Brunelleschi's Dome

In the late 1200s – before the Black Death, before the Little Ice Age – Europe reached a pinnacle of population and wealth it would not surpass until well into the 1500s. Rich, growing, proud cities competed with each other by building ever larger, ever grander cathedrals. In Florence, the city's elite decided to build a cathedral such as nobody had ever seen before. It would be huge and tall, and it would be surmounted by the largest dome ever constructed.

(To put yourself in the mood for the rest of this post, consider putting on Nuper rosarum flores, a vocal work by Guillaume Dufay that was performed at the consecration of the cathedral in 1436.)

The Florentines actually began constructing their new cathedral three times, each time abandoning the old design as too small and paltry and beginning anew. The thing is, and this was true all across Europe, the ambitions of these builders were outrunning their technical knowhow. Many grand edifices simply collapsed; by one estimate half of the new cathedrals built in that period suffered at least one catastrophic failure during construction. In some of these, fortunes were lost and dozens of men killed. Lesser failures bringing down one arch or one section of wall were routine. You have to remember that nobody could calculate whether a design would stand up until after Newton's time, so these builders were all relying on some combination of experience and guesswork. As the new cathedrals grew larger than anything the people involved had designed or worked on before, guesswork predominated.

The design for Florence's cathedral was finalized in 1294; the main architect was a man named Arnolfo di Cambio. The painting above, completed before construction of the actual dome had even begun, shows how it was imagined. Di Cambio was an Italian patriot who disliked the messy spikiness of Northern Gothic. He therefore banned flying buttresses, which carry much of the weight of northern cathedrals. He specified that the lateral forces generated by his great dome, doing their best to force the walls outward, would be contained by stone and iron chains built into the masonry. This technique had been used successfully on smaller domes, but nobody had tried it on a dome anywhere near as big as the one he envisaged. Di Cambio also specified that this would be a double dome, the lower dome a hemisphere and the outer dome taller, so as to present a more pleasing profile.

But then the weather turned cold, the plague came, the population fell, trade was interrupted, etc. So it was after 1400 before the cathedral had been built up to the point, 180 feet above the ground, where construction of the dome would begin. Gazing across the opening that the dome had to span, 143 feet 6 inches across (44 m), Florence's leaders began to worry. No such dome had been built since the days of ancient Rome, so it was not at all clear how this would be done. People began to say that instead of a great triumph the cathedral would become one of Italy's great jokes, and Florence would be known as the city with the huge hole in their cathedral's roof. In 1420 the Republic held a public competition and invited architects and builders to submit their plans for building the dome.

All of the entrants but one proposed to build the dome by first erecting a vast wooden frame on top of which the dome would grow; this, the usual method of building domes and arches, was called "centering." But the Florence dome would be so big that to build such wooden centering would be hugely expensive. Hundreds of massive trees would be required, and in a crowded Italy such trees were rare and costly; the wood to build the centering would have cost more than all the other materials of the dome, and the city simply did not have the money. Only one man said that he could build the dome without centering: a Florentine goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi was not an architect and had never built anything. In the best Renaissance style he claimed that years spent in Rome and elsewhere studying Roman building techniques gave him special knowledge of such matters. Asked to describe how he would build the dome, he refused, saying his methods were secret; give me the job, he said, and you will see. 

I am tempted to try this the next time I bid on a big project; "my methods are secret, but hire me and you will see what a genius I am."

And they hired him. But they forced him to work as part of a committee of three with two other, more experienced architects, and they declined to pay him the announced prize of 200 gold florins until he showed that his method could work. No doubt Brunelleschi was miffed, but he had the job and set about doing it. And he finished in in 16 years, nothing short of astonishing for medieval construction. His first task was to create a new method of lifting materials to the cathedral roof, since an old-fashioned hamster-cage crane would have added years to the project. His ox hoist, as it was known, is now one of the most famous mechanical contrivances of the Renaissance. It had the first known reverse gear, allowing the oxen to walk all day in the same direction whether loads were going up or down; it also had what we would call a three-speed transmission, so heavy loads would rise more slowly, putting less strain on the beasts and the device. 

Among those who were fascinated by the design was Leonardo da Vinci, who did this drawing; imagine how furious Brunelleschi would have been to learn that some future historians thought this was Leonardo's own creation. Anyway Brunelleschi's machine worked wonderfully and needed no major repairs across the whole 16-year process of building the dome.

But the hoist just got the material up and down. To ease the heavy stone beams that made up the chains into the exact position Brunelleschi built another crane, called the Castello, and this became another famous Renaissance marvel. In this case the only surviving drawing is the small one by Leonardo, who seems to have been the only later witness to understand how the thing actually worked. All modern reconstructions are based on that one sketch.

So how, exactly, did Brunelleschi build the great dome – still the largest masonry dome ever constructed – without wooden centering? What kept the bricks from falling as the structure was built? Well, that is an excellent question, and people have been arguing about it for centuries. In keeping with his manic secrecy, Brunelleschi left no plans or drawings. The only surviving drawing of the dome under construction was made by an enemy who was trying to discredit Brunelleschi by showing that his methods could never work; some historians think he was mostly right in describing the process, and some think he was mostly wrong, but nobody thinks he was entirely right since, after all, he said the thing was bound to collapse long before it was finished. The one thing everyone agrees on is that Brunelleschi's use of the brick pattern called in Italian Spina Pesce, and in English herringbone, was part of the secret. The picture above shows what this looks like on the 1/5 scale model Italian scholar Massimo Ricci has been building in a Florentine park. The idea is that the spiraling sections of vertical brick broke up the shear planes along which the brickwork might have failed. Also, if the vertical bricks went in first, as Ricci thinks they must have, then the horizontal bricks would have been wedged between them, keeping the bricks from falling.

There is an interesting Nova episode (available on YouTube) about the dome that focuses on Ricci's work, with cameos by some American bricklayers who talk just like guys from New Jersey but obviously know a lot about masonry, and you can see in detail how he imagines the process. But searching around I have not found a single other scholar who agrees with Ricci's approach, so it remains just one theory.

An archaeological discovery made in 2012 sheds a little light. This is a small dome, found under a Florentine parking deck a block from the cathedral, apparently built at about the same time as the large one. You can see that it uses the same herringbone brick pattern. The best guess is that this was a demonstration project, made by Brunelleschi to convince his employers, and perhaps also his masons, that his method would work.

But somehow Brunelleschi did it. Was he some sort of visionary genius who intuitively understood the forces involved? Or was he just lucky?

Seeing this, does it matter?

Links 13 August 2021

Flora, tapestry by Edward Burne Jones and William Morris

Five parrots separated at UK zoo after encouraging each other to swear at guests.

Rails to trails: the US now has more than 24,000 miles of bike and walking rails along old rail road lines. (Washington Post) And the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's Hall of Fame, showcasing the best trails.

Diving gods, who are shown in Maya art plunging from the sky, and the famous Maya blue paint on the vessels that depict them.

In California, the politics of homelessness are changing: after saying the only solution was more subsidized housing Governor Newsome has now come out strongly in support of removing homeless camps from sidewalks and other public land. Signs are that voters in California are fed up, and politicians are responding. I have an acquaintance who lives in San Francisco and I think he would vote for Lenin if that meant the homeless people were cleared off his block. 

The spiritual outpouring that flooded West Germany in 1945-1949: a review of A Demon Haunted Land by Monica Black.

Street murals inspired by iridescent pigeon feathers.

Another in a continuing series: environmentalists against solar arrays, this time in Texas. These folks may have a point, but then there is almost always a reason not to build a solar array or wind farm in any particular location.

In the realm of illiberal anti-racism gone amok, consider the case of Maud Maron, a career New York public defender, public school parent, and pro-integration liberal fired from her job at the Legal Aid Society for defending New York's system of elite high schools.

Key handle from Roman Britain depicts a lion devouring a barbarian, likely a criminal being executed ad bestias. 

And more from the messed-up world of Young Adult book Twitter, where a book judged by mainstream critics to be heavy-handed preaching of tolerance has been attacked as racist and harmful to People of Color, near as I can tell because it depicts racist characters saying racist things. Which is one of the reasons why my imagined, magical realism novel about 18th-century America will never be written.

Excavations at a Roman bath site in Tuscany that was also a religious sanctuary.

According to this study, people who say they "trust science" are more likely to believe and pass on pseudoscientific claims.

Charles H. Loeb and the role of the black press in exposing the radiation damage from the bombs dropped on Japan (NY Times). According to this article, black newspapers rejected the government's claim that radiation damage was small (based on readings from fallout downwind, not the initial gamma burst) and insisted anti-Japanese racism played a part in justifying the use of the bomb.

Today's thing that has become problematic: the grocery store ethnic food aisle. (NY Times)

Interesting 90-minute documentary about the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and their conflict with censors that eventually led to the show being cancelled.

The resident pedant wishes to point out that the use of "Pythagorean Triples" in Babylonian land surveying – groups of numbers like, 3, 4, 5 and 5, 12, 13 that give you right triangles – is not the same as having a general Pythagorean Theorem. You can absolutely use equations that seem to work without being able to derive them from first principles or prove that they are generally true – even modern physicists do this – so just using the formulae doesn't mean you understand the rule. Which means that this article is not exactly right, and the tablet they discuss is not a "Babylonian Pythagorean Theorem."

Do polar bears sometimes attack walruses by throwing rocks at them from above? Maybe.

After a decade of protests, lawsuits, denials, etc. Newark, New Jersey has now replaced all of its lead water pipes. The cost was $120 million in a city of 274,000. The new federal infrastructure plan has $15 billion for lead abatement but cities and states are going to have to come up with at least as much to finish the job. (NY Times)

The young man who killed a Pentagon police officer, then himself, had been menacingly stalking his neighbors, had had numerous run-ins with the police, and was obviously crazy, but he never got any real mental health care. He was supposed to be on his way to a psychiatric evaluation when he launched his final rampage.

Tyler Cowen interviews Andrew Sullivan.

The Cantopop band Mirror has swept Hong Kong, spawning  adulation, a Facebook group called "My Wife Married Mirror and Ruined my Marriage," and, some say, the first mass joy the city has seen in years. Which gives me an excuse to post a playlist of Asian boy band pop. As a service, I mean; I assume many of you do not have Asian daughters who could introduce you to this stuff, so let me point you to a sample: Mirror, "Warrior"; "My Dear Friend," BTS, "Fire"; "Idol;" EXO, "Overdose,"  "Growl." And here's your introduction to a whole genre of videos called "Dance Practice," some of which have millions of views. I don't love this music but I am sucker for performers who really crank out the energy, and these guys do.

Paul Chaat Smith, "Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong"

Paul Chaat Smith is a curator at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; I wrote last year about an exhibit he curated on commercial images of Native Americans. I thought his take on that topic was fascinating, so when I saw this 2009 book on my sister's shelf I snatched it up and took it home with me.

Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong consists mostly of individual essays, talks, and exhibition reviews written or given between 1992 and 2007. But it has a consistent theme, which is the wrenching confusions of being an Indian in the modern world. (Chaat Smith almost always uses "Indian," especially when he is speaking rather than writing.) The book starts with a little essay about Indians and the camera, in which he says that Indians love being photographed as much as the rest of the world loves pictures of them. The notion that taking pictures of Indians like Sitting Bull was stealing something from them, he finds ridiculous; Sitting Bull loved being famous, loved being able to sell his autograph for spending money, happily dressed up in his old battle gear for anyone who would pay him to pose. And when movies came along, Indians loved them, too. Chaat Smith mentions that in 1991, when "Dances with Wolves" was up for the Best Picture Oscar, one of the networks got an elementary school full of reservation children together for a watch party so they could film the kids' ecstatic reaction when the film won.

But the impact of movies might be even deeper than that. Down into the late 1800s, Chaat Smith says, people didn't think of themselves as Indians. They thought of themselves as Lakota or Navajo or Seneca. So how did they learn what it meant to be an Indian? He says, from the movies. He points out that one of the first commercial films ever made, by Edison himself, was called "The Sioux Ghost Dance," and that this was followed by a steady stream of westerns that ran strong down into the 1980s. So when the American Indian Movement emerged and swept up Indians from all across America into one cause, what did they have in common? Movies. 

The idea is typical of Chaat Smith: an arresting juxtaposition of Native and Euro-American culture, leading to a fascinating idea that might not be exactly true.

Chaat Smith has a lot to say about romantic depictions of Indians as deeply spiritual and noble guardians of the land. Mostly he despises it, calls out its fakeness. He complains that it roots Indians in the past and ignores the contemporary reality of their lives. He points out that some of the most famous books and speeches about romantic Indians were actually by white people. But then he points out that those fake, written-by-white-people books about noble, spiritual Indians guarding the land are best-sellers among Indians, read by far more people than books by serious Native intellectuals. Nobody falls for this myth more than Indians themselves.

It is when complaining about this romantic nonsense that Smith says something that struck me as doubly important:

The ultimate result — the continued trivialization and appropriation of Indian culture, the absolute refusal to deal with us as just plain folks living in the present and not the past—is the same as ever.

But, really, Chaat Smith does not think Indians are "just plain folks." He wants being an Indian to be central to his own identity, and he wants the rest of the world to recognize the unique vision of Indians and grant them an important place in world culture. He exists between two poles: on the one hand the noble Red Man of Chief Seattle's Speech or Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, on the other disappearing into just plain folks society in our big cities and suburbs. Neither fits, neither makes for a sensible, fulfilling life.

The ambivalence shows in Chaat Smith's writing about art. He loves Native artists who have wrestled with questions of identity and objectification, who turn their relationship to history and the land into something memorable or even shocking. But his standards of art are very modern; he heaps praise on artists who have made it into the Venice Biennale, which so far as I am concerned is where art goes to die and be reborn as money. He wants art to spring from the Native American experience, but he wants it to be recognized in New York and Basel.

But it is all consistently interesting, with surprising revelations in every piece. In Chaat Smith's hands the Indian's tortured relationship with history and contemporary civilization makes for a steady stream of insights that often apply just ask much to the rest of humanity, and I highly recommend this book.

The most personal essay comes near the end. It starts,

If you are Indian and live in the city you basically are screwed. This is because a large flashing neon asterisk floats above your head, which turns into a question mark, before again becoming an asterisk. You are in the wrong place and you know it.

Chaat Smith's mother is a full-flooded Comanche. His father is a member of the Choctaw nation but 7/8 white, and he chose to become a professor and live in suburban Washington, DC. Growing up in the suburbs, Chaat Smith thought he lived in hell itself. Not only was he torn away from the native world where he ought to have grown up, he traded that birthright, not for excitement and riches, but for a bland middle class existence in Prince Georges County.

I felt persecuted by history, tortured by fate. I wanted it all to be one thing or the other. I hated being half-white and half-Indian. . . . The truth is that I longed to be a stereotype. Mainly I wanted to be the full-blooded Comanche, secure in his own Comancheness, raised on the stories of his people. (Somehow the full-blooded Comanches whom I had known my whole life, who had never moved away from southwest Oklahoma, who almost always married other Comanches, would not suffice. They were Christians and not traditional enough. I think over the next rise I imagined more suitable Comanches.)

Ambivalence runs rampant in his feelings:

I believe blood quantum is a bunch of racist nonsense, but I also bitterly resent individuals who discover they are Indian as adults and then become Indian experts or Indian artist or writers or whatever. Saying you are Indian or not sounds good, but it also makes people choose one ancestry over another. I don't see urban Indians as second-class citizens, or reserve Indians as the epitome of all that is truly red, but if the land question is not central to our struggle and the reason for our continued survival, then I don't know what is. I despise the whole concept of tribal certification, but I have to admit I felt all warm inside when I picked up my own Comanche ID card.

At the end, the same words show up again: "Heck, we're just plain folks." In a sense, that is true. But Paul Chaat Smith seems to me like something much more than just a plain person.

The Tabor Opera House

The Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado was built in 100 days in 1879 by a certain Horace Tabor, who passed himself off as a wealthy silver magnate. For a while it was a standard stop for artists on coast to coast tours, including Buffalo Bill, Oscar Wilde and Harry Houdini (who is said to have installed the trap door still present in the center of the stage). Tabor, it turned out, was just riding a local silver bubble, and when it crashed in 1894 he was bankrupt. The opera was taken over by the local Elks Lodge and slowly declined.

It is now being renovated with help from the National Trust. During the renovation, more than 100 pieces of historic scenery were discovered, dating back as far as 1883. The collection is now being cleaned and investigated.

One of the interesting things about such an operation from our perspective is that the division between "classical" music and popular music wasn't very well formed, so a place like this might host things we think of as opera (Puccini, Verdi, etc.) and also Vaudeville shows. Puccini and Verdi were after all once very popular composers with mass audiences. So theaters like this hosted a crazy variety of performances. And therefore needed a lot of scenery.

Wonderful, the thing lying around in old attics.

Meanwhile at the Faculty Ethics Committee

Ahem:

One math lesson Prof. Edward C. Ennels taught at Baltimore City Community College was, according to prosecutors, pretty simple: $150 for a C; $250 for a B; and $500 for an A.

And in some courses, an A could go for as little as $300.

Over the course of seven months last year, Mr. Ennels, 45, solicited bribes from 112 students, and received 10 payments from nine students, totaling $2,815, the Maryland attorney general, Brian E. Frosh, said in a statement on Thursday.

In another scheme, Mr. Ennels sold online access codes that enabled students to view instructional material and complete assignments, prosecutors said. From 2013 to 2020, he sold 694 access codes for about $90 each.

Awesome. But this is my favorite part:

Mr. Ennels, a professor at the college for 15 years who served on the faculty senate’s Ethics and Institutional Integrity Committee, pleaded guilty on Thursday in Baltimore County Circuit Court to 11 misdemeanor charges, including bribery and misconduct in office, according to prosecutors and online court records.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison with all but one year of the term suspended and to be served in a local jail. He was also ordered to pay $60,000 in restitution and will be on probation for five years upon his release.

Just the man for the average ethics committee. It's a wonder they didn't make him chair.

Château de Val, Lanobre

Château de Val sits on the edge of a small lake in the town of Bort-les-Orgues in south-central France. Construction began in 1397 and was mostly completed by 1440.

The interior was entirely redone in the 1500s.

Quite a place.

Links 6 August 2021

Stone sculpture, 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall, recently discovered 

in Kazakhstan near the Syr Darya river, 

dated on the basis of style to c. 700 AD.

Learning about the Timucua Indians from a Spanish confessor's manual. (For example, "Did you order that incantations should be recited over the lake before fishing in it?")

Artists around the world have submitted 55,000 sketchbooks to the Sketchbook Project, and you can peruse many of them online. Just find the "random book" button.

The NY Times lists the 25 most significant works of architecture since World War II. A few are ok, but mostly, ugh.

Nigerian megachurches: the biggest can accommodate a million worshipers, and some are building their own cities.

Huge, zoomable image of the wonderful Tiffany stained glass window at the Art Institute of Chicago.

One of Rome's boundary stones, which marked out the sacred border of the city, has turned up in sewer work. Other stones are known but this is the first to be found in over a century.

Four of the DC police officers who responded to the Capitol riot on January 6 have now died by suicide, the last two within hours of each other. One of the weird things about this is that so many cops commit suicide anyway that nobody seems to know if this is even unusual.

Interesting essay on Francois Poulain (1647-1723) and modern feminism.

Hyperloop's thoughts on trains, tunneling, and their demonstration project in Las Vegas.

Researchers in many academic fields (particle physics, analytic philosophy, economic theory, etc.) feel like they are at dead ends. Is this a result of real limits in what we can learn about the world, or of the strange ways we organize academia?

In a remote, mountainous part of southern Australia, several hikers have disappeared, and people talk about a mysterious Button Man who hangs out in the woods all summer, making buttons from deer antlers. (NY Times)

The Washington Post publishes a strange article titled "Five Myths about the Haitian Revolution," none of which is entirely false, and a couple of which are entirely true.

After mistaking him for someone else, police in Hawaii arrested a homeless man and committed him to a mental hospital where his protestations of innocence were called "delusional" and he was dosed with anti-psychotic drugs for more than two years. It's the kind of thing that makes homeless people paranoid and unwilling to accept many kinds of help even when offered.

Democratic moderates have won four contested primaries in a row over more progressive candidates, and are in chest-thumping mode. (NY Times, NBC News)

At the Met, a splendid exhibit on the art of Medici Florence. All 34 beautiful objects here, splashy slideshow explaining the symbolism and politics in terms of social media here.

After Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society distributed more than 5,000 kits to build small homes know as Shelter Cottages for emergency housing. A few survive, although nobody known how many.

In India, trying to preserve a beloved cricket stadium. We've seen movements like this in several American cities, but they have always failed, because the teams say they need "modern" stadiums to remain competitive. No idea what the dynamic will be in India.

NY Times review of the new book by Lake Country shepherd James Rebanks (my review of his memoir here). The new book is about sustainable farming and says it will only happen if people become willing to spend a lot more on food. (And a Time piece by Rebanks arguing this himself.)

V.S. Naipaul on the Western Idea of the Writer

V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018) was many things, including a sometimes obnoxious crank. He came from an Indian family in Trinidad and migrated from there to London, where he became one of the English-speaking world's most celebrated writers. From his post as an outsider/insider he poured scorn on a numerous enemies, from British snobbery to feminine hysteria to Islam. In 1990 he was invited by the Manhattan Institute to give a talk on political matters. Most particularly they wanted to hear his thoughts on the world's different value systems, and whether they could be politically accommodated in any common global order. His talk covered a lot of ground and I found it all interesting, but here I will focus on one part: the vast, contentious discourse about authorship. We inherited a great body of European literature, and puzzle over whether it is tainted by bad values. People who think it is want us to read authors from different cultures, who will have different perspectives. Naipaul is having none of that. For him, our way of writing, our whole notion of what it means to be a writer, is absolutely embedded in a civilization that came from Europe but is becoming, as he termed it, the Universal Civilization:

I am not going to attempt to define this civilization. I will only speak of it in a personal way. It is the civilization, first of all, that gave me the idea of the writing vocation. It is the civilization in which I have been able to practice my vocation as a writer. To be a writer, you need to start with a certain kind of sensibility. The sensibility itself is created, or given direction, by an intellectual atmosphere.

Sometimes an atmosphere can be too refined, a civilization too achieved, too ritualized. Eleven years ago, when I was traveling in Java, I met a young man who wanted above everything else to be a poet and to live the life of the mind. This ambition had been given him by his modern education; but it was hard for the young man to explain to his mother exactly what he was up to. This mother was a person of culture and elegance; that should be stressed. She was elegant in visage and dress and speech; her manners were like art; they were Javanese court manners. 

So I asked the young man—bearing in mind that we were in Java, where ancient epics live on in the popular art of puppet plays, “But isn’t your mother secretly proud that you are a poet?” He said in English—I mention this to give a further measure of his education in his far-off Javanese town, “She wouldn’t have even a sense of what being a poet is.”  . . .

I understood the predicament of the young man in central Java. His background, after all, was not far removed from the Hindu aspect of my own Trinidad background. We were an agricultural immigrant community from India. The ambition to become a writer, the introduction to writing and ideas about writing, had been given me by my father. He was born in 1906, the grandson of someone who had come to Trinidad as a baby. And somehow, in spite of all the discouragements of the society of that small agricultural colony, the wish to be a writer had come to my father; and he had made himself into a journalist, even with the limited opportunities for journalism existing in that colony.

We were a people of ritual and sacred texts. We also had our epics—and they were the very epics of Java; we heard them constantly sung or chanted. But it couldn’t be said that we were a literary people. Our literature, our texts, didn’t commit us to an exploration of our world; rather, they were cultural markers, giving us a sense of the wholeness of our world and the alienness of what lay outside. I don’t believe that, in his family, anyone before my father would have thought of original literary composition. That idea came to my father in Trinidad with the English language; somehow, in spite of the colonial discouragements of the place, an idea of the high civilization connected with the language came to my father; and he was given some knowledge of literary forms. Sensibility is not enough if you are going to be a writer. You need to arrive at the forms that can contain or carry your sensibility; and literary forms—whether in poetry or drama, or prose fiction—are artificial, and ever changing.

This was a part of what was passed on to me at a very early age. At a very early age—in all the poverty and bareness of Trinidad, far away, with a population of half a million—I was given the ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which my father had presented to me as the highest form. But books are not created just in the mind. Books are physical objects. To write them, you need a certain kind of sensibility; you need a language, and a certain gift of language; and you need to possess a particular literary form. To get your name on the spine of the created physical object, you need a vast apparatus outside yourself. You need publishers, editors, designers, printers, binder; booksellers, critics, newspapers and magazines and television where the critics can say what they think of the book; and, of course, buyers and readers.

I want to stress this mundane side of things, because it is easy to take it for granted; it is easy to think of writing only in its personal, romantic aspect. Writing is a private act; but the published book, when it starts to live, speaks of the cooperation of a particular kind of society. The society has a certain degree of commercial organization. It also has certain cultural or imaginative needs. It doesn’t believe that all poetry has already been written. It needs new stimuli, new writing; and it has the means of judging the new things that are offered.

This kind of society didn’t exist in Trinidad. It was necessary, therefore, if I was going to be a writer, and live by my books, to travel out to that kind of society where the writing life was possible. This meant, for me at that time, going to England. I was traveling from the periphery, the margin, to what to me was the center; and it was my hope that, at the center, room would be made for me. I was asking a lot—asking, in fact, more of the center than of my own society. The center, after all, had its own interests, its own worldview, its own ideas of what it wanted in novels. And it still does. My subjects were far-off: but a little room was made for me in the England of the 1950s. I was able to become a writer, and to grow in the profession. It took time; I was forty—and had been publishing in England for fifteen years—before a book of mine was seriously published in the United States.

You will understand, then, how important it was to me to know when I was young that I could make this journey from the margin to the center, from Trinidad to London. The ambition to be a writer assumed that this was possible. So, in fact, I was taking it for granted, in spite of my ancestry and Trinidad background, that with another, equally important part of myself, I was part of a larger civilization.

In a famous book, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described his attempt to journey so far into the Amazon that he would encounter people untainted by western civilization. He was in search of something purely other, completely alien to western ways. But the people he met at first were all experienced intermediaries, guides who spoke Portuguese and wanted payment in cash, whose notions of their old cultures Lévi-Strauss therefore found suspect. And then when he finally did meet a man who seemed to be the genuine article, a real Native, they were completely unable to communicate. Nobody knew his language, so Lévi-Strauss was unable to find out anything about him.

And this is how I, and I believe Naipaul as well, think about non-western novelists. Obviously writers from Nigeria or Thailand have had different experiences than Europeans or Americans, so their books will not be exactly the same. But the novel is a western creation, and to write one is to take on, in a very deep way, western notions of art, society, character, and storytelling. You cannot learn this peculiar language without taking on its perspective, indeed its morality.  Books by people Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth are set in India, but so far as I could tell they might as well have been written by well-informed Europeans. The sensibility of their books is not just English but Victorian, obviously the product of a long acquaintance with Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray. 

Once you have learned to be a novelist, you no longer reside entirely in another culture, and you by definition see it differently than a true native does. The same I think is true of memoirs, perhaps even more so.

So, sure, read novels or memoirs from around the world. They will be different, because their authors have lived different lives, and you can learn much from them. And while you're at it read novels by men and women, by people born to wealth and poverty, by engineers and civil servants and drug addicts and explorers. But never imagine that you are really stepping outside your own world; you are still communicating in a language you have long known, and hearing stories and meeting characters you have encountered many times before.

A Trip to the Movies in Switzerland, c. 1912

This is from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), which I listened to for hours and hours on my latest set of long drives. The setting is a resort town in the Swiss Alps, circa 1912, based on a stay Mann made in Davos in that year. 

Life flitted across the screen before their smarting eyes: life chopped into small sections, fleeting, accelerated; a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing, performed to a thin accompaniment of music, which set its actual tempo to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means at its command, yet managed to evoke a whole gamut of pomp and solemnity, passion, abandon, and gurgling sensuality. It was a thrilling drama of love and death they saw silently reeled off; the scenes, laid at the court of an oriental despot, galloped past, full of gorgeousness and naked bodies, thirst of power and raving religious self-abnegation; full of cruelty, appetite, and deathly lust, and slowing down to give a full view of the muscular development of the executioner’s arms. Constructed, in short, to cater to the innermost desires of an onlooking international civilization.  . . .

The despot died beneath the knife, with a soundless shriek. Then came scenes from all parts of the world: the President of the French Republic, in top-hat and cordon, sitting in a landau and replying to a speech of welcome; the Viceroy of India, at the wedding of a rajah; the German Crown Prince in the courtyard of a Potsdam garrison. There was a picture of life in a New Mecklenburg village; a cock-fight in Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose-horns, a wild elephant hunt, a ceremony at the court of the King of Siam, a courtesans’ street in Japan, with geishas sitting behind wooden lattices; Samoveds bundled in furs, driving sledges drawn by reindeer through the snowy wastes of Siberia, Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron; a Persian criminal under the knout. They were present at all these scenes; space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here. A young Moroccan woman, in a costume of striped silk, with trappings in the shape of chains, bracelets, and rings, her swelling breasts half bared, was suddenly brought so close to the camera as to be life-sized; one could see the dilated nostrils, the eyes full of animal life, the features in play as she showed her white teeth in a laugh, and held one of her hands, with its blanched nails, for a shade to her eyes, while with the other she waved to the audience, who stared, taken aback, into the face of the charming apparition. It seemed to see and saw not, it was not moved by the glances bent upon it, its smile and nod were not of the present but of the past, so that the impulse to respond was baffled, and lost in a feeling of impotence. Then the phantom vanished. The screen glared white and empty, with the one word Finis written across it. The entertainment was over, in silence the theatre was emptied, a new audience took the place of that going out, and before their eager eyes the cycle would presently unroll itself again. 

This scene reminds me again of how middle class Europeans had in that era access to more knowledge and images of the world than anyone had ever had before. This, to me, was Europe's real gain from the imperial era, not money (it cost more to administer colonies than they ever paid in taxes) but knowledge. I am reminded of something from my own childhood, the Travelogue, in which a speaker who had visited some exotic land regaled his audience with stories while showing films or slides of gorgeous scenery and exotic customs. I, full of unbounded curiosity, loved them. And of course there was National Geographic and many similar publications.

The west gathered the knowledge of the whole world to itself, and feasted on it.

RIP Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso is my favorite philosopher, the one who asked most compellingly two questions I care deeply about: what is our relationship to the universe? and, how did our society get to be the way it is? Two of my reviews of his books are here and here. Calasso spent a lot of time wondering how a modern person without religious faith should feel about who and what we are, and what ancient myths might tell us about our contemporary predicament.

I'm about to get on the road for another journey, so in lieu of writing my own obituary let me pass on part of the one in the Times:

Much of Mr. Calasso’s writing stemmed from his lifelong preoccupation with ancient myths and their meaning, and with uncovering the common allegories and narrative threads across cultures, eras and civilizations. Fluent in five modern languages and proficient in three ancient ones, including Sanskrit, which he taught himself, Mr. Calasso was fascinated by the question of how humans create meaning through shared stories. . . .

He was perhaps best known for his vivid and poetic writing on Greek mythology in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993), which braided together ancient myths into a novelistic, genre defying work of literature, philosophy, psychology and history. It found a wide international readership and was praised by Gore Vidal as “a perfect work like no other” in reimagining “the morning of our world.”

Mr. Calasso later published “Ka,” an exuberant exploration of Indian religion and philosophy, which The New York Review of Books praised for its “ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis.” . . .

“Calasso carved out a new space as an intellectual, retelling myth as true, certainly as true as science,” Tim Parks, who worked with Mr. Calasso on the English translation of “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” said in an interview. “His implication is always that we are as subject as our ancestors were to the forces that find their names in Zeus or Venus or Yahweh or Shiva.”

In a 2012 interview with The Paris Review, Mr. Calasso spoke about humanity’s search for transcendence, be it through art, nature or religion, as his central intellectual pursuit. “All of my books have to do with possession,” he said. “Ebbrezza — rapture — is a word connected with possession. In Greek the word is mania, madness. For Plato it was the main path to knowledge.”

Of course Calasso never experienced rapture himself, and was never himself certain that it was any kind of path to knowledge, so his writing was always tinged, and sometimes haunted, by melancholy.

Links 30 July 2021

Rebecca Belmore, Madonna, 2017

The archaeology of Istanbul's basements.

In Sidney, Australia, sulfur-crested cockatoos have learned to open trash bins. The behavior was invented at least twice, but has mainly spread by imitation, one bird to the next. (NY Times story, original article)

Tyler Cowen interviews Niall Ferguson about the history and future of Britain.

You may recall that a year ago the archaeological press was all agog over the "discovery" of massive pictograph panels in the Colombian Amazon that were said to be 12,000 years old and to depict extinct animals. Well, they're not a new discovery, they're not 12,000 years old and they don't depict any extinct animals. But they are very cool.

The plan to build America's largest solar plant, north of Las Vegas, is abandoned after opposition. We are going to run out of places to put solar panels long before we achieve carbon-free power by that route.

Rebecca Belmore, a First Nations artist from Canada, was one of the first Native Americans to be featured at the Venice Biennale. After perusing the images on her web site, my impression is that she absolutely belongs at the Biennale with all the other celebrity creators of avant garde "installations," "performances," and "events." However much her stuff grapples with identity and tragedy, most of it leaves me completely cold. One exception is at the top of this post.

The 1976 Chowchilla Kidnapping, a truly bizarre California event (long story with literary pretentions at Vox, wikipedia)

An American dies of bubonic plague, in southwestern Colorado.

A disturbing racist incident among high school kids in a mostly white Michigan town leads to a tense debate over "Critical Race Theory" and the question of whether talking about race increases or decreases racism. Many parents say their kids never thought about race until the school system forced them to. I don't believe that, but on the other hand the liberal side keeps recommending more sensitivity training and I absolutely believe that makes things worse. (Washington Post)

The Ethicist at the NY Times suggests that you should not fire your dog walker for being an angry Trumper online.

Ben Pentreath documents June in Dorset, many wonderful photos.

A look at the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite group of 300 warriors made up of male couples who had sworn a vow together. Interesting but unfortunately little is known about them beyond their bare existence, so most of the questions a modern has about them are unanswerable.

Remember the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer? It now turns out that half the people involved were FBI agents or informants, including the second in command. The defense being offered by the militiamen in jail is that the idea for the plot came from the FBI guys, who set everyone else up, and that most of them never had any intention of actually kidnapping anyone. If true, does that make this a brilliant operation to smoke out potential domestic terrorists or cruel government overreach?

In the 30 states that accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare from the beginning, medical debt has declined by 44%.

The strange world of beekeeping in New York City. (NY Times)

Is our civilization getting more depressed? Or, given that this study is based on books, is it just the people who write books who are more miserable?

Images that compare giant extinct animals with their modern relatives.

Mariko Kusumoto's fabric sea creatures.

Adolescent loneliness is increasing worldwide.

Slow, sad songs: Leon Bridges, River;  Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah; Katey Segal, Bird on a Wire; Gregory Alan Isakov, The Trapeze Swinger; Tyler Childers, Hard Times.

Martin Shkreli, the Wu Tang Clan, and NFTs

You may remember that when he was riding high, "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli bought a unique album by the Wu Tang Clan for $2 million. When he was convicted of securities fraud the Feds seized it, among with a lot of other property, and they just sold it for an undisclosed sum:

Earlier today, the United States sold the sole copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” (the “Album”) which had previously been ordered to be forfeited as a substitute asset in connection with the approximately $7.4 million forfeiture money judgment (Forfeiture Money Judgment) entered against Shkreli at his March 2018 sentencing. Proceeds from the sale of the Album will be applied to satisfy the outstanding balance owed on the Forfeiture Money Judgment. The contract of sale contains a confidentiality provision that protects information relating to the buyer and price. …

At the time Shkreli purchased the Album in 2015, it was marketed as “both a work of art and an audio artifact.” The Album includes a hand-carved nickel-silver box as well as a leather-bound manuscript containing lyrics and a certificate of authenticity. The Album is subject to various restrictions, including those relating to the duplication of its sound recordings. In September 2017, just weeks after his conviction but before the district court-imposed forfeiture, Shkreli attempted to sell the Album through an on-line auction. 

Matt Levine thinks the Feds showed a real lack of imagination here:

Ehh I guess? I mean, fine, it’s a box and a book and an associated set of contractual provisions. I suppose if you are buying the thing you have to figure out whether you succeed to Shkreli’s contractual rights to prevent Wu-Tang from releasing more copies of the album; it’d be funny if someone paid the government a lot of money for this one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album and then Wu-Tang just put it on Spotify. You’d still have the certificate of authenticity, though; no one else has that. Unless they type up their own. You’d have the only authentic certificate of authenticity.

Obviously the thing that Martin Shkreli bought from the Wu-Tang Clan was a non-fungible token? It was a non-fungible token rendered in paper and leather and nickel and silver rather than immutable blockchain code, but still. And then the government seized it and re-sold it, which is a thing it can do, but you can certainly imagine a more interesting deal? What if the government had securitized Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang album? Or what if it had sold a limited edition of 1,000 non-fungible tokens, each recorded on the blockchain, each accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Brooklyn, each representing “hey I bought an NFT of the time the U.S. government seized Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang album”? What if the government had held a press conference and said “crime does not pay, and we will destroy everything associated with this crime,” and then burned the Wu-Tang album on camera and then sold an NFT of that? What if I sold this section of this column as an NFT? What if someone filmed Martin Shkreli reading this paragraph and sold that as an NFT?

Do you remember when NFTs were a big deal? It was only like a couple of months ago.

The Pessimism of the Aging Founders

Jamelle Bouie has a long review by in the Times of Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis Rasmussen. Rasmussen's book documents how pessimistic America's founders came to be as they got older. Washington, as many Americans know, was upset about the rise of parties and the partisan spirit, and once commented that if the Democratic faction were to "set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty," it would get all their votes. "Character," he wrote, "counts for nothing."

Hamilton feared that the national government was too weak to hold the country together or defend its interests against foreign powers. He also despaired over America's anemic economic growth and slow industrialization and the failure of state governments to promote banking, industry and trade.

John Adams took the opposite tack and thought Americans were being ruined by peace and prosperity:

If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe.

Jefferson turned his rhetorical talents to doom-mongering and became pessimism's poet. He despaired about everything: the rise of industry, the decline of yeoman farmers, the tendency of all power to turn tyrannous, the impossibility of resolving the slavery question. The fight over the Missouri Compromise in 1820 inspired pages of despairing letters to friends and old allies: 

I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76. to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.

Jefferson could see perfectly well that if America was going to fight over slavery the existing governmental arrangements were not adequate to resolve the conflict, so the nation was headed for dissolution.

It is an important lesson in two opposite senses. In the first sense, it shows that all eras have problems that seem apocalyptic to people who live through them, but in fact apocalypse is rare. The history of the US before the Civil War has always struck me as rather melancholy: the ongoing conquest and displacement of Indians, staggeringly uneven economic growth, a parade of towns founded but never populated and business started only to fail, repeated recessions and bank failures, high rates of violence, and of course the sad reality of slavery and the looming collision over its fate. But on the other hand, the population boomed, new cities blossomed, and new technologies transformed the land.

So in one sense the period is a lesson of how people can thrive in the midst of perpetual crisis. Even among the enslaved, the population surged and there was much creativity in music and other areas. But in another sense, Jefferson was right, and the inability to end slavery by some sort of gradual manumission doomed millions to needless suffering and the nation to catastrophe.

And this, I think, is a reason to be optimistic about our own time. We have problems aplenty, and doom-mongering in spades. But we do not, I think, have any underlying issue like slavery –so important, so emotional, so economically vital – that is fated to tear us apart.

Fernando Pessoa and the Empty Self

Certain modern psychologists and neuroscientists have concluded that the self is a myth. Experiments show that our hand begins to move before our mind becomes aware of formulating the desire for movement, sometimes when we feel that we have just begun to weigh up the pros and cons and movement. Rather than having a single character that remains unaltered through every vicissitude, we change kaleidoscopically in response to every alteration of circumstance. We have no pure feelings, just salad bowls where every emotion is mixed, and if the fork of the moment chances on hate or love and nothing else, that is of no real import.

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) believed all of this. As microscopic in his self-examination as any artist who ever lived, he found at the deepest level only confusion and emptiness. Pessoa is remembered, by those who remember him at all, as a sort of prophet of modernity, a lonely, alienated soul whose work explored the limits of loneliness and alienation. He also pulled off one of the great feats of posthumous literary self-promotion. There is a new biography of Pessoa, by Richard Zenith, from which a reviewer in the Times extracts this summary of the trick:

He published a few books that went mostly unnoticed, but there were rumors of a trunk in his room stuffed with his true life’s work. After his death in 1935, the trunk was discovered, brimming with notes and jottings on calling cards and envelopes, whatever paper appeared to be handy. They were authored not only by Pessoa but by a flock of his personas (“heteronyms,” he called them): a doctor, a classicist, a bisexual poet, a monk, a lovesick teenage girl. Among his writings was a sheaf of papers that would become his masterpiece: “The Book of Disquiet,” a mock confession in sly, despairing aphorisms and false starts — “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides.”

So most of Pessoa’s work, like much of Emily Dickinson’s, is as much a creation of the editor’s as his own. Zenith, who has translated some of Pessoa's work, says it consists of

a large but uncertain quantity of discrete, mostly undated texts left in no sequential order, such that every published edition — inevitably depending on massive editorial intervention — is necessarily untrue to the nonexistent ‘original.’

And this, you have to think, is exactly what Pessoa wanted. He did not believe that he had a true voice, which expressed an inner self, because after searching for decades for that self he concluded that there was no such thing. 

“I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he wrote. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me.” Or he was “the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.” Or, he wrote in a poem, “merely the place / Where things are thought or felt.” 

In one of his poems he wrote,

We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.

As to where his work came from, if not from himself, he was mystified:

After writing, I read —
What made me write that?
Where have I been to find that?
Where did that come to me from? It is better than me —

He believed everyone else was as complex and ultimately uncentered as he felt himself to be: 

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

Given this, he believed that communication between people was all but impossible. His most famous poem these days seems to be “Your Eyes Go Sad”:

Your eyes go sad. You're not
Listening to what I say.
They doze, dream, fade out.
Not listening. I talk away.

I tell what I've told, out of listless
Sadness, so often before ...
I think you never listened.

Pessoa did not do much in his life. He lived off his inheritance, read, wrote, sometimes hung out with other artists but had no lovers and no close friends. He probably died a virgin. He scorned busy-ness and said in a dozen different ways that thought was always preferable to action. A dilettante, he once wrote, 

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

He also had no teachers, no role models. Obviously he was influenced by books he read and people he knew, but he felt quite alone:

I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul.

Pessoa's poetry has a strange diversity to it. I would probably not know a verse of his if I saw it. This is always an issue with translated writing, but clicking from one Pessoa poem to the next you really have no idea what to expect. Much of it does nothing for me; it is obscure, indirect, and has a sort of random quality. But some is nice:

To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
In the least you ever do.
The moon, because it rides so high,
Is reflected whole in each tiny pool.

The difficulty was deliberate. He once wrote, 

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

I found what I have read this week about Pessoa fascinating because I agree that there is a prophecy in his writing. I see around me millions of people with little in the way of self, and I suspect that if people in the past seemed to have more it was because they lived in narrower cultures with more rigid expectations. Freed to be their true selves, millions of people have looked hard within their minds and found nothing: no desires, no ambitions, no passions. No firm nature, just “fluidity,” one of our age's buzzwords.

Love, for much of the current generation, is not the great pursuit or the great passion, but something impossibly distant and unreal. To be truly known by another seems either impossible, or, if possible, horrifying. I am struck by the persistent modern fantasy of going off alone to a cabin in the woods, where one could avoid the whole messy business of dealing with other humans. Pessoa:

I have no ambitions or wants.
To be a poet is no ambition of mine.
It is a way of staying alone.

Suppose it is true that, for many people, a world with too much freedom leads only to alienation and emptiness? That without strict cultural norms, there is only purposeless fluidity? That without social structures, we can hardly communicate with each other?

I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.

Only I, only I
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky -
Seen, nothing in it to see.

It is not, I assure everyone, that I long to immerse myself in some ancient, rigid tradition, or even in Victorianism. I am sure that has its own terrors. But maybe Pessoa's self-examination showed that the great danger of life in our age emerges at the intersection of neuroscience and freedom: that freed to look inside ourselves for a purpose and a path, we might see all the way through to a nothingness beyond. But maybe Pessoa also understood, in a way, one of the solutions to this predicament, to celebrate the lives we chance to have:

Crown me with roses
And with swiftly wilting leaves.
That will do.

Mt. Desert Isle 2021

Pictures from Monday's fogbound hike up Parkman Mountain: Thomas and Clara resting, and a general view off the trail. The highlight of the first two days was actually a kayak trip on Sunday morning to visit a rock where seals sometimes hang out; we saw more than twenty seals, half in the water and half on the rock, truly spectacular.

Tidepooling on Tuesday: Clara and Ben exploring, and a picture Clara took of the little squid that was the day's most interesting discovery.

Flowers around the house.

Wednesday Ben and I took a little hike up Acadia Mountain, a hill with a great view of Sommes Sound; fortunately we had sunny weather for the first time this trip.

Ben admired the waterfall on Man O War Brook, so called because it falls almost directly into Sommes Sound and sailing ships sent boats to this spot to fill up their water barrels.

And our Thursday morning hike up Sargent Mountain by a different route.

Canada Lily on the mountain.

Tremont Harbor, where we had lunch.

I feel like we just got here but we'll be on our way in the morning. So farewell, Mt. Desert, until next time.