Autumn IV. Poetry and landscape

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn III. Time regained again

The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature, especially of nature as seen in the English rural landscape. From the “Cuckoo Song” of our language in its beginnings to the perfect loveliness of Tennyson’s best verse, this note is ever sounding. It is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! ...

This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an English school of painting. It came late; that it ever came at all is remarkable enough. A people apparently less apt for that kind of achievement never existed. So profound is the English joy in meadow and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal expression, it took up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and created a new form of art. The National Gallery represents only in a very imperfect way the richness and variety of our landscape work...

One obvious reason for the long neglect of [J.M.W.] Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner’s landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist not the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory -- but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet of colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England would not love him. If any man whom I knew to be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should smile -- but I should understand.

Alpha.

J.M.W. Turner is somewhat in the public mind these days. There is a new movie about him and a major exhibition [I would have edited out much of the beginning of this video] at Tate Britain. I suspect he was one of the painters Proust was thinking about when he wrote about artists having to educate an audience to see the world -- or at least their canvasses -- the way they did. Ryecroft isn’t completely unfair to Turner here as he admits his virtues when it comes to color and form. I rather imagine that Ryecroft would prefer landscape painting over photography only in it’s potential for perfecting or idealising the image (though with Photoshop I guess the photographer can also delete the unwanted wires and or add the properly rustic worker).

I’ve never been that big a fan of Turner myself. He seems to me too much a transitional figure: Not the realism Ryecroft likes or the full impressionism/ expressionism I prefer.

VisiCalc, cat videos, and symbolic horses.

Who remembers VisiCalc nowadays? I do because I was a Sinclair ZX81 owner in the early days of personal computers. VisiCalc was the first “killer app” -- a spreadsheet for the Apple II that gave “serious” people an excuse to invest in the new gadgets. The killer app for the Internet would seem to be cat videos.

I can’t make fun of either of these things -- though for me, the original PC killer app was the BASIC computer language. Today I can’t imagine life without spreadsheets. It’s a rare day when I don’t use at least a couple spreadsheets for one thing or another,and just the thought of doing those things without spreadsheets makes me tired. And Maru is my favorite cat in the world. (How wonderful that he also has his own Wikipedia page!) But I’ve moved on from cat videos, first to goat kid videos and most recently to foals.

I suspect that both goat kid and foal videos are most effective if you’ve had contact with these animals in the past. There is one foal video with a woman petting this adorable animal that gives me a hint how some women feel about babies. Oh, and while we’re on horses, lets consider for a moment the symbolic use of horses in literature. How smooth was that?

First there’s the hard to miss episode with Vronsky racing the mare Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina (source here):

What's important about the scene symbolically is that it foreshadows what's going to happen to Anna herself. Vronsky is absolutely taken with the horse, but his love of her doesn't prevent him from doing something that ruins her forever – he misjudges where he's put his weight as Frou-Frou is gearing up to jump, and she breaks her back. This is similar to his relationship with Anna. Vronsky loves Anna, but he convinces her to have an affair with him, which destroys her. Vronsky's great tragic flaw is that he's capable of deep love, but he's just not that careful, and his lack of care has terrible consequences for the women (or female horses) with whom he gets involved...

The use of horse symbolism in Parade’s End is rather more complicated. Besides being a special (and antique) sort of Tory, Christopher Tietjens is sold to us as being especially good with horses. His "way" with horses comes up several times but first and most importantly (in my opinion) in the first volume Some Do Not. The several scenes with the Wannop’s poor horse are excellent for establishing Christopher’s character, but less effective at symbolizing his relationship with his wife, Sylvia, as we have, at this time, not seen them together. Tom Stoppard --  given the amount of time he lavished on these scenes with the horse -- was all over this symbolism I think, while writing the screenplay for the recent TV mini-series of Parade’s End.

Sylvia is a thoroughbred. She may be difficult in any number of ways, but if you start thinking of her as a spirited horse, much in the novel that is obscure becomes clear. And Christopher, for all his way with actual horses, is not in need of a thoroughbred mate. To quote what he says in the mini-series script when he first sees the Wannop’s new horse,

...Gosh, don't you know you've got a 13 hands pony harness on a 16 and a half hands horse? Let the bit out three holes.

It's tearing the animal's tongue in half...

...This isn't the rig for you, Mrs Wannop.

A pony and basketwork chaise, that's the trap for ladies...

Christopher himself needs a pony and finds one in Valentine Wannop. But where he can immediately recognize the problem with the Wannop’s horse and suggest the obvious solution -- trade for a new animal -- in his personal case he dithers and is blocked by his Tory principles... or something. What he does to Sylvia is worse than what happens to the horse in the accident with the General's automobile, but his lines at the end of the first episode of the Mini-series (addressed to the horse) could just as well apply to Sylvia ,

...Damn near forty miles in one night.

You've lost a lot of blood.

I let you down, old girl, didn't I?...

And, just because I can, here are some of the videos I've referenced. First Maru, the cat that likes to walk around with a bag on his head:

Then the foal video:

And finally some baby goats. I Have no idea why I can't display it the usual way.

Next: Autumn V. Illness.

Summer XXI-XXII. British character and Democracy

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XX. Jubilee + The Cat

At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their breakfast on the question of diet. They agreed that most people ate too much meat, and one of them went so far as to declare that, for his part, he rather preferred vegetables and fruit. “Why,” he said, “will you believe me that I sometimes make a breakfast of apples?” This announcement was received in silence; evidently the two listeners didn’t quite know what to think of it. Thereupon the speaker, in rather a blustery tone, cried out, “Yes, I can make a very good breakfast on two or three pounds of apples.”

Wasn’t it amusing? And wasn’t it characteristic? This honest Briton had gone too far in frankness, ‘Tis all very well to like vegetables and fruits up to a certain point; but to breakfast on apples! His companions’ silence proved that they were just a little ashamed of him; his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to right himself in their opinion, nothing better occurred to the man than to protest that he ate apples, yes, but not merely one or two; he ate them largely, by the pound! I laughed at the fellow, but I thoroughly understood him; so would every Englishman; for at the root of our being is a hatred of parsimony. This manifests itself in all sorts of ludicrous or contemptible forms, but no less is it the source of our finest qualities. An Englishman desires, above all, to live largely; on that account he not only dreads, but hates and despises, poverty. His virtues are those of the free-handed and warm-hearted opulent man; his weaknesses come of the sense of inferiority (intensely painful and humiliating) which attaches in his mind to one who cannot spend and give; his vices, for the most part, originate in loss of self-respect due to loss of secure position.

Alpha.

I have no clue if Ryecroft is right here or if Englishmen differ from the rest of mankind in this respect. Being naturally cheap myself (my Scots or German genes, perhaps?) I marvel and am made slightly uncomfortable by people “living largely.” For one thing, there is often an unavoidable element of waste.

I’m reminded of the spectacular, introductory, after dinner party given by Mynheer Peeperkorn in The Magic Mountain. I would have thought that Peeperkorn was a magnificent invention of Mann’s except that he is widely acknowledged as being closely based on Gerhart Hauptmann. I have known some, lesser, Peeperkorns, and while their company can certainly be invigorating, I also find their manic energy unsettling. There is a tendency to excess in some people that I associate with self-doubt or low self-esteem. I once heard a story about Michael Milken, during his high-rolling days, taking associates to lunch at an exclusive restaurant and ordering everything on the menu for the table. For him I’m sure this signaled his ability to afford lavish expenditures -- and possibly an impatience with the usual ordering process. But to me it reeks of posturing and a disregard for the little people going to needless effort to realize his whim. And how much of that food ended up in the trash?

Potlatch.

I’ve been reading about the First Nations/Native American tradition in the Pacific Northwest of holding seasonal social events the purpose of which was to give presents to each other and to demonstrate the wealth of important people by destroying that wealth. This from Wiki:

Dorothy Johansen describes the dynamic: "In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished."

This traditional custom drives the entire economy of the peoples concerned making it a prime example of Georges Batalle’s Accursed Share economic principle. This would be an extreme example of the free-handedness that Ryecroft believed was typical of Englishmen. It is also a curious example of conspicuous consumption and status symbols (see Thorstein Veblin) in that your status is determined not but what you have but by what you give away or destroy.

One could see something similar in Andrew Carnegie's lavish, non-productive (in an economic sense) spending on public libraries or the current schemes to encourage the super-rich (like Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and the like) to devote significant amounts of their wealth to charitable contributions.

What Ryecroft here argues is part of the generous character of Englishmen, Bataille sees as a necessary aspect of economic systems that are too productive for their own good. I suspect Aldus Huxley was familiar with Bataille, or at least the desperate need to consume and waste production is stressed in Brave New World. So is this a human characteristic or an economic necessity? Or perhaps it’s both.

XXII. Democracy

For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught with peculiar dangers. Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social, but a moral superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the worthy life. Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty. However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendor, they were gladly made; this was the Englishman’s religion, his inborn pietas; in the depth of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to lordship. Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth in act. A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as though he were the victim of some freak of nature. The Lord was Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words, virtually constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.

In a new world, beyond the ocean, there grew up a new race, a scion of England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant Republic began to shake the ideals of the Motherland. Its civilization, spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the old cult. Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth. If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin. In the very word is something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory. The democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case; he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has set up mere Plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of baseness. And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is haunted with misgiving...

Alpha.

I rather think Ryecroft is giving the old U.S. of A. rather more credit than it deserves here for destabilizing the British aristocracy. Since the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, it was actually the resurgent British middle-class that shaped the American plutocracy. The British aristocracy was slowly wasted and finally destroyed by the repeal of the Corn Laws and by revised Inheritance laws that were part of the class warfare between the upper and middle British classes. America benefitted in predictable (the import of grain) and unpredictable ways (the acquisition of estates and spouses by wealthy Americans), but I think this process was driven mostly by local factors.

(And isn’t it curious that the American Republic was modeled on the Roman Republic by people who were familiar with the sad -- though glorious -- fate of that Republic?)

In Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens is “The Last Tory” -- the person who stands for 18th century values as the 20th century rises around him. Yet the Groby fortune rests on coal. The Tietjens of Groby stand with one foot in the age of King Billy and the other in the Mephistophelian age of industry and science and capital. They stoke the fires of the middle-class machine they both detest and see as ruining England, just as Ryecroft does here.

Next: Summer XXIII. Forms of true happiness.

Spring VIII. Nature and society + special moments

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VII. Roots of philosophy

The early coming of spring in this happy Devon gladdens my heart. I think with chill discomfort of those parts of England where the primrose shivers beneath a sky of threat rather than of solace. Honest winter, snow-clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not un-cordially, but that long deferment of the calendar’s promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May -- how often has it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that February is still in rule: --

Mild winds shake the elder brake,

And the wandering herdsmen know

That the whitethorn soon will blow.

I have been thinking of those early years of mine in London, when the seasons passed over me unobserved, when I seldom turned a glance toward the heavens, and felt no hardship in the imprisonment of boundless streets. It is strange now to remember that for some six or seven years I never looked upon a meadow, never traveled even so far as to the tree-bordered suburbs. I was battling for dear life; on most days I could not feel certain that in a week’s time I should have food and shelter. It would happen, to be sure, that in hot noons of August my thoughts wandered to the sea; but so impossible was the gratification of such desire that it never greatly troubled me... I remember afternoons of languor, when books were a weariness, and no thought could be squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake myself to one of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable sense of change. Heavens, how I laboured in those days! And how far I was from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion! That came later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from bad air, bad food, and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire for countryside and sea-beach -- and for other things yet more remote... Sound sleep (often in places I now dread to think of) sent me fresh to the battle each morning, my breakfast, sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and a cup of water. As human happiness goes, I am not sure I was not then happy.

Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by companionship... Of my position, the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster... The truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a “member of society.” For me, there have always been two entities -- myself and the world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile. Am I not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social order?

This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not a calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.

Alpha.

One of the things I like best about Henry Ryecroft is that he is even more of an anti-social misanthrope than I am. I find myself thinking I tire of, and eventually avoid, the people I meet because they are mostly so much younger. That it is a conflict of generations. But then I remember I’m not much better pleased with the “friends” I’ve known for decades.

Society and friendship can be a wonderful thing, but it is often more wonderful in theory or in expectation than in reality.  One of the mixed blessings of belonging to an online community is that you learn how many people’s lives are racked by depression or anxiety. As a person who enjoys “fixing” or solving problems, I find people who are overwhelmingly depressed or anxious for no particular reason very frustrating. And since, in the long run, we are all alone anyway, I prefer Ryecroft’s peaceful isolation to the doubtful consolations of friendship.

And suppose you do achieve that perfect connection with another person. It is a wonderful thing, I don't know that anything is better, but what if you then lose that connection. Joyce Carol Oates was devastated by the death of her first husband who had been, I think she would have said, the better part of her self. Within a year she had found a new "better part of her self," and had moved on.

It puzzles me how few (male) characters in fiction achieve or even seek this sort of a connection. Faust (Goethe) is all about the Eternal-Feminine but seems to care very little about actual women. I could say the same for the male protagonists of The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq and for Bernard Marx in Brave New World. Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, while usually consumed by a very particular sort of fetish that (in the novel) focuses on one female or another, is at least interested in women and ends up in some sort of a relationship with Gilbert. Christopher Tietjens, in Parade's End, for all his other failings, does form a connection with Valentine.

I try to tell my young online friends that, in the long run, and in the end, you are on your own, but I don't press it because no one wants to hear that, and in some cases I will be wrong... at least for a time.

Beta.

This section also reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Proust -- favorite because it resonates so well with my own feelings. Frustratingly, I can’t find the passage (although I’m almost certain it's in the 2nd volume).

Imagine the perfect quote here. Perhaps a taste of madeleine with a splash of tisane will help you with this. Adopt a French accent in your mind. You are a young, hyper-sensitive, young man on your first holiday at the beach in Brittany. You are overwhelmed by an aesthetic feeling as you contemplate some transitory view. You long to share this moment with another person but then you realize that if you had company the moment would quite possibly be ruined. You would be too involved in conversation to fully attend to the marvel before you (especially if your company was in any way connected to the Guermantes dynasty). The extent to which you were engaged with your friend would necessitate a compensatory disengagement from the very thing you wish to share. And it would be even worse if your friend was in a “mood,” and utterly impossible if your friend was the Baron.

The longing to share special moments with people close to you is so often spoiled, even when such a person is at hand, by our inability to comprehend another’s experience. Their experience of our “special moment” is not the same as ours. At best it may be a sort of translation. Worse, our “special moment” may be undermined by the mere presence of the other person.

Art -- painting, photography, literature, film, even music -- may be a better attempt to share those special moments with others. Within art we can control their experience and curate their impressions. We can try to bring to the experience the emotion we feel.

For Proust, in this passage, you need to keep in mind the character’s youth and delicate health; for Ryecroft, his lifetime of travail and his surprising respite and new found sense of peace.

And it gets worse... If our special moment is based on the evidence of our senses, as it most probably is, we have to consider the very real possibility that our friend does not perceive the world quite the way we do. Synesthesia is, in itself, freakish enough, but once you are aware of it you have to think that Synesthetes only know they are Synesthetes because their condition is so extreme. If it was less extreme, who would know? Just recently I took an online color test and discovered I can distinguish fewer colors than is normal. I'm not color blind, but where I see a shade of blue or red or green, most people can distinguish several shades of that color. I can't imagine any way this detracts from my life, but it does mean that I see the world slightly differently than others do.

If what I know as "red" is what other's know as "blue" is an entirely different question and one no one can answer.

Here's a fascinating passage from The God Delusion that Richard Dawkins really should contemplate some more:

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data -- a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal... I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in order to perform much the same task... Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues -- what philosophers call qualia -- have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality...

Next: Spring IX. Independence, forsooth!