steepholm

Okay, I'm probably the last person on the internet to notice this, but - well, yay! I've been checking in now and again for about two years, hoping Allie would follow up her hilarious-yet-devastating post on depression, and now she has - with another hilarious-yet-devastating post on depression.

Curiously, both this and "To Kill a King" (see my last post) are about severely depressed and blocked writers, and both were put on the net on 9th May, 2013. Can this possibly be a coincidence?

(Yes.)

In this BBC report a man called Nick Hancock anticipates the difficulties of spending 60 days on Rockall - to which the obvious answer would seem to be: well, don't do it.

I've never been able to sympathize much with the urge to put oneself (and one's eventual rescuers) in danger just for the sake of it, though clearly it excites admiration in many. However, I was prompted by something the reporter said on this clip to wonder about the cultural history of this kind of exploit: "In Victorian times, just visiting Rockall was said to be the epitome of heroism." That sounded a false note to me - but should it have? I can imagine a Victorian calling a visit to Rockall brave, but "heroic"? The Victorian version of that word has an overtone of nobility and service to others, to my mind, distinct from because-it's-there adventuring.

I'm far from certain about this, though. I try out a few test cases in my mind, running them through my patented "Victorian Mindset Filter":

Grace Darling and her father. They are uncontroversially heroic, showing extreme bravery and saving lives in the process. If they had merely been trying to break the night-time rowing endurance record? Not so much.

Sir John Franklin. Doomed, of course - but still fairly heroic because doomed in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage - a solid geopolitical objective that would have benefited his country had he succeeded.

The Light Brigade. Not only doomed, but doomed in a futile action; but heroic nonetheless because they acted from devotion to duty rather than reckless bravado.

Refining this a bit: Victorian heroism should not be entirely selfish; but while altruism is no doubt the ideal it is acceptable to be motivated in part by a desire for fame and glory. Indeed, desire for fame is a legitimate incentive within the classical, Germanic and Celtic heroic traditions alike. It goes clean against the Sermon on the Mount, which is no doubt why Milton calls it "the last infirmity of noble mind" - but he is praising with faint damns, there. Still, fame mustn't be the only incentive for an act otherwise pointless or contemptible. Herostratus is not admired, and no more are famous-for-being-famous celebrities (a solidly mid-Victorian word, in that sense - not a twentieth-century one as one might imagine).

It's when we get to the twentieth century though that the concept of heroism gloops out into an untrammeled glory fest - a race to get to the ends of the earth or the top of Everest for no other reason than to say that you did it first, or quickest, or with the least equipment. Are such people more likely to be called heroic now than of yore? Such feats may wear the dress of patriotism, scientific research or charity fundraising, but to what degree are these the real motivations, and what effect do they have on our conception of them as heroic or otherwise? Scott, for example, was certainly seen in his own time as a hero, and still is by many. In what exactly did the estimate of heroism consist, either now or then?

It's in the twentieth century, as far as I can see, that people become obsessed with superlatives for their own sake: the fastest, longest, highest, first, and so on. The Guinness Book of Records is published first in 1951: how did previous generations get by without it? Perhaps they didn't find that sort of thing as fascinating, or perhaps they did but wrote about them piecemeal in publications such as almanacs? Here's where I hit the buffers of ignorance - but I'd be interested to know at what point Wisden, for example (first pub. 1864) started noting records in the Guinness sense rather than merely keeping records of individual matches; or when people started thinking of the World Record for running a certain distance rather than who won a particular race. That seems to me an interesting epistemic shift. It was facilitated no doubt by technology (accurate chronometers) and organization (the creation of events such as the Olympics with the authority to declare results and have them universally accepted), but were people just waiting for that kind of opportunity, or did its arrival signal the creation of a whole new way of thinking about achievement, in absolute rather than relative terms?

Twitter - the bleating of the gulls
Facebook - a stone tossed out to sea
LJ - a sandcastle on the beach
Hardbacks - the old seawall.

"Unter den Linden? How sublime!"

For years I've nursed that multilingual pun, looking for an opportunity to slip it naturally into conversation. "I wonder what Longinus would have made of the Brandenburg Gate?" I might say, a propos of nothing - only to see the other people in the bus queue shuffle warily away. Would anyone feed me a line that would allow me to unsheathe my devastating witticism? Would they heck. It became an albatross round my neck. An albatross called Moby Dick.

Today, in a fit of abandon, I put it up as my Facebook status - but it didn't get so much as a single Like. After that I was forced to face the fact that a) not many people would get the joke, and b) even those that did probably wouldn't find it funny.

Perhaps, in fact, it isn't very funny. There - I've said it.

I admit defeat. Take it. Do with it as you will. Publish it as your own, and make millions - I care not.

God, I feel so much better for that.

Today, to assuage my melancholy or perhaps to indulge it, I took a slight detour on the way home from my mother's house in order to visit the wood in Otterbourne where we scattered my father's ashes in 2005. The land belongs to the Woodland Trust, and when he died I gave them some money in his memory - enough to care for an acre there in perpetuity. I'd not been for couple of years, though, and never in May. It's a pleasant spot, where the blackbird's song mingles with the not-so-distant rumble of the M3, and where Charlotte Yonge no doubt walked arm in arm with John Keble many and many a day. (Now they lie in neighbourly repose in nearby Otterbourne churchyard.)

Anyway, when I found the right glade I discovered - much to my surprise - that my father had turned into a bluebell wood!



And they say I've changed.

( Meanwhile, this is now my favourite view in Bristol city centre. )

I don't suppose I'm alone in finding Landseer's "The Cat's-Paw" by far the most disturbing of his paintings:



For reasons I can't now recall I was searching for it on the web this morning, and the first description I found was from a coffee table book called The Cat in Art by Stefano Zuffi: "This painting, marked by subtle cruelty... shows a monkey trying to burn the cat's paw by holding it over a brazier."

No, no, no! This totally misses what makes Landseer's painting so shocking. The monkey isn't "trying to burn the cat's paw" at all; it's trying to get the chestnuts. The cat's paw is entirely a means, not an end. Compare and contrast this sixteenth-century illustration of the same story, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder:



It's hard to read a monkey's expression, but it seems to me that there's a sadistic smile on Gheeraerts's monkey's face. It wants the chestnuts, yes, but it's also enjoying the control. That's disturbing too in its way, but it's a common-or-garden cruelty. Landseer's monkey by contrast barely knows the cat is there: if it had seen the poker first, it would probably have used that. That is the face of evil in our own times. That is the face that collapses factories in Bangladesh for the sake of a cheap Primark T-shirt. That is the face of ATOS, staring fixated at the bottom-line chestnuts and not caring how many people must be burned to get them. I don't believe for a moment that people who shop at Primark are "trying to burn the cat's paw". But the factories still collapse, and the dust spreads thinly over all of us.

Meanwhile, "The Pot of Basil" is almost two centuries old, but remains chillingly up to date. Hypocrite lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frère!

With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.

I mentioned my grandfather's sailor's palm a while ago, but at that time I wasn't sure whether my mother still had it. Turns out she has - and the bodkin too! I'm very glad they've not been lost.



Trying it on, I discover that my grandfather had smaller hands than I do. I never thought of him as dainty.

On the wall of my local cafe is a quotation purporting to be from Terry Pratchett: "Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self."

I've no reason to doubt that it is from Pratchett, although checking on the web reveals only the same quote similarly attributed, without context - and, as we know, sometimes self-perpetuating mistakes get made.

A bit of context would be nice, though, since I really can't see what this quote means. The only way I can make sense of it is as a warning that drinking coffee shortens your life - but in that case, why would a cafe advertise the fact? (This isn't a Gothy, half-in-love-with-easeful-death type establishment, but a cheerful place full of mums and toddlers, which sells Pom Pom Bears and Tunnock's Tea Cakes and milk shakes made from Maltesers. It may be called Lashings, but you just know they mean ginger beer rather than BDSM.)

So, what coffee-friendly meaning might this Pratchett quotation actually have? I'm quite prepared to believe I'm missing the bleeding obvious.

A few days ago, my friend Joe (who designs experiences for a living) and I went on a tour of an alternative Bristol. We were taking part in Tom Abba's These Pages Fall Like Ash. I don't know Tom Abba personally, nor have I ever met Neil Gaiman, who had some input into the project, but because we have so many mutual friends this non-acquaintance feels increasingly weird, almost as if we were slipping in and out of interleaved existences - which is very apropos, in fact. The idea of These Pages Fall Like Ash is that you are given a mysterious object (wrapped as all such objects should be in brown paper and string), which contains fragmentary information about Portus Abonae, an even-more waterlogged version of Bristol that occupies the same space as the familiar city, but is only intermittently perceptible. Armed with smartphone/iPad (I own neither but looked over Joe's shoulder) you follow the mildly cryptic clues to places in the city that are narrowcasting - if that's the word - scraps of prose, pictures, and other squintway glimpses of Portus, with a range of a few metres. The project will unfold over the next couple of weeks, with more hot spots coming into operation, so that the experience is lived out in real time - for some values of real. Already, though, the journey has taken us to such mysterious sights as this and this and also to this spot - just a few yards from the place where we celebrated DWJ - another mutual friend of both Abba and Gaiman - exactly a year before.

Anyway, I won't say much more about it now, as the experience isn't finished yet - but it got me to wondering about the whole question of superimposed cities. Obviously Gaiman's got form for this, with Neverwhere. China Mieville's Un Lun Dun also springs to mind. I even dabbled myself, in The Fetch of Mardy Watt. What other examples are there? And which was the earliest? I expect Johns Clute and Grant have something to say about it, but I don't have their book with me.

At any rate, it's perhaps worth distinguishing between your alternative city proper, and the revelation of a hidden aspect to the known city. Something like Charlie Fletcher's Stoneheart, for example, reveals many aspects to London that most of its inhabitants are unaware of, but London remains the location. The same might be said of the Borribles trilogy, or Archer's Goon. I make this distinction - between worlds bleeding into each other, and people bleeding between different aspects of the same world - only to wonder whether it's worth making.

Niger: [The daughters of Niger] were the first form'd dames of earth,
And in whose sparkling and refulgent eyes,
The glorious sun did still delight to rise ;
Though he, the best judge, and most formal cause
Of all dames beauties, in their firm hues, draws
Signs of his fervent'st love ; and thereby shows
That in their black, the perfect'st beauty grows ;
Since the fixt color of their curled hair,
Which is the highest grace of dames most fair,
No cares, no age can change ; or there display
The fearful tincture of abhorred gray...

So wrote Ben Jonson in The Masque of Blackness (1605). That last line has always bugged me, though. Did Jonson really believe that black women never went grey? If so, where did he get that idea? If not, why did he have Niger say it?

Pliny the Elder would normally be suspect number one for the first question, but it's hard to believe that Pliny, living in such a multi-ethnic society as first-century Rome, would be unaware that African women do indeed turn grey. The same would surely be true for most ancient writers of the kind that a Renaissance autodidact might believe in preference to his own eyes.

What had those eyes actually seen? Jacobean London wasn't exactly devoid of black people - though I wonder whether many of them were women of middle-age and older. The fashion for black pages would tend to skew the population towards youth; while foreign merchants would be overwhelmingly male. Maybe Jonson had never seen a black woman over thirty-five? Or maybe hair-dye or head coverings were in common use, which would have hidden the evidence? Either way, I've never come across anyone else stating the same belief, either before or since.