The 21-Story Icicle Tower

Last week in Chicago the sprinkler on the top floor of this building failed, sending a cascade of water down the fire escape. Where it froze into this.

Photographer Andrew Hickey stopped by and took these pictures. More at This is Colossal.

Rock Crystal Dish in the Form of a Temple

From Carthage, 3rd to 5th century CE. Now in the Met.

Sue Yourself

The latest from New York:

Seeking to position himself as a national leader against climate change, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday announced a two-pronged attack against the fossil-fuel industry, including a vow that city pension funds would divest about $5 billion from companies involved in the fossil fuel business.

The mayor also announced a lawsuit against five major oil companies, seeking to collect billions of dollars in damages to pay for city efforts to cope with the effects of climate change.

“This city is standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to take our own actions to protect our own people,’” the mayor said, wearing a green necktie and sitting in front of large green sign that said “NYC: Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” He added, “We’re not waiting.”

I hate, have always hated, continue to hate this habit of blaming oil companies for our environmental problems. If you don't like what oil companies do, stop using their product. Get an electric car and an electric lawnmower and a solar panel array. Do something. But sitting back and fulminating against companies who just sell what people want to buy is nothing at all.

The reason we have massive CO2 emissions is not that the oil companies are evil. It is because all of us love driving cars and flying in planes and turning on the air conditioning. What, exactly, could the leaders of the oils companies do about our emissions even if they decided they wanted to? Invest in solar power? They're already doing that. Stop us from driving our cars? If they tried that, we would put them in jail.

If there were a massive verdict against the oil companies, what would the effect be? They would pass the cost onto their consumers, so the net effect (if any) would be to increase fuel costs. If that is your aim, why not just raise the tax? It's a much simpler, more elegant, and more efficient. But I suppose it doesn't serve the purpose of finding Bad People to blame, and punishing them.

Much of the wrath directed against the oil companies these days is about the climate change debate. Some of the oil companies have indeed funded studies by climate change skeptics. I don't care. First, it is an interesting fact that there are scientific climate change skeptics, despite the efforts of the alarmist faction to get them banned from publishing and so on. Second, I think question of belief is not very important here. By and large, European governments are on board with the threat of CO2 emissions and committed to reductions. But their emissions are not falling meaningfully faster than they are in the U.S. This is just a very hard problem, and the solutions have to be technological. Those solutions – other than nuclear power and hydroelectric dams, which most environmentalists oppose – are only now becoming available. As they do, our emissions will fall.

Suing the oil companies is a dumb sideshow.

Giovanni Gasparro

Contemporary Italian artist and devout Catholic, born 1983. His degree is in art history rather than studio, for a thesis on Van Dyck in Rome. It shows. Above, Amoris Laetitia (the joy of love), John the Baptist warning of the adultery of Herod Antipas.

Details.

St. Nicolas of Bari, 2016, detail.

Gasparro has executed a couple of large religious commissions, in particular for the rededication of Aquila Cathedral, damaged in the terrible earthquake of 2009. This work, The Vision of St. John of Patmos, was part of that commission. I find these paintings 1) a little clumsy, and 2) redolent of that sort of highly emotional Catholicism that makes me think, I'm too Nordic for this.

Detail of something. Certainly is interesting to see a prominent contemporary artist working in this vein. Alas, I have read that the habit of painting extra hands and heads, which Gasparro does a lot of, is a sign of mental illness. I haven't been able to find out much about him, but I worry.

Halitrephes maasi

Spectacular jellyfish filmed by the E/V Nautilus at a depth of 4,000 feet off Baja California. Video here.

The Forty-Five, or, Jacobites and Madmen

John Petite, The Jacobites of 1745, 1873

In the realm of human behavior that needs explaining, I offer you the case of Lord George Murray. On September 3, 1745, Lord George wrote to his brother, the Duke of Atholl, to declare his intention of joining Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion, despite having accepted lucrative positions from the government:

I never did say to any person in Life that I would not ingage in the cause I always in my heart thought just and right, as well as for the Interest, Good, and Liberty of my country . . . though what I do may and will be reccon'd desperate . . .  and may very probably end in my utter ruin. My Life, my Fortune, my expectations, the Happyness of my wife and children, are all at stake, and the chances are against me, yet a principle of (what seems to me) Honour, and my Duty to King and Country, outweighs every thing.

Murray was not hungry, or desperate, or oppressed; indeed he had pretty much everything his century could offer. Yet he threw it all away to follow a prince who had never before set foot in Britain.

There is a famous Gaelic song about these events, Mo Ghile Mear, "My Gallant Darling", written around 1750 by Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill; Sting's version isn't on Youtube but you can hear Mary Black's here. The first stanza, spoken by a sort of goddess who represents the Irish people, translates as:

Once I was a maiden fair
Now it’s widow’s weeds I wear
My husband lies not in the grave
But far from me he ploughs the waves

I have a wonderful book about the folklore of the Island of Skye, and mixed in with all the water horses and selkies are dozens of items about Bonnie Prince Charlie, who passed through the island when he was fleeing after his defeat and seems to have been sheltered by every other family on the island. People treasure these memories and have passed them on for generations.

I've just finished reading a quite good book about the Forty-Five, as Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion is generally known, and what lingers in my mind is a puzzle. What is all this about? What explains the enduring appeal of this half-wit royal adventurer and his doomed rebellion, brushed away in an hour at Culloden Moor by a single division of the government's army? Why so many songs about these rebels, and none about the men who in defeating them saved Parliamentary rule and paved the way for British democracy?

This is going to be a long essay, because there is a lot here to unpack.

There is, first of all, the weird human fascination with royal blood. Many Jacobites touched on this in their personal justifications: as far as they were concerned, the 1688 rebellion was a crime and the Stuarts remained the real kings of Britain. Here is Dr. Archibald Cameron to his wife, from the prison where he awaited execution, 8 June 1753:

I thank kind Providence I had the happiness to be early educated in the principles of Christian loyalty, which as I grew in years inspired me with an utter abhorrence of rebellion and usurpation, tho’ ever so successful. And when I arrived at man's estate I had the testimony both of religion and reason to confirm me in the truth of my first principles. Thus my attachment to the ROYAL FAMILY is more the result of examination and conviction than of prepossession and prejudice. And as I am now, so was I then, ready to seal my loyalty with my blood. As soon, therefore, as the royal youth had set up the king his father's standard, I immediately, as in duty bound, repaired to it. . . .

I could go on, but I think you all know what I mean. And I have to say that of all the political principles ever articulated by humankind, none makes less sense to me than the divine right of kings. What possible difference could it make to me who your father was? or your great-great-grandfather? If you go back far enough, all kings are descended from usurpers or conquerors; why is being descended from a grasping thug more noble than being one? You expect me to do what you say because your great-grandfather killed somebody else's great grandfather and took his crown? Really? James II was overthrown in 1688 because he sought to limit the powers of Parliament and impose French-style absolutism on Britain, besides promoting Catholicism in a way that offended many of his mostly Protestant subjects. When his subjects got sick of him, they tossed him out and brought in a king more to their liking. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Yet to millions of humans, past and present, loyalty to the true king has been one of the deepest moral touchstones, something more to be treasured than marriage or family or friendship, second only to devotion to God.

And then there is our fascination with the doomed gesture, the forlorn hope, the men who fight and die because that is what they feel called on to do: the 300 Spartans, the Saxons at Maldon – courage must be harder, our hearts bolder, our minds keener, as our numbers dwindle – the Forty-Seven Ronin, the defenders of the Alamo, the Irish rebels of 1916. Mostly we bend to fate, but sometimes instead people choose to defy it. Instead of surrendering to that which is, they go down fighting against it, and something about that touches us deeply. As Gimli puts it in the movie version of The Return of the King:

Small chance of success — certainty of death — what are we waiting for?

It's a joke, but it sums up one piece of the hero's creed: where the danger is greatest, there is the greatest chance for eternal glory. It impresses me that although the actual Spartan warriors at Thermopylae were sent with a strategic mission, to delay the Persians until the Greeks could fortify the Isthmus of Corinth, the movie version casts all that aside and makes their stand a completely pointless gesture of courage. That is, to some, more noble and more pure.

Some Jacobites had been raised on stories of earlier rebellions – 1689, 1708, 1715, 1719. When they joined Bonnie Prince Charlie, they stepped out of ordinary life and into story. This is another way of explaining the heroic impulse; to live as characters in a legend, not as mortal humans, thinking not of today but of how we will be remembered in a century.

But I think a deeper level of explanation is needed.

Many people feel keenly the sordid, messy, compromising ordinariness of life. Shouldn't there be more to existence than a struggle to survive, or to get ahead; than squabbles with relatives we love but can't get along with; than a string of insults from strangers and dismissals from superiors; than churches full of hypocrites; than sadness and loss and regret? There is in all of us a longing to break free from earthbound life and soar. I see this longing all around me: in fantasies of the apocalypse, in the hope of lottery riches, in the dream of a perfect love that transforms, in the unchained rage of killers.

I see this longing among British Jacobites. They were not united by any particular social or economic grievance, or any single vision of life after the Stuarts had been restored. Some were Catholics, but others were Protestants who assumed the new Stuart king would convert to Protestantism, as Henry IV had converted to Catholicism to become King of France. Some wanted to undo the Act of Union that ended Scottish independence, while others wanted greater and closer union. Some wanted to give up the colonies, others to expand them. What united them was a dream of a different world. Especially among the writers and poets – John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott – Jacobism was part of a disaffection with the existing order of things. They felt a loathing for the money-grubbing, power-grubbing, self-promoting culture of getting ahead and stomping on whoever got in the way, and they associated this order with scheming Whig politicians and their fat Hanoverian kings. They wanted something else, and the King Over the Water provided a focus for these dreams.

Charles Edward Stuart by Allan Ramsay, 1745

Some people are especially put off by the sordid ordinariness of political life. Shouldn't a people's leader be something more than the most talented vote grubber, the most skillful pledger of false promises? Why should getting the most votes matter more than being the best man? There is, it has to be said, a dearth of purity and high-mindedness in democratic politics. Personally I think that is true of all politics, but anyway democracy is just not that inspiring to many people. They want something pure and true, and the one example that comes up most often is to give their loyalty to someone they believe in. In this loyalty they see something noble and clean that transcends mere political intrigue. Combine this with faith in divine kingship, and politics is transformed, in imagination anyway, from something material and grubby into something sanctified. There is a recurring literary image to describe such people and such times: a falling away, a casting off, a shedding of clothes and even skin, leaving behind something noble and pure. As Yeats wrote of a different rebellion:

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard
`Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace

I see all these longings in the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Dissatisfied with the increasingly commercial, increasingly impersonal, increasingly technical world around them, dissatisfied with politics as trading votes for preferment, they sought to cut through all of it with a pure act of sacrifice. In loyalty and courage they sought redemption from the world of compromise and care.

So there is my explanation. It has many parts as, I think, all explanations of human behavior should. There was boredom, restlessness, longing for adventure. There was the fascination of the hero's path, blazing through life on the way to a fiery end that might be long remembered. There was the dissatisfaction of the everyday and the longing to soar above it; there was the longing for pure and noble feeling. There was the desire to shed the skin of an ordinary, compromised, muddled life and to stand for a moment revealed as pure spirit, strong in decision, certain in action, powerful in faith.

What was completing missing from Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion, if you ask me, was any kind of politics that made sense. The Jacobites had not a single idea about how to make Britain a better place for the people who lived there. Charles did not proclaim a single policy; he did not question anything about the government he sought to overthrow except the hereditary right of its king to lead it. It is not just modern cynics who find the whole thing ridiculous, but many at the time. The reaction of people who did not feel the attraction of the Stuart cause was generally not anger but eye-rolling. You want what? The savage brutality meted out by the royal army after their victory was motivated by bafflement; if the clansmen were so far beyond reason that they would sacrifice themselves on such mad adventures, then they had to be eliminated for civilization to proceed.

Yet in the Britain of 2018 the people care not a fig for the government's victory, which is seen as oppressive in Scotland and forgotten elsewhere. No, it is Bonnie Prince Charlie and his quixotic rebellion that seized and still holds our imagination.

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

I think about this and similar incidents all the time, and they make me wonder about the politics of my own time. My sort of politics is based on rational self-interest plus empathy. I support governments that defend the rights of the people and do their best to care for them and help them get along. I support democracy because although it is sordid and petty and corrupt, it does people the honor of allowing them to choose their own leaders. None of which is legend; none of which is heroic story; none of which inspires the kind of irrational fervor that Bonnie Prince Charlie did.

We rational liberals are often mystified by human behavior. The enthusiasm of millions for dictators like Mussolini or Saddam Hussein leaves us scratching our heads. We don't understand why poor people vote for conservatives who have promised to cut health spending. We can't imagine why people vote without even bothering to find out what positions their candidate holds. But we should not be surprised by any of these things. We humans are irrational, in love with stories, devoted to phantoms. We live only half our lives in the material world. The rest we spend in the Dreamtime, with gods and heroes. If you expect your fellow humans to live sensibly, you are making a grievous error. When you catch yourself in this mistake, think about Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highlanders: fools, who marched dreaming to the field of their destiny and charged dreaming at the guns that killed them, remembered forever for their folly.

St. John's Cathedral, 's-Hertogenbosch

St. John's Cathedral at 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands is one of the last great churches of the first Gothic era. It was built between 1370 and 1529. It began as a parish church, so 's-Hertogenbosch must have been one of those late medieval towns that was rich and prominent but still had no bishop.

In 1629 the town was conquered by Dutch Protestants who banned Catholic worship and turned this into a Reformed church. Fortunately they seem to have left the building pretty much alone.

Then in 1810 Napoleon came to visit and received a delegation of citizens who pointed out to him that since most of the townspeople were Catholics, this great edifice was mostly unused and falling into disrepair. Napoleon, who was at that time trying to make nice with the Pope, agreed and transferred the building back to the Catholic church. He also promised the people a bishop, and the Pope dutifully created one. So this huge church finally became a Cathedral, thanks to Napoleon, one of Europe's great unbelievers.

The glory of the building is the sculpture, more than 600 figures. Even the tops of the buttresses are lined with sculptures.

Famous image of the "pea man," a figure from Dutch folklore.

Entrance. And here we start to get into major questions of authenticity. Dutch wikipedia tells us that the cathedral was under restoration "almost continuously" from 1858 to 1985. Among other things the restorers had to completed disassemble this entrance to remove iron locking pins that had rusted and swollen, cracking the stone. No cracks are visible in contemporary images, so I suppose the cracked stones were replaced.

And what about the sculptures? They look so pristine that I wondered if some had been carved in the 19th century.

But it seems that most of them are original designs, at least, and those that were replaced were copies made in Portland stone; the originals are in a nearby museum, should you be curious. I have no problem with this; I have never really understood why we need to leave up gargoyles that have melted under acid rainfall to the point of being unrecognizable.

And I'm glad to know that these reflect late medieval sensibility.

There are actually some new figures on the cathedral as well, but they are obviously different in appearance.

So anyway here is a great marvel of the late Gothic that I never even heard of until this week. How wonderful that there are so many great monuments of the past to discover and explore.

Gregory Manchess, Above the Timberline

Just checked this delightful picture book out of the library. It's an adventure story set in that steampunk world that's half far future, half 1880. The story is nothing special, even deliberately made to be like 1930s pulp fiction.

But the pictures!

 Manchess can paint, and he has a great feel for the necessary details.

Lots of Ice Age fauna, with obligatory half-tame polar bears.

Lovely.

And creepy, too. I've had great fun these past two days sharing this with all my sons.

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