Of Gremlin-Fueled Delays

For the gazillionth time in the three years I have had it, my computer caught a virus and has had to spend extensive time at the doctor.  Whenever this happens, I feel like Bugs Bunny battling the gremlin...only not so funny.  At least this time I feel as though the doc may be helping me permanently remedy my computer's susceptibility.  I have hijacked Nick's computer in order to generate this post, but the boy needs it for more important things like school work, so I have not been posting and will not be able to until I get my own computer back safe and sound.  Hopefully this will be next week.  I look forward to it, because in the meantime I have been painting a bunch, cooking some and reading an interesting, and at times frustrating, book.  I can't wait to share some of this stuff.  Until then, bis später cyberspace!

Of Collapsing Time and Crossing Rivers

Very soon after the death and subsequent canonization of St. Francis (c. 1181-1226), designs began to construct a church at Assisi, Francis' hometown, in his honor.  Here's a picture of it.

Like most medieval structures of high aspiration, this basilica took decades to construct and decades more to adorn.  The list of artists who painted panels and/or frescoes in this church and its adjoining buildings reads like a roll call of late medieval/early Renaissance superstars: Cimabue, Pietro Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Giotto, to name a few. 

For Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me an amazing book:  The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi by Elvio Lunghi, which details the architecture and artwork of the basilica with a plethora of fine color pictures.  I have a special affection for Giotto, who is particularly well represented in the paintings of the basilica.  Among the many works he completed for the church, is a series of paintings depicting the life of Mary Magadalen that adorns the basilica's Magdalen Chapel.  

I find Giotto's images of Mary Magdalen incredibly compelling.  They possess all of the hallmarks of his work - the heavy, distinctly unGothic bodies, the expressive long-eyed faces, and the generously applied lapis blue paint.  The Magdalen paintings also contain a number of Giotto's peculiar cherubim, who fade away into nothing around the knee, as well as his strange smooth mountains and rock.  Of all of the Magdalen paintings, I found myself returning again and again to "The Magdalen's Voyage to Marseilles".  

 

A portion of Catholic legend concerning Mary has her voyaging to Gaul, where she converts the entirety of Provence.  I like Mary Magdalen as a figure, but apostolic stories have a little too much baggage attached to them for me to really enjoy painting them.   I will not go into it, but you can read more about the legend of Mary in Gaul here.

In any case, I really loved the composition of this picture, as well as the idea of painting a medieval ship; tiny with huge people in it.  I adore the completely symbolic representations of ships and buildings in medieval art; the way they pay no attention whatsoever to scale.  So I began dreaming up who I could put into my boat, and over what body of water they would be sailing.  I recalled a 4th-century pilgrim I had read about in school and began revisiting her account.

In 381 AD, a woman named Egeria made a pilgrimage from Gaul to the Holy Land, where she spent three years.  We know of her journey because she left a detailed account, much of which still survives, that she addressed to a group of women back home.  It is unclear whether Egeria was a nun or simply a wealthy woman, but the account of her pilgrimage remains a fascinating document that has much to reveal about late antique/early medieval travel.  Among her many trips in and around the Holy Land was an excursion from Antioch to Edessa (modern day Antakya to Şanliurfa, both in Turkey).  She had to cross the Euphrates and describes the river so:  

"[I]t is very well written that it is the great river Euphrates; it is huge and, as it were, terrible, for it flows down with a current like the river Rhone, only the Euphrates is still greater.  And...we had to cross in ships, and in large ships only". (31)

As I thought of this voyage, I did a little research into Şanliurfa, which is a very ancient city, indeed.  According to Muslim tradition, the prophet Abraham was born near Şanliurfa and it is also the place where Nimrod ordered him executed by burning.  As the tradition goes, God turned the fire into water and the embers into fish, saving Abraham.  A mosque, Halil-ur-Rahman, built in 1211, stands on this spot and, to this day, an abundance of fish swim in a sacred pool there.  This story set me to thinking of the medieval artistic fluidity of time; the way ancient figures were pictured in medieval garb and contemporary patrons could be pictured with long dead saints; kind of like a temporal version of that medieval disregard for scale that I mentioned earlier.  I decided this project provided a perfect opportunity for me to play with all of these aspects of medieval art.

Using the composition of Giotto's "The Magdalen's Voyage to Marseilles", I imagined the water as the Euphrates instead of the Mediterranean.  I envisioned Egeria as she crossed the river.  Pilgrimages necessarily entail an individual navigating through space as through doing so could collapse time.  The pilgrim goes to Jerusalem, not to see Jerusalem as it stands in their time, but to envision it in the time of Jesus, and so forth.  So I decided to do some collapsing of time myself.  Egeria had just visited a shrine to St. Thomas when she left Antioch, and was heading for a city that, hundreds of years later, would become associated with Abraham.  Instead of Mary and other apostles in the boat then, I placed Egeria, flanked by Abraham and by St. Thomas, as though the religious subjects of her pilgrimage could, in some sense, accompany her on her travels.  And instead of a European building on the shore, there I placed the Halil-ur-Rahman, built 800 years after Egeria's voyage.  I even put a fish in the water, to reference the pool of Abraham.  

All in all, I am very pleased with the way it turned out.  Here are some pictures of the painting underway. 

 

  

  

 

 And here's the finished product.

 

  

  

  

 For more paintings, visit My Etsy page.

Book: Metahistory by Hayden White

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is not a work for the casual reader.  Hayden White's opus requires some commitment and some work.  It is lengthy and there is a lot of jargon to wade through.  While jargon in a work of history often seems to substitute for original or even simply interesting thought, White's project is complex enough that the jargon is warranted.   It effectively becomes shorthand for very complicated ideas, enabling the reader to follow him as he builds his arguments without needing to restate at every turn. 

Essentially, White examines eight nineteenth-century authors (four historians and four "philosophers of history") in order to dissect their works and discern the literary premises upon which they constructed their narratives.  I will attempt to paraphrase his project and I will not half do it justice.  White examined the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt.  In doing so, he paid special attention to what he called the poetic "trope" each author used to characterize their narrative.  That is, were they basing their historical narratives in Metaphor, Irony, Metonymy or Synecdoche?  Depending on the trope employed, each author's work would proceed on the grounds assumed by that trope.  In this way, the operative trope of a work of history would necessarily characterize its subject in a certain fashion, whether the trope were consciously chosen or subconsciously employed.  Additionally, unconnected to the operative trope, but working in conjunction with it, is the author's given method of "emplotment".  Does he present the historical events at hand as Romance, Tragedy, Comedy or Satire?  All of these questions (and oh so many more) determine, for White, the form these men's histories took. 

I would come up with an example but, frankly, this aspect of Metahistory bored me a little.  I already believe that history is not a science or even really a pseudoscience, but an art.  It is not the least surprising to me that an historical narrative draws its epistemological assumptions from poetic conceits (storytelling conceits) and not from "objective" observation.  But this very topic, whether history is a science, a pseudoscience or an art, is precisely what White's subject authors were debating.  Which, in fact, brings me to what I did find really fascinating about Metahistory.  

White contends that history in the newly scientific, Enlightenment world of the 18th century suffered from extreme irony.  There was nothing new under the sun, man had repeated the same savage and stupid mistakes in the past and would continue to do so into the future, and while change is inevitable it is neither distinctly traceable nor predictable.  This state of psychological malaise, triggered by a fever of scientific inquiry that only pointed out humankind's limitations, made it practically necessary to write history in an ironic mode.  Come Hegel and the 19th century, and folks were really tired of irony.  Hegel and the gentlemen whom White studies in Metahistory, sought to identify history as a discipline proper and, in many cases, as a scientific discipline.  They sought to liberate it from irony and to *gasp* learn lessons from it that would improve the state of man.  Okay, that last bit only generally.  For as White discovered, liberating oneself from irony when the history of man is, in fact, a cyclical pageant of power relationships is not an easy task.  And a good portion of these eight authors did not believe the march of history was necessarily toward something good or better. 

And here's what I found really interesting - the extent to which our post-post-modern world suffers from just such an ironic malaise.  We live in an incredibly ironic age.  It is truly difficult to be earnest and genuine when you have been shown, again and again, that there is a dark side to every positive human impulse and that the light and the dark exist in each of us simultaneously.  And if history does anything, it instructs us well of that.  As I wholeheartedly believe this correlation between the 19th century and the early 21st century, and as I too have studied history hoping to learn some "truths" of humanity, I was thrilled when White repeatedly found each of his eight authors grappling with a central conundrum, with which I struggle daily - action versus withdrawal.

Over and over again, the intellectual pursuits of these eight historians led them to weigh the public merits and personal toll of remaining politically active and invested in the the future of their societies, or of withdrawing into a personal life where one invests in private pursuits and loved ones and pretty much leaves the outside world to itself.  Something about studying history must bring this specific quandry upon one, for I have certainly been consumed by it in recent years.  Or maybe it is a more general question we all must answer and, for those of us who are historically minded, the study of the expanse of time brings the question front and center.  Maybe for the scientifically minded, studying the universe's beginnings or the minute cosmos of an atom has the same effect.  

In any event, I certainly fall on the withdrawn side of things - as, it turns out, did Jacob Burckhardt.  I felt a great kinship with these eight men, even the ones who answered this question differently, for at least they asked it...if all change seems to end up as the same old grinding wheel of power and oppression, why should I really advocate for change?  You take a long enough perspective on history and it all seems inane.  We are dust motes.  And we are not even particularly kind or virtuous dust motes.  We love our power and we want, want, want.  It makes me think of Meet John Doe (the 1941 Capra film) and Walter Brennan's rant about the "heelots".  If you are not familiar, please take a few minutes and watch this clip.  I do not agree on every point, but I find it a really succinct way of summing up human greed and materialism.  And, like Walter Brennan's character, I prefer simply to not play that whole game rather than deal with the heelots.  I get by on a little and try not to wish for a lot.  I withdraw and I invest myself in the people and quiet pursuits I love.  I do vote, I donate a little time and money now and again, and I listen to the news.  But I definitely hear it filtered through the assumptions of the Ironic trope and emplotted by a mix of Satire and Comedy.  

For more book reviews visit My Goodreads Page.