or features of dress that announced their wearers

 with varying degrees of iconographical exactitude.  In 

theory all this was swept away by the Revolution, one of 

the three bywords of which was Égalité--equality of social

station.  One title alone was thought sufficient for all:

Citoyen—citizen.  (For the Russians a century later it 

would be tovarishch—Comrade.)                 

Never mind that the egalitarianism might in reality be 

more linguistic than social.  The world of titular elitism

had been dealt a punishing blow.  And it might seem to

have created a “merit gap”.  Napoleon was at heart a 

soldier, and he believed that soldiers, though they fought 

nobly for their homelands, for their leaders, for their

religions, and for glory, by no means despised the 

“baubles” of military decorations.  Their miserly pay, 

when they got it, hardly made them what we would think 

of as mercenaries.  It was with this in mind that in1802,

 he devised the Legion of Honor to recognize conspicuous 

service to the French patria.  The recognition was not

 material, but of the highest prestige.  The Legion’s motto

 is “Honneur et Patrie"-“Honor and Homeland.”  At its 

origin Napoleon thought of such service as principally,

though not exclusively, military in nature.  The very

word Legion of course was a term borrowed from ancient 

Roman military history—a large fighting force (a minimum

of four thousand men) organized into a precise hierarchy 

of well-oiled functional parts.  The excellence recognized

among the new French Legioneers came in gradations or

degrees, as it had in the old church hierarchy and in the

burgeoning secular religion of the Free Masons.  Over 

time the concept of service to the French Republic was

largely directed to notable achievement or leadership in

many fields, culture, scholarship, industrial enterprise, etc.

It was also realized that there were throughout the world

men and women who, though not in fact French citizens

or perhaps even residents of France, were notable

contributors. People could and did honor the French

patrie from many foreign climes.  This was particularly

true, perhaps, of academic experts dealing with French

materials: French history, French culture, Francophone 

countries, and so forth.    

Two new electrifying knights
 

            By now you see where this is going.  A short while ago Christophe Kerrero, the Recteur de l’academie de Paris, inducted Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, historian and CEO of the Getty Foundation,  as a chavaliere.  Chevalier/e continues the title of distinguished military distinction in ancient Rome and the Christian Middle Ages.  The English word knight (from Old English cniht, “young man”) was a bit of an outlier.  The Latin word eques, like the French chevalier, the Spanish caballero, the German Ritter, etc., made clear this person’s essential source of fearful power.  As the French joke has it, the most important thing about a chevalier is the cheval (horse).  And indeed I would hate to be standing in an infantry line, sword in hand, facing ten or twelve 1400-pound war horses, each mounted by a steel-clad warrior with extended battle lance in “charge” position, headed my way at a canter that soon advanced to a gallop.

                                                       Claudine and Joan in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne
 

            External evidences of the award—what Napoleon called the “baubles”--are a fancy medal for ceremonial occasions and a very discreet small red lapel bar for trips to the grocery store and things like that.  I now remember quoting Nina Berberova on the Kravchenko trial.  “To see with my own eyes how a former minister, or a world-known scientist, a Nobel Prize laureate or a Sorbonne Professor with the Legion of Honor in his lapel button hole, or a famous author would take the oath and under oath affirm that there never had been and were not any concentration camps in the USSR was one of the strongest impressions of my entire life.” Reports of Katy’s testimony are much more uplifting.

                                                        Pierre and Claudine Bloch: friends of seventy years
 

I have already reported on one of these filial laureations in January of 2001, also in Paris and also at the Sorbonne.  (I am now sort of embarrassed by the bragging in which I indulged, but should you have nothing better to do you can run a search under “What a Prize!”—an allusion to the prize-winner, actually--or follow the list back to January 27, 2010).  A large issue of my own this time is simply the unfortunate fact that I am in New Jersey, not Paris.  I didn’t think it was wise from the medical point of view to undertake another international trip so soon after the last one.  In case of my own possible temptation to revise this decision, the prize-winner herself stood ready to reaffirm it in emphatic form.  But all is very well.  Joan, accompanied by our eldest and very globe-trotting son Richard, are already ensconced in the elegant guest quarters of our very old friends Pierre and Claudine Bloch--next to the Luxembourg Gardens, a short walk from the site of the ceremony.  My erudite son-in-law Zvi, prohibited by his own professional obligations from attending the ceremony, has been keeping me company here.  So it's Hands Across the Water, and if all goes well with Richard’s plans to send me a couple of photos pronto, I shall achieve my first and probably only semi-live blog.  And I will say it again: What a prize!

                                                   

photo credits: Richard A. Fleming

 

Felix Culpa

 

On this slow news day, the closest I want to come to politics is a possibly eccentric meditation on the idea of the margin of error.  John Milton, in his epic treatment of the Genesis story, Paradise Lost, advances a theory of what is called in Latin a felix culpa and in English the “Fortunate Fall”.  This is the somewhat convoluted Christian theological idea that the primal sin of Adam and Eve, though utterly disastrous in its immediate effects, turned out in the end to be the cause of humanity’s greatest happiness, namely redemption through Jesus Christ.  Hence it was a “happy” sin or fault.  The paradox of the felix culpa is actually rather fascinating in its many ramifications.

 

My attention was recently drawn to the idea of fortunate mistakes in art and literature.  The line of thought was introduced by a news squib concerning a painting by the modernist Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).  Apparently one of his most famous works has been hanging upside down in various museums for the last seventy-five years.  I say “apparently,” because I don’t see how anybody can actually know.  The painting is a group of strips of color crossing at right angles parallel to the four sides of its canvas, a geometrical square.  The expert who declared the painting to have been hanging upside down claims there is independent evidence of this fact, but it doesn’t convince me.  The real reason behind the claim is that this guy thinks it looks better the other way.  I can get behind this argument.  Life would certainly be much improved if it conformed to the way I see things.  And as I look at the painting, it would look about the same whichever of its four edges was “up”.  If the way it has been hanging for seventy-five years is culpable, it is happily culpable.  It's all in the way you look at things.

 

 

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the philosopher-bishop George Berkeley published his novel ideas about ontology—ontology meaning, roughly, how things exist.  What brought things into existence was the fact that they were perceived to exist.  This theory was very elegantly expressed in a short Latin sentence.  Esse est percipi.  “To be is to be perceived.”  You have probably heard about “Berkleyanism” in terms of an example commonly used to illustrate it.  If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to see or hear the crash, did it really fall?  Indeed, did it really exist in the first place?  According to Berkeley it is only the perception of phenomena that makes them exist.  So at first blush it would seem that the answer is negative.

 

            Well, we do say that seeing is believing.  I recall from many years ago a hilarious segment on, I believe, “Candid Camera”.  A refrigerator salesman was trying to close a deal with a supposed prospective buyer (actually a conspirator in on the joke).  How, this man wanted to know, could he be absolutely sure that the interior light in the refrigerator actually went out when the door was shut?  He didn’t want to be paying for wasted electricity!  No amount of explanation and assurance from the salesman, no amount of fiddling with the little switch in the side of the door, could persuade him.  He insisted on actually climbing into the refrigerator and having the door shut on him if he was to be persuaded.  The salesman, apparently willing to do anything to close a sale, cooperated; so he scrunched the supposed “buyer” into the shelf above the vegetable drawers and actually closed the door!  In fact, Berkeley didn’t think metaphysics demanded such strenuous human measures.  Fortunately, all-seeing God, whose divine perception was continuous and ubiquitous, was in charge of ontology.

 

The witty English priest Ronald Knox wrote a limerick on this theme

There once was a man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad”

 

which elicited an equally witty if anonymous response:

Dear Sir,
              Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
                          Yours faithfully,
                                                  God

            Of course, if there is perception, there must be the possibility of misperception, and thus another chance of felix culpa.  For example I am slightly color blind.  How can I know that what I do not see is better than what I do see?  There are some great examples of masterful mistakes from literary study.  One concerns a very dramatic incident at the end of Melville’s novel White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War.  The narrator, a Yankee seaman who takes his strange nickname from his home-made upper garment, narrowly escapes death in an accidental plunge from a spar high on a mast into the sea.  He plunged deep into the water before resurfacing miraculously uninjured.  In the submerged moment of his terrifying near-death experience, his whole life races through his mind.  “I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying.  But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through”  (p.763, LibAm edition).

 

            An eminent Harvard professor, one of the country’s leading authorities on American literature, and a man who had either bad eyeglasses or a bad edition of the novel, waxed lyrical about this passage.  He was particularly excited by the idea of a soiled fish.  He wrote thus: “[Melville’s] “discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.”  Now who could possibly doubt the poetic superiority of a soiled to a coiled fish?  And who would settle for rubbing up against a slippery eel if you could have a discordia concors instead?  The mistake is a great improvement on the take.  God bless the typographical error.  O felix culpa!