Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: History

  • The Past is a Foreign Country

    The Past is a Foreign Country

    They do things differently there. Or do they? Man’s real fear is of the unknowable future.

    I was sitting in a quiet Wimbledon garden chatting to my two lovely nieces. One is an undergraduate studying classics at Oxford and the other hopes to go to Durham shortly to read English. Bright, wonderful little sparks of life they do not possess an ounce of malice between them and in their quiet company I can often feel at peace with the world

    We were discussing Roman literature and suddenly the glorious security and certainty of reading Cicero, Livy or Pliny struck me forcibly.

    Whatever we say about re-interpreting the past, it is difficult to deny the veracity of the written word. Fools and knaves may deny the holocaust but it would take a bigger fool indeed to look at the works of a classical author, copied faithfully throughout the centuries, and claim he did not write them.

    Thus, whatever re-interpretation pushy academics may place upon the words of a classical author, it is reasonably certain that many of these works remain as written. It remains the case as it has done for the past two thousand years.

    There is thus a security in reading such works. This happened, that happened. This is how this author felt about his world, his life. His writing is a fly in amber, a fossil record, a tablet written in stone. Immutable.

    Einstein may have posited time to be non existent; that past, present and future do not flow. But it is not so for we mere mortals. If the future is knowable, we do not know it.

    How we long for gnosis, for revelation. How many questions there are for which we have eternally sought answers. How consistent and poignant our search for meaning in a capricious universe. How numerous the grand theories of reality we have invented to comfort ourselves. The gods, the voids, the nirvanas.

    Do we find comfort in such things? Perhaps we do; the mystic would certainly claim so. Some of us are lucky enough to have had glimpses through the doors of perception; or at least to believe so.

    We look for certainty in the past and can find great comfort in its famliliar and sometimes warm embrace. The very stones of Oxford itself breathe a kind of warmth, a blanket of security and beauty. There was I too, many years ago, reading history in those ancient hallowed halls. Walking those paths where scholars have walked for nigh on a thousand years.

    Feeling continuity, peace, a sense that all is well.

    Do I seek the same thing in my beloved country churches? A sense that even if the future is unknowable, I can at least wrap myself in the familiar clothing of Norman arches and ancient stained glass windows.

    Far from being a foreign country, I would argue to my nieces that the past is a present comfort to us. That we can derive joy and meaning from our living history and use it to help us see our place in our vast and ever changing universe.

    Not so that we become ossified, not so that we find ourselves fossilised in these ancient writings and stones. But so that we can congratulate ourselves on some of our better achievements, our greater glories. So that we can more clearly see our past mistakes and look to a brighter if unknowable future. Where there we may indeed hope to do things differently.

  • The Medici

    The Medici

    If you are tempted to envy the wealth, power and influence once wielded by this famous Florentine dynasty, consider what it took to achieve and maintain it.

    I highly recommend watching the series currently available on Netflix if you want to learn how not to live your life. While none of the violence is particularly graphic, I have nonetheless found myself sleeping badly.

    The bank is endlessly on the edge of collapse following some crisis or another. No change there then: think Barings and Lehman.

    The family is under constant physical threat from their banking and political rivals. The Medicis are not averse to lashing out themselves.

    Life seems to be constant strife and fear which must, you would have thought, tarnish all that beauty around them.

    What use are statues by Donatello or paintings by Botticelli and Michaelangelo if you live in fear of a dagger in your back round the darker alleys of Florence or Venice.

    Intrigue and violence and a constant battle to stay top dog can’t be much fun. Nor can it have been greatly amusing to find yourself married off to some ugly old tart for the good of the bank or the family.

    But it’s all good fun, and, I am reliably informed, reasonably accurate.

    If you find yourself less than enthralled by the behaviour of these ancient magnates you will at least gasp at the Renaissance beauty their wealth commissioned.

    Stunning palaces and works of art, churches, libraries, all the fun of the fair. How very ironic that such beauty should arise from such venality but then it has always been so.

    Bestial Popes, venal Cardinals and such beautiful, ethereal music and architecture. How do they go hand in hand? More kiddy fiddling than god fearing I suspect. I will never be able to reconcile such bizarre contradictions.

    Are we that much better off today? Does great beauty and art still have to rely on sordid business and corruption?

    I don’t think as a species we have changed much over the 500 years since the Medicis first ruled Florence. In essence it’s still a smash and grab show.

    These days I don’t really give a toss. Although I wish the world were otherwise.

    But the series has really captivated me. I am forced into a sneaky and grudging admiration for those ghastly rogues and can’t wait to go back to Italy once the Black Death has retreated.

    A month in Tuscany beckons.

    My only visit to Florence has thus far been to its railway station and I have no pictures to hand. You will have to content yourselves with the above photograph of one of England’s finest remaining Norman churches. It is to be found in a tiny village called Barfreston, a few miles from where we live.

    I wonder whether it was built with dirty money? The Normans were a horrible bunch too.

  • The terror of early humans

    The terror of early humans

    A visit to the Bronze Age Boat gallery today brought home very forcibly the sheer terror I would have felt as one of our early human ancestors.

    The picture above is of a bronze age boat, thought to date back 3,600 years. It was found in 1992 in Dover, a busy seaside port on the South East English coastline.

    I haven’t been to a museum for years, but happily my son took me along as part of a visit to a young cousin’s pub in Dover. I suppose it was all stuff I was peripherally aware of, but the gap since my childhood education now being rather lengthy, pre-history has become for me just that. Pre-historic. Out of mind and sight.

    I was reminded that modern man emerged perhaps half a million years ago, that England once housed woolly mammoths and hippos, saber toothed tigers and lions; and was at various times was covered in ice while at others with tropical vegetation.

    What shook me most was the reminder (or was it the first time I had been told?) that aborigines are thought to have traveled to colonize what is now Australia in skin covered coracles 40,000 years ago.  They must have been rather like frog spawn or tadpoles: most must have died in the attempt for a very few to survive and prosper. What sheer terror: a coracle floating on a vast and unforgiving ocean, out of site of land, with no idea where or when or if a landfall would be ever be made.  Behemoths and krakens their only companions.

    Even the bronze age boat (modern by comparison) comes as a shock: it predates Moses and the Pharaohs.

    I was spooked, no other word for it. Moved, shocked, taken aback. Horrified by the thought of what these early peoples must have experienced and suffered.

    There is a re-construction of a bronze age hut. Thought to consist of tree branches and mud. Early farmers huddled around a central fire dressed in odd looking rags.  What strange looking Muppets!

    As ever, my mind turned to what these people were thinking. What their beliefs were. Whether they were angry or sad, happy or sheer bloody terrified.

    Imagine living in a mud hut in the god forsaken middle of nowhere. With your head stuffed full of madcap ideas about why the world is the way it is. You saw spirits in the trees and rivers, terrifying supernatural enemies or gods who threw hail and rain at you, thunderbolts and lightening, pestilence and plague. And filthy, horrible plundering neighbors intent on kicking the shit out of you and yours and making it theirs. Or dispatching you to whatever heaven or hell such people believed they went to .

    Sheer, unadulterated existential terror.  The questions “why?”, “how?” “where?” and “WTF?” must surely have loomed large in those ancient minds.  What did those people know about their world? Where they had come from and why? Where they were going to?

    And then back to modernity and an ice cream on the beach, in the sun. Boats chugging in an out of the harbor. Modern life.

    My son hit me with a terrible and profound truth: we are really not much further forward than those ancient savages.  In every relevant sense we know as little as they do, except the scale differs. While they did not know what was over the next hill, we now know (or think we know) about the big bang. But not what happened before that.  And yes, we have modern medicine thank god. In particular pain killers and antibiotics.

    But while we no longer believe in water sprites or Neptune, daemons or gods we still have absolutely no idea about the deepest questions we need answered.

    Why are we here? An accident of evolution we assume but we have little idea of how that came about let alone why. Except that there very probably is no “why”.  What was there before our universe, if anything? Will it all end in a bang or a whimper? What would there be if our universe did not exist? What else could there be? What caused the Big Bang (assuming it happened)?

    And while early man’s horizon was the next hill, ours is not so much further away. We realize the universe is vast, infinite perhaps. But we have no idea whether there is anything out there we would call meaningful. Life? Intelligence? Or just an infinity of cold, cruel ice and devastating fire? Does it even have an end?

    The scale of what we can see has changed. But still we have no answers to those questions which are so profound and so deeply important they haunt every one of us at some time or another in our lives. Each and every one of us, then and now, has yearned for, craved those answers.

    In some very real sense, we are still living in absolute darkness. What a scary thought.

  • William West, 1st Lord Delawarr

    William West, 1st Lord Delawarr

    The somewhat brutal face and the arrogant pose of William West, 1st Lord Delawarr, reassures us that human nature has not changed much over the centuries.

    This portrait hangs in the 1540 Gallery at Tate Britain on Millbank, London, near the Palace of Westminster. The aggressive pose is similar to that used by Hans Holbein in his portraits of the English tyrant Henry VIII and at one time this portrait was attributed to Holbein. These days, it is confessed that the artist is unknown and that the portrait was painted sometime later in the 16th Century.

    The sitter has not actually been confirmed. But it is amusing to think that it may indeed have been the thoroughly unpleasant William West, since this portrait indicates that the sitter was perhaps not an altogether pleasant character. Born c.1519, William West was  the nephew of the 9th Lord De La Warre, whom he tried to poison in order to gain his title and estates.

    Despite much exquisite beauty in the Tudor period, these were turbulent and brutal times.  Alongside the sublime music of Taverner, William Byrd and John Downland the period revelled in barbaric practices such as hanging, drawing and quartering.  The magnificence and lavishness of the architecture (Christ Church Oxford for instance) sits ill beside the abject poverty and misery of the masses.

    These days I try to be pretty methodical when I “do” art. I like to spend an hour or so in a single gallery and look at every painting in detail, read a little about each and then hone in for some more detailed research on those that particularly appeal to me. Any more than and my mind wanders.  The Tate Gallery’s website is a fabulous resource and thanks to my smartphone I can do a little research while I am in situ.  The technical details of the work involved in the attempt to date and verify artist and sitter are fascinating and well worth the effort to absorb.

    But primarily, as ever, what interests me is the psychology, the “meaning”, the “why”.  What does this painting tell me about human nature, about myself perhaps? Why do we humans behave as we do and what drives us?

    Much of the world today is no better than it was in Tudor England. Vicious savages entirely the equal of Henry VIII (or worse) rule much of the third world. Brutal dictators in Africa and other man made hellholes, rip off their people and squirrel away their winnings in Swiss Bank accounts. Rivals are murdered and whole populations “ethnically cleansed”.

    The Trumps of this world and the Corbyns are not altogether pleasant either..

    Animals are brutal. We are animals. William West was an animal.  Perhaps it is the fault of evolution. Perhaps we can not help ourselves but we have a duty to try.

     

  • John Singer Sargent

    John Singer Sargent

    John Singer Sargent ranks high in my list of favourite painters.  In particular I love his portraits.

    The above is his 1901 portrait of Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, close to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

    Sargent befriended the family and  Asher Wertheimer, an art dealer, helped Sargent obtain commissions.

    I visited the Tate yesterday on a glorious sunny summer morning and as in my wont I wandered the gallery stopping at whim, at random when some painting or other grabbed my attention.

    I am a Johnny-Come-Lately to the visceral attractions of visual art, although my first visit to the gallery was in 1970, when I was at school round the corner in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.  I am ashamed to say I have been all too rare a visitor in the intervening period.  My wife is rather scornful of my late attraction to culture since she, unlike me, studied the history of western art at school.  Well as far as I am concerned, better late than never.

    My attitude to culture is that it is to be enjoyed and, if possible “understood”.  As with literature I don’t really need to know a great deal about the painter to appreciate what he is trying to tell me (or, perhaps more probably, his patron).  A few details of the artist’s life and his place in the society of his time can greatly enrich my experience but are not strictly necessary for me to enjoy and understand his work.

    In any event, I did learn a little about John Singer Sargent, an American expatriate in Europe, and in London in particular.

    The more personal details are that he appears to have been an avid and busy lover and while nobody seems to know for sure, some believe his lesser known erotic portraits of the male form suggest his taste may have veered in that direction.

    It is said by some that Sargent may even have used a male figure as an initial model for his stunning and controversial 1884 portrait of Mme Gautreau, American wife of a French banker in Paris.

    Whatever his personal life may have been he was a favourite of the important and wealthy in the late Victorian and Edwardian days: his clients included Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Lady Randolph Churchill amongst other luminaries of his time.

    Anway while such details are of interest to me, my pleasure in art is of quite another sort. Sargent’s glorious portraits do something for me. Mme Gautreau was a beautiful woman and the Wertheimer daughters, while not so beautiful, were nonetheless wonderfully portrayed.  The female form, beautifully attired, is indeed a work of art, however it is portrayed and in whatever medium.

    The sheer voluptuous elegance of his woman, the richness of their costly gowns, the translucent skin. And the evocation of those now far off days. The “certainty” of that period; the days of Empire of world domination that brought such security and power to what in those days was rightly described as Great Britain.  The luxury liners of Cunard and White Star, the glamorous first class dining rooms on those magnificent transatlantic behemoths. The J Class yachts, the robber barons, the wicked and louche Edward VII.

    It is living history. I do not admire the concept of empire as my long suffering readers will certainly have gathered nor do I condone the arrogance it entailed. But I do envy the certainty of the time, which tragically was too end all too soon in the apocalypse of World War One.

    Sargent’s portraits bring alive a distant and in some ways attractive and enviable age for me. I revel in his technique, the beauty of his women and the grandeur of their surroundings.

    Sargent moves me.

  • The Hazards of Dramatising the Near Past

    The Hazards of Dramatising the Near Past

     writes  of the hazards of dramatising the near past and asks whether we should delay so as to achieve perspective.  “Assange, Farage, Cummings – isn’t it too soon for the Cumberbatch treatment?“.

    Very witty Martha Gill. An amusing and thoughtful article. History is constantly revised – every age has its different slant on the events of yesterday. As time recedes “facts” (if they ever exist in the absence of interpretation) become more muddied and opinion becomes louder.

    Who would have imagined 100 years ago that “colonialism” would have become a dirty word? Who in the late 19th Century criticised Jardine’s for pushing opium on the Chinese (other than the Chinese)?

    Society changes. Hopefully for the better. An old colonel down in Kent I met a few years ago was still talking of the need to shoot down natives who misbehaved. I was shocked. My father was deeply racist. I was shocked, particularly since he also professed Christianity.

    And yet each generation makes its mistakes and those mistakes only become evident with hindsight.

    Even so, if we were to agree to a ban on art reflecting events until 20 years had passed, there is no guarantee that the playwright would get it “right”. He would merely represent the coloured glass of his own generation and a generation after that mores would once again have changed.

    So thank you for a reflective article – I must give it some further thought!

    In a different article  Emma Brockes wonders in the same vein whether recently deceased author Tom Wolfe has become too dated to read.  A slightly different angle on the same question.

    I am a long term fan of Tom Wolfe and have read much of what he wrote. We still read Shakespeare, Jane Austin Dickens and Chaucer.  We will continue to read Tom Wolfe.

    Yes, their language may be antiquated and difficult for us to understand but these people wrote about human nature and society. That I fear has changed very little. Wolf wrote about greed, prejudice, race and had valuable things to say. As an investment banker and long time financial market analyst, Bonfire of the Vanities was actually a pretty profound read for me and remains so – the greed, insincerity, malfeasance and even fraud still prevail in Wall Street and the City of London. Watch “Billions” for an amusing update.

    No, Wolfe was an expert in the human psyche – there is nothing outdated in his views on the awfulness of human behaviour.

     

  • Rembrandt – Belshazzar’s feast

    Rembrandt – Belshazzar’s feast

    In an age of atheism and apathy, the literature, art and music of religion still holds vast sway over the imagination of us all.

    I defy you to find me, even in this dumbed down age, a single individual with even the most basic of cultural awareness who will not have heard the phrase:

    “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.”

    And here it is, writ large by none other than Rembrandt:

    How extraordinary that our very consciousness is so intricately threaded and woven through by these magnificent old fairy tales and the wonderful English of the King James version of the Bible.

    The writing is on the wall: you have been warned. Your behaviour in unacceptable, expect to pay for it. Things are about to change, and for the worse.

    Belshazzar’s dad Nebuchadnezzar had been naughty enough and now this deluded Chaldean king was up to the same tricks. Don’t mess with the god of the Israelites: he ought to have learnt his lesson.  The silly fellow had to go and blaspheme and quick as a shot his kingdom was handed over by the wrathful Yahweh to the  Medes and the Persians.

    ‘Shazzar had decided on a rave for his mates but made the cardinal error of using crockery ripped off from a raid on the Hebrew temple.

    Daniel (he who will later face the lions’ den) translates for good king ‘Shazzar:

    “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.  Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”