34 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/28d0df56f8bc8510021493cf3e33b1e7.pdf c1cc00dee656e89e1c1bd7eff23b09e1 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 9. Gothic Ground and Vault CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 9. Gothic Ground and Vault a1) Early Christian (Antioch) 6th century, Vienna Genesis, Flood, detail, left side, National Library, Vienna English Gothic, 13th cent., Grapes from the Promised Land, from a window in the Corona of Canterbury Cathedral Whole of a1; + V: detail of right side b1) 1) Music: Ambrosian Chant 5th cent. ff., Tenebrae factae sunt, ARC 2533 284 "The Old Testament," Augustine says in The City of God, "is nothing but the New covered by a veil, and the New Testament is the unveiling of the Old… What Scripture tells of Abraham really happened, but it was at the same time a prophetic image of things to come." From Paul through the Dark Ages (Isidore of Seville, Bede, Irish Crosses) that Doctrine of Correspondence sounds Biblical resonances — in the rise to Gothic, pointing prediction to some heretical today or tomorrow. So from Suger's St.-Denis, Joachim de Floris points his Eternal Gospel. This Flood of the 6th century Vienna Genesis must unveil the always expected coming. Yet here, as with Augustine (or the chant named for Ambrose), the Classical heritage still clothes timeless symbol in the suavities of earth. (Fade Ambrosian) 2) 2a) 2b) 9/2/95 Double. [A] North African(?) 7th cent., Ashburnham Pentateuch, Flood, Nouv. Acq. Lat. 2234 f.9, Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Franco-Spanish (Landes) c. 1050, Flood, St.-Severs Apocalypse, MS Lat. 8878 f.85, Bibl. Nat., Paris A of 2; V: detail only B of 2; V: two details only Gothic Ground and Vault 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Gregorian (de Van) from AS 34 B, last "a" of Alleluia, then "Pascha," etc. With the Ashburnham Pentateuch a century later (left) the temporal veil is being stripped away, preparing for the ultimate destruction of the St-Severs Apocalypse (right) about 1050 — that dimensionless vision to which medieval Realism would reduce the sensory itself. In Dark Age chronicles such fabulous Judgment walks over Europe. Flodoard, 944: Balls of fire were seen rushing through the air, which in their flight set houses ablaze, but when faced by the cross and holy water they were driven away… It is said that demons in the shape of horsemen destroyed a church, then used its timbers to beat down the walls of a building of strong cement that had long stood on Montmartre. Yet at the heart of that ghostly world of hardening chant (Fade Gregorian) and of Guido's Diaphony (Music: Guido, brief example of contrary motion; then close) a colossal energy has been released, which points to another future: 3) Paulo Uccello 1447-48, The Flood, detail., Santa Maria Novella, Florence (CGB ‘86); + V detail Closer detail of 3, Uccello's Flood 3a) Music: Binchois, c. 1430(?), Inter natos mulierum, L'Oiseau Lyre 128 (78) the Christian reconquest, in the faith frame, of dimensional actuality. From the first awakening, the Romanesque had set unconscious sights on what by the 15th century and Uccello would be clear, the perspectival endowment of the sacred with the incarnate power of Renaissance — in music, Binchois. (Fade Binchois.) 4) Mosaic copy c. 50 BC of Greek painting c. 300 B.C. Battle of Alexander, detail (Darius group), Museo Nazionale, Naples V4a) V detail of Alexander not shown in slide 4 Music: Greek 2nd cent. BC, First Delphic Hymn, close, J.E. Butt, private recording Was not the world loss foreshadowed in the chromatics of the Delphic Ode, the moody drama of the Hellenistic Battle of Alexander, where marvelous techniques enforce the heaped outwardness of the Platonic cave? (End Delphic Ode) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 2 �C.G. Bell 5) 5a) Symbolic History Norman French 1066 ff, Bayeux Tapestry, cavalry detail, Bayeux Another tapestry detail; + V return to a detail of 5 Music: Peire Vidal 12th c., Baron de mon dan covit (near close) SAWT 9567-B But by 1066 the battle-joy of Homer is renewed in the fierce Norman (then Troubador) exhilaration of mythic encounter — the Bayeux Tapestry, with Peire Vidal. As in the Song of Roland, stripped zeal precipitates the lines of action: "Where is your sword, which is called Halteclere, With its hilt of gold, with its jewelled gear?" "I had no time to draw," cried Oliver, As he pierced mail with the trunk of a spear. (CGB) "U est vostre espee, ki Halteclere ad num? D'or est li helz e de cristal li punz." "Ne la poi traire," Oliver respunt, Kar de ferir oi jo si grant bosoign." 6) (Fade Vidal) Paolo Uccello, c. 1445, Battle of San Romano, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Isaac c. 1485(?), A la bataglia, near close, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104 (4) And again that clean renewal bears in linear potentiality the exploratory dynamic of Uccello, the battle music of Isaac. (Fade Isaac.) a2nd 5) French Romanesque, c. 1080. Fresco of St. Michael, Church of St.-Savinsur-Gartempe 2nd 5) Again, Bayeux Tapestry, Surrender of Dinan; V2nd 5a) Bayeux Tapestry, Edward the Confessor As we would know from the Song of Roland — God sent his angel Cherubin, and Saint Michael of the Peril, and Gabriel with them, To bear the Count's soul into Paradise 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (or in history from the sanctification of William's conquest of England) — it is hard to distinguish between the secular eruption and its transforming embrace in a church which (as the priest says in Faust) can digest every ill-gotten gain: "kann ungerechtes Gut verdauen." 2nd 6) Uccello, c. 1446, another Battle of San Romano, National Gallery, London; V first pans to a detail By the Italy of Machiavelli's birth, the profane stood on the point of declaring itself as an independent realm having its own values, of which the visual sign is exactly that filling in (like the chordal progressions of music) of its spatial and human weft. Music: a7) 7) Again, Isaac, Battle, close German Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., Michaelskirche, exterior, Hildesheim French Romanesque, 1st half of 12th cent., St.-Pierre, Angouleme, exterior; + V detail Whereas what has seemed most Medieval is the transcending entrainment of earthly power in the sacred synthesis: the 11th- and 12th-century arching and vaulting of the new Romanesque; in theology the reasoned proofs of Anselm; in music the horizon of noteagainst-note polyphony, spread from England to northern Italy and from Spain probably to the Rhine, though German examples are lacking. To experience again that massive forehall to Gothic, hear the first known three-part piece (c. 1130?), a "Congaudeant catholici" from the Compostela MS in Spain, though there ascribed to Magister Albertus of Paris; and with it, this Angouleme, the interior of Le Mans, and — fountainhead of Romanesque in England — the cathedral of Durham. Music: 8) 9) a10) 10) 9/2/95 Campostela MS c. 1130(?), Congaudeant catholici, 1st and last stanzas: RCA-V-LM 6015 French Romanesque 11th-12th cent., Le Mans, Nave from Aisle (CGB '74) English Norman 11th-12th cent., Durham from below (CGB '80); V details only, first from V9, then from 9 Same, interior, a bay of the south aisle (CGB ‘80) Same, 1104, nave with rib vault (CGB '80); + V detail (End Music) Gothic Ground and Vault 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Durham, first cathedral completely ribbed and vaulted in stone, 1104, the transverse arches raised to points, to achieve one height with the semicircular diagonal crossings of the bays. 11) French Romanesque c. 1110-15, South Portal, St.-Pierre, Moissac 11a) French Romanesque, Vezelay Capital, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace 11b) Detail of 11, South Portal, Moissac No doubt these religious structures, by the organizing risk that raised them (agrarian monasteries shading into urban cathedrals), were products of the new economy and temporal sway — that investment bank Saint Bernard accused: "Thus money is drawn up with ropes of money." As if Moissac portal, 1110-15, opened to the Exchange and to Wall Street. Though surely, the abstract ubiquity of greed (cupiditas) differs with every style-complex. Whatever earth awakening — Bernard's "knights… and hunters winding their horns" — this Judgment Gate required, converts to a more than earthly service. Such sacred ingestion fuels the Gothic dialectic of Sic et Non, ground and vault. 12) Irish c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, east side, a video detail Monasterboice, Louth; first, How much more bluntly and somberly of that creed ground was the first monumental stone carving in the West — from the Irish crosses of the early 900's, this of Muiredach at Monasterboice, also a Judgment, flanked, from the sin of Adam and Eve upward by correlated scenes. Without comparison of art value, what this Dark Age precursor lacks is just the melting flash and flow. 13) Same, a panel of Adam & Eve and Cain & Abel Place any detail — this Adam and Eve and the Murder of Abel, in its paleolithic and primitive pre-humanity, heavy pathos and dark vacancy, Abel like a trepanned frog — against a 12th-century cognate: 14) Gislebertus, French c. 1120-40, Flight to Egypt, St.-Lazare, Autun here Gislebertus' Flight to Egypt at Autun; is it not clear that what was to vault from that ground was the fresh humanity of Gothic love? 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 13) Muiredach's Cross, west side, panel of Christ giving the Keys and the Book (video first shows a slide of the whole as V2nd a13, then a detail) The motion of Roman Christianity was the repudiation and denial of the material. As long as that downward eddy prevails, we conceive ourselves as in the Dark Ages. But in the tenth century of this Celtic Cross, by paradox and anomaly, the vortex changes sign; the birth force, though of the same creed and timeless loyalty, a2nd 14) Gislebertus 1120-40, Flight to Egypt; V: two details only 2nd 14) Same, Flight to Egypt (CGB '80); + V detail creates (as in Suger) an upward whirl of incorporation, by which the passions of earth are more and more lifted to affirm spirituality. To know how far and how suddenly this nascent tenderness has found (as with Abelard's theory of atonement) the Western road of sensuous devotion, we have only, from Gislebertus (with the close of a 12th century Benedicâmus, as beautiful as by Leonin), Music: Time of Leonin, Benedicâmus Domino, close, (Cape) EMS 201 (End Benedicâmus) 15) 15a) Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Flight into Egypt, Magi predella, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48); + V details Landscape detail of 15, to the left to leap three centuries, to the soft Italian mingling of Gothic and early Renaissance in Gentile da Fabriano's handling of the same Gospel scene, smoothing the brushwork of nature and the human caress — while we shift in music to a passage from Dunstable's "Quam pulchra es," sung by the same Brussel's Pro Musica Antiqua. MUSIC: a16) b16) 16) 9/2/95 Dunstable c 1425(?), from Quam pulchra es, near close, ARC 3052 (Fade Dunstable.) Italian, (Castelseprio) 8th-9th cent.(?), Presentation in the Temple, Santa Maria foris Portas; + V details, drawing first from Va16 Same, detail from the Flight into Egypt Same, detail of an angel from the Nativity Gothic Ground and Vault 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History There must have been Dark Age arts which stood outside the church, unincorporated, even in defiance; but what was then rare is now irrecoverable. If the secular paintings of Charlemagne's palace showed precursive talent, our nearest approach is in the startling humanity of the sacred frescoes found at Castelseprio. So too with Charlemagne's collection of German songs destroyed by his son Louis the Pious for their pagan license. Music: Verona 10th-11th c., O admirabile Veneris ydolum, RCA-V-LM 6015 (2) Only with the 10th and 11th centuries and in Latin, do manuscripts begin to record the passionate songs that boil up from the cauldron of student loves — this to a boy, "Veneris ydolum." (End O admirabile) Others are known only as poems: Iam, dulcis amica, venito Come, dear as my heart to me, come sweetheart, into my chamber … 17) 17a) 17b) Spanish Romanesque 12th cent., Shepherd, fresco detail from San Isidoro vault, Leon North Italian 940 and 13th cent., ruins of Castle of Canossa Spanish Romanesque mid-12th cent., whole vault of 17: Annunciation to the Shepherds; V has only details A poem touched with nature and romantic anticipation: Alone in the wood I have loved hidden places Ego fui sola in silva et dilexi loca secreta. So too the 11th century Catalan "Veri dulcis." Music: Barcelona 11th cent., Carmina: Veri dulcis, MHS OR433 Where are the visual parallels? The castle ruins have lost their tapestries. Theocritan delights in Spanish Romanesque are Biblical, details of Christ's birth announced to the shepherds. Are these stiff pastorals reminders of vernal precursors, where northern stock had flowed out into the Graeco-Roman and Byzantine-Moorish 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History challenge of former cultures — as if in cultural combustion that heavy German fuel kindled first in thinnest attenuations? (Fade Veri dulcis) 18) Byzantine, 10th cent., David playing the harp, with Melody & Echo; Bibl. Nat., Paris; first a video detail In Byzantium there was no such admixture. In that unviolated sanctum of Classical lore, it had been easy, in the awakening which began there also in the 10th century, to revive ancient forms (though this River God, Melody, and Echo attend David playing his harp); but the facility was a measure of the unfertilized and retrospective thinness of the achievement. a19) 19) 19a) Sicilian Byzantine (Norman and Moorish), 1174, Ceiling of the Crossing, Monreale Cathedral Sicilian, later 12th cent., Hunting mosaic, Sala Normana, Pal. Reale, Palermo; + V detail French, Mosan (Verdun), 12th cent. (Attributed to Godefroi de Claire), Centaur, enamel, Louvre, Paris Music: 12th cent.(?) from Carmina Burana, Tempus transit gelidum, SAWT 9455 A And it seems almost a law of nature that the prodigy of Norman germination in the Sicilian soil of life-styles, Graeco-Byzantine and Persian-Moslem, which made 12th century Palermo the rich and enlightened wonder-city of Europe, should fulfill the proverb, "tost allumes, tost estaintes" — "Soon kindled, soon burnt out" — though the flare touched off a succession of Holy Empire darings, always more anti-clerical and preNietzchean — from the Carmina Burana to Frederick the Second. (Fade Tempus transit) In Romance France, a like fusion of strains and ideas produced (after the Eastern stimulus of the First Crusade) a wider break with the gaunt creed-ground (this enamel from the Meuse). a20) b20) 9/2/95 France, early 12th cent., Initials from Citeaux MSS: Fighting a dragon, and Monk cutting grain; Dijon, Bibl. Municipale; video takes them singly. Romanesque Languedoc c. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, Portal. St.-Pierre, Moissac Gothic Ground and Vault 8 �C.G. Bell 20) 20a) 20b) Symbolic History French Romanesque c. 1120, St. Michael from a capital of Priory Church, Perrecy-les-Forges Abraham Smith c. 1593, Venus chastising Cupid, plaster relief, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire Gislebertus (Burgundian) c. 1120-40, Eve, detail of upper body. St.-Lazare, Autun At the center of the whole Troubador (and Trouvere) motion of knighthood, courtly love, music and decorative art, verse itself may stand as a proto-Renaissance indicator. Against the heavy tread or the short-lined brittle sharpness of Church Latin, the rhythms, the stanza forms of Provence expatiate in the veiled aesthetics of pentameter yearning — which would spread to Italy and from Petrarch back over Europe, slowly ripening from the mystery of Romanesque devotion, to the swelling harmonies of Renaissance. There is no clear road from the stridence of the Gothic sequence — When for spite and malediction Wretches feel the flames' affliction Render me thy benediction — (CGB) to Spenser's measure: One day I wrote her name upon the strand. But the 12th century pentameters of Blondel: A l'entrant d'esté, que li tans comence — At the start of summer when the dance begins — are on the way to that — or to Shakespeare: From you I have been absent in the spring … 21) V21a) 21b) 21c) Provence late 12th cent., Cloister, Saint-Trophime, Arles Limoges, early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Nat. Mus., Copenhagen Limoges c. 1200, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British Museum, London Variant of St.-Trophime Cloister; + V detail of 21 As the melody points to Ars Nova, Dowland, recitative. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let Max Meili's Anthologie Sonore recording sound (in the dearth of secular art) where the love and warmth of Provence linger, in the cloister of Saint-Trophime at Arles: Music: Blondel de Nestles 12th cent., A l'entrant d'este (Meili) AS 18 (End) That the Troubador thrust was also violent, a22) b22) 22) V22a) 22b) St.-Trophime, Arles, C. 1180, John and Peter from West Portal Same, East Cloister, Capitals, Monster (Samuel Adams' slide) Provence, c. 1160-70, Main Portal, St.-Gilles-du-Garde, detail of Paul and James; with V22 variant Same, detail: archangels in a niche French, c. 1260(?), MS Initial R, fighting figures; Bible from Monastery of St.-André-au-Bois, Boulogne, Bibl. Mun. Bertrand de Born makes unforgettable as he stalks with the Sowers of Discord through Dante's Hell, a passage Pound (who also "dug him up" in a Sestina: "May God damn forever all who cry 'Peace'!") has paraphrased: Surely I saw, and still before my eyes Goes on that headless trunk, that bears for light Its own head swinging, gripped by the dead hair, And like a swinging lamp that says, "Ah me! I severed men, my head and heart Ye see here severed, my life's counterpart." Not even the volcanic Roman revivals of St.-Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles, stage such tragic outbreak. Only the history itself — as always with a prophetic art, love and song, commerce, religious reform and personal mysticism simultaneously asserting themselves, the heretical movement of the Cathari, or Pure Ones, rising to a genuine revolt against the Roman Church, until it was suppressed (early 13th century) in the crusade which devastated the most flourishing region of France. 23) Gilles-du-Garde, c. 1170, Young Apostle [detail of next slide] That the carvings of St.-Gilles-du-Garde should range from the gentle humanity of this youthful apostle 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 22) Gilles-du-Garde, four Apostles from an Ascension panel; video uses two bearded heads on the left, then whole to the almost daemonic stare of these Reform precursors, evokes the recurrent ambivalence of 12th century — the arts a continual bridge over the temporal cleavage, a symbolic containment of the historical tragedy. 2nd 23) From Gilles-du-Garde porch, The Good Shepherd, relief V2nd 23a) Same, base of columns, Lion (Samuel Adams' slide) V2nd 23b) Video returns to detail of 2nd 23, The Good Shepherd It was the beauty and exposure of Troubador love that it enjoyed an aristocratic island of proto-Renaissance refinement, a sort of detachment from "the fierce dispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay" — though it turned out hardly island enough — a brief chance for romance pentameters of love's idolatry. 24) Burgundy, 1120-50, Vezelay, Capital in the Nave, Seduction by Profane Music; + V details Music: Carmina Burana 12th cent., from 16: Michi confer venditor, MHS 3793 Not so with the Goliards or Wandering Scholars, fired in the crucible of church and state. The 12th century amplification of passion they share with this Vezelay capital of the Devil and Profane Music (as with the Carmina Burana Magdalen tempted by unguents), was both in and out of the church, a ferment where the Dark Age ground sprouts sexual vegetation, to seed over centuries the love gardens of Bosch. For the Creed-ground (to repeat) is ideal. There is no historical winter when Christendom merely sheltered in the ascetic fold. Even in the 9th century there had been Gottschalk, 300-year precursor of the Archpoet, who comes now: "seething inwardly with fierce indignation," — "Estuans instrinsecus/ ira vehementi" — that Archipoeta, most eruptive peak of 12thcentury genius — (End Michi confer venditor) 25) Another Vezelay capital, Lewdness and Despair; + V details Music: 9/2/95 Carmina Burana 12th(?) cent., 88a: Jove cum Mercurio (Binkley) SAWT 9455-A Gothic Ground and Vault 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a Rhenish Villon who flames an obscure course over Europe in the train of the Archbishop of Cologne and the Italian court of Barbarossa — a man who saves us from easy generalizations about the Age of Faith: (Waddell) Seething over inwardly With fierce indignation, In my bitterness of soul, Hear my declaration. I am of one element, Levity my matter, Like another withered leaf For the winds to scatter. Yet the mould-breaker is also of the age, betraying in self-twisted intensity the marks of the faith-grip he opposed. Like the Despair and tit-tugging Lust on another Vezelay capital, his energy flames against its own. Greedier for all delight/ Than heaven to enter in: Since the soul in me is dead,/ Better save the skin. Voluptatis avidus/ magis quam salutis, mortuus in anima/ curam gero cutis. 26) Winchester, mid-12th cent., Angel locking Hell, Psalter of Henry of Blois, British Museum, London; + V details (also using V26) How could earthly blessing unfold, held in a timeless creed which turns its wishes into deadly sins, its peace to sloth, its love to lust, appetite to gluttony, nobility to pride, commerce and politics to covetous envy and wrath? No wonder there are kingly crowns in this Leviathan mouth of Hell. Had not Gregory VII declared (1081) Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from those who — ignorant of God — by pride, plunder, perfidy, murders — in a word by almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world, urging them on — have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals: namely over men? 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 12 �C.G. Bell 27) Symbolic History Moissac, c. 1125-30, Gluttony and Lust, Portal of St.-Pierre, Mus. des Monuments (CGB '80); + V details When Greek δαιµων, or spirit, became "demon," no temporal power was left without its damning name — the Seven Deadly Sins. Let them dance. Staggering, within the medieval energizing of earth and counterforce intensification of hell, the vitality of that dance. (Fade Jove cum Mercurio) The liveliest thing in the 12th century English "Rule for Nuns" (Awncren Rule) are those condemned sins, grinning at their late-Gothic followers in Langland, Dunbar, the mystery plays: The Greedy Glutton's heart is in the dishes; his thought is in the cup; his life is in the barrel; his soul is in the crock. He comes with a dish in one hand and a bowl in the other; he slobbers his words and holds his great belly, and the fiend laughs as if he would burst. (CGB) 28) Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Fall of Simon Magus, St.-Lazare, Autun; + V details The Archpoet's freedom becomes satanic mockery, even, it seems, of communion: Sweeter tastes the wine to me In a tavern tankard Than the watered stuff my Lord Bishop hath decanted. His taking Christ's claim for the adulterous woman as his own plays (like this Gislebertus Simon Magus) with defiant mockery: "Let him who has no knowledge of sin hurl at me the stone." There is no art parallel for the climax of that Goliard confession; yet it hovers between the grotesques of damnation, 29) South Tyrol, late 12th century, Fighting Monsters fresco, S. Jacobo, Termeno; + V detail and their Tyrolean transformation into fighting monsters, anticipating both Renaissance and again Hieronymus Bosch. (Music: pick up close of Jove cum Mercurio) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Meum est propositum/ in taberna mori For on this my heart is set:/ When the hour is nigh me, Let me in the tavern die,/ With a tankard by me, While the angels looking down/ Joyously sing o'er me, Deus sit propitius/ Huic potatori. Grant grace and favor, Lord, to this drunken toper. (End Jove cum Mercurio) For 2nd 28 and 27) Again 24, Seduction by Profane Music (Video begins with Lust detail of 27) Even Troubador love could catch the sharpening frenzy, as in the rhyme-saturated "Kalenda Maia" (The first of May), which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras wrote for his lady (about 1200) at the court of Monferrat in Piedmont — of five versions the wildest. Music: Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, c. 1200, from Kalenda Maia, Everest 3270, last stanza Curious to read in the Troubador Vida that the Estampida, or stamp-dance on which it is based, had just been played by two wandering fiddlers from Northern France. For 2nd 26 and 2nd 25) Again 25, Lewdness and Despair (with video tit-tugging detail) The pounding tune and rhythm pierce Troubador devotion like a Gothic invasion: sinners locked in hell; the despair of lust: "How can I have lost what I never had … I never held you naked in my arms … I have pledged and desired without return:" Con er perduda/ ni m'er renduda …/ qe nuda/ tenguda/ no-us ai/ ni d'als vencuda/ volguda,/ cresuda/ vos ai,/ ses autr' ajuda. (End Kalenda Maia) For 2nd 24) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History French Romanesque c. 1100, Wives Restraining Brawlers, from capital at St.Hilaire, Poitiers, Mus. des Monuments Français, Paris (CGB '80); + V detail (Slide 2nd 24a repeats 27, Moissac.) But the Paris of Abelard's love, mutilation, and earth-denial was the focus of that vitality, inseparable from its fever — 12th century music suspended between melting organum purum and the strident rhythmic modes of stress scansion: Dic Christi Veritas/ dic cara raritas, dic rara Caritas,/ ubi nunc habitas? Where is the dear rarity,/ Where the rare Charity Truth of Christ,/ sooth, where placed? (CGB) John of Salisbury, about 1175, in thought a liberal, could not countenance that lashing of Gregorian: "Music," he said, "defiles the service of religion." Here an instrumental Benedicâmus, like the church carvings Bernard blamed, monsters and brawling devils: Music: French, late 12th(?) cent., Benedicâmus Domino, Instr., opening and close, O.L. AUT-231 For 3rd 25 and 3rd 26) Gislebertus, 1120-40 Judgment: detail of sinner grasped by the head; Autun (Video adds detail from 28, Simon Magus) For 3rd 27) Southern French, Moissac c. 1125-30, Death of a Miser, Portal of St.-Pierre, Museum des Monuments Français (CGB ‘80) V 3rd 27a) English Romanesque, c 1130, Adam and Eve Fresco, west wall of Chancel, St. Botolph's, Hardham, Sussex For 3rd 28) Gislebertus c. 1120-40, Devil detail from capital of Judas Hanged, St.-Lazare, Autun 2nd 29) Detail of 29, Fighting Monsters fresco, South Tyrol (End Benedicâmus) The 12th-century heightening of person and passion stretches the Romanesque everywhere, from Italy or Tyrol (as here), 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 15 �C.G. Bell 30) 30a) Symbolic History English Norman & Celtic, c. 1145, Kilpeck Portal (CGB '65) Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188, Central Arch, Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de Campostela to the British marches of Wales — Kilpeck, where the wreathing blend of Norman, Celtic, Viking bears motifs from the pilgrimage route south, as far as Santiago de Campostela in Spain. To the institutions of the Church, what fantastic power, and what risk, that ferment of worship, as popular as zealous, boiling toward its peak. Va31) b31) Vc31) 31) French Romanesque, Moissac c. 1120, St. Peter, left jamb of south portal, Tarn-et-Garonne, SW France Gislebertus (Burgundian) 1120-40, Temptation of Christ, Capital, St.Lazare, Autun (CGB '80; Museum des Monuments Français) French Pyrenees 11th cent., The Black Virgin, Church of Dorres English Romanesque carving, 12th cent., Raising of Lazarus, detail, Chichester Cathedral Faith as never before; heresies as never before; and the heretics, as Shaw's inquisitor says, "to all appearances better than their neighbors." In that Christendom of strange fervors — the blessed French Father Abraham (of all names), on whose pure lips, in vision, the Mother of God pressed the chaste kiss of her mouth, so graced with spirit that when he came in the presence of Jews he reeled from the hell-smell of sulphur and brimstone; pious Bernard quoting pious Jerome, "Be cruel for Christ's sake," lashing Europe (1146) to the Crusading mood which by 1212 would lure an army of children into slavery — how tense the participation in Biblical drama and pain. The Chichester Lazarus carvings, 1125-50, through the crudeness of local craft, voice such a cry as Abelard's of David, a death-lament for himself and Heloise: "If the stilled harp could still my tears …" …raucis planctu vocibus/ deficit et spiritus. a32) Vb32) c32) 9/2/95 Irish, especially 12th-13th cent., The Rock of Cashel, Tipperary English Romanesque c. 1180, Apostles with Angel above, relief, east wall of south porch, Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire Provence, Romanesque, 1110-20, God throned and crowned, detail of Tympanum, Moissac Gothic Ground and Vault 16 �C.G. Bell 32) Symbolic History French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1200, St. Etienne, Portal Statue, Church of Valcabrere, Haute Garonne The intenser the drive, the more the perimeter flames with heresy, and the faithcenter hardens to a stripped decretal of zeal: Hegel's "antithesis unharmonized." Yet in that warfare the birth and human ripening, the temporal incorporation, goes on. Over what gulfs of canonized and unaccommodated selfhood. Thus Coulton's case of "heretical puritanism" from about 1160: Master Gervase of Tilbury, seeing a maiden alone in a vineyard, and impelled by the wanton curiosity of youth (as we have heard from his own mouth in later years when he was a canon) asked her what she did there alone, and observing her comeliness, prayed her of love par amours. "Nay," replied she, with a simple gesture and a certain gravity in her words; "God forbid… for if I were defiled and lost my virginity, I should suffer eternal damnation beyond all help." Hearing which, Master Gervase forthwith knew her for one of the impious sect of Publicans (or Cathari), who in those days were sought out on every hand and destroyed… 33) V33a) 9/2/95 French Illumination, 2nd half of 12th cent., St. Gregory, MS Lat. 2287 fol. 1, verso, Bibl. Nat., Paris English (Winchester) mid-12th cent., Christ's Passion, MS Cotton Nero C.IV, sheet 21r, British Museum, London Gothic Ground and Vault 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So the girl is arraigned and, in the end, by "righteous cruelty," burned to death, "to the admiration of many, who marked how she uttered no sighs… as the martyrs of Christ (yet for how different a cause!)." While the good old Canon could tell it in age as a Catholic act of care. Such channeling and containment of the holy madness which might otherwise have torn the Middle Ages apart is an organizing subtlety of the Scholastic and Gothic buttressing. 34) V34a) French Gothic c. 1145-1225, Cathedral of Chartres, rising over the wheat fields of Beauce Same, 1145-50, part of West Front (CGB '59; cf. 41ff) The most quoted document from Coulton's Medieval Garner is Abbot Haimon's description of church-building by miraculous crusade. Though he writes of his own church of St.-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, and only mentions the like case of Chartres, it is generally to the Chartres construction of 1145 (and sometimes even, by confusion of fires, of 1194) that selections, sweetened and sentimentalized, are made to apply. Though the devotions Haimon narrates are as remarkable for rapt ruthlessness as for piety. a35) b35) 35) Chartres, from the Royal Portal: Kings and Queens of Judah, French Romanesque, c. 1150, Christ and Apostles, Loaves and Fishes, a capital from St.-Nectaire (Puy-de-Dôme) (CGB '80; Mus. Mon.) Chartres, Royal Portal, A King of Judah Whoever saw, whoever heard, in generations past that kings and princes, the mighty of this world, men and women puffed up with honor and riches, should bind bridles on their proud necks and submit themselves to wagons which, like brute beasts, they dragged, loaded with corn, wine, oil, lime, stones, beams — all things needed to sustain life or build churches — even to Christ's abode. And though a thousand are bound in the traces (so vast the mass, so great the engine) this miracle is seen, they go forward in such silence that no murmur is heard… When, again, they pause on the way, there is no voice but confession of guilt, supplication, and prayer to God for pardon. 36) 36a) Limoges enamel, c. 1180, Christ in Majesty, Museum de Cluny, Paris French stained glass, c. 1150, from the Ascension, 2nd window, south aisle, Cathedral of Le Mans; video chooses two details If any, however, is so sunk in sin that he will not obey the pious admonition of the priests to confess and forgive, his offering is cast 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History down from the wagon as unclean, and he, with shame and ignominy, is separated from the unity of the sacred people… There the sick rise from wagons where they were laid; the faithful fall to the ground and kiss the earth again and again, old men and young, and children, crying upon the Mother of God. For this work is especially known to be hers, next to her gentle Son; she first adorned the Cathedral of Chartres, and then our church dedicated to her with so many signs and wonders… Va37) 37) Cathedral of Laon, 1190-1205, Statues from the West Portal (CGB ‘59) French Romanesque, c. 1130, Isaiah, portal, Abbey of Souillac, Perigord (for slide 37 from Skira, video uses CGB, Museum des Monuments Français — so too digital) When they had come to the church, the wagons were arrayed around it like a spiritual camp; all night the army of the Lord kept watch with psalms and hymns. Wax tapers were lighted, the infirm were set apart, relics of the saints were brought to their relief… If, however, the healing was somewhat delayed, then all might have been seen putting off their clothes — men and women alike, naked from the loins upward, casting away confusion and lying upon the earth. 38) V38a) Senlis Cathedral, 1154, Death of the Virgin (cf. slide 38 from Enc. Ital., with CGB '80 from Museum des Monuments Français, Paris) French, c. 1150, Eagle of Suger, from St.-Denis Treasury, Louvre, Paris Their example was followed even more devoutly by children and infants, who dragged themselves flat on their bellies first to the high altar and then to all others, calling upon the Mother of Mercy in this new fashion of prayer. Who would not be moved as he watched the innocent children scour their naked ribs on the bare ground, in pious humility stretching their tender arms to be beaten with rods? For it did not suffice them to cry out with the voice of weeping, but they must add bodily affliction also, to obtain healing for those sick. 39) French Romanesque c. 1130, Destruction of the World, door pillar, Souillac, Perigord (digital: first, upper detail) The priests stood over them, shedding tears while they beat with scourges on the tender limbs; and the children begged them not to withhold their hand. All voices echoed the same cry, "Smite, scourge, lash, and spare not." There might be seen more than a thousand hands 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History outstretched to the scourge; nay, they exposed their very ears and eyes and tongues, saying "Let these hands be smitten which have wrought iniquity, these ears lashed which have heard vanity, these eyes which have seen it, this tongue and these lips which have uttered idle and lying words!" a40) 40) Gislebertus 1120-40, The Adoration of the Magi, Capital of St.-Lazare, Autun French Romanesque c. 1160, Apostle, S. Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles; + V detail Truly the Mother of Mercy is moved to compassion on those who afflict themselves before her; for soon the sick and infirm leap forth healed from wagon after wagon, hastening without support to give thanks at her altar… This is the manner of their vigils, these their night-watches; this is the order of the Lord's camp; these the forms of the new religion, the heaven-taught rites and mystical processions. Here nothing carnal is seen, nothing earthly, all is divine, as in Heaven; heavenly altogether are such vigils, wherein is heard nothing but hymns, thanks, and praise! From this creative vortex, fulminating with heresy and holy wars, yet quickening the earth as with rain, a41) b41) Vc41) d41) Ve41) 41) Chartres, 1145-1513, Cathedral over the town (CGB '74) Nantes Cathedral, c. 1170 ff., Nave, looking west (CGB '74) Suger, St.-Denis, 1140-44, Ambulatory, (copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I ‘62) Chartres, 1145-1225, buttresses of the Apse (CGB ‘74) Soisson Choir, 1160-1212, arches and glass (CGB '59) Chartres, West Front, 1145-65 (CGB '59); video picks two details the Cathedral of Chartres was reared. While in schismatic Constantinople, 1204 (the present Chartres rebuilding after the final fire) Christian zeal pillaged the city, burning the great body of Greek literature — all the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, preserved until then. Gothic glows with sweetness and light, but it was not made of sweetness and light. In the performances of Leonin and Perotin, two trends were shown from the start: Cape's Pro Musica, of Brussels, refined a lilting tenderness (duplum purum) in which they have never been matched. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 20 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History From Leonin's Judea et Jerusalem, from 2nd Duplum, ARC 14068 (Fade) While the Van group (Paris), with the sopraniste Archimbaud, to be followed by Oberlin in New York and others, beat the structural frenzy of rhythm: Music: From the 2nd Quadruplum of Perotin's Vidêrunt, OL, Alb. 78 (Fade) Early Gothic requires the blending of these poles. But the only performances to do it are older still, by Yves Tinayre, on Lumen. No one else has poured the mystical tenderness into the stern severities of structure. Though projections of a modern search, they are as moving as anything in the musical repertory. Music: 42) 43) Va44) Vb44) 44) Va45) 45) 46) 46a) 47) Va48) 48) 49) 50) V50a) Leonin c. 1180(?), Deum Timê, Org. Duplum, Lumen 32011 Chartres, Royal Portal, 1145-75, rebuilt 1194-1225 (CGB '59) Chartres, Interior, 1194-1225, Nave from South Transept (CGB '59); video, two details only, below and above Whole of slide 46, to be detailed below, Chartres, bay of north Nave, with Triforium and Clerestory (CGB '59) Variant of 44, but a copy of Gothic I, 68 (CGB '59) Chartres, interior, Ambulatory and Lady Chapel (CGB '74) Chartres, Lancet window, Adam & Eve and Good Samaritan (CGB '74) Chartres, South Ambulatory Bay, Zodiac window, etc. (CGB '59) Chartres, Bay of Nave, north side: (Video has shown the whole as Va44; here it details: first, Triforium, then Clerestory) Chartres, Clerestory of Apse (CGB '59; video details from V46a, CGB '78) Chartres, mid-12th cent., Glass, Madonna de la Belle Verriere (Video details from V47, a wider view, and adds a closer detail) Chartres, early 13th cent., North window, lancets and rose (CGB '59; cf. Milton, 26); + V detail Chartres, from North Transept into the Nave (CGB '59) Chartres, c. 1150 (and 1200), West Lancets and Rose (cf. CGB '59) Chartres c. 1150, Royal Portal, Tympanum Christ, from the side Chartres, same subject as 50, from the front (detail of 42) (The above hae been revised for video and digital) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault (End Deum Timê) 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A certain awe for the experienced oneness of Chartres has let us stretch the Deum Timê of Leonin from the Royal Portal of his youth, to the interior, occasioned (probably after his death) by the 1194 fire. 51) Chartres Cathedral 1194-1220, study from Lesser, Sacred Geometry; + V details That Sacred Geometry, as Lesser's study of the ground plan will imply, rides the spring tide of High Gothic, a formal perfection only Dante, in literature, a hundred years later, achieved. The cult of symbolic number which organizes the Divine Comedy, from its terza rima to its 100 cantos, and through all levels of punishment and reward, has shaped here a trinity of interlinked squares, proportioned as circumscribed and inscribed on the formative circle, under the recurrent factor of the root of 2. From Leonin's "Duplum Purum" we have reached the triune divisions of the metric modes, the melodic and rhythmic repetitions in which Perotin's Clausulae explore the mathematics of the isorhythmic motet. a52) Chartres, 1194-1225, Apse (CGB '59, copy of Bach, a9) 52) French Gothic 1160-1205, Laon, West Front through narrow street (CGB '74); + Video detail Here it is the group formed around Van which intensifies the frenetics of structure. The opening section from the four-voice Vidêrunt might seem a modern excess, if it were not so matched by darings of tower, buttress, and vault — this Laon, then Chartres, Paris, Bourges, Amiens, Le Mans, Rheims: Music: 53) V53a) 54) 55) Va56) 56) 9/2/95 Perotin act. c. 1190-1230, Alleluia Vidêrunt, opening, Ducretet Thompson 320 C 107 Chartres 1194-1225, Apse Buttressing (CGB '74); video uses detail Chartres, flying buttresses of the choir; video uses detail Chartres interior, starkly lighted pier, arch, and vault Paris, 1163-13th cent., Notre Dame, Choir from the south, with Buttressing (CGB '59); video pans to a detail Bourges, 1195-1266, Choir from southeast, buttressing (copy of CGB '84; see Michelangelo, 36) Bourges, pier rising to vault (CGB '84) Gothic Ground and Vault 22 �C.G. Bell 57) 58) V58a) 59) 60) 61) Symbolic History Amiens, mostly 1220-1236, black & white detail of buttressing Le Mans Choir, Apse buttressing (CGB '74) Same, from the north (copy of CGB '74; Gothic I, 73) Le Mans Choir, begun 1217, wide-angle black & white of vault Rheims, 1211-41 ff., from Ambulatory through Nave; video uses detail Rheims 13th cent. and after, air view; + V detail The aerial view of Rheims turns history to symbol: at the core of the time-bomb which is the modern West, towers the prior release of energy in the formal grip of faith, seed of that infinite out-reach which now engulfs it, and for which the Incarnation of God in flesh was the kindling archetype. a62) 62) 62a) Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, near Vienna, the triple spread (Video having prefaced with a detail of 62, Sampson) Same: enamel of Sampson and the Lion From the same Altar: Resurrection of Christ, Klosterneuburg; + V detail Music: Perotin, c. 1200, Vidêrunt, close of last Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 2565050 B (End) The "Style of 1200" has become a by-word for that great opening tug at the throttle of transforming force. Its most extraordinary representations are the enamel scenes from the Klosterneuburg Altar by Nicholas of Verdun. Here the physical and spatial are so entrained in the surge of spirit that two hundred years of painting — with Giotto at their center — seem anticipated. Yet this Sampson grappling with the lion is more than a pioneer depiction. Like a Perotin dynamic cadence, it means Rebirth, the Harrowing of Hell and wrestling with death — "Surrexit Dominus de sepulcro." And it somehow means it Now. (Close Perotin) 63) 63a) 63b) 63c) V63d) 9/2/95 Nicolas of Verdun, 1181, Klosterneuburg Altar, right side of central panel, 15 scenes (video intersperses various details as named) Same, enamel of Jonah into the whale Same, The Harrowing of Hell (video uses only a detail) Same: from a closer view of twelve scenes, video details four: Passover, Jacob's Promise, Resurrection, Sampson with the Gates of Gaza Same: "The Brazen Sea" on Twelve Oxen, from Solomon's Temple Gothic Ground and Vault 23 �C.G. Bell V63e) V63f) 63g) Symbolic History Same: Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt (video uses detail) Same: Last Supper Same: two scenes: Descent of the Holy Spirit and Judgment Angels Nothing is more at the heart of that 12th- and 13th-century revolution than the extension of the Biblical analogues of Augustine, where we began. Here we see half of the altar frontal. The scene of Sampson and the lion is in the bottom row, next to last on the right. The Crucifixion, central to the triple array, appears at the left. It is flanked by events from Christ's life. Above each is a cognate from Genesis or Exodus, and below, another from later Israel. Thus in the column before that of Sampson, we read from top to bottom: Joseph into the well, Christ into the grave, Jonah into the death-and-hell whale. What would that be in history but the corruption and crisis of any age? Next right, (above Sampson and the lion) Christ looses the Patriarchs from hell, while from the life of Moses, the Passover speaks the sparing of the chosen. At the far right, above, is Jacob's promise ("out of Judah a great lion" — the lion transformed); between, is Christ's Resurrection; and below, Sampson carrying off the Gates of hostile Gaza. The prophetic now of any such sequence has only to be pushed, for the orthodox daring of art to suggest the mystical heresy of Joachim de Floris, from the same years. In his three resonant levels, the Old Testament Age of the Father and the priestly Age of the Son are about to yield to the mystical Age of the Holy Spirit, a kingdom of God's indwelling, where Church and State withered away, each man, as Dante would put it, will be "crowned and mitered" over himself. Va64) 64) French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Nave French Romanesque-Gothic, 1157, Noyon, Apse with buttresses (CGB '74); + V detail Panovsky has written a small book documenting the tie between scholastic theology and Gothic, the reconciliation of Sic et Non, beside that of upward thrust and lateral ordering — a particular of the soaring dialectic which from year to year releases and contains more daringly. In a sequence of cathedrals, mid-12th to mid-13th century, the height of ceiling vault becomes a visible index of the launching-forces, economic, civic, speculative, with the synthesizing marvel of their incorporation. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Noyon, the apse, a first use of flying buttresses, 1157, modestly lifting and lightening the Romanesque. 65) Same, Noyon, interior, Choir 1157, Nave 1170 (CGB '74); first, a video detail Imagine the interior before the clear windows and 18th century ironwork gave an enlightenment the opposite of Suger's New Light. All these quiet transitions from Norman — St.-Denis, Laon, the English cathedrals — in stable three-storied harmony, vault at no more than 75 or 80 feet. 66) French Gothic, Notre Dame, Apse from east (CGB '59) Music: Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt, 1st Quadruplum (Munrow) ARC 256 5050 B The extravagance begins in Paris, with Notre Dame, where Perotin launched his vast Quadrupla. Already by 1163-77, when the choir-apse was raised, it was vaulted at 115 feet. 67) Notre Dame, within, 12th-13th cent., Transept Crossing (CGB '48) Within, mostly new glass restores the closure of once jewelled dark. The Argus in 1948 recorded its inadequacy of angular view: to find the lift of the vaulting it lost the floor. 68) Rheims Cathedral, 1211-41, Apse from northwest (CGB '59) Paris touched off a chain of Notre Dames, a civic and devotional rivalry, where dates and heights correlate with evolutionary fitness. Skipping Chartres and Bourges, about 1200, at 120 feet, we come to Rheims, 1211 and after, at 125. 69) Rheims, Interior, Triforium and Clerestory of the Nave (CGB '74) Inside, without a wide-angle lens (or the miraculous eye), one is lost. The old triple harmony reels under lines that go up and up — the triforium dwindled to a band between the reach of arches below and the soar of clerestory above. 70) Amiens Cathedral, Apse, 1220 and after (CGB '74: vertical slide; video substitutes details, below & above) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet Rheims holds a lateral harmony beside the two that follow: Amiens, from 1220 and after, the pinnacled apse leaping like a range of cliffs, to sustain the 139 foot vault; 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 26 �C.G. Bell 71) V71a) Symbolic History Same, Amiens, Arches of the Nave (CGB '74) Same, Amiens, Nave and Vault, up to West Rose (S. Adams’ slide; cf. Gothic III, 24) the camera, within, hardly encompasses the aisle-arches of the nave, much less the windowed range above. 72) Beauvais Cathedral, 1247 ff., Apse and North Transept (CGB '74); + V detail of the Apse In Beauvais, 1247 and after, the reach for the infinite goes beyond possibility, bringing to an end that high Gothic race. Only the choir and transepts were built; the choir fell soon after completion, had to be more densely arched and buttressed; the 500 foot open tower over the crossing, unstayed by a nave, fell in 1573. 1st73, 1994 edition) Same, vertical of the interior; + V detail V73a) Same, whole of vertical south wall (CGB '74; see 2nd 73 below) Yet this Promethean trunk, vaulted at 158 feet (in Ruskin's quaint phrase, "There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear fall as high as the choir of Beauvais"), this end-product, has the inebriating lure of Dante's Ulysses, sailing toward the sunset ("diretro al sol") in the "folle volo" (the mad flight) which took him beyond tragedy. (End Perotin.) Where is the comparable daring in Gothic thought? For 2nd 72) Nicolas of Verdun, Klosterneuburg Altar 1181, Nativity The Incarnation implies the heresy of God's self-realization in time. From theology through Hegel to evolution, this has made the problem of change, of temporally conditioned spirit (of which calculus is a quantitative and equational specter) the rootproblem of the West. a 2nd 71) Greek 370-360 BC, Round Temple ruins, Delphi (CGB '77) For 2nd 71) Again, Verdun Altar, Crucifixion (video uses detail only) 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against Greek harmony, with its temporal recurrence, its Euclidean containment, the post-and-lintel temple, the musical scale going not up but down — against the pathos of recollective Platonism — Christianity had no choice but to make the moment creatively decisive; though that is to venture the paradox of a world becoming God, or a God so world-immersed as almost to contradict his name. a 3rd 72) V3rd 72a) Same, Ascension of Christ (video uses detail only) Beauvais exterior (video uses whole of 72, CGB '74) Inevitably, the Hegelian germ lay under the resonances of the Coming; it declared itself with visionary force in those three Kingdoms of Joachim de Floris, anticipating Dante's De Monarchia, the Protestant Fifth Monarchy men, Condorcet's Tenth Age, and even the classless brotherhood of Marx. It is hard to recognize heresy in architecture; but like Joachim and the spiritual Franciscans, Beauvais has the glory of soaring excess. a 2nd 73) 2nd 73) V2nd 73a) V2nd 73b) Beauvais, flamboyant window of the North Transept (CGB '74) Beauvais, interior, south wall (CGB '74; video: center-spread) Beauvais, 13th cent. glass of the Lady Chapel (CGB '74) A closer view of Beauvais Apse (from 72 above) As in a dialectic of the Trinity, Gothic had to reconcile mystical oneness and the hunger of the heights with the earth-aligned horizontals, the weight of stone, columned piers, capitals, the tripartite divisions. The theology which culminated in Thomas had to hold in equilibrium every speculative wildness and heretical risk. From the formal balancings of the Summa Theologica, we seize on the central issue of Joachim's selfrealization of the Divine, Articles 3 and 4 of Question 106. Va74) French Gothic, Rheims Cathedral, Apse, 1211-41 (from 68, above; CGB '59) 74) Rheims, 1211-90, interior, looking west 74a) Rheims Choir Clerestory While the stabilized soaring of Rheims signs a like perfection. "Whether the New Law should have been given from the beginning of the world?" Though God disposed otherwise, Thomas, as always, reasons first for what is wrong — argues the unanswerable injustice to those who could not know Christ, though Scripture says God is no respecter of persons and will have all men saved. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "On the contrary, the Apostle says: That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural." [Emphasis added.] In support of which Thomas accepts organic process as the way of God in the world: "Because a thing is not brought to perfection at once from the outset, but through an orderly succession of time" — a principle which could lead as far as we like, to Hegel's history or Darwin's paleontology. a75) b75) Vc75) Vd75) 75) Rheims, 1211-41, Apse (Editions Gaud) Same, wilder close-up of Apse buttressing (CGB '74) Le Mans, begun 1217, from the east, Apse, etc. (CGB '74) French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Rheims Nave, Buttressing of Clerestory (slide by Sam Mason III) Rheims, Apse with buttressing ( best CGB of 1974) As in the countered stress of Rheims apse, the truth, which, overextended, would lead to Joachim's error, must be stated, then opposed and buttressed into strength. Thus Article 4: It would seem that the New Law will not last till the end of the world… Just as the Father is distinct from the Son and the Son from the Father, so is the Holy Ghost distinct from the Father and the Son. But there was a state corresponding to the Person of the Father, namely the state of the Old Law, and there is a state corresponding to the Son, wherein the clergy… hold a prominent place. Therefore, there will be a third state corresponding to the Holy Ghost, wherein spiritual men will hold the first place. Against that free indulgence in Christ's promise, comes the stern contrary: how can we have more of the Spirit than "the Apostles who received the firstfruits"? And as Dionysius says, "The third kingdom will take place not in this life, but in heaven." "This puts out of court the senseless idea that the Holy Ghost is to be expected at some future time." [Emphasis added.] a76) 76) V76a) Chartres, 1200-1240, North Portal, left of center (CGB '59, sunset) Same Portal, right side: John the Baptist, etc. (CGB '74; video uses detail) Detail from another slide of North Portal, left of center (CGB ‘74) Whatever the hope or danger of prophetic history, in the vaulting of Gothic the incarnate thrust was held in mystical surrender over an eternal ground. Thus the 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History culminant sequence of Medieval Latin, the Dies Irae, perhaps about 1235, perhaps by Thomas of Celano (CGB translation): Day of anger, that the day, When time burns itself away, As David and the Sibyls say. Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla teste David cum Sibylla. Quantus tremor est futurus. quando judex est venturus cuncta stricte discussurus. What the trembling and what terror When a judge of past and future Searches every secret error. 77) French Gothic, Bourges, c. 1225(?), Central Portal, with Judgment Tympanum 77a) Same: from Last Judgment, detail of lower two bands The great horn thundering doom Through the shires of the tomb Gathers all before the throne. Tuba mirum spargens sonum per sepulcra regionum coget omnes ante thronum. 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mors stupebit et natura, cum resurget creatura judicanti responsura … Death struck and nature stunned Loose the bonds of flesh and bone Judgment-summoned, the dead respond. 78) Chartres, c. 1210-20, South Portal, right side of central bay; + V detail 78a) Same: North Portal, detail Melchizedek (video, head only) V78b) Same, St. Peter, North Portal, center, right jamb (video, head only) To whom shall I — wretch — complain At that bar, what patron fain, Where even the just have no claim? Quid sum miser tunc dicturus, quem patronum rogaturus, dum vix justus sit securus? Rex tremendae majestatis, qui salvandos salvas gratis, salva me, fons pietatis. King of fearful majesty, Swayed to save, salvation free, Fount of pity, be saviour to me. 79) V79a) 79b) Same, Chartres, North Portal, head of Moses Same, head of Samuel, north side of Center Portal Same, detail of devil from the Last Judgment, South Portal Take pity, Jesus, to your heart; Pity was your cause of birth, Lose me not that day with earth. Recordare, Jesu pie, quod sum causa tuae viae, ne me perdas illa die … 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When for spite and malediction Recreants feel the flame's affliction, Render me your benediction. Confutatis, maledictis, flammis acribus addictis, voca me cum benedictis … a80) b80) c80) Chartres, detail of Simeon and John, North Portal Same, detail of Judith, from right of North Portal Double: [A] French late 9th cent., Ste. Foi, Conques; and [B] French c. 1210, St. John the Baptist, North Portal, Chartres d80) Double: [A] French Romanesque 1160, Beardless Prophet, Gilles-du-Garde; and [B] French Gothic c. 1210, St. John the Baptist, Chartres Ve80) Chartres, c. 1210, North Portal, the same St. John Chartres (postcard) f80) Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, Upper Church of St Francis, Assisi (cf. Dante, 50) Vg80) Again, St. John the Baptist, Chartres (Houvet Monograph) 80) Detail of Ve80, St. John the Baptist (from Chartres card) 80a) Detail of V80, St. John (from Houvet Monograph) When, on that day of tears, Man, resurgent out of fires, Waits the justice of your rod, Spare us then, Father and God. Jesus, full of sympathy, Grant us peace eternally. Lacrimosa dies illa, Qua resurget ex favilla Judicandus homo reus: Huic ergo parce Deus. Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen Against the Dark Age sternness this melting Chartres St. John; against the mystical Gilles-du-Garde head, where we ended our 12th-century Prelude, this, where mysticism takes flesh and person. Or against plainsong and all earlier melody, a onevoice praise of the Lamb: "Agniauz Douz," which Tinayre called "School of Perotin." 9/2/95 Gothic Ground and Vault 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All are contemporary with St. Francis, whose mother (from Provence) taught him Troubador songs and chivalric romance. In all, the new passion burns — with joy — over a Judgment Ground. Music: 9/2/95 French early 13th cent., Agniauz Douz, (Yves Tinayre) Lumen 32017 (first stanza only) (End) Gothic Ground and Vault 33 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 34 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gothic Ground and Vault, Symbolic History, Part 9 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 9 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_09_Gothic_Ground_and_Vault Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fec9b38e35f21bc3ece11d3f39af762c.pdf abf1d4a6859153bcf3d5b59c96bc77eb PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 8. Gothic Prelude: Lux Nova a1) 1) French Ivory, 13th cent., Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (CGB '80) French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel (CGB '74) The waking of a culture shares with spring and dawn this mystery: first buds seem most jewelled, brightest songs greet the earliest rays: Lenten is come with love to toune, With blosmen and with briddes roune, That al this blisse bringeth ... Almost incredible, the New Light with which Gothic love opens in the ascetic dusk, gracing the beauty of earth with sacred sanction. So the lilting poignance of a 1235 motet, "Ave Maria," with this detail and another from Mont-Saint-Michel, and three from Rheims. Music: French, c. 1235?, Ave Maria, Syntagma Musicum, SIC-6052 2) French Gothic, c. 1210, Kitchen, Mont-Saint-Michel (CGB '74) Va3) French Gothic, c. 1220-30, Head of Mary from a Visitation (full face), West Portal, Rheims Cathedral 3) Same (profile), Rheims Cathedral 4) French Gothic, 1211-90, Clerestory of Nave, detail, Rheims Cathedral Va5) Closer detail of 5 (from Gothic Wave, 9) 5) French Gothic, c. 1260, West Front, detail with Coronation, Rheims Cathedral (CGB '74) (fade “Ave Maria”) But the waking had begun by the year 1000, two and a half crucial centuries before Rheims portal. From its Gothic height, this prelude must look back — August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 1 �C.G. Bell 6) 6a) 6b) Symbolic History Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave and late 15th cent. Choir (CGB '74); video: detail only Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 11th cent. Nave (CGB'74); video: details only, below and above Mont-Saint-Michel Chapel, 15th cent. Choir (CGB '74); again, video to details, below and above where Romanesque vaults toward Gothic out of the Dark Age ground. As the cathedrals soar from earlier crypts as dark as holy, or the rhymed tropes embellish scripture, as the organa and motets of Ars Antiqua flow from plainsong — Music: Free Organum, 12th cent., Agnus Dei, opening, HSL-2071 (7) (fade) so the 11th-century nave of Mont-Saint-Michel lightens to a late-Gothic choir (time of Ockeghem) Music: Ockeghem, c. 1480?, from Missa pro defunctis: "ad fontes aquarum," Archiv 2533 145 (B) — a favored blend, as at Aachen, Tournai, Le Mans. 7) (fade Ockeghem) Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Mausoleum of Galla Placida, interior with Tombs, Ravenna; video to details, below and above Music: Gregorian (Solesmes) Da pacem, lst mode, V-M-87, side 18 We have seen Christianity, in the crumbling of pagan power, rear in the grave, antinomies of eternal faith and world abandonment. At first the poles were draped in the dissolving arts of classical leisure. (fade Gregorian) 8) Carolingian, c. 800, First cover of the Lindau Gospels, J.P. Morgan; + V detail Music: Liturgical Chant, lOth cent., from "dextera tua, domine'', close of Offertory, Nonesuch H-71348 (A-4) But as they move north, a symbolic cross to the German tribes, while these pour southward over Rome, the residual suavities of space and consciousness are stripped August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History away, leaving the poles burning as in void, with the abstract inconsequence of timeless vision. (fade l0th cent. chant) 9) North Italian, c. 1100-35, Christ Enthroned, Bronze doors, S. Zeno, Verona (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Santiago de Compostela, MS, 12th cent., Conductus — Annua guadia (close) Decca DL 79416 (B-1) And the first strands of the Western temporal fabric stretch over the rift, a preGothic sharpness of joy and pain, concentrating into spirit the apocalyptic enigma where they are born. (end Annua Gaudia) a1O) French Gothic, c. 1163 into 13th cent., Notre Dame from S.E., Paris (CGB '80) 10) Same, c. 1163-77, Ambulatory of Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59) 10a) Same, c. 1270, Rose and lancets of South Transept, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only Or the metaphor of poles may be extended to the historical weaving. Then the cross of stripped faith and earthly negation becomes a temporal base for the western curve, the Gothic birth a many-phased unfolding from that somber ground. Such the rearing of Notre Dame and Perotin. Music: 11) Perotin, c. 1200, Sedêrunt principes, separate quadruplum (close), Archiv 2723045 (1b) Byzantine, 6th cent., Virgin, detail of Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai; video: detail only But the ground is ideal, an assumed limit of the actual field. What is its art locus? Not the early Christian and Byzantine — not this 6th-century Madonna from Sinai, with its troubled Greek shadowings of sensuous personality. 12) Armenian, 915-21, Virgin and Child with Gabriel, King Gakik's Church, Aght-'Amar; video: detail only August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The negation had begun there, but it had not run its course. The stripping to the bare abstract was the Dark Age drift of Christendom everywhere. Here we pick it up from 1Oth-century Armenia, still in precursive contact with the West, though soon to fall to the Sultan. 13) Irish, late 8th cent., Virgin and Child, Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin; + V detail The Book of Kells exhibits the general affinity and even specific features derived from earlier Coptic and Armenian contacts. Through that old-world ascetic hardening, Celtic wonder looks out, a child's eyes through a mask of age. How near is the Kells flowering to the Dark Age ground? a14) 14) Irish MS, c. 1000, David and the Lion, Southampton Psalter; V: detail only Irish MS, c. 1000, David and Goliath, Southampton Psalter (V14, wider) The Irish were faithful, anyway, to linear abstraction — the Book of Kells a summit among such manuscripts produced over more than three hundred years. By 1000, after the Viking raids and the exodus of scholars, representation (as in this Southampton Psalter David and Goliath) seems flattened to the barest outlines of penmanship — what Klee and the 20th century would revive in post-Freudian psyche-art. But is that inverted Goliath lying on the Dark Age ground? 15) Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Luke, from Four Evangelists Page, Codex Aureus, Cathedral Treasury, Aachen Carolingian manuscripts, struggling for space in spacelessness, hardly admit of so comical a grounding. Nor the poems of mondo-pessimism and God-hope: Alcuin's epitaph: ''Yearning I followed the delights of the world —/ Ashes and dust now...'' — ''delicias mundi... nunc cinis et pulvis…'' Nor the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer's vanity of vanities: "All is labor and loss in this lower world.'' 16) Rheims, c. 820, St. Matthew, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Epernay; first, V detail Nor from Cynewulf's Christ, late 8th century: "swa we on laguflode ... windge holmas/ Ofer deop gelad … A waste of surges we sail across August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this wavering world, over wind-swept tracts Of open sea … The Son of God guides us. (after Spaeth) 17) Anglo-Saxon (Ely), 1006-23, Nativity from Sacramentary, f. 32 v. MS Y 6, Bibl. Mun., Rouen; video: details only, below and above As the dialectic of poles implies, the clearest expressions of that winter ground do not come from the broken trough, but as the forces rally that would lift off from it — as in the pre-Conquest schools of Winchester and Ely, a vitality alien as something from China opens in the calligraphic symbol-world. 18) German, 9th cent., pre-Romanesque Church at Oberzell, Reichenau Music: Notker Balbulus, d. 912, Christus hunc diem, 1-5 (HAM) MHS OR 349 The final outpost of a transition where lean backward-looking presages the birth to follow is the Germany of the Ottos. There Notker and Wipo were writing the sequences our historical discs leave historical. There the Saxon nun, Hrowswitha, about 980, created out of faith and stark Latin a sacred drama, blending comic and tragic — though the mystery plays it anticipates would grow not from such learned imitation, but from the life of the Mass. a19) 19) 19a) German (Ottonian) Reichenau, c. 1020, Woman and the Beast, Bibl., Bamberg; first, V detail Same, ''Fount of Living Waters"; + V detail German, 1015, Bronze door, Cathedral, Hildesheim; video: two details only Consider a plot: Callimachus has to wife the saintly Drusiana; to avoid his legitimate caress (that monastic chastity Hegel would despise) she receives death by prayer, is protected by a divine serpent, revived by the Apostle John, converts old Callimachus, and banishes a vulgar servant to hell. As in Ottonian illumination, mind, action, and world begin and end in miracle; nothing stoops to the physical; every cause reverts to First Cause. (fade Notker after "apostolos") That the pagan vanity of drama can be revived in piety is one of the life-giving reversals by which the profane and temporal spring in the timeless enclosure of creed. So at the end of the Dark Ages, we have seen outlawed reason ("Professing themselves to be August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wise, they became fools'') prove in Anselm the Tertullian impossibility of God's Incarnation. 20) 20a) 20b) 20c) Late 10th cent. German, Lothair Cross, with 1st cent. Augustus; Palace Treasury, Aachen Same, detail (which V takes from 20) Same, closer detail of center — Augustus cameo Carolingian, 9th cent (or 16th cent.?), equestrian statuette of Charlemagne; Louvre, Paris Music: Carmina Burana 52, Conquest of Jerusalem, 1099: Solemnibus, MHS 3793 Nomen a For the deified Augustus (lst-century cameo) to win the center of the 10th-century Cross of Lothair reflects in its most dramatic form the same about-face, by which Christian withdrawal changes to Christian attack. It began with Constantine, but the Dark Age life of paradox, from Charlemagne's Saracen struggle to the First Crusade, made it the automatic stance of Warrior Christianity. Thus Fulcher of Chartres describes the 1099 fall of Jerusalem, also hailed in music: The Franks entered the city magnificently at the noonday hour on Friday, the day of the week when Christ redeemed the whole world on the cross... Nowhere was there a place where the Saracens could escape the swordsmen...Within Solomon's Temple about ten thousand were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain... They did not spare the women and children. Within a faith once of radical peace and estranged from Empire, what Vico calls the holy wars of heroic peoples have been reinstated. (fade Nomen a Solemnibus) The mode of this accomplishment is the medieval mode of faith-symbol. Augustus here is both the Prince of Peace and his secular image. So Arthur and the Peers of France are baptized; the Celtic Graal becomes the Cup of Redemption, the horn of Bran (cors), by a Frankish pun, the wafer of Corpus Christi — even as bread and wine are body and blood. So the eagle-shaped M in Dante [Paradiso XVIII and cf. VI] raises Roman Monarchy to the stars. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 6 �C.G. Bell 21) 21a) 21b) 21c) Symbolic History French (Norman), 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel from the causeway (CGB '74) German Romanesque (Köln), 10th cent. and after, Gross St. Martin, apse and tower, from the S.E. French Romanesque (Burgundy), 1088-97, Remains of Abbey Church, Cluny, France French Romanesque (from the Meuse), 11th cent., Tancremont Crucifix, Tancremont Abbey, France; + V detail Music: Marcabru, 1137, from Pax in Nomine Domini (Munrow: Crusades) Argo ZRG 673 A 2 Under the cult of the timeless and spaceless, what has occurred? Europe was rising like Mont-Saint-Michel out of the mist. The warhorse had been bred for chivalry, the mouldboard plow invented for the forest soil; the "three-field" crop system was boosting food production. For the destroyed life-trade of the Mediterranean, the road and river trade of Europe had seeded the medieval towns. The very principle of disruption — empire into warlike fiefs — shapes the feudal ties of modern kingdoms. The Dark Age terrors of war and passion — Brünhilde, Deirdre, Hallgarda — turn to chivalric devotion; while the Church, vitiated and corrupted through the Time of Troubles, begins with Cluny, 910, its passionate regeneration. Even in statements of the ascetic ground — Peter Damiati, 11th century: "Nothing remains but the love of God and mortification of yourselves" — we forget that the key words, "love" and "self" are subtly changing. "My wretched heart," (his Yeatsian cry) "which will not lose the memory of a form seen but once." So Marcabru's 1137 lament becomes a chivalric call. (end Marcabru) a22) 22) German Tapestry, 11th-13th cent., Knight, fragment of "The Twelve Months," Kunstindustri Mus., Oslo; + V detail German Romanesque, 1040-50, West Facade, Cathedral of Trier (CGB'74); video to details, above and below Music: Carmina Burana 11th-12th cent., #22, Homo quo vigeas (Binkley) SAWT 9522-A Everywhere the earthly is entrained in the heavenly quest: Pope Urban prompts to the First Crusade not merely for the glory of God and his kingdom: "This land is too August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History narrow for your population ... Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others." To which the cry of acceptance was "Dieu li volt." From that crusading century, the symptom of new life which still dominates the landscape is a wave of first-Romanesque churches in those rising centers of trade and prosperity. If the Kaiserdoms of the Ottonian Rhine and Mosel (here the west front of the Roman Basilica of Trier, with a Golliard chant) initiate the surge — in a form as weightily archaic as the organization of the Empire — it is at once caught up, or independently advanced, in northern Italy and France. (end Carmina Burana 22) 23) 24) 24a) N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1118, Cathedral of Pisa, from S.W. (CGB '48) Same, view of the Apse (CGB '48) N. Italian Romanesque, 1063-1350, Pisa Group: Cathedral, with Baptistry and tower (CGB '48) 1063: and the free commune of Pisa begins an arcaded marble basilica of protoRenaissance harmony. Though if vault had been grappled with as in the driven North, this first benign beauty of our culture could hardly have afforded such purity and ease. In the paucity of early organa and plainness of their reconstruction, it is of interest that the first Italian polyphony ("Regi Regum Gloriosa", 11th century Lucca MS) blends smooth plainsong melodies in perfect intervals — against the more dissonant risks of French organum: Music: 25) 11th c. Ital. (Lucca 603), Regi Regum Glorioso, RCA-V-LM 6015 (cut, end stanza) Venetian Byzantine, 1069-74, Cathedral of St. Mark's Music: Byzantine, Mt Athos, Easter chant, 9th Ode, ARC-2533 413, end of side 1, ARC 2533 413 At the same time in Venice, queen of the Adriatic and Eastern trade, the art lingering of Constantinople found hospitable soil and leafed out in the breath-taking domes of St. Mark's (1069-74). Though beneath the outward exhalation, 26) St. Mark's interior, Crossing of nave and transept, Cupola of the Resurrection, with 13th-cent. mosaics; video: details only, above and below August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 8 �C.G. Bell 26a) Symbolic History Same, another (lighter) view; video: detail only (for digital, a26) brood gold mosaic vaults, decorated through centuries, but still symbolic enclosures of jewels burning in the Dark Age gloom. Was the chant as Byzantine as the art? (fade Athos) Or had the diaphony of French-Italian Guido already reared the poles of Organum? — Parallel (Music), and Contrary (Music). Music: a27) 27) Guido of Arezzo, c.1025, Parallel & Contrary Diaphony, examples 9 & 18 from Micrologus, sung by K.Williamson et al. S. Italian, c. 1090, Christ in Glory, S. Angelo in Formis, near Capua S. Italian, c. 1080, interior of S. Angelo in Formis (video order: 27, detail; then a27, detail; and again, detail of 27) To the south, the impoverished heart of what had been imperial Rome showed no such progress. Music: Gregorian, Psalm 116, Laudate, 8th mode, History of Italian Music, VLM 40000, I, 1 It must have seemed strange to the independent north, that the Papal tail should so determinedly wag the dog. Especially when the Tuscan Hildebrand, elected pope in 1073, pushed ahead with church reform in the spirit of Cluny, outlawing the imperial practice of lay investiture. Against the archaic Roman manner of this little Capua church, (fade Laudate Dominum omnes gentes) 28) 28a) German, 11th-13th cent. (and later), Cathedral of Mainz; + V28, detail German, 11th cent., from the bronze doors of Augsburg Cathedral, Creation of Eve, Fall, etc. (copy of Faust, 15 — CGB '59); V and digital: Adam only V28b) German Romanesque, 1080-1160, Cathedral of Speyer, Rhenish Kaiserdom 28c) German Romanesque, 1000-1181, Apse and Towers, Worms Music: Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent., #19 Fas et nefas (Binkley) SAWT 9455A how vastly the Mainzer Dom, 11th century at core (though a conglomerate from the 1Oth to the 19th) sprawls over the Rhine. With such gangling pride Henry the Fourth must have gathered his appointed bishops to answer Gregory VII's claim that the Roman Church had never erred, nor would err to all eternity, that it was in the apostolic power to August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History depose emperors, and that Henry should "Obey the mandate of God". (fade Carmina Burana) Henry, king ... by the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, not pope but false monk ... By wiles ... thou hast achieved money; by money, favor; by the sword, the throne of peace. And from the throne of peace thou hast disturbed peace ... Thou, therefore, damned by this curse ... relinquish the apostolic chair which thou hast usurped ... I, Henry, king by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say thus unto thee: Descend, descend, and be damned throughout the ages. 29) French Norman, 1062 and after, St. Etienne (Abbaye-aux-Hommes) Caen; first, video detail Music: Santiago MS (Magister Albertus of Paris) c. 1135, Congaudeant, opening, Argo ZRG 900 But Hildebrand was linked all over Europe with the rising tide of Catholic power — from Santiago. through Magister Albertus' Paris, as far as Normandy, where Duke William and his churchmen were then creating the most pregnant of Romanesque styles, which, in the superimposed heights of his own monastery at Caen, already looks to Gothic. (fade Congaudeant) The papal ban was no negligible weapon. Henry's submission at Canossa in the snowy winter of 1077, Gregory himself describes: 30) 30a) 30b) N. Italian, 940, rebuilt 13th cent., Castle of Canossa ruins, Emilia; + V close detail (as in slide 30b) Roman Mosaic, 1128, Crucifix with Vine, S. Clemente, Rome Again, Canossa ruins, slide: close detail; video: a wider detail (from 30) Music: Carmina Burana, 11th-12th cent. Dulce solum, (Binkley) SAWT 9455-A And there, having laid aside all the belongings of royalty, wretchedly, with bare feet and clad in wool, he continued for three days to stand before the gate of the castle. Nor did he desist from imploring with many tears the aid and consolation of the apostolic mercy, until he had moved all those who were present there ... to pity and depth of compassion. Today the Apennine castle of Canossa is a ruin as abandoned as the Papal dream of Europe under spiritual sway. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (fade Carmina Burana) 31) French Norman, 1020 and after, Mont-Saint-Michel, upper portion (CGB '74) Though the feud went on, even to Henry's taking Rome in 1084 and the NormanSicilian Guiscard's recovering it for the Pope, but with such rape and misconduct that Gregory was driven into exile by the outraged Romans. As in all deep conflicts of history, progress banked on both sides: the emerging national states, and the Catholic synthesis of Europe. While in thought and the arts, France confirmed itself as the ordering center. 32) V32a) V32b) 32c) V32d) Norman French, soon after 1066, from the Bayeux tapestry; video: detail of ships only Same, detail: King Edward Same, detail: Guy takes Harold Same, detail of battle Same, detail: Norman archers The Chanson de Roland, against the looser German epics, reveals the formative discipline of the Norman French. The Bayeux tapestry, record of the conquest of England, has such clean force and drama within the iconographic stripping of all figures — as description in the Roland is cut to a functional core: "Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage" — "Roland is brave, and Oliver is wise." And are we not told by Malmesbury and Wace how the Duke's jongleur Taillefer (or Toliver) joined battle at Hastings chanting the "Cantilena Rollandi"? a33) b33) 33) Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbey-aux-Dames, outside at dusk, Caen (CGB '74); video: details only, below and above French Romanesque, c. 1080, The Archangel Michael, Church of St. Savin Norman Romanesque, 1059-66, La Trinité or Abbaye-aux-Dames, Nave, Caen (CGB '74) Music: Magister Albertus, c.1235(?), Congaudeant, conclusion, st. 3 & 4, Argo ZRG 900 Emotion, pathos, everything personal, is held here in the severity of automatic faith, which dominates and transforms, until the horn of Roland sounds through the Pyrenees like the trumpet of doom: "Roland feels that his time is no more." He is on a steep hill August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History that looks toward Spain ... He has held up his right glove to God: the angels of heaven come down to him. AOI" — "Angles del ciel i descendent a lui. AOI." August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With the Norman Conquest, and even just before, that mighty style (here Matilde's church of the Trinity in Caen) a34) 1st 34) Norman, 1089-1100, and 15th cent., Gloucester Cathedral over the town English Norman, 1079-93, remade Perpendicular, 1366-1404, Nave of Winchester (CGB '74) spreads over England, so that most of the Cathedrals of the island are built round or carved out of a great Norman core, often begun within ten years of the conquest. (fade Congaudeant) Thus at Winchester, longest cathedral in Europe, the solemn proportions of the 1079-93 nave must be felt through a Gothic surface of the time of Chaucer. Music: Worcester Fragments, c. 1325, Hocketed trope from "Epiphaniam Domino," Nonesuch H-71308, A, bd.4, middle The verticals, the lierne vault, 35) Winchester, exterior, Nave from the south (CGB '74) stretch the low solidity of structure, lightened by modest buttresses and the pointing of windows once round-arched. V2nd 34) Winchester, nave: video returns briefly to an upper detail of 1st 34 Yet all that richness speaks 2nd 33) (fade hocketed trope) La Trinité, nave; video: details only, above and below; digital: above what it came from and must have been — Music: French, 12th cent.(?), Verbum bonum et suave (first 2 st.), SAWT 9531 A again the Abbey of Matilde, wife of the Conqueror. There are always attempts to differentiate Romanesque from Gothic, as Frankl's additif against divisif: still, this vaulted stone already contains the other future, as centuries of polyphony would unfold from this early organum. (fade Verbum bonum) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 13 �C.G. Bell 3rd 34) Symbolic History Winchester, nave, through the choir screen (CGB '90); video: first detail of 1st 34, then of V3rd 34 (CGB ‘74) (Music: Continue hocketed trope, as above) And what could more beautifully show the sweep of Romanesque-Gothic than to move from Matilde's Caen to the nave of Winchester — melodized and harmonised hockets on that ground? (end Trope) 2nd 35) Again, Winchester, exterior (CGB ‘74) Here, where the poise of Norman, to be continued through the quieter Gothic of England, awaits the filling-in of Rennaissance, we are struck by the continuity of the Western rebirth, the speed with which it found its expressive forms. 36) French Romanesque (Vienne) c. 1080, St. Savin s. Gartempe (interior) Another of those early polyphonies, this from Chartres before 1100, an Alleluia, Organum joined with plainsong, will let us move from the pre-Romanesque of Southern France (1080, St. Savin) 37) French Norman, 1063 ff., Abbaye-aux-Hommes (St. Etienne) interior; Caen (CGB '74) through William the Conqueror's own church in Caen, begun in 1063 — piers (as alternately through Romanesque and early Gothic) replacing columns, the dialectic of vertical and lateral, like the Scholastic vaulting of "Yes and No," grandly anticipated — 38 and for 2nd 37) English Norman, early 12th cent., aisle, with nave columns, Tewkesbury Abbey (copy of 2nd 38 — CGB '66) to English Norman, columned again in Tewkesbury, early 12th century, later windows glimpsed through the dusk; though we would need more music than we have, records recovered from the still vibrating molecules of those church walls, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 14 �C.G. Bell 2nd 36) Symbolic History St. Savin s. Gartempe; video: details only, below and above to distinguish the musical stages of Romanesque. Music: 2nd 37) 2nd 38) Chartres MS, c. 1100, from Alleluia: Angelus Domine, V-LM 6015 Again, Abbaye-aux-Hommes, Caen; video: detail only Again, Tewkesbury Abbey (CGB ‘66); video: details only (cut plainsong close) Tewkesbury, with the aisled solemnity of Egyptian Karnak. 39) Tewkesbury Abbey, from the south, c. 1110-50 and after (CGB '66) And outside, the long nave roof and tremendous tower of Norman. How much French history was enacted north of the Channel: the Anglo-Norman scribe of the Roland, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Marie de France also of England, the play of Adam, chief relic of 12th-century drama. a40) b40) c40) French (Burgundy), 1120-40 ff., Vezelay exterior; video: detail only Same, Vezelay interior; video has detail of c40 Same, Vezelay portal, lighted Back to France, Vezelay (1120-40); and now, available music admits of a style distinction. At the very time when the upward reach of Gothic begins in art and soul — that angel clarity of fierce mystic love, in which so many great men join: theologianlover Abelard, builder-politician Suger, mystic Hugh of St. Victor, and even their puritanical censor Bernard of Clairvaux — Gregorian stretches out to a tenor (Latin: tenere, "to hold") over which new melodies slide in melismatic organum. 40) V40a) Burgundian, 1132-40, Nave viewed through portal, Vezelay; + V detail French (Burgundy), Vezelay interior (from slide b40) With the Vezelay portal and Gislebertus' Christ and the Magdalene, hear the brief recorded section of a Benedicamus Domino, of August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the St. Martial school at Limoges — the first beautiful performance of polyphony. Music: 41) 41a) St. Martial School, mid-12th cent., Benedicamus Domino, Haydn Society, L2071 (close during slide 41) Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ & the Magdalene, St. Lazarus, Autun (CGB '80); + V details (while slide goes to Gislebertus, 1120-40, Flight to Egypt, detail, St. Lazarus, Autun) Again, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene, detail (CGB '80) Here is Hugo of St. Victor, early 12th century, in praise of Love — De Laude Caritatis: You have great power, O love; you alone could draw God down from heaven to earth. How strong is your bond with which even God could be bound... You brought him bound with your bonds, you brought him wounded with your arrows... you wounded him who was invulnerable, you bound him who was invincible, you drew him who was immovable; the Eternal you made mortal... O love, how great is your victory. Set that celebration of love's paradox against its ultimate source, 42) Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C., Socrates, Diotima, and Eros, Mus. Naz., Naples Socrates taught by Diotima in the Symposium, of which this Hellenistic relief survives, where Plato invokes Eros, just to avoid the paradox of the divine and earthly: What then is love?...He is a great spirit... the mediator who spans the chasm which divides the divine and the mortal... For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. 2nd 41 and 2nd 42) French glass, c 1150, Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere, 1st window, south aisle of Choir, Cathedral, Chartres; but video inserts a detail of Socrates from Alexandrian Melt, a90 (see V2nd 42) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "The Eternal you made mortal ... O love, how great is your victory" — what lucent contradictions have opened stained glass windows in the dark, since the Socratic search for rationality. Va43) b43) 43) French, 1145-50, Two Queens of Judah, detail, Royal Portal, Cathedral, Chartres Same, One of the Queens of Judah, closer detail Southern France, c. 1130, Prophet holding a Scroll, Moissac (Tarn et Garonne); + V detail In Southern France,. and soon after in the north, the love of woman, its poetry and music, are caught up in the same mystical fervor. Perhaps the best known Troubadour song is that high chivalric one by Bernard de Ventadorn of the 12th century: the lover's envy when he sees the lark: As she beats her wings with delight against the sun, Loose herself and fall, in the sweetness that goes to her heart — Can vei la lauzeta mover/ de joi sas alas contral rai Que s'oblid' e's laissa chazer/ per la doussor c'al cor li vai... In the dearth of secular art, we hear it with the Moissac Prophet Holding a Scroll — both pierced by timeless ecstasy. The improvised accompaniments are lost, and efforts by later groups (Binkley, etc.) to supply them, make us treasure the solo refinements of Max Meili, or (here) Mertens, of the Brussels Pro Musica Antiqua. Music: Bernard de Ventadorn, 12th cent., "Can vei la lauzeta" EMS 201 In troubador love, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 17 �C.G. Bell a44) Vb44) 44) 44a) 44b) 44c) 44d) Symbolic History Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Flight into Egypt, Mary and Jesus, detail; St. Lazarus, Autun French early Gothic, c. 1200, detail from Coronation of the Virgin; St. Yved, Braisne Gislebertus, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Recumbent Eve; St. Lazarus, Autun German Gothic, end 12th cent., Fall of Man, Ceiling Painting; St. Michael's Church, Hildesheim Again, Gislebertus, Eve, detail of upper body G. Pisano, 1302-11, Nativity, detail, from the Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa Closer detail of Eve's upper body; video then returns to 44 in the burning love of Mary, second Eve, a new species of joy possesses Europe; (end Ventadorn) as if mutation had produced a flower of unknown grace and fragrance, we see as recognizably as snowdrops spread through a forest, the lyric fire (Gislebertus' Eve in the snake-vines) lighten from Provence over Burgundy and France, to England, Germany, and to the Italy of "the Sweet New Style." For early 12th-century France, Abelard and Eloise draw both loves to a flaming core. That the man, condemned by St. Bernard for logic and rationality ("This man has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued") would later stand for medieval passion sacred and profane, hints at the sheer ambivalence of that intellectual fire. A likely conjecture, that the supreme Latin love poem of the time, the "Dum Diane Vitrea," in its richness and freedom, may be one Abelard sang for Eloise, and heard sung after him by admiring scholars. From it we cull three phrases: When the gleaming lamp of Diana is kindled Late at the rosy light of her brother, And west winds bearing fragrance Wander the ether-ways of heaven... (CGB) Dum Diane Vitrea/ sero lampas oritur, et a fratris rosea/ luce dum succenditur, dulcis aura zephyri/ spirans omnes etheri ... The sounds of water on pure sand And of a mill wheel turning round Steal oblivious eyes from the light... (CGB) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History murmura rivorum/ per arenas puras, circulares ambitus/ molendinorum, qui furantur somno/ lumen oculorum ... Sweet is the passage from love into sleep, But sweeter the waking from sleep to love... (CGB) Hei quam felix transitus/ amoris ad soporem, sed suavior regressus/ soporis ad amorem... a45) 45) Ottonian, c. 975, Gero Crucifix, detail, Cathedral, Cologne French Romanesque (Haute Loire), c. 1135, Lavaudieu Head of Christ, Louvre, Paris; + V detail From the Gerokreuz at the close of The Dark Ages, identification with the human Savior matures to this Lavaudieu Head of 1135; and again it is Abelard who, in his epochal poem on Good Friday, at the condemned close of his own life, voiced the personal theory of atonement, which, as Waddell says: "His century branded as heresy, and which is the beginning of modern theology": 46) 46a) Spanish Romanesque, 1st half of the 12th cent., Doubting Thomas, Santa Domingo de Silos, near Burgos Same, Doubting Thomas, detail "Alone to sacrifice thou goest, Lord" — "Solus ad victimam procedis, Domine." From northern Spain at the same time (which shares with France the passions of pre-Gothic), such human participation melts with tenderness the archaic figures of the Silos reliefs. As with Abelard, the sin which required Christ's sacrifice is taken up, deeply and personally ours: "Nostra sunt, Domine, nostra sunt crimina." 47) French, 12th cent., Crucifixion and Ascension window from Poitiers; + V details, below and above (V47 and V47a) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That spirit is confirmed in the 12th-century Passion windows of Le Mans, this Poitiers, then Chartres. "Why must thou suffer torture for our sin?" Abelard's answer is to fast as with Christ in the grave: Heavy with weeping may the three days pass, To win the laughter of Thine Easter Day. So Dante would himself descend on Good Friday and rise the third day. a48) 48) Again 41, Burgundian, c. 1120-40, Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene; St. Lazarus, Autun Spanish, lst half of 12th cent., Deposition – Resurrection, S. Domingo de Silos, near Burgos; first, video details We stand here at the source, not only of Protestant theology, but of the realistic incarnations of Christian art, the impersonation of the Easter trope which engendered Western drama: "Quem queritis in sepulcro, O Christicolae? — Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O women of Christ?" "Jesum Nazarenum, crucifixum — Jesus of Nazareth, crucified." "Non est hic, surrexit. Ite, nuntiate. — He is not here ... Go, and announce that the Lord has risen." That earliest (St. Gall) example is of the time of the Gerokreuz; but by the twelfth century, the sacred play has developed as startlingly as, in this other 1140 relief from Silos, the burial of Christ indicates its entire realistic bent and pre-Rennaissance soul. As in Abelard, the inward change has been made. It would take centuries to elaborate the techniques of the earthly; but this martyred Jesus, the mourning Marys, the sleeping guards below, stand on the threshold 49) 49a) 49b) 49c) English, c. 1380-1400, Resurrection from retable, Norwich Cathedral Rembrandt, 1639, The Resurrection of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Burgundian, 12th cent., Descent from the Cross, Louvre, Paris Catalan Romanesque, early 12th cent., Lazarus the Beggar, fresco, from San Clemente de Tahull August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of the 1400 humanization which heralds the Renaissance, the Norwich-school Resurrection, say, toward which the arrow of Romanesque awareness is drawn. How many strands of the Western soul are already spun into the fabric of the time of Abelard. In that fabric, indeed, forces opposed become the warp and woof of one awakening. Even Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), faith-centered watchdog against progress, was so borne on the individual and passionate tide, that he seems a source of Reformation, with the Christ-imitating piety of its arts. Small wonder he was already at odds with Abelard, most daring precursor of Renaissance — Reformation and Renaissance a warring identity, joined in the larger empowering of man and world; though Reformation's drive toward renewed Christianity would counter the classical claims of reason and taste. a50) b50) c50) 50) 50a) French (Burgundy), c. 1110-15, South portal of Saint-Pierre, Moissac French Romanesque, 1120-50, Conversion of St. Eustace, from a Vezelay capital Gislebertus (Burgundian), c. 1120-40, Body of St. Vincent guarded by ravens, capital, Cathedral of Autun (CGB '80) French (Burgundy), c. 1120-30, Main portal of St. Lazare Cathedral, Autun Romanesque-Gothic, 1134-50, Triple West Portal, Chartres (CGB '59; copy of Gothic II, 42); video uses lower spread of a51 St. Bernard not only hunts down what he calls heresy (Abelard, Arnold of Brescia, William of Conches, and the rest); he attacks the now wealthy monasteries of Cluny for the size and extravagance of their churches — then as richly colored and jewelled as they are still recognizably carved — What profit is there in those ridiculous monsters... that deformed comeliness, that comely deformity... those half-men... and fighting knights, those hunters winding their horns?... Doth not the root of all this lie in covetousness, which is idolatry... At the sight of these marvellous vanities men are more kindled to offer gifts than to pray. Thus wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money... (Coulton) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet as from Abelard not only the heretical but the church-sustaining energies of the next generations were to spring, so in the great series of portals beginning about 1100 to 1120 with Moissac and (here) Autun and culminating after 1140 in the Royal Portal of Chartres, we experience a logos powerful in ordering the divine — an achievement impossible without a daring that continually walked the knife-edge of heresy — heresy being in Abelard's case an advance too rapid or too proud along the road his followers would make orthodox. a51) b51) 51) 52) 52a) French Gothic, 1134-50, West front up to Tower, Chartres Cathedral (copy of CGB '59); here video takes the upper spread of this slide French Gothic, 1145 ff., view of Chartres from hotel French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145 ff. and 1194 ff., the western façade of Chartres Cathedral, with the 15th-cent. taller spire Lesser's Geometrical Analysis of the same west front, Chartres Double of 51 and 52 — actual church and scale analysis 1 Right, that Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres and of its Platonic school (just before the 1130 fire occasioned much of the present West front), should defend Abelard at Soisson (1121), since in this divine geometry, heaven-scaling reason speaks "with most oracular organ". It was in the brilliance of his youth that Abelard opened dialectic theology with the Sic et Non — Yes and No: for 157 questions crucial to the faith, a columned array of quotations from the Bible, the Fathers, the pagan classics, affirming and denying — a handbook of contradictions. The prologue states what is almost Heidegger's basic tuning (Stimmung) of Western thought, Cartesian certainty mediated by question: "For by doubt," says Abelard, "we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth." This was the book which Peter Lombard later called his "breviary," and from which Aquinas would draw his method of Objection and Reply. Though Abelard was even more blamed for his lectures and tract (c. 1120) On the Divine Unity and Trinity. 1 After b51, held longer in the slide show than in the video, these are the basic slides — yet differently applied. In the video, the double not only closes the sequence, but opens it, as if it were c51, as well as 52a. Between, the video runs a series of separate details — photo followed by Analysis — first of the façade up to the towers; then of the towers; then a lower central detail (Analysis only). Here the video returns to the slide double. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In "The Story of my Calamities" he tells of writing it for his scholars, who wanted to know "rather what could be understood than what could be stated ... nor could anything be believed unless it could first be understood." Bernard could hardly ignore such a reversal of Augustine's "believe that you may understand — crede ut intelligas." He bestirred himself before the second trial, at Sens, 1140: Peter Abelard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss; nothing may hide from him! Not content to see things through a glass darkly, he must behold all things face to face... (Taylor, The Medieval Mind) The church builders had it better. They were not tried for heresy, despite their daring or Bernard's disapproval. Though the geometric analysis of the West Front of Chartres, revealing the three superimposed modules and harmonies of the 1145 and 1194 constructions, with the 15th-century taller spire, leaves no doubt how far those architects trusted Whitehead's "unbridled reason of the Middle Ages" in proclaiming the divine. 53) 53a) Same, Chartres, Royal portal (1145-50), central door (video crops first from 50a, triple portal, CGB '59); + V detail Same, Christ of Tympanum; video: detail only of 53 That formulation of the Trinity which Bernard called heretical ("He savors of Arius when he speaks of the Trinity ... The faith of the righteous believes, it does not dispute.") is most briefly and beautifully expressed in the close of Abelard's hymn for Saturday Vespers ("O quanta qualia/ sunt illa sabbata"). With what measured glory the logic of God becomes the flesh of the poem, in the untranslatable mastery of Latin syntax: To the Lord of forever, Praise evermore, From whom all, by whom all, In whom all, are. From-whom-are, Father is; By-whom-are, Son; In-whom-are, Spirit, Of Father, Son, one. (CGB) Perenni Domino perpes sit gloria, ex quo sunt, per quem sunt, August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History in quo sunt omnia. ex quo sunt, pater est, per quem sunt, Filius, in quo sunt, Patris et filii Spiritus. To that intellectual precision, apparent even in translation, a54) b54) 54) 54a) French (Auvergne), 12th cent., Christ head, Louvre, Paris (another view of the Lavaudieu head of slide 45, above) French, 12th cent., bronze Crucified Christ, Metropolitan Museum, NYC French (Auvergne), 2nd half of 12th cent., Virgin and Child, Metropolitan Museum, NYC; + V details Auvergne, 2nd half of 12th cent., detail of Virgin, Louvre, Paris Bernard's hymn, "Jesu dulcis memoria" — within the same style-horizon — is diametrically opposed. Music: Bernard of Clairvaux, c. 1145(?), "Jesu dulcis memoria," St. John's group under Frank Flinn In this puzzling saint the old dilemma of faith crops out: selfless humility and dogmatic pride. Arnold of Brescia, whom Bernard had thrown out of France, accused him (John of Salisbury reports) "of being a pursuer of vain glory, one who envied all who were not of his own school." Yet the hymn shows simple piety and childlike faith — so childlike indeed that it evaporates in translation, leaving the obvious sentiments of later religion. It begins: Jesu dulcis memoria dans vera cordis gaudia, sed super mel et omnia eius dulcis praesentia. Jesus sweet to recall, The heart's joy in essence; More than honey and all, The sweetness of your presence. (CGB) Bernard's key word "faith" is also crucially changing — like some 12th century Madonnas, filled with the sensuous actualizations of person. As if his Christ were to be apprehended by taste. While the melody, against modal Gregorian, moves like a August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Protestant hymn, by harmonic chords. (close "Jesu dulcis memoria") 55) 55a) 55b) French Gothic (Suger), 1140-44, Ambulatory, St.Denis, (CGB '84); video divides to a central spread and detail of the vault Again, St. Denis, but the upper church, rebuilt about 1230 Again, the Ambulatory of St. Denis, Chapel of St. Peregrin, two windows (before which video has returned to the central spread of 55) Music: August 6, 1995 French, mid-12th cent, Benedicamus Domino, 2-voice (Cape) EMS 201 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The great Suger, regent of France and abbot of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, provides a link between Abelard, whom he defended, and Bernard, by whom he was stirred. In 1140 to '44, about the time melismatic organum joined with discant, he had his church enlarged, windowed and triple portalled — an act which, as much as any, turned Romanesque into Gothic. Though most of that Saint Denis has been rebuilt or defaced, this ambulatory with Suger's account of the building (edited and translated by Panofsky), heralds a new mysticism of Gothic Incorporation, an anagogical ascent, by which the earthly is symbolically elevated to the spiritual and becomes a kind of sacrament. (fade Benedicamus) 56) Catalan, mid-12th cent., Porch of Santa Maria at Ripoli It is hard in any period to call one man of the past and another of the future; Bernard's backward looking inspires another future, of penitential reform. "The church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked ... " 57) French, 11th-12th cent., Basilica (St. Remi), Rheims (CGB '76); video takes this in three cuts: below, middle, and above But we who, for the sake of Christ, have deemed as dung whatever shines with beauty, enchants the ear, delights through fragrance, flatters the taste, pleases the touch — whose devotion, I ask, do we intend to incite by means of these very things? Indeed, the monumental pre-Gothic bareness of Bernard's own church at Clairvaux seems to have exerted the sort of revolutionary impact Bernard himself did. That church is mostly destroyed, but the shadowy vast Basilica of Rheims (not the cathedral, but this older church, 11th-12th centuries) may suggest the type. 58) 58a) Again, Suger's Ambulatory, 1140-44, another view (CGB '84); video takes only an upper detail; then a lower detail of 55, with tomb; then a detail of the vault from slide 63b to follow) Closer view of 58: column between windows (CGB '84); from which video gives only an upper detail of the right window Music: August 6, 1995 Leonin, c.1160, from Haec Dies, near close (Tinayre) Lumen 32011 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was Bernard's passionate rephrasing of the Dark Age question which Suger's church (here a chapel of the ambulatory) was made to answer. And not only his church, but a theology derived by way of Irish-born John Scotus from the Pseudo-Areopagite (Syrian, ca. 500), viewing all process as an ascent, in which the material and sensory is drawn up and receives the radiance of the divine: so the lilt of troubador love in the sacred organum of Leonin. (resume speaking on the last held note of the Haec Dies) Here is a passage from Suger which becomes a jewelled window, itself lighting a hundred and more years of the mystical fabric of Gothic — a59) 59) French Gothic, 1212-41 and after, Rheims, interior, nave and west windows Same, west windows, nearer (CGB '59); video: rose window only up to the height of Rheims, the height of Perotin. Music: Perotin, c. 1200, from an Alleluia, last section, Seraphim SIC 6052 When... in the beauty of the house of God the loveliness of the manycolored gems has called me away from external cares… I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth, nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner... (end Alleluia) 60) Jan van Eyck, 1425, Madonna in a Church, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; first, V detail Music: Dufay c.1440(?), from Flos Florum (at "Regina"), (Cape) ARC 3003 There is the insight behind centuries of Gothic incorporation, from Chartres through The Divine Comedy, to the 15th-century symbolic sanctities of here and now — this Dufay, with Van Eyck's Madonna in a Church, where as Panofsky has noted, the light that seems so actual falls from the North, as on Dante's Earthly Paradise. (fade Dufay, after "dolorum") Va61) 61) Again, Chartres, Royal Portal, center cropped from 50a, above French Romanesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Central Tympanum, Royal Portal, Chartres (CGB '59); + V detail (replaced in the slide show by 61a, again Suger's Ambulatory, two windows; CGB '84) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History On the gilded doors which by his analogy open (like this portal of Chartres) to heaven, Suger inscribed a Latin poem, in which repetition takes the place of rhyme: For the splendor of the church that has fostered and exalted him, Suger has laboured for the splendor of the church. … Bright is the noble work; but being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, that they may travel through the true lights To the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it inhere in this world the golden door defines: The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material Raised from prior submersion by the sight of this light. Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit Et demersa prius hac visa luce resurgit. 62) Suger's Ambulatory; variant: column between windows (CGB '84) On the windowed enlargement of the upper Choir, a model for Notre Dame and so many to follow (though it is the ambulatory that remains), another poem was inscribed: Bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright, And bright the noble edifice pervaded by the new light. Such is Suger's Lux Nova, the sacramental light of Gothic. 63) 63a) 63b) V63c) French early Gothic, begun c. 1170, Buttressed Apse, Mantes (CGB '74) French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques, Aveyron Again, Suger, 1140-44, Ambulatory, St. Denis (slide overexposed to show Gothic vaulting, used by video earlier, as detail, see 58, above; while here video shows a detail of Mantes, from 63) Cathedral of Laon, 1160-1205, buttressing, north side of nave, detail from a vertical slide (CGB '74); digital: add v63d, Canterbury Choir What ingenuities of structure that light required, any early Gothic apse (here Mantes, near Paris, 2nd half of the 12th century) will remind us of. From the first groining and ribbing of vaults (the aisles of Bernay Abbey, Norman, 1017; the crossing of Ste. Foy, Conques, 1039 ff. — as in music from the principle of simultaneously moving voices — a chain leads as by necessity to the dialectic triumph of Gothic. To open his August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History windows, Suger reduced the walls to buttresses, though he did not make them fly. But within ten years at Noyon that step was taken — to be followed at once in the churches being built at Sens, Laon, and not long after, in England, at Canterbury. 64) 64a) French Gothic, 1162-82, (rebuttressed 13th cent.?) Choir Apse, Notre Dame, Paris, from far-off (CGB '59); + V detail Same, buttressing of Choir, from the south (copy of CGB '59; see Gothic II, 55); first, two video details, the second now video-revised to the Madonna of the North Portal, also Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80 — V64b) Music: Leonin, c. 1180(?), Deum timê. Organum duplum, Lumen 32011 The boldest early application was at Notre Dame in Paris, 1162-82. In music it was Leonin, master there through that time, who perfected the sustained-tone style, combining it with powerfully driven rythmic passages of note against note — or of tenor note against a triple in the organal voice — here his Deum timê, sung by Tinayre. The prerequisite for those soaring polyphonies was what we take for granted, though it had then to be painfully evolved, a system of time notation that would blend independent voices. It is the crisscrossing of Perfect, or triple, rhythm that gives the music its stripped energy; it is the sustained-tone melting of melody over a held ground which complements that force with a shifting devotional tenderness of incomparable poignance; while the mystical turning from the vanity of earth to the eternal is attested by the bare-fifth harmony. 65) Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1783, Mrs. Sheridan, detail, head; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and [B] French Gothic, c. 1210, N. Portal, Head of Sainte Modeste, Chartres Cathedral; + singles. 2 In the world of Enlightened hope, of Gainsborough (right), Haydn, Jane Austen, dissonance is a passing trial, which resolves into the triadic chord of homecoming to the valid earth. (Music: harpsichord cadence, Richard Stark) But in Gothic, those triads of the heart are passing tones, dissonances of wish; and what they resolve into is the transhumanity of perfect intervals. 2 Where the slide show goes from 65, through B, then A, and back to the double, the video enriches to 65, then B, again 65, then A, again 65, and finally A once more. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 29 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, c. 1240, Anima–Descendi–Alma, close, AS 91) So in Sainte Modeste at Chartres (left) the loves and moods affirmed by our major and minor hang unvalidated, as over an eternity of pure fifth, octave, unison. Such formal exclusion of the chords of joy and tears, in which Gainsborough's Mrs. Sheridan (right) has her being, might seem of the Dark Age Ground; but their actual appearance, floating in the mystery of denial, tokens the shadowy first smile with which Gothic love lightens the ascetic pre-dawn. No piece so voices that suspension as 66) Score of Leonin's Organum Duplum, Judea et Jerusalem, transcribed by Richard Stark from Cape performance (video follows through the text and performance in a series of 17 details) Leonin's organum on "Judea et Jerusalem". This opening Duplum, in the lower or tenor voice, stretches out those three words, with their notes, as heard in the plainsong. (Music: Solesmes opening of Judea et Jerusalem, French Decca 7.452A.) We are in the fourth mode, whose tonic is the closing E. The dominant is A, to which the tenor rises once at the climax of the discant section. Discant denotes the bar-by-bar treatment marked in yellow. (Music: Stark, on harpsichord.) Sustained tone, or vel purum, bespeaks the melismatic melting over held tones, into which the discant also returns at the close. (Music: Stark, on harpsichord.) The tension between the life of earth, which was to shape tonal harmony, and the earthless center is enacted between the Gregorian tonic E and the F with which the chant opens. For no sooner does the organizing voice move from F above, than the entire claim of sensuous F Major appears, dreamed over the mystic void — as in four haunting variations of the B-flat phrase marked in red — the desired smile of Guinevere. (Music: CGB, recorder #1 and #4.) In that emergence of romance, the repeated rise to thc sacred tonic E (marked in blue), a seventh over the earth ground, F, sharpens a spirit-cry. Which way do we move? The "Judea" close affirms temporal F. With the "Jerusalem" phrase, the flat is withdrawn. The penultimate search (over F) avoids B. Still hungry for F we are led toward dissonant E ("our sister the death of the body"). But the plainsong tenor drops to its E close. How strangely earth's climb completes itself in the modal octave of mystery, the timeless center of creed. Let us hear, first with the score, the tender Cape performance. August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 30 �C.G. Bell Music: 67) Symbolic History Leonin, c.1160, Judea et Jerusalem, lst Duplum, ARCHIV 14068 (close) French Gothic, c. 1160, S. Transept, Soissons Cathedral, (CGB '59) And now once more, with details from Soissons and Chartres — the perfection of the New Light: Music: 68) 69) 69a) The same, repeated French Gothic 1194-1225, North Ambulatory, columns and windows, Chartres (CGB '59) French Gothic, 1194-1225, South Aisle of Choir, Chartres (CGB '74) French Glass, c. 1150, West Lancets and Rose, Chartres (video divides to lancets first, then rose) (close Leonin) Such keenness of discovery, within the veneration of sacred authority, Va70) 70) Mont-Saint-Michel, Chapel, 11th-cent. Nave and late 15th-cent. Choir (returning to slide 6 of this show, CGB '74) French Romanesque, 11th-12th cent., and Gothic, 13th cent., from Nave into Choir, Le Mans Cathedral (CGB '74); + V details is visibly attested by those dual constructions (as Mont-Saint-Michel earlier, and here Le Mans) where a Gothic choir launches itself from the round-archings of a Romanesque nave. And in music too, the Leonin two-part, the huge Perotin three- and four-part organa, expand their resources in the ritual embrace of plainsong. No correlation of one living polarity with another presents a true match. Romanesque is not (as popularly conceived) quite cognate with plainsong, nor polyphony with Gothic — since the new Romanesque already embodies, with note-for-note organum, the principles from which Gothic would spring. But to the extent that Christendom with its patristic reverence continually shapes contrasts of new and old, a Perotin Quadruplum (here from the Deller "Vidêrunt Omnes") 71) Le Mans, outside, from the Northwest, Romanesque nave and Gothic transept (CGB '74) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History may accompany the Gothic east-end of Le Mans as it springs from the lower containment of the nave. Music: Perotin, c. 1220(?), from "Vidêrunt Omnes" (2nd sect. plainsong, and 4-voice, from "Jubilate") BG-S 5045 72) Same, Le Mans, 11th-12th cent. N. aisle of Nave (CGB '74) 1st 73) Same, 13th cent., Choir, buttressing, from the NE (CGB '74) 1st 74) Same, Choir, interior, N side, with columns (CGB '74); video makes two views of the vertical slide, above, then below (with plainsong close) (with Quadruplum) (fade Perotin) Here, even in the Gothic choir, the supporting columns preserve the stability of Romanesque — as the quadruplum not only follows, but itself rests on plainsong. Va2nd 73) Lower section of slide 76 ff., detail of Apse arches and windows (CGB '74) 2nd 73 and 74) A closer copy of 1st 73, above (CGB '74) Though with the tour-de-force of Le Mans choir, we should play the liveliest recorded Quadruplum (attributed to Perotin), a motet of victory over death — Mors — sung after de Van's death by his masterly syncopators. Music: Attributed to Perotin, c. 1220(?), 4-voice Motet, "Mors," from OL 232 V2nd 74) Same, interior, S. side of Choir from N. Transept (CGB '74); lower detail 75) Le Mans Choir, S side, from N Aisle: arches and clerestory (CGB '74) 76) Same, Apse: arches, windows, and vault, (CGB '74; lower spread has been videoed as Va2nd 73; here, video uses only the upper spread) 77) Same, from S. Aisle: rhythm of arch and piers (CGB '74; after which, video reverts to upper detail of slide 74) (end Mors) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this return to high-Gothic, the style we compared at the beginning to dawn, it may seem that we have misapplied the metaphor, since in the display of Le Mans choir, we are already in the blaze of Gothic sun. From which soul may well long back to the mystical glimmer of true dawn, as from these canny rhythms to the shifting "Duplum vel Purum" of Leonin. Va78) 78) 78a) 78b) V78c) Chartres, 1145: a wider view, right of the main portal Same, Kings and Queens of Judah: the four figures to the right of the Main Portal; first, a video detail of the central two Same, detail of the King second from the left; video uses V78a, another King Same, detail of another of the Queens Same, detail of still another King of Judah Back where the Kings and Queens of Judah smile from the columnar distance of Chartres. The road there is of Grail romance, Chretien's Knight of the Cart, where Lancelot crosses the bridge of a single sword to rescue Guinevere (always such sacred resonances) from "the Land from which no Stranger returns". Those Arthurian knights inhabit the anagogical dream, before the codification of space, time and cause ("Why, when, and where?") sapped the life of chivalry. There men swim in telepathic mystery: Lancelot rides to the queen's rescue before he could have learned of her capture; he mounts the shameful cart on the blind promise of news — a disgrace of which everyone thereafter is aware, even the Queen in the other country, who blames him, not for mounting, but for the converse love-fault of a moment's hesitation. With how spectral a smile the lover in that realm gazes from a castle window at the glimpsed procession of the Queen, her captor and the wounded Kay: a79) 79) 79a) Still Chartres, c. 1150, Angel of the Sundial; + V detail Same, but the plaster cast, Musée des Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video shows details only Back to a detail of the Chartres original (a79); video: head only And early at the dawning hour The gentle lady of the tower Called for the sacrament of mass, And waked the knights and bid them dress; And when the mass was sung and said, The one knight sat with pensive head (He who had ridden in the cart) August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At a little window just apart, And looked into the open land. To the other window near at hand The maiden came, and as she stood, My lord Gawain with her abode And spoke with her a word or two, But what they spoke I do not know; Their private words I cannot tell, But as they leaned on the window sill, Along the fields by a river clear They saw one carried in a bier. It was a wounded knight who was borne, And by his side to weep and mourn Three maidens walked in sorrow strong. After the bier there followed along A company, and at their head A proud knight rode in arms, and led A lady by the bridle rein. And that knight saw it was the Queen. At the high window still he stood And followed her as long as he could With eager eyes and with delight Until she had passed out of his sight. And when he saw that she was gone, He thought at once to throw him down And break his body on the stones. (CGB) As in the enigmatic smile of the Chartres Angel of the Sundial, childish simplicity here is of a piece with magic skill. Va80) b80) c80) Vd80) Ve80) Vf80) Again, Chartres, 1145-50, (from b43, above) A Queen of Judah; detail of face only Return to upper half of 79, Angel of the Sundial, plaster cast, Musée des Monuments, Paris (CGB '80); video shows face only Provence, c. 1169, Beardless Prophet (or St. Michael?) from the façade of St. Gilles du Garde, near Arles (waist up); + V detail Return to Christ detail of 41, above: Gislebertus, Christ and the Magdalene, S. Lazare, Autun (CGB '80) Return to face of Moissac, C. 1130, Prophet holding a scroll, detail of 43, above Return to head of Angel of the Sundial, Chartres, from 79a, above August 6, 1995 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 34 �C.G. Bell 80) Symbolic History Again, head of St. Gilles du Garde, c. 1160, Beardless Prophet, detail of c80, above Such the sustained-tone melting through love's discords into the octave or fifth. Such the recovered paradise in the Easter sequence by Abelard's succesor Adam de Saint Victor — the "paradisi gaudium" which is also the springtime of earth: Coelum fit serenius, Et Mare tranquillius, Spirat aura levius, Vallis nostra floruit. The heavens quiet be And tranquil is the sea, The winds blow tenderly, The vales of our land flower. (CGB) The Gilles-du-Garde beardless prophet is a paradigm of that lyrical self-giving. How the face blends with emasculated Abelard's Easter hymn, another paradise recovered: Vera Jerusalem est illa civitas ... Jerusalem is the city Of everlasting peace... There finds the dreamer waking Truth beyond dreaming far, Nor is the heart's possessing Less than the heart's desire. (Waddell) So too the promise of Leonin's "Judea and Jerusalem," twice heard, and now, triune: Music: August 6, 1995 Again Leonin, Judea et Jerusalem, lst duplum, from ARC 14068 Gothic Prelude Lux Nova 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gothic Prelude : Lux Nova, Symbolic History, Part 8 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 8 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_08_Gothic_Prelude--Lux_Nova Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7f6c5ed5313f63cc49178b1325f81fa6.pdf 1512ae22ac66f820b2e96daf6da58875 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 7. The Dark Ages CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 7. The Dark Ages 1) 1a) German (Ottonian), c. 950, St. Luke in Ecstasy, Gospel of Otto III; Staatsbibliothek, Munich; + V details Same, upper half (video varies the order of whole and details) Music: Plainsong Sequence, attr. to Wipo, c. 1000-50, Victimae Paschali (Mass for Easter) Haydn Soc. HSL 2071 To call the birth-phase of Western Culture the Dark Ages — those Gregorian centuries from the fall of Rome to the sequences of 1000 and after (this Victimae Paschali) — is to invoke a mystery like the cloud of the tabernacle from which God speaks. Since the arts of vision (here St. Luke in Ecstasy, German, c. 950), attain heights of mandala. In such a blaze, where is the dark? Does it lie within or beyond those staring eyes? 2) Spanish Bible, 920, Sign of St. Luke, Cod. 6, f 211, Leon Cathedral, Spain; + V details Certainly beyond — on the world abandoned: the earthly fabric of space, time and causality. But the reduction of the phvsical has its inner concomitant, the mortification of humanity, so tied to space, time and cause. Stranger than the eyes' stare is that their God-centered inwardness (as in this Spanish 920 Angel-sign of Luke) may wear the deformity of being crossed. (End Victimae Paschali) 3) 3a) 3b) French Gothic, c. 1250, Angel of the Annunciation, detail of central Portal, Rheims (video shows the angel of 3b or V3) Maitani and school, 1310-30, detail from Inferno, west façade, Orvieto Cathedral (video upper detail only) Again, Rheims Portal, Angel guardian of St. Denis, detail of face Music: August 5, 1995 French Motet, c. 1230, Ave Maria (close), Seraphim SIC 6052 Side 1, #5 The Dark Ages �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whereas, in the Gothic (Rheims, about 1250), mystical love has entered our realm, and smiles. Thus in Dante, it is the sinner who twists his eyes, "Biechi" (Inferno VI, 91), and falls into the mud of hell; while Revelation comes as Beatrice: "Dolce amor, che di riso t'ammante" — "Sweet love, mantled in smiling." (End Ave Maria) 4) Roman Christian, 4th cent., Christ to Jerusalem, from Junius Bassus Sarcophagus, Vatican (video: detail only) 4a) Double: Naumburg Master c. 1329, Saved and Damned, Choir Screen, Cathedral, Mainz V4b) Giselbertus, 1125-1135, Christ in Judgment, detail of Tympanum over main door, Cathedral, Autun 4c) Again, 4th-century Christ to Jerusalem, wider view Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), Lux Aeterna (close), Mass for the Dead, Decca 7532 A Though there is a source of confusion here, something hard to clarify, since Græco-Roman Christianity had favored a gentle kind of nirvana smile. It is just that change from valedictory lightening to the Gothic surge of energy and delight, which the centuries of invasion, the stripping off of outward things and the fierce charging of spirit had to accomplish — to transform (by paradox) a motion of withdrawal into a dynamic of attack. Where this 4th-century Christ, even as he enters Jerusalem, seems soothed into a neo-Platonic, almost Buddhist, child-teacher and immortal guide. (end Lux Aeterna) 5) 5a) French Romanesque, Gothic 12th cent., Corpus Christi, Bronze gilt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (first, video detail, Va5) Same, detail of head and shoulders Music: Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) opening (Tinayre) Col M 431 (1) But that proud and terrible agonist would not be tamed; and the smiling Gothic grace is coterminous with a twisted Gothic pain (Leonin and Chartres, 12th century) — both of which, mediated by the Dark Ages, have become bearers of incalculable force. So the darkness is doubly creative; its arts of vision attest the birth of a culture. (Fade Leonin) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History a6) Apulian Romanesque, 1078-1197, toward High Altar, S. Nicola, Bari (CGB '84) Vb6) Carolingian, c. 796-804, Karlschrein, relief, Charlemagne dedicates chapel, Royal Chapel, Aachen, Germany 6) Northumbrian before 716, from an Italian 6th-cent. MS, Ezra copying the records, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence; + V detail 6a) Milan (or Reichenau?) 11th cent., Christ from Healing of the Possessed, Ivory, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Gallican(?), Media Vita opening, Vict. M-87 If that darkness were not windowed, it would preclude our study. By the monastic continuation of art and learning, we enter a gestation which, with other civilizations, was obscure. So in this Northumbrian 700 copy of an Italian 6th-century manuscript, showing Ezra — by the resonance of symbol, such a monk in such a study — himself copying the Temple records. Here history presents us with the first luminous Dark Age, the only documented Time of Troubles. Let us consider it in three aspects: its oneness, its multiplicity, its directional transformation. (Fade Media Vita) 7) Græco-Roman, from Pompeii, 1st cent. A.D., fresco, Perseus and Andromeda, National Museum, Naples' + V detail Music: Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn (opening), RCA-V-LM6057 (IV, 2) When seen in the larger sequence: from the temporal and humanist command of Greece and Rome (the Delphic Hymn, with Perseus and Andromeda from Pompeii), (fade Delphic Hymn) 8) Northumbrian, c. 710, Echternach Gospels, St. Matthew, National Library, Paris; + V detail through the 710 Gospel of Echternach, also Northumbrian, where everything spatial and human flattens to the hieratic — as in Gregorian reduced to the tread of parallel organum; Music: August 5, 1995 Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Organum of the fifth, Nos qui vivimus (HAM 25, a, 2), Orpheus 349 (end phrase) The Dark Ages �4 C.G. Bell 9) Symbolic History E.Q. Asam, 1721, St. George and the Dragon, High Altar, Weltenburg church, Bavaria (from CGB '59) and so to the gradiloquence and whelming drama of the Baroque (Asam, 1721) — in such a context, the whole span For 2nd 8) Asturian Romanesque, before 848, Santa Maria del Naranco, near Oviedo, Spain from the Fall of Rome to the 11th century rise of Europe, seems a concave of primitive withdrawal, between two vast waves of civilized, assertive force. 2nd 7) a2nd 7) Again, Perseus and Andromeda, upper detail Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Polyphemus and Galatea (detail of Galatea), Villa Imperiale, Pompeii Let Virgil supply the Classical cognate — when Aeneas sees the fall of Troy already depicted at Carthage: Here is Priam: even here, worth has regard, And there are tears for things, and human hearts Touched by the chances of mortality (CGB) — ...sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. Or the line which for Augustine epitomized the tempting pathos and glory of pagan art: the farewell of Creusa's ghost: Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae — 3rd 8) Again, Echternach Gospels, detail (video wider view, then detail) Set it against the first hymn Caedmon (c. 670) is said to have sung, dreaminspired. The shades Augustine loved and feared have been shed from the soul. Nu we sceolon herian heofonrices Weard, Metodes mihte and his modgethonc — Now let praise the Prince of Heaven, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Might of the Maker manifold of plan, Work of the Father all the wonders he wrought, The Lord everlasting when he laid out the world. (CGB) a2nd 9) 2nd 9) Again, St. George and the Dragon, detail (from CGB '59) Again, St. George and the Dragon (CGB '59) [video, using 1st 9, a2nd9, 2nd 9, and one V9 variant, makes a sequence of five views] For the Baroque, music will voice it more richly — a phrase from Bach's "A Mighty Fortress is our God." Music: Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott, Cantata 80, opening; Vanguard BG 508 (fade) This victory spills over in earthly pomp and power. Whereas in Gregorian chant, the entire phenomenal world a10) b10) 10) Palace School, early 9th cent., Evangelist, detail of Xanten Gospel, Bibliotheque Royal, Brussels Carolingian Palace School, end of 8th cent., St. Mark, Coronation Gospel, f. 76v., State Library, Munich Again, Xanten Evangelist, closer detail dissolves in self-effacement at the dilating spaceless center of the one melodic line: O flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee! Music: August 5, 1995 Gregorian (Solesmes), 8th-9th cent., Media Vita, cont.; V-M-87 The Dark Ages �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The body of Celtic chant is lost; "poor music", says Leonardo, "which dies in the moment of its birth." Solesmes performance assimilates even the Media Vita, probably of Carolingian and Gallic origin, to the suavity of Roman practice — a thing Charlemagne could never quite school his monks to. So our parallel has taken us from the Celtic flatness of Echternach to the Roman-Christian revivals of the Palace School. Though for all its softness of robe and shadowed mood, this Evangelist is no less timeless, spaceless, selfless. (fade Media Vita) In the Dark Age invariance of earthly fall and total faith, it rears a polarity of technique: the Graeco-Roman lingering against Va11) 11) Irish, c. 800, Four Symbols of the Evangelists, Book of Kells, f.290v., Trinity College, Dublin Again, Book of Kells, detail from Nativitas Christi page the exactly contemporary (c. 800, Book of Kells) linear abstraction in which the Celtic (and even Germanic) conspires with the Syrian and Armenian East. To call such labyrinthine sophistication primitive is strange; yet both soul and the world soul inhabits share here in a primitive reduction, to a criss-cross of saintly miracle and Mabinogian wonder. For 2nd 10) Again, b1O, St. Mark, detail To see the Dark Ages as a mystical and ascetic trough between the breaking crests of Græco-Rome and the West is to emphasize its oneness of Augustinian shadow and Christian affirmation. While to juxtapose the meditative humanism of 800 Aix-laChapelle For 2nd 11) Again, Book of Kells, Symbol of St. Mark, f.130r., detail 2nd 11a) Again, Book of Kells, Virgin and Child with Angels, f.202v. against the Irish calligraphs, is to see that trough as a manifold over which run random sallies of intersecting waves — a hint at the bottomless complexity of tribal wanderings and successor kingdoms, local arts and classical revivals — a variety, however, stretched in the same polar field, as if these were all translations in contrasting languages, copies in different hands, but of a single sacred text. While above that ascetic one and fluctuating many, points the historical arrow, such a pregnancy of change that a single image — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �7 C.G. Bell 1st 12) Symbolic History Irish, 7th cent., Bronze head on an enamel base, from a ship burial at Miklebostad, Bergen Museum, Norway; video uses V12, + a detail here an Irish 7th century bronze — opens under the sacrifice of civilized nuance that passionate identification voiced again and again in Celtic and Germanic poetry: thus the Anglo Saxon lament of Satan sometimes attributed to Caedmon — O might of the Maker ... mirth-dream of God ... That my hands hereafter may not reach heaven, My eyes never again be raised to that upland, Nor my ears hear forever and forever The hallowed bright peal of angel clarions ... (CGB) Eala drihtenes thrym! ... Eala dream godes! ... thaet ic mid handum ne maeg heofon geraecan, ne mid eagum ne mot up locian, ne huru mid earum ne sceal aefre geheran thaere byrhtestan beman stefne! a13) b13) 13) Roman Christian, 312-15, Constantine, Head from Colossal statue, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome German (Reichenau), c. 998, Otto III Enthroned, upper detail, State Library, Munich Byzantine, c. 370(?), Barletta Emperor, Barletta (video: upper part only) As in any living complex, we cannot exhibit the constant but as it shows alteration. What dominates Christendom from Constantine at least to Otto III is the lionbodied paradox of faith, with the world-abandonment that so appalled Hegel: But the highest purity of soul defiled by the most horrible barbarity; the truth, of which a knowledge has been acquired, degraded to a mere tool by falsehood and self-seeking; that which is most irrational, coarse, and vile, established and strengthened by the religious sentiment — this is the most disgusting and revolting spectacle that was ever witnessed, and which only philosophy can comprehend and so justify. 2nd 12) Again, Irish Bronze Head (cf. V1st 12) V2nd 12a) Irish, late 7th cent., The St. John's Crucifixion Plaque, upper part; National Museum, Ireland August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History One could answer Hegel as the devil did Faust: "Willst fliegen und bist vorm Schwindel nicht sicher?" — "You want to fly, and get dizzy?" Since, when Spirit withdraws (as he says) into itself, it waives the cost. Hegel's enlightened wish is for the Christ-kernel without the hard shell. But without that shell, how could it have seeded itself over the Dark Ages, converting even by combat? For 2nd 13) Roman Christian, c. 360, Constantius II (sometimes called Constantine I), colossal bronze head, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome 2nd 13a) Same, another view Hegel will not see that what depressed him in Byzantine Christianity, "a millenial series of uninterrupted crimes," was the other face of Yeats' "artifice of eternity" — of that self-scourging piety of anchorites in the desert of the Thebaid. And perhaps a saintly cognate for the schismatic Constantius would be Simeon the Stylite, anchored to his column, the rope rotting his flesh, he replacing the maggots as they fell from the sores: "Eat what God has given you"; yet from that pillar preaching sacred politics to hordes of followers in a church where ascetic soul was power. 14) Again, b13, Otto III Enthroned, whole view; + V detail Indeed that mask of religious force is treasured and revived from Constantine to the Ottos and beyond. Eusebius' miraculous history of Constantine's conquest by the "salutary sign" of the cross, remains the model for Fulker of Chartres' Chronicle of the First Crusade (end of the 11th century), as in this Otto III, the old arrogant humility proclaims Christ militant. Yet something has changed. The willed conversion of late Rome has become the automatic condition of the North. The impersonal flattening is complete; dimensionality itself is allegorical. 1st 15) V15a) Byzantine, 6th cent., Hagia Sophia (exterior), Istanbul (CGB '77) Same, another view, from the south (CGB '77) (cf. slide show 2nd 15) Music: Byzantine Chant, 8th cent. ff. (St.John of Damascus), Ode, Anastaseos Imera, RCA-V-LM-6015 (I, 1) Another sequence of descent leads from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (and no doubt from Byzantine Chant, if against the flux of oral tradition we had something August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History stronger than this Brompton Oratory attempt at the 8th century "Golden Canon"); (fade) 1st 16) Carolingian, 796-804, Octagon or Chapel of Charlemagne (CGB '74); + V detail from 2nd 16) across Europe and 300 years, to the Chapel of Charlemagne in Aachen, or Aix, with the parallel organizing on octave, fifth, or fourth. Music: Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the octave, HAM 25 a, 1 Orpheus 349 Here too what is continued reverts to the primitive; yet that dark and heavy narrowing bears the potential thrust of Gothic, a beginning, where Hagia Sophia, 2nd 15) Again, Hagia Sophia, same view as V15a (CGB ‘77); here video gives detail only, then inserts detail of buttressing from 1st 15 2nd 15a) Again, Hagia Sophia, another angle (emphasizing layering) (CGB '77) 2nd 15b) Italian Byzantine, 532-47, Mosaic detail. Head of Justinian, San Vitale, Ravenna [video uses V2nd 15b, then returns to yet another detail from 2nd 15) 2nd 15c) Again, Hagia Sophia, interior view with streaming sunlight [slide only] like its age, is terminal — however strange the word may seem of what, in so many ways, begets the West: the shift to accentual rhythms in Byzantine poetry; in chant (we are told) to passionate imploration over a bass drone; in building to the enormous buttressing of vaulted stress. All springs from Classical foreclosure, like the Code of Justinian, that final consolidation of Roman law, but with the hardening caste rigor, each worker frozen in his father's trade. In that vitiated Empire, defended by barbarian troops ("the Emperor's drunken soldiery"), torn by dogmatic schisms (as Gregory of Nissa says: "you ask the price of bread and learn the Son is inferior to the Father; you inquire of the bath and are told the son was made of nothing"), this church rose from the ashes of the Nika revolt, the slaughter of 30,000 spectators in the hippodrome; and after a comparable sacrifice of beasts, Justinian stood under the dome: "Glory to God who has deemed me worthy ... O Solomon, I have surpassed thee." Twenty years later, its structure of prophetic transcendence fell and had to be rebuilt, but lighter, more windowed. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 16) Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view [slide here (CGB ‘74) also used as V1st 16a, above] V2nd 16a) Same, wider view (CGB ‘74), from which V takes a detail, returning to another detail of 1st 16 Music: Again, Scholia enchiriadis, Nos qui vivimus, Organum of the Fourth, HAM 25 a3, Orpheus 349 Against it Charlemagne's harsh little chapel in the German forest, bound in on itself, assumes the vertical cast of what it moves toward, the jewelled dark enclosures of Romanesque and Gothic. Charlemagne's empire hardly outlived him, and the century that follows is in a way the darkest of all. 1st 17) Byzantine Ivory, c. 950, Christ crowns Romanos and Eudoxia, detail of upper portion, Cabinet des Medailles, Paris But by 950 revival is underway, in Byzantium as in the West. In Byzantium, preserved sanctuary of the past, soon to be thrown down by the Crusaders, schooled in its arts, no mutation of force has occurred. The most peerless ivories — this Christ, compared by some with Phidian marbles — in impersonal, gentle glory, dream their early-Christian life away. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �11 C.G. Bell 18) Symbolic History German, c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, Cathedral of Cologne; + V detail Where the Gerokreuz of the 1Oth century Rhine — from a Roman colony (Cologne) torn to pieces and savagely rebuilt — like Charlemagne's chapel, is precursive, with a drive strengthened now by a hundred and fifty years. Of the five centuries of turmoil and near stagnation, such works, against the Roman Christian and Byzantine, make us say with the Shepherd in The Winter's Tale (even of the dead Christ), "Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new-born." 2nd 17) Again, Byzantine Ivory, whole; + V detail, shown first The heresies of the early church tend to neo-Platonic shocked withdrawal from the Crucified body of the God-man — as in the discovered Gnostic Gospels: "It was another ... who drank the gall and vinegar ... but I was rejoicing in the height." So Justinian died in a Byzantine heterodoxy — to remove the divine in formal frontality: that the body of Christ was incorruptible, had never experienced the wants and limits of flesh. 2nd 18) Again, Gerokreuz, black and white, detail of head But the heresies of the West go the other way, toward a personal self-merger with God as man. In this the Gero Christ has crossed the watershed, as of the Alps, into European immediacy, 19) Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows (drawing), Kunsthalle, Bremen; + V detail (after '98: Double: heads of Gero-Christ and Dürer) where the torment and ecstasy of God and his Kingdom are read over into the I, the here, and the now. Toward the image that lies at the heart of that incarnate dynamic — Dürer's Self as the Man of Sorrows, 1522 — the Crucifixion of Gero is already aimed. Va20) 20) Gallic from Entremont, c. 200 B.C., Four Mask-heads as trophies, lower detail only Same, the group of four August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Back now, having sketched the field, to the art-appearance of the Gallic tribes, end of the 3rd century B.C., the Heads from Entremont, just past the limits of Greece and Rome. The techniques already learned have sunk into the unrelenting rigors of barbarian spirit, sullen with potentiality. Against these future-haunted beasts, ranked at the rampart's pale, 21) Hellenistic (Alexandrian), c. 290 B.C., Ptolemy I of Egypt, Copenhagen how undercut by self-questioning, the civilized Hellenistic face (here Ptolemy I of Alexandria, c. 290 B.C.), which gazed northward, from age-old refinements, toward that stirring in the forests. 22) V22a) Roman, 1st cent. B.C.(?), Garden fresco, detail, Villa Livia, Thermae, Rome (video draws from V22, a wider view) Same, a closer detail of fronds and birds By the first century it was Rome; the frontiers were pushed back; but what the watchers at the stretched limes were looking into must have seemed a fabled garden (frescoes from the Villa Livia); and what they were waiting for, was surely a sign of weakness in the ordered realms. 23) Egypto-Roman, 2nd c. A.D., Funeral portrait from Faiyum. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Where, in fact, the whole orchard-empire was rife with soul-sickness, already flowing over (2nd century A.D.) into a valedictory Christian denial of the world. Striking, the affinity of longing between this hollow ripeness of late Egypt, Greece, and Rome 24) Belgic, 1st cent. B.C., (found, Kent) Head from a cremation bucket, British Museum, London and the primitive, implacable, but no less yawning question of the pagan North (here a Belgic cremation-bucket detail, lst century BC), subject to the dark enigmas of Wyrd. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �13 C.G. Bell 25) Symbolic History Roman Gaul (Mosel), 3rd cent.(?), Portrait from the Mausoleum of Neumagen, Trier; + V detail By the 3rd century, when the Gauls and Rhine Germans express the softening of Empire, their mausoleum portraits (here from Trier) share exactly in the heavy-eyed hunger of the Roman-Egyptian encaustics 2000 miles away. Bede, in his most famous passage, of the year 627, voices that somber clue to conversion: the missionary Paulinus has told the Northumbrian thanes of the faith, and an old man compares life to a sparrow's flight through the mead hall in winter. 2nd 24) Again, Belgic head from a bucket It is the emptiness centuries of art had recorded: He flies in at one door and out at another, stays a moment in the warmth of the fire, and vanishes into the rain and dark from which he came ... So the life of man: but of what was before or of what comes after, we know nothing. 2nd 25) Again, Neumagen head portrait If this new teaching can tell us anything more certain, it ought to be followed. Could this Gallo-Roman stoic of Neumagen have said more? 26) V26a) Roman Gallic, early 4th cent., Porta Nigra, Trier (Treves) Same, another view with gate (CGB '74) Or the nearby Porta Nigra guarding Trier? The somberest face of gloom could hardly convey more of the burden of carrying Rome to the Germans than this gate, to be taken so soon, and in turn, by Vandals, Huns and Franks. 27) Gallo-Roman (Neumagen), 3rd cent., Toilet scene on a tomb, Museum, Trier; + V detail So the question is academic whether a successor offshoot of the Classical might have emerged in Gaul. Certain carvings, like this family scene of the deceased, also from Neumagen, tempt us toward Gandharan parallels. Though the question, no doubt, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History becomes one already raised: could Christianity have been tamed to a gentle continuance of its earthly-endowed and Classical phase? 28) Hellenistic Indian (from Hadda), 3rd-5th cent., Genius with flowers, Musée Guimet, Paris; + V detail, shown first — Religion central to the birth of cultures. That the Hellenistic, which in the West had to fall into the earth and die, could in the East be grafted directly to a living stem (as in this Genius from Hadda, 3rd-5th century), must have depended on the millenial growth of Buddhism from the even older Vedic ground. 29) Roman Celtic, 2nd-3rd cent. AD, "La Melancolie," from near Auxerre, Yonne In Roman Gaul the Celts promised most. This head from Auxerre, "La Melancolie," seems almost to have found a way of succession to the Greek. But barbarian wanderings, which in India were prehistoric, now flooded the whole Western world. 30) Visigoth, c. 400, Seal ring of King Alaric, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail In 406 the Vandals struck through Gaul. The Visigoths at the same time moved through Italy toward the sack of Rome. It is not just its small size that gives the seal of their Arian-Christian leader Alaric its Dark Age stare. Jerome's lament, from his hermitage in Bethlehem — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth and sobs choke my utterance when I think that the city that led captive the world is now led captive — might have served for the Western Empire. 1st 31) Gallo-Roman, 2nd-3rd cent., Dancer from Arlon, Belgium The Gallo-Roman arts were plowed under. Though most of what has been dug up damps our speculation of a living transplant from the Greek. Compare one of the dancing girls of Arlon (in Belgium) 1st 32) Indian, from Mathura, 1st-3rd cent.(?), Tree Goddess, Victoria and Albert Museum, London For 2nd 31) Double: details of pelvic regions from [A] Arlon Dancer (31); and [B] Tree Goddess (32) V2nd 31a) England (Yorkshire), Rock of Ages (video returns to 32, Tree Goddess, then to 31, Arlon Dancer; while slide holds to the double of Dancer and Tree Goddess) with an Indian tree goddess of the same time (3rd century?). The Greek influence here has come through Iran, there through Rome; but in both, the classical Aphrodite has been sexualized — the Mound of Venus (like the Yorkshire Rock of Ages, where preacher Toplady would write his hymn) is cleft. But in Mathura the erotic nude has become a divine being, joyful, fresh, keen. That the dancing girls of Arlon have female parts does not make them less colonial and drab — heavy-hearted pre-Protestant whores. For 2nd 32) Indian (late Orissan), c. 1200 A.D., Female figure (Apsara) from tower of Rafarani Temple, Bhubaneswar The West is our center, but in touch with the world: so it must be noted again that during our Dark Age of ascetic severity, India went on blossoming, century after century, in a sacred culture of sensuous humanity and personal grace — Va33) 33) Indian, 6th-7th cent., Mithuna figures from Cave 1, Ajunta Same, scene from "The Prince Will Renounce the Throne" August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History what made D. H. Lawrence say of the 6th-7th century Ajanta frescoes: "Pure fulfillment... Botticelli is vulgar beside them... I love them beyond everything pictorial... perfect intimate relation between the men and women." And though Indian music has an improvised bearing on any past, traditional Ragas refine modalities ultimately and hauntingly Greek to hymn the sanctities of love and life. 3rd 32) Again, Tree Goddess, upper detail Music: From Raga-Dadra (Uttar Pradesh), Basmillah Kahn on Shenai, Odeon MOAE 163 2nd 33) Again 33, central detail 2nd 33a) Same, detail, upper left 34) (fade raga) Honan (China) Lung-Men 6th c. AD, Siddhartha in Meditation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Chinese (Wei) 386-534, Seated Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Portland, (CGB '83) [slide only] Again 34, Honan Siddhartha, another (color) view; + various video details 34a) 34b) Whether in India or China (this 6th-century Siddhartha from Honan), what would seem meditational parallels for the Medieval inhabit another realm of human ease and nirvana peace. Though Buddhism has declined in India, something of what smiled over Tibet, to the Hwang Ho and Yellow Sea still sounds in Sanskrit hymns. Music: a35) 35) V35a) From Sanskrit Hymn to Shiva by Dikshitar, sung Sriniva UNESCO BM 30 L2021) Greek (Athens), 520-10 B.C., Piraeus Apollo, detail of Head, National Museum, Athens Chinese, Shang Dynasty, 14th-1lth cent. B.C., Bronze funerary vessel, Musée Cernuschi, Paris Again, Piraeus Apollo, another view, upper body (video returns to 35, funerary vessel) Are civilizations parallel or radiative? Both in one. The Chinese sages Lao Tzu and Confucius are more or less contemporary with Buddha, with the rise of Greek August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History wisdom and the climax of Hebrew prophecy. Yet however native Chinese culture, the Hellenistic and Roman trade of the silk route, with the eastward spread of Buddhism, fostered, as far as Korea and Japan, a vital mutant of something once Greek; as the leap from Shang funerary urns (2nd Millenium B.C., and remote as Stone Age Mayan) 36) V36a) Chinese (Ku K'ai-Chih), c. 344-405, Silk scroll, Lady at her Toilet, detail, British Museum, London From same scroll, "Admonitions to Court Ladies," Music: Chinese, 4th cent.(?) (printed 1425), Plum Blossom (chyn setting) RCA-V-LM-6057 (I: 2, b) to the caressing line and personal mood of 4th century A.D. silk painting (with a chynzither setting of a tune, "Plum Blossom" traced to the same time) persuasively suggests. Va37) 37) Greek, Tanagra (Bœotia), 4th cent. B.C., Woman with Fan, Louvre Greek (Tanagra?), 4th - 3rd cent. B.C., Statuette of a Woman, Painted Terra Cotta, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (video upper detail only) Where had such play of sophistic elegance been explored but in the likeliest export product of Greece, those Tanagra figurines, where life is trimmed to the precious turns and poses of New Comedy? 38) Chinese, T'ang, 7th-1Oth cent., Lady at her Toilet, Signora P. Varzi Galliate Collection; first, V detail In China, as in India, the cultured flowering went on and on; this T'ang lady at her toilet, from the darkest centuries of Europe, comes a thousand years and more after the wares of Tanagra. Direct influence is not in question; rather the transmission from dynasty to dynasty (without the cyclical upheavals of the West) of an incredibly civilized, post-Hellenic stance — 39) Japanese (Nara), 645-793, Kichijoten (Mahasri), Nara, Yakushiji; + V details an ultimate refinement, which by the 7th centurv had spread also to Japan. Music: August 5, 1995 From 16th cent. "Lion of Eight Thousand Generations," Kota interlude, Kimio Eto: Art of the Kota, Elektra EK S 7234 The Dark Ages �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Fade) 40) 40a) Sassanian Iran, mid 6th cent., Palace of Khusro I, Ctesiphon, near Baghdad; + V detail Mohammedan (Abbasid), 848-52, Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq (cf. Ars Nova 9) While the Buddhist related arts spread East, and the dwindling empire of Byzantium encapsuled post-classical Christianity, the old Sumerian and Persian centers produced successor kingdoms which, though they seemed to menace Christendom, preserved and sometimes advanced, for European revival, Greek knowledge and skills. Let the ruined palace of Khusro I (mid-6th century) near Bagdad, with its elliptical vault of a hundred foot span, summon from the Parthian wars against Rome, the Persian coup and revival, the subsequent complex of interplays east and west, that brief splendor of Sassanid Iran. Music: a41) 41) Islam, 9th cent., traditional, Muezzin's call to prayer, close, RCA-VLM 6057 (IV, 4) Moorish African, 862-3, Kairouan, Sanctuary of the Great Mosque, Tunisia Islam (Ommiad), 705-11, Mosaic detail, west portico, Great Mosque, Damascus; + V detail (end Call to Prayer) Music: August 5, 1995 Islam (Turkish), Taqsim Bayati, flute, RCA-V-LM 6057 (IV, 5) The Dark Ages �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let this mosaic detail from the Great Mosque in Damascus crown the Arabian and Moslem adventure, the religious power structure of Islam, which in its phenomenal spread, became host to Sassanian, Jewish, and Alexandrian commerce and lore — a fit image (landscape, the human form excluded), since here, as in philosophy and mathematics, the Hellenistic has been essentially caught and, with something of the abstraction of algebra, launched toward the future. (fade Turkish flute) 42) Germanic, 7th cent., four Bronze Bracts from Torslunda, Historical Museum, Stockholm; + slide and video singles of Bract C (42a) and Bract D (42b), to which video adds Bract B (V42c) and a detail of Bract D (from 42b) Meanwhile Europe had gone under. Beowulf looks back into the Norse and German myth-world of the 7th century and before — heroes struggling in mist-hung monster-lairs. To catch mood and action in a patchwork of phrases: This foe of God was ghastly Grendel, Stalker of moors grim haunter of marshes; Out of fens and oak forests he fastened on Hartshearth, The king's bright meadhall, with each murk of nightfall... Seized a thane sleeping, slashed him to pieces, Bit through the bone-joints, sucked at the blood-stream, Gorged flesh in gobbets ... Beowulf's death-grip Wrenched arm and shoulder; sinews sprang asunder; The axle-hinge opened; under the towering hall roof, That hero flung down the clawed limb of Grendel. Waes se grimma gaest Grendel haten, maere mearcstapa, se the moras heold, fen ond faesten ... Heorot eardode, sincfage sel, sweartum nihtum... (feng) slaepende rinc, slat unwearnum, bat banlocan, blod edrum dranc, synsnaedum swealh; sona ... he (him) onfeng inwitthancum ... seonowe onsprongon, August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages (CGB) �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History burston banlocan. Beowulfe ... alegde Grendles grap(e) under geapne hrof. a43) 43) Irish carving, 9th cent.(?), Caryatid, with Crozier and Bell, White Island, Fermanagh Roman-Christian, c. 300, Christ-Helios Mosaic, Tomb of the Julii, vault, Vatican; + V detail To sense the crisis of life-giving reduction as that force sweeps over Europe, amalgamates with Rome, becomes itself fiercely Christian, set down first a 4th-century Christian burial hymn by Prudentius (with this Apollo-Christ from a tomb under St. Peter’s): Nos tecta fovebimus ossa violis et fronde frequenti titulumque et frigida saxa liquido spargemus odore; that is the close — or as translated by Waddell: But for us, heap earth about him, Earth with leaves and violets strewn, Grave his name, and pour the fragrant Balm upon the icy stone. 44) Merovingian, 8th cent., Reliquary Casket, Virgin and Child with Peter and Paul, Musée de Cluny, Paris; + V details So leap north and over 400 years to this Merovingian casket and to the Wessobrunner Gebet, in the gutteral giant-talk of old German: Dat gafregin ih mit firahim firiuuizzo meista dat ero ni uuas noh ufhimil noh paum nohheinig noh pereg ni uuas noh sunna ni scein noh mano ni liuhta noh der mareo seo. Do dar niuuiht ni uuas enteo ni wenteo enti do uuas der eino almahtico cot. Va45) Carolingian (Rheims), c. 820(?), MS 1, f. 90v, Gospel Book of Ebbo, St. Luke; Municipal Library, Epernay August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �21 C.G. Bell 45) Symbolic History Same, f. 60v., St. Mark (first, video detail) Which we may translate (after Anglo-Saxon): Among mortal men I have heard with main marvel How earth of old was not, nor arched-up heaven, Nor tree-bole was none, nor marsh-wone, nor mountain, Nor sun did not shine Nor moon not lighten; nor the merging mere-world. But though nought was not there, beginning nor ending — One there and alone was, the all-bending God. (CGB) Having shifted in art to the Book of Ebbo, Rheims, about 820... Already German intuitive wonder wakens in "mareo seo," the fabled sea, with all related possibilities of mare, marah, mere. 46) Northumbrian, c. 710, Lion of St. Mark, Echternach Gospel, National Library, Paris (first, video detail) Where in the cyclical descent did the barbaric reversion and stripping become regenerative? We cannot say. By the 6th century the Franks had begun the political regrouping which led to Charlemagne; while the monasteries of Ireland and Northumbria gathered the first fruits of letters and art. Though the Echternach lion-sign of St. Mark (Northumbria, c. 710) does not suffer from being overtamed. Va47) 47) Northumbrian, c. 720-40, , Lindisfarne Gospel, St. Matthew, detail; British Museum Same, St. Luke (video: detail only) Yet the Lindisfarne Gospel, from twenty years later, suffuses its still metallic lines with the growing humanism of that island of learning. As Ambrose had said at the beginning of the Time of Troubles — and every Dark Age monastery tried to enact his words: August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �22 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Amid the agitations of the world the Church remains unmoved; the waves cannot shake her. While around her everything is in horrible chaos, she offers to all the shipwrecked a tranquil port where they will find safety. 48) 48a) Northumbrian, Viking-Age relief, 8th-9th cent.(?), Marauders, Lindisfarne Viking, 7th. cent., Iron Helmet, State Historical Museum, Stockholm Not, however, from the Vikings, who seem to be represented in this Lindisfarne relief. As the Anglo Saxon Chronicle records, January 8, 793: "The harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter." Or as Alcuin, from the court of Charlemagne: "Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain." It was the opening of 250 years of culminant darkness. 49) Irish MS, c. 800, Book of Kells, St. John; Trinity College, Dublin (video reduces the page to four successive details) Iona was ravaged soon after. St. Columba's monks fled to Kells north of Dublin, probably taking with them the unfinished Book which bears the name of the new monastery. "While the sea spewed forth the foreigners over Erin." (Annals of Ulster, 820.) Living in the world of symbol must have prepared the soul for such raiders. Each Christian, sat like this St. John, holding the Gospel, at the center of a calligraphic Gospel, which shows by the cloudy head at the top, the hands at the sides and the pierced feet below, that it is the crucified Christ. a50) b50) c50) d50) 50) Carolingian (Palace School), beginning 9th cent., double page, St. John the Evangelist and text, from Reichsevangelair, Munich (video: first, the page of text) Same, the page of John (video: detail only) Carolingian, 799-818, Ark of the Covenant, mosaic, Oratory of Theodulf, Germigny-des-Pres Again, Reichsevangelair, Matthew (first, video detail) Again, John from the Reichsevangelair; + V detail On the continent, Charlemagne welcomed scholars from the islands to the shelter of his Palace School; and it was an island too, hard-held, between the earlier unrest of Germans, Huns, and Moors, and the onslaught of Vikings and Magyars to follow — post- August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Classical, pre-Western, an arctic solstice where the twilight meets the dawn. Its central poem is the Lament for Alcuin (on his leaving Aachen), either by the master himself, or by his pupil Fredugis. The Augustinian memory of his "little house" (with Waddell) — O mea cella, mihi habitatio dulcis, amata ... pomiferis redolent ramis tua claustra per hortos — and all thy cloisters smell of apple orchards — yields to the starker burden of loss and faith: So passes all the beauty of the earth ... O flying world! that we, sick-hearted love thee! Still thou escapest, here, there, everywhere, Slipping down from us. Fly, then, if thou wilt, Our hearts are set in the strong love of God. nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? ... tu fugiens fugias, Christum nos semper amemus. Such is the ground of the Dark Ages. Perhaps the St. John's page from the Reichsevangelair is the somberest art-revival of Roman mellowness in that German-Christian winter. The gathered toga, the bearded meditation, the sad little garden of shrubs — as in the Lament: "undique te cingit ramis resonantibus arbos" — repeat: "Oh flying world! that we, sick-hearted, love thee!" and "Our hearts are set in the strong love of God." Here on the threshold of the West, the Western antinomies appear: against the shadowed piety of the Palace School, 1st 51) Rheims, c. 820-30, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XI detail, University Library, Utrecht August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �24 C.G. Bell 51a) V51b) 51c) Symbolic History Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm XLIII, battle detail Same, from Psalm CII, Messiah and angels Again, Utrecht Psalter, from Psalm XI [these are Vulgate numberings] the reckless vital line of the Utrecht Psalter. And in thought, Hrabanus Maurus, pious churchman, at his best in monastic greetings, as to Grimold, Abbot of St. Gall (Waddell): "And God, who brought us on this earth together, bring us together in his house of heaven" — comes into history linked in furious opposition, jailor and inquisitor of his fiery ward Gottschalk, the first whom logic led toward Calvin's heresy of predestination. Everything about him speaks passion, from his recusant stand to the first personal rhymed lyrics he wrote in prison: "O quid iubes, pusiole ... Carmen dulce me cantare ..." Even more prophetically strange was that John Scotus, that wise Erigena (Erinborn), Irish translator of the mystic Aereopagite, called in to answer Gottschalk, should dissolve predestination only in a pantheistic Christian Platonism of the universe as God in processu, drawn toward a deificatio, or resumption of all nature, evil and good, even Satan himself, into the Divine: 2nd 50) Again, Matthew from Reichsevangelair (cf. d50; while video repeats John, as in slide 50) Evil will have its consummation and will not remain in any nature, since the divine nature will work and be manifest in all... In his knowing revival of pagan and Christian antiquity, Erigena shares the robed richness of the Palace School. 2nd 51) Again, Utrecht Psalter, Psalm CVIII (video: upper detail only) In the freedom with which he absorbs the world into God, who "subsists," he said, "as the essence of all," he rather suggests the racing sketchwork of the Utrecht Psalter, where objects are fused in sacred energies. 52) Irish, c. 800, Incarnation page, fol 34,. from the Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin; + V details August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History While the Irish tradition from which he stems, least like him in classical surface, may be nearest to his visionary ecstasy. As in this Book of Kells page of the Birth of Christ, where the monograms Chi, Rho and the rest, threaded through with live geometries, less illustrate than form the divine substance of Matthew I, 18: "Christi ... generatio." 53) School of Rheims, early 9th cent., St. John, Gospel Book of Ebbo, Municipal Library, Epernay; first V detail, then V53, wider variant The aim is not to match this with that, but to perceive in the Carolingian ferment how the later Western forms of art, of thought, of personality itself are being explored — nowhere more masterfully than in the Rheims Gospel Book of Ebbo, which alchemizes into one the togaed weight of the Palace School and the expressive frenzy of the Utrecht line. Giant precursors, these miniatures. a54) 54) N. Italian, 9th cent.(?), Castelseprio frescoes, head of a priest, detail, Castelseprio (CGB '80) Same, detail, Presentation in the Temple (CGB '80) [video reverses 54 and a54, then returns to V54a, a wider view of 54] Claudius, 9th century bishop of Turin, tried and condemned but never crushed, gives the new force an Italian voice: He is not the apostle who sits in the seat of the apostle, but who fulfills the life and office ... Why bend your body to worship vain images? God made you erect ... Let no man trust in saints, but as he holds the faith and truth and justice of the saints. So the Castelseprio frescoes, probably of the 9th century, startle us with the prophetic eruption of spatial and humanistic power, hung like the Carolingian, between past and future. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 55) Viking, 9th cent., head from a cart, Oseberg Ship Burial, University, Oslo 55a) Viking, 9th cent., Ship from Oseberg Burial Mound, Oslo 55b) Germanic, 8th cent., Engraved Tombstone to a warrior: Viking Vallhalla ship, Klinte, Gotland (video, details only) The death of Charlemagne (814), the wars of succession, the battle of Fontenoy (841) "Maledicta dies illa" (Angilbert), which drained the blood of France, left Europe exposed as the islands had been. The long boats with the carved prows moved up the rivers. The chant went up in the churches: "A furore Normanorum libera nos Domine." The Sibyl's prophecy for 1000 seemed fulfilled: "A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age." Utrecht burned; Charlemagne's palace sacked; the cities of France mowed down: Perigeux, Limoges, Angouleme, Toulouse, Angers, Orleans, Rouen; and then the Mediterranean. a56) 56) V56a) Gerona Beatus, 975, Warrior spearing a snake, Cathedral, Gerona Carolingian, 781-85, St. John from the Gospels of Godescalc, National Library, Paris; video: upper part only Carolingian, 781-3, Godesalc Gospels, Beardless Christ, National Library, Paris; video: upper part only While Saracens fixed mountain aeries in Italy and Provence, and the Turkish Magyars terrorized the east, raiding yearly, often as far as the Rhine. Even the sacred shrines of refuge — Tours, Corbie, Reichenau, Fulda — whence had echoed the greetings of Colman, Alcuin, Maurus — were not secure. And may God give thee in thy hands the green unwithering palm of everlasting life — this by Strabo, also to Grimold of St. Gall — St. Gall, at the Swiss heart of Europe, to be plundered in 926 by the Hungarians. 57) Carolingian, 870, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, Adoration of the Lamb, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (video divides to upper and lower details) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The beloved Bishop Radbob of Utrecht, later visited in his illness by the blessed Virgin with Agnes and Thekla, wrote of the time: (Waddell) In the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 900 there appeared a marvellous sign in heaven. For the stars were seen to flow from the very height of the heaven to the lowest horizon ... woeful calamities followed ... untowardness of the seasons and frequent tempests, rivers overflowing their banks...and ominous upheavals of men boasting themselves against God ... a58) b58) 58) V58a) Fulda Lectionary, c. 975-80, Adoration of the Lamb, Hofbibliothek, Aschaffenburg (video: lower detail only) Carolingian from St. Gall, first half of the 1Oth cent., Mounted Warriors, Book of Maccabees, Codex Perizoni 17, f. 46r, University Library, Leyden, Holland German (Cologne), c. 1OOO, Luke, from City Archive, MS 312, Cologne Reichenau, 1010, The Woes of Jerusalem, Gospel Book of Otto III, f. 188v, State Library, Munich (video takes first 58 upper part, then V 58a; then returns to 58, whole) The epitaph which follows the record closes: Long hunger wasted the world wanderer With sight of Thee may he be satisfied. The tenth century moves in the forehall of the doom the millennium was supposed to bring. The synod at Trosle, 909, echoes Gregory on the Lombards: "The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined ... Men devour one another like fishes in the sea." Of the end of the century Glaber chronicles: Perilous times were at hand for men's souls... about the thousandth year after the birth of our Lord... almost all the cities of Italy and Gaul were ravaged by flames of fire... At this same time a horrible plague raged among men... By 1000 the art of the Rhine has the bare force of sainted bones rising at the last day. 59) N. German (Saxon), c. 700, Hornhausen Equestrian relief, Landesmuseum, Halle August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History We would wish, but there is no way, to resume the sequence in music: to hear the barbarian chanting voices spill down over Rome; the transformation of Gregorian as missionaries spread it north; a60) 60) V60a) Court School of Charles the Bald, 870, Incipit page, Gospel of St. Matthew, Christ as Lion, Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram f. 16v., State Library, Munich Irish, c. 910, Cross of Muiredach, det., Arrest of Christ, Monsterboice Same, view of whole cross the varying liturgies, Mozárabic, Celtic, Frankish; to experience as Charlemagne did in the churches of his kingdom (so the Monk of St. Gall) distinctions of rhythm, intonation, even melody and perhaps harmony — Gottschalk's accuser, Maurus of Mainz declaiming against the theatrical style of his singers — innovations no doubt as startling as the visual leaps of the Utrecht psalter, or the first monumental carving of the West, the Irish Crosses from the "forty year recess" (early lOth century) in the Viking raids. A of 61) Roman-Christian, 432-40, center detail of The Annunciation, Triumphal Arch mosaics, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome B of 61) Mozárabic, 1091-1109, from Beatus on the Apocalypse (upper detail), British Museum, London 61) Double: [A] Roman-Christian, and [B] Mozárabic 61a) Again, B of 61, Beatus on the Apocalypse (slide: whole; video: a larger detail) Music: Mozárabic, from c. 1100(?), Aleph from Lamentations of Jeremiah, Archive 198-459 Where are the musical parallels for the loss and stripping, the heightening of force so clear in the imprints of art — from the ease of Christian Rome (about 440, Santa Maria Maggiore, left), through the absorption of Eastern and Barbarian (Coptic, Syrian, Moslem, with Celtic and German), to the final cutting edge (right) of the Beatus Commentary from 1100 Spain? If only we could exhibit that vital stiffening in the rhythms of song. Ephemeral poor music: it is all lost. Where the notes survive (as with the reconstructed liturgy of the same Spain), today's monks, trained in the would-be 5th century practice of Solesmes, melt all styles into one — August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �29 C.G. Bell a62) 62) Symbolic History Lower right detail of 62 Carolingian (Rheims), early 9th cent., Four Evangelists, Codex Aureus, f. 13r., Cathedral Treasury, Aachen; + V detail this Mozárabic Lamentation indistinguishable from Ambrosian. For the complex of barbarian, Byzantine and classical, hardening as to encapsule the radiant of rhymed sequence and polyphony — all we get in effect is the attempt at Roman-Christian revival — moody as this page of Evangelists from the Aachen Gospels, or as Alcuin's Latin Lament: nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus? (fade Mozárabic) An art which looks, over a solemn gulf 63) 63a) Byzantine, 6th-7th cent., Peter from an Icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai German (Werden), 1064-80, Bronze Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr (video returns to 63, Peter from an Icon, detail to the Roman Christian, whether of East or West (this of the 6th century, from Sinai). Against it stands in music a single recorded interpretation of a more strident Gregorian, which Guillaume de Van and his group made for Anthologie Sonore — Billy Van from Texas, who founded the frenetic style of Gothic, and set himself here, like the Gauls (as the Romans complained) "with their barbaric voices crushing the melodies in their throats", to recover a Byzantine-affined Gregorian of about 1000. It lacks the suave beauty of Solesmes, but it will in fact Va64) 64) Again 14, Otto III enthroned, here upper detail Reichenau School, 1Oth cent., Ascension, Laurentian Library, Florence accompany the Reichenauer MSS of the lOth century — the lean style of the Ottos — which no Solesmes version will do. Music: August 5, 1995 Gregorian, before 1000, from "Adjiuvabit eam Deus...", de Van group, on AS 34 The Dark Ages �30 C.G. Bell Va65) Symbolic History Ottonian, c. 1010, Mary anointing and wiping Christ's feet, Perikopenbuch, Staatsbibliothek, Munich Same, the Angel to the Shepherds 65) (Fade de Van) Meanwhile, under those now irrecoverable variants of plainsong, 1st 66) Carolingian, 796-804, Interior of Charlemagne's Chapel, Aachen; video: detail only the practice of organizing in chords was turning, without wish or knowledge, from the surrender of Gregorian to what would become the musical command of space. Here we should extend to music the contrast already made, between Charlemagne's Chapel 1st 67) Byzantine 502-37 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, interior, Constantinople (CGB '77) (video also uses detail from 2nd 67) Music: Byzantine (John of Damascus, d. 754), from Easter Canon, ARC 2533 413, side A, in band 4 and the irradiation of the Hagia Sophia. To which Byzantine chant. as practiced on Mount Athos, old refuge of the Virgin from the dragon, exhibits, still over 1400 years of changing style and notation, some strangely related hypnotic strength. (fade Mount Athos chant) 2nd 66) Again, Charlemange's Chapel, another view (video divides to upper and lower details and adds a detail from 1st 66) while with the cramped and struggling height of Charlemagne's chapel, though we cannot hear the harmony Erigena speaks of, we can manage a demonstration attempt at a brief phrase, Rex coeli, from the Musica Enchiriadis, a treatise of 850-910 — mostly in parallel organum with some contrary motion: Music: 2nd 67) Scholia enchiriadis, c. 850, Rex coeli, Organum from Musica Enchiriadis, Haydn Society L-2071 (Close) Again, interior of Hagia Sophia, another view (CGB '77) (video instead picks up 2nd 15c, interior with streaming sunlight) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Christendom inherited from Rome two structural modes for churches: centralized dome we think of as Byzantine, 68) the Early Christian 549, St. Apollinare in Classe, interior, Ravenna; + V detail and the columned hall we associate with Rome, though this is Ravenna. Here, the change from the classical, with Gregorian — Music: 69) 69a) Gregorian (Solesmes), from Gloria IV (Domine Deus … Christis) VM-87 (fade) French Romanesque, 1007 and after, Nave of St. Philbert, Tournus; + V details Fortified Church, 9th-12th cent., Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, Provençe to the first Romanesque at the turn of 1000, St. Philbert, Tournus, scores the end result of Dark Age stripping, church like soul narrowed into strength, fortified against calamity; yet in that dark, stone-walled weight, appear the new principles of rib-support which would empower Gothic heights — as in the hollow organum on the 1020 or so "Veni Sancte Spiritus," music too has found in its winter descent a ground of regeneration. Music: Va70) 70) Plainsong with parallel organum, c. 1020, Veni Sancte Spiritus, (beginning and end) Col. 5710 German (Rhine), c. 969-76, Gerokreuz, most of the carving, Cologne Cathedral Detail of Gerokreuz, head and shoulders (close Veni Sancte Spiritus) At the heart of the change lay the fact of Incarnation: et homo factus est — of which God's pain and death was the literal crux. In the tragic Gerokreuz, of Cologne, we are already launched toward the Gothic humanity which is the source of Western power. Early Christian art, in its Orphic gentleness, had avoided the Crucifixion. For 1st 71) Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, British Museum, London (video reverses order of 1st and 2nd 71) August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The first representations known are five centuries after Christ's death, and they show the eternal surrender only in the aspect of its calm. 72) German Gothic, 1304, Gabel Crucifix or Pestkreuz, S. Maria im Kapitol, Cologne If one pursues the identification of God and process too far, one reaches the Gothic (Eckhardt) and romantic (Hegelian) heresy where Christendom ends; 2nd 71) Roman Christian, 422-34, Crucifixion, door of Santa Sabina, Rome (video: detail only, after beginning with the whole of 1st 71) if one draws back too strongly from that, one comes into the Neoplatonic heresies with which Christendom began — the Arian: Christ as incarnate cannot be of one substance with the Father; the Nestorian: the Logos is in Christ, but not joined with the human person as one individual — these with others mark the startled retreat of Classical reason from the contradiction of the Man-God. 2nd 72) Again, Pestkreuz, upper detail; + V closer detail) 2nd 72a) Romanesque, early 11th cent., Sedes Sapientie of Walcourt, Church of St. Maternus, Walcourt But the tendency of later heresy, from Meister Eckhardt down (just contemporary with this Pestkreuz, also of Cologne, 1304) is the opposite: the identification of Christ and everyman, of God and world-soul, of eternity and time, whether history or the moment Now... Toward that, as toward every essential archetype of the West, the 10th century has somehow crossed the line. a73) b73) 73) Roman Christian ivory, end 3rd cent., Good Shepherd, Louvre, Paris Roman Christian mosaic, c. 325 and ff, Cherubs at Grape Harvest, S. Constanza. Rome Byzantine, c. 400, S. Porfirio, mosaic, Church of St. George, Salonika Take what had been central to the Christian break with Hellenism, the surrender of reason to faith — Paul's "folly" and Christ's "except as a little child." The most August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History moderate could not avoid the leap of God's paradox — Ambrose: "I do not require reason from Christ; if I am convinced by reason, I reject faith." 74) Byzantine (Ephesus), 5th cent., Bust of Eutropius, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail Tertulian's "quia absurdum" is always quoted, not merely for its violence, but as a radical pole of all Christian speculation: The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed, because one must be ashamed of it. The Son of God died — this is credible just because it is folly. He has been buried and resurrected — this is certain because it is impossible. We match it with the Byzantine 5th-century Bust of Eutropius, a carving which breaks, as much as any, with classical form. 75) French Gothic, c. 1210, John the Baptist, detail, N. Portal, Chartres That incarnate enigma became, through the Dark Ages, the automatic Christian home. By 1200, five centuries of transrational acceptance have so reoriented the mind, that thought, from Fredugis to Anselm, can support in the mode of reason (new-born) — can prove — the necessity of the very God and Incarnation 2nd 74) Again, Eutropius, another view which Tertullian acclaimed divine impossibility. Reason, with the whole fabric of secular humanity and world, to which early Christianity had said farewell, has been transplanted, a2nd 75) Again, Chartres: Simeon, John the Baptist, and Peter, from the North Portal b2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, another view (also video variant; Vb2nd 75) 2nd 75) Again, John the Baptist, detail and is growing again in the walled close of Creed. So the Chartres ascetic Baptist turns the twist of Byzantine conscious otherworldliness to a Troubador gesture of love, as tender, as lyrical, as the duplum purum of Leonin. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: 76) 76a) Leonin, c. 1160, Crucifixum (duplum) close (Tinayre) Col. M-431 (1) (end) French Romanesque, c. 1120-50, Christ detail, Portal, Vezelay Detail of 4b, Ghiselbertus, Christ in Judgment, Autun; + V closer detail Here is Anselm, with the Christ of Vezelay: One can convince oneself of these truths ... by the force of reason alone. (Of God): If that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exist in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than whom a greater can be conceived. But this is a paradox. Hence ... he exists both in understanding and in reality ... (Of Incarnation): God became man by necessity... the satisfaction being such as none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it. (To which the monkish interlocutor): Blessed be God! We have made a great discovery ... Go on ... I hope God will assist you. 77) French before 1020, Church of St. Martin, Chapaise, Burgundy; + V detail Thus in all the arts, (here, before 1020, the church of Chapaise in Burgundy), the forms which the 12th and 13th centuries would perfect, have their origin before or just around the millenium: the groined and ribbed vault to focus thrust, the regional schools of painting and stained glass, the chivalric state, the monastic reform of Cluny, sacred drama, a passionate poetry of assonance and rhyme, Guido's solmization of the major hexachord, and central to all, a philosophy of reason justifying faith. 78) German (Rhine), 1030 to 12th cent., esp. 1080, Kaiserdom, Speyer (video: details only) How evident the surge must have been for that chronicler of doom, Ralph Glaber, to have written, about 1040 — while this Speyer and the other great Rhine cathedrals rose: August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But every nation of Christendom rivalled with the other which should worship in the seemliest buildings. So it was as though the very world had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and were clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches. Music: 79) Perotin le Grand, c. 1210, 4-voice. Sedêrunt, close, Cape, Archive 14068. French Romanesque, 1039-65, Transept Crossing, Ste. Foy, Conques, Aveyron; first, V detail The transept crossing of Sainte Foy in Conques, 1039 to 1065, looks to the miracle of Gothic, as the first polyphony we have heard is trained on Perotin. 80) French Gothic (Normandy), later 13th cent., lantern of Crossing, Coutance (CGB '74); + V detail Looking back to Sainte Foy from this crossing of Coutances (13th century) we realize that around the year 1000 we passed one of those nodes the poet Yeats liked to symbolize by the construction of a cone within a cone, and that all things, to use his words: Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. August 5, 1995 The Dark Ages (end Perotin) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Dark Ages, Symbolic History, Part 7 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 7 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_07_The_Dark_Ages Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/00c49d5996ae1871ba1afa7095ed0a2f.pdf 5570781d8ddbdc52b999e158fb580351 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 6. Early Christianity CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 6. Early Christianity 1) 1a) Attic, 520-510 BC, Korê 682, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Attic, Temple c. 440 B.C., Hephaisteion called Theseion, Agora, Athens (CGB '77) From Greece — "whence the famous song of praise" (Pindar) — from the time of Homer to the Peloponnesian War, the fullness of choric celebration betrays no flaw, no hollow, for alien cults and immortality religions. a2) b2) 2) Greek, Round Temple or Tholos 370-360 BC, Delphi by twilight (CGB '77) Cyprus, 4th c. BC, Terra Cotta head of a man, National Museum, Athens Hellenistic, 2nd c. BC, Maid of Anzio (upper part), Thermae, Rome But when the art-softened cities fell to Macedon and Rome, leaving vacancies of private refinement, then philosophy, born of wonder, became with the Stoics a medicine for sick souls; and Epicurus, validating free will by atomic swerve, balmed it into a beatitude like that of his own gods: "freedom from all that produces fear … from the prison of affairs and politics … from pain in the body and trouble in the mind." 3) Augustan, end of 1st cent. BC, Lady Minatia Polla, National Museum, Rome Subjectivity deepens in Rome. In the Lady Minatia Polla of the late Republic, we plumb a desire like that of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, having two components, the earthly and spiritual, corresponding to two historical solutions, the City of Caesar and the City of God. a4) 4) Roman, c. 20 BC, Prima Porta Augustus (special lighting), Vatican, Rome Roman, c. 217 AD, Apotheosis of Caracalla, Cameo, Nancy, Museum June 1996 Early Christianity 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The first component — the Augustan — springs naturally from a century of civil war, and was soon to be met by the Principate of Octavian. Though after 200 years of varying despotism, the heaven-sent hero (here the deified Caracalla) may seem a shabby answer to the Messianic cry. a5) b5) 5) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacomb of St. Calixtus, Rome Early Christian, 3rd cent., Christ-Orpheus, Cemetery of Domitilla, Rome Roman Christian, mid 3rd cent., Good Shepherd, Aurelii tomb, Rome; first, video details, above and below (also dig.) Music: Gregorian, old Solemes Album, Agnus Dei, V-M-87 (1-b) For there was always the other component. It made Virgil's eclogue seem a Christian prophecy of a time "when our wickedness will cease, the earth be freed from fear, when the serpent will die, and nature pour forth her plenty, under the rule of a prince of peace." As Isaiah had said less ambiguously, to be rendered into the Vulgate by Jerome: "Sicut pastor gregem suum pascet: in brachio suo congregabit agnos" — "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm." (end Agnus Dei) a6) 6) Greek, bronze Krater c. 330 B.C., from a Macedonian tomb at Derveni, Revelries of Dionysus and Ariadne, detail, Museum, Thessalonike Roman, copy from Skopas, 350-340 B.C., Orgiastic Maenad, Dresden Music: Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, J.E. Butt (chromatic section) But the lady Polla lived in the luxury of Hellenized Rome — the music Nero would love, the art-copies spread over the Mediterranean, and by trade as far as Britain and Asia — this from Skopas, most Dionysiac of post-Euripideans. That was the sensuous part; (fade Delphic Hymn) 7) Roman Egyptian, Encaustic, 2nd cent. A.D., Man with Dark Skin, Alexandria; + V detail (also dig.) June 1996 Early Christianity 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and against it, cohabitant in all lives, but more and more withdrawn, the longing beyond death (here 2nd century, from Roman Egypt). There was no such cleavage in the early Greek. Its outwardness was spirit. Even in Plato the word for Idea is the visible shape of a thing. Now the beautiful body becomes a husk in which the soul waits wide-eyed. How to fuse the polarity, to give the Greek way a new life? 8) Neo-Attic, 1st c. B.C., Archaistic Athena, National Museum, Naples The fad of archaizing showed the need (as in late Egypt and the modern West), but also the irreversibility of cultural protoplasm. Those neo-Attic essays in stiff drapes and frontality — bright-eyed Athena lured by Hollywood fakeries — prove by reductio that to archaic renewal there is no direct road. a9) b9) 9) Indian Buddhist, 1st cent. B.C., East Gateway of Stupa #1, Sanchi, India Gandharan 2nd cent. A.D., Birth of Buddha, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C. Græco-Buddhist, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D., Smiling stucco head, Magari-Sharif, Afghanistan Music: Indian Raga, Pandit Ramnarain on Sarangi with tabla ODEON-MOAE 174 Only a road beyond the Classical: palingenesis as avatar. A study of the Western arts can at least hint that Asia managed to extend what in Europe had to fall into the earth and die. Since Gautama Siddhartha (c. 500 BC), Buddhism had been redirecting the larger search for peace of soul. But Buddhist art first appears after contact with Alexander, and it is not until the age of the Antonines that the loving Bodhisatvas transcend Epicurean detachment in the mystical compassion of the Nirvana smile. (Tabla drum begins) June 1996 Early Christianity 3 �C.G. Bell a10) Vb10) 10) Symbolic History Again a9, Gate of Stupa, detail (lower right) of Yakshi as bracket Indian (Uttar Pradesh), c. 2nd cent., Yakshi with parrot and cage, from Bhuteshar, Indian Museum, Calcutta Indian (Sanchi), c. 25 B.C., Yakshi, Fine Arts Museum, Boston With that smile, Greek sensuousness was also reborn — in India. The treasuretrove of Begram shows how far the arts of East and West met in the trading places of the silk route. (Raga, toward close) But the museums had long attested the passion of Skopas sprung to livelier dehanchement — as a feature of Asian beatitude. Whereas in the West, the split widens to Paul's bitter quarrel with the flesh, Origen's dire enactment of scripture: "If thy right hand" — in his case the sexual root — "offend against thee, cut it off." (Close Raga) a11) b11) 11) Northumbrian, 7th cent., Ruthwell Cross, Christ and the Magdalen, Parish Church, Ruthwell, Scotland French (Vezelay), c. 1120-50, Head of Christ, Tympanum, Vezelay Saxon, c. 1000, Christ on the Cross, detail of head, from Hildesheim Music: Leonin, c. 1160, Organum Duplum, Crucifixum, from "In Carne Laudate" phrase; old Col. M-431 (1) Perhaps the dayadhvam of princely Buddha more suits our mood than the bowstretching violence of the crucified carpenter's son. But it could not have so plowed history with incarnate paradox, mammocking time in the violence of Gothic and Reformation, colonial conquest, science, democracy, even Marxism. If a wise (or scheming) god had asked what, in a thousand years, would stir the tribes of Europe to incalculable energy-release, he could hardly have hit on more formative tensions than were knit into Christianity — though we turn for their exhibition to this Saxon Crucifix of 1000, and in music to the 1160 Organum of Leonin. Such was the apocalytic love and reprobate godhead which staggered the pagan world. a12) 12) Roman, 251 AD, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, detail of Romans fighting Barbarians, National Museum, Rome (cf Va12, whole); dig. whole, then det. Same, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, closer detail of Barbarian; also dig. The Roman Empire stood apalled; It dropped the reins of peace and war, June 1996 Early Christianity 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When that fierce Virgin and her star Out of the formless darkness called. That is Yeats, but scripture is wilder: Resist not evil, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, take no thought of the morrow; deny mother and father, sell all you have and follow me. [And if not], Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. (fade Leonin) 13) 13a) Græco-Syrian, 1st cent. A.D., Chief Ministrant, detail of head, frescoes, Fortress of Dura Eurotus, Euphrates Same, Dura Fortress,three standing figures; + V detail; so dig. Music: Yemenite Jews, Paraphrase of Psalm 137, History of Music in Sound I, V-LSC 6057, side 4 What Semitic intensity stared through and put to shame those mythic satyrs and sarcophagus barbarians of the pagan world? We feel it in the lst-century frescoes from the fortress of Dura on the Euphrates, in the Synagogue chant of the Yemenite Jews, the Essene searchings of the Dead Sea Scrolls, John the Baptist's preparing in the wilderness for another Teacher of Righteousness, in the mass suicide of the besieged on Masada. But where is the doctrine of love in that hypnotic zeal? Neither the Qumran sect of the scrolls, nor the cult of Dura, nor the fierce intensity of Hebrew chant, can do more than hint at the ferment from which Christianity arose. (End Psalm) 14) 14a) Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Glorification of Tiberius, Great Cameo of France, National Library, Paris Roman, 54-68 A.D., head of Nero, National Museum, Rome As with Buddhism earlier, the birth occurs behind a veil of mystery, and in a silence of art. Augustus brought in the Age of Gold when Christ was born; Tiberius (whom Augustus here glorifies), sulked at Capri when Christ was crucified. Persecution of the spreading sect began with Nero. As the state hardened against them, the faithful fortified themselves in the episcopate orthodoxy of the Word: by 100 the four Gospels were probably complete. June 1996 Early Christianity 5 �C.G. Bell 15) Symbolic History Roman Christian, late 2nd cent., Eucharistic meal, "Greek Chapel", Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome But another hundred years would pass, the fortunate Adoptive reign fall to the frenzy of Commodus and Caracalla — the canon of the New Testament be almost fixed, and the preaching of the Fathers tipping the scales to the Church — before the first Christian art would appear — this Eucharist, or love-feast, from the Catacombs of Priscilla. 1st 16) Roman Christian, mid 3rd cent., Apostle, Aurelii tomb, Rome So we must suspend chronology to image the ambivalence of faith. For the kernel of wisdom, humanity, and Christ-like love, we choose an Apostle from the tomb of the Aurelii about 240, and against it 17) Roman Christian, c. 360, Constantius II, Pal. dei Conservatori, Rome for the shell of dogma in which Christian love rides, the son of Constantine, bigot Constantius II, a hundred years later, when the crown of faith was no longer martyrdom, but tax-exempt holdings in the Roman slave-state. Though the contrast we are making is not only of time. As long as God witnessed is the pride of the witnesser, religious humility will wear a mask of intolerant zeal. For 2nd 16 and 2nd 17) Double: 16 and 17, Aurelii Apostle and Constantius II; dig. 17za The opposition is in Christ himself: Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls … But that Jesus of Matthew goes Byzantine in John: Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews... the testimony of two men is true. I am one that bear witness of myself, and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me... Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning... 3rd 16) Again, Aurelii Apostle June 1996 Early Christianity 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Paul, who closes the letter to Galatians: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself... If a man be overtaken in any trespass... restore such a one in a spirit of meekness... Let us work that which is good toward all men... Far be it from me to glory save in the cross of our lord Jesus Christ — 3rd 17) Again, Constantius II, another view Paul opens it with a curse on all divergence from his gospel: But though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. 4th 16) Again, Aurelii Apostle, detail The deepest beauty in Augustine — Two cities have been founded by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self... The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God: "Thou art my glory and the lifter-up of my head." [If the earthly kingdom shall fail, what then?] for the Kingdom of God shall be eternal, and we shall be assured of its eternity; and thus the peace of this blessedness and the blessedness of this peace shall be the supreme good — 4th 17) Again, Constantius II, detail that Augustine shades into spiteful rant: I fell upon a sect of men proudly doting, too carnal and prating, in whose mouth were the snares of the devil, a very bird-lime composed of the mixture of the syllables of thy Name... they cried out Truth, and Truth... yet was the Truth itself nowhere to be found amongst them. (Confessions, III, vi) Had Plato and Aristotle so identified with God, each would have seen the other as the Prince of Lies. 1st18)Roman, c. 117, Trajan in old age (bronze), Archeol. Museum, Ankara June 1996 Early Christianity 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From Augustine, chronology takes us back three hundred years, to Trajan. How could that civilized blunt soldier be anything but blind, deaf and dumb to Christian complexity? Could he share what was within: 1st19)Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Good Shepherd from the tomb of Livia Primativa, Vatican; + V details (one dig. detail) doubt swallowed in disciplined surety: "O death, where is thy sting, O grave?" — the sarcophagus of Livia Primativa — the Good Shepherd amidst the waves of immortal life, filling the gnostic dark? No pagan observer saw beyond the stiffnecked madness and doomsday zeal. As Festus cried in Acts: "Paul, thou art mad, thy much learning doth turn thee to madness." Even the "much learning" betrays a Christian text, and where else do we hear Paul's answer: "I am not mad, but speak the words of truth and soberness." 2nd 18) Again, Trajan bronze, detail So when Pliny the Younger writes Trajan from Bithynia: "The infection of this superstition has spread through not only cities but also villages and the country, though it seems possible to check and remedy it" — the emperor tries to be fair: One must not punish on the word of informers, that would be against the urbanity of his reign; but if any will not deny Christ and bow to the gods ... For 2nd 19) Roman Christian, 2nd half of the 4th cent., Bust of Christ fresco, Cemetery of Commodilla, Rome (There Revelation takes it up): "As many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed." But "blessed are the dead which die in the Lord," for "the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever." a20) 20) Christian from Antioch, 6th cent., Vienna Genesis. The Flood, detail, National Library, Austria Same, whole June 1996 Early Christianity 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Lucian says: "Those unlucky people have brought themselves to where they think they shall live forever ... They therefore despise all things alike." That was at the core of the mad reversal of pagan values, the odium generis humani, "hatred of all humanity", of which the sect of love was accused; and indeed, as in the Flood of the Vienna Genesis, they did urge catastrophes, past and to come. 21) 21a) Roman, c. 147, Marcus Aurelius as a youth, Antiquarium di Foro, Rome Roman, c. 166-180, Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, detail of head, Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome Even Marcus Aurelius, in earthly gloom and the doubts of reason — If indeed there are no Gods, or if they do not concern themselves with the affairs of men... Things are so wrapped in mystery that even the Stoics find them hard to comprehend... And the poor soul itself is an exhalation of the blood. — shunned that self-surrender. He admired Christian courage, but not at the price of frenzy: a22) 22) Roman (Athens), 2nd cent. A.D., Annius Verus, son of Marcus Aurelius, Louvre, Paris Byzantine, c. 1000, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius (c. 107), Menologium of Basil II, Vatican Let the preparation of the mind [for death] arise from its own judgment, and not from obstinacy (like the Christians), but deliberately and reverentially and undramatically, that it may persuade others. Strange, that Marcus' reason persuaded nobody, where the death of Ignatius in the Colosseum (in 107) — "I am God's wheat... ground by the teeth of wild beasts... to become pure bread of Christ" — was depicted 900 years later, in the persuasion it had helped to form. 23) Roman, c. 135 A.D., Marble copy of Greek c. 330 B.C. bronze, Apollo Belvedere, Vatican (CGB '86); + V detail (not dig.) That coldly academic embodiment of Greek reason, the Apollo Belvedere, may suggest the sort of argument Marcus Aurelius had in mind. Thus when Socrates is in June 1996 Early Christianity 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History prison, and Crito wants to get him away, there is a debate with the abstract laws, proving by logic that he should stay and die. 24) Roman Christian, late 3rd cent., Orant from Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome Ambrose offers the counter-example of Christian argument. Peter has escaped from prison and is fleeing from Rome. At the gate of the city he meets Christ bearing a cross. "Domine, quo vadis?" — "Where are you going, Lord?" "To be crucified once more." Peter returns to martyrdom. It is persuasion by contagion. 25) Palatine graffito, from Page-boys' school, 3rd cent.?, "Alexemenus worships his god," National Museum, Thermae, Rome; + V detail (not dig.) Hardly surprising that the Christians were rumored to worship a crucified ass, as in the charcoal scratch from the Palatine school: "Alexemenus worships his God." Both Christ and Paul had made it clear that we must become like children and fools: For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness... I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent... we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and to the Greeks foolishness. (I Corinthians 1, 18-23) 26) 26a) 26b) Roman, c. 190, Commodus as Hercules, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome Coptic, 3rd cent. A.D., Isis suckling Harpocrates, Karganis, Egypt Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Christ, from a fresco, Catacomb of Domatilla, Rome But Classical reason was eroded everywhere. Marcus' own son, Commodus, plunged the empire into a new orgy of misrule. His playing Hercules against beasts in the Amphitheater is matched in Christian credulity by the spiteful excesses of the apocryphal infant Christ: The son of Anna scattered the waters which Jesus had gathered into lakes. The boy Jesus became angry... "Behold, thou shalt wither as a tree." Immediately he became withered all over... At the request of all, Jesus healed him, leaving only some small member withered, that they might take warning. Another time Jesus went forth into the street, and a boy running by, rushed upon his shoulder; at which Jesus, angry, said: "Thou shalt go no farther." And he instantly fell down dead... June 1996 Early Christianity 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then the parents going to Joseph complained... "he kills our children..." And immediately they who accused him became blind. Music: a27) b27) 27) Gregorian, Requiem 6th mode (Solesmes), French Decca 7532 (to slide 30) Roman (Herculaneum), c. 50 A.D., Egyptian cult scene, detail, Museum, Naples Paschal II, 12th cent., San Clemente Church, with Apse Mosaic, Rome Roman fresco, late 11th cent., Miracle of San Clemente, Lower Church, San Clemente, Rome In that ground, as in a forest, fattened by decay, Christ was not the only saviour stirring. Under the Dark Age church of San Clemente, with its 12th-century mosaic apse, excavations lead back in time. Through these frescoed remains of the lower church, down a trench past a prehistoric Cyclopean wall, where a lost Roman water descends as in Dante's Hell, 28) 28a) Mithraic chapel and altar, 3rd cent., under San Clemente, Rome Græco-Roman, 3rd cent. A.D., the God Mithras, British Museum, London (video returns to 28) one comes to a vaulted room. The windows for seasonal light are twenty feet underground. On the carved altar the Persian god Mithras drives a knife into the dogharried, scrotum-pinched bull. A jag for the world-weary? And did the chapel later go Christian? It seems the carved shepherd, found there, is carrying not a lamb, but a goat. 29) Roman, 222-35, Alexander Severus, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V & dig. detail The face of Alexander Severus is like a barometer of the groping soulfulness that brought faith down. In his private chapel were busts of Orpheus, Abraham, Apollo and Jesus. (Why not of Mithras?) One recalls Augustine's phrase of his own later search through the stews of personality: "with proud dejection and untired weariness" — "superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine." Even the techniques respond to the spatial abandonment, the plasticities of face and hair thinning around the gloaming eyes. 30) Double of 29) Severus & 16) Aurelii Apostle (V, Apostle only) June 1996 Early Christianity 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against that slippery sweetness, set its near contemporary (already seen), the Apostle from the Aurelii tomb. (end Requiem) For Alexander the dark of earth and reason is negative, for the Apostle, a way of salvation. But there is something more surprising than the mystical and moral lightening: 31) Post-Phidian from Mylasa, c. 340 B.C., Head of Zeus, Museum of Fine Arts. Boston it is that the noblest Greek past — the Zeus-type of Phidias, the 4th-century type of Platonic meditation For 2nd 30) Triple: 31, Head of Zeus , 29, of Severus, and 30, Aurelii Apostle (V dpible of 29 & 30) — is more preserved in the Christian head than in the pagan. Faith is becoming an ark to float the classical over the German flood. Yet the difference between the Christian head and the post-Periclean tells as much as the likeness. 2nd 30a) Roman Christian, c. 400 A.D., Ivory panel, The Crucifixion, British Museum, London Nietzsche called Christianity Platonism for the masses. But in the incarnate Being which gave it its name, in Christ, it broke not only with Platonism, but with all classical thought — fusing in faith the poles speculation had precipitated. a2nd 31) Double: [A] Roman, c. 300 A.D., Male Portrait,. Capitoline, Rome, and [B] Roman Christian, 307-37, Head of a Boy, detail of sarcophagus, Lateran Christian Museum, Rome For 2nd 31) Attic from Aegeira (Euclides of Athens?) 2nd cent. B.C. (or later?), Head of Zeus, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) The art sign of this suspension of disbelief is liberation from the pathos of personality, as its sign in thought is the embracing of paradox. From Socrates down the logic of noncontradiction had become the limit of reason, the everpresent shipwreck of deep inquiry. June 1996 Early Christianity 12 �C.G. Bell 32) Symbolic History Græco-Roman, 150-170, Herodes Atticus(?), Louvre, Paris As conscious hungers increase, the frustration of mere mind more and more shows itself in the earnest brow and troubled gaze of private, searching awareness. 33) Roman Christian, c. 359, Head of Christ as Lawgiver, Junius Bassus Sarcophagus, Grottoes, Vatican And the gift of the Christian faith-leap is just the sudden lifting of all that brooding weight — since the denominator of the change, visual and logical, is absorption in the larger, in this case the luminous impossibility of the Eternal born and crucified. Consider Augustine's handling of the old contradiction between God's foreknowledge and man's free will. 2nd 32 & 2nd 33) Double: [32] Herodes Atticus, and [33] Christ as Lawgiver Cicero, he says, guided by reason, could not accept both. "Like a truly great and wise man," he chose what man most required, free-dom; but that drove him to deny God's foreknowing. Thus to make men free, he made them sacrilegious. "But the religious mind," says Augustine, "against the impious darings of reason, chooses both, confesses both, and maintains both by the faith of piety." 34) 34a) Græco-Roman, c. 260 A.D., Portrait of Plotinus(?), Museum, Ostia Same, Plotinus, detail of expression So Plotinus, of whom this is probably a portrait, c. 260 A.D., almost desperately follows the logic of the One: "We must provide for knowledge and truth; we must secure reality... The only way is to leave nothing outside the veritable intellectual-Principle... Only thus is mind dispensed... from acts of faith." At once he is in the old Eleatic bind: no way to account for matter and becoming. "The mind is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated: from such a unity as we have declared the One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number?" He can only dream his way out, by metaphor: "The vision has been of God in travail." 35) Italian Byzantine, c. 495, mosaic, Angel detail, San Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna June 1996 Early Christianity 13 �C.G. Bell 35a) Symbolic History Same, Angel, upper detail Plotinus' metaphor becomes Christian truth. Reason strikes shuddering on the rocks, and a cry goes up of "Glory, glory, halleluia." So Augustine's Confessions: What therefore is my God? What I ask but the Lord God... most merciful and most just, most secret, and most present... constant and incomprehensible; immutable, yet changing all things… ever active and ever quiet… still seeking, although thou standest in need of nothing... what can any man say when he speaks of thee? And woe to them that speak nothing... seeing those that speak most are dumb. The robe of doubt is reversed and it is all gold. 36) Roman, 267-70, Claudius Gothicus relief, detail, National Museum, Rome; + V closer detaill (not dig.) There are degrees, even in the leap of faith. In the lack of Christian art, let those human softenings on the Imperial side — Claudius Gothicus sacrificing in the pensive shades — remind us of the liberal fathers: Justin: "Christ is the Logos of whom the whole human race partakes, and those who live according to reason are Christians... Such were Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks"; Clement of Alexandria: "Philosophy was a schoolmaster to bring the Greek mind to Christ, as the Law brought the Hebrews." 37) Roman, 238-44, Emperor Gordianus III. National Museum, Rome; + V detail, shown first (so dig.) While to the cruel hardenings of imperial face (Gordianus III, 238-44) we liken the holy arrogance of Tertullian: "kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust... the blood of Christians is seed"; his scorn for pagan thought: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church? Away with all Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! After knowing Jesus Christ, we need no investigation, after the tidings of the Gospels, we need no searching. 38) Roman, c. 192, Mosaic of beast slaughter, detail, Borghese, Rome Even the beast-slaughter and sacrifice of Christians in the Flavian Amphitheater finds an inverse frenzy in Tertullian: June 1996 Early Christianity 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness... so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars... so many celebrated poets... 39) Roman (from Egypt), c. 300 A.D., Four Emperors Group, San Marco, Venice; + V detail, shown first (so dig.) The 3rd century breakdown of traditional sanctities had enforced the need of some new divinity to hedge the throne. The Four Emperors group of Diocletian and his regents reflects in its gestures the menace of the time, as by its techniques the Eastern and Barbarian reversion. So Diocletian's reforms turn the Roman state to an oriental monarchy, to which the conversion of Constantine gives supreme sanction. Faith becomes the key to power, and history takes the form of a spaceless encounter between spiritual legions. a40) b40) 40) Roman Christian, 5th cent., Egyptians in the Red Sea, lower detail, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome Same, Egyptians in the Sea, upper detail Same, Egyptians in the Sea, whole In Eusebius' Life of Constantine, Greek and Roman causality dissolves; we are in the miraculous realm of the "Salutary Sign." Constantine's armies march under the banner of the cross. Maxentius puts forth all his sorcery: "sometimes for magic purposes ripping up women with child, searching into the bowels of new-born infants... practicing horrid arts for evoking demons." But the Biblical prototype suggests the issue: as Pharaoh and his chariots here go down into the sea, Maxentius and his guards are drowned in Tiber. 41) V41a) Roman, 312-15, head of a colossal statue of Constantine, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome Same, Constantine, another view Constantine erects in Rome a triumphal statue (fragments now) bearing a spear in the shape of a cross: By virtue of this Salutary Sign, which is the true test of valor, I have preserved and liberated your city from the yoke of tyranny. I have also set at liberty the Roman senate and people, and restored them to their ancient distinction and splendor. June 1996 Early Christianity 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As in the Holy Roman Empire, Christendom espouses the lost glory of Rome. a42) 42) Byzantine, 532-47, Empress Theodora and retinue, South wall of Choir, San Vitale, Ravenna (V uses detail only; dig. whole mosaic) Same, north wall of choir, mosaic detail, Head of Justinian In Book III, on the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius climaxes the sanctification of force. It is the imperial heaven which glistens two centuries later in the gold mosaics of Justinian's Ravenna. Here too humility toward God — "With regard to his mind," Eusebius says of Constantine, "it was evident that he was distinguished by piety and godly fear" — parades in an exterior of regal pomp: And now, all rising at a signal which indicated the emperor's entrance, 43) Same, Justinian with two flanking figures at last he himself proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like some heavenly messenger of God, Clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious stones. But the final reversal, in Christ's name, of Christ's values, follows in the fifteenth chapter: a44) 44) Same, mosaic, left half: Justinian, attendants, and soldiers (dig. far left) Same, whole mosaic; + V detail, right, shown first (dig. whole only) Detachments of the bodyguard and other troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of those, the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the imperial apartments, in which some were the emperor's own companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ's kingdom was thus shadowed forth, more visionary than actual. 45) 45a) Again, 17, Constantius II Same, Constantius II, a nearer view The son of Constantine brings us back from Justinian to the time of Eusebius. We displayed this bronze before, as a sinister portal of Dark Age religion: the mortal June 1996 Early Christianity 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History arrogation of divine will. In abstract asperity it epitomizes a state defended and threatened by barbarians, hardening socially to feudalism, spiritually to a dogma stripped of humanistic shading. Yet even here the germ of advance — the visionary force of self and world — like a crab retrogresses forward. 46) Vergilius Romanus, 400-50, Book III, Georgics, Vatican Library; + V detail, shown first It was this Constantius who made the terror of Christian piety so clear that his successor, Julian the Apostate (361-63), tried to reinstate the old liberal gods. But the Vergilius Romanus in the Vatican, from a few generations later, shows the remoteness of the values to be revived. 47) Roman, c. 400, Consul with cloth, Palazzo dei Conservatori. Rome So this stately, yet somehow frozen, attempt to refurbish the full-togaed dignity of a consul — like the ineffectual efforts of Symmachus, cousin-opponent of St. Ambrose — all testify to the shallowness of Julian's hope, that a relativism, unable to maintain itself when alive, could be resuscitated against faith by an act of will. 48) 48a) Byzantine, c. 370 (or after?), Bronze statue of an Emperor (Valentinian I?), Barletta, frontal view Same, another view, detail Though anyone facing the rigors of Constantine and his like successors, might have thought the Lord's prayer buried forever under the official basilica; or assumed from the hardening of style that the Dark Ages had already fallen, all classical good thrown down by "A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,/ A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." (Yeats) a49) 49) Holy Shroud, claimed imprint of crucified Christ, Cathedral, Turin Same, detail of head Both fears would have been premature. In the demon lover of scripture (whose stamp of hypnotic power some find in the Holy Shroud), Christianity bore its own refining fire. With monasticism and the apostolic earnestness of the Latin fathers, spirit drew to a fellowship of saints, challenging the militant body by which it was maintained. June 1996 Early Christianity 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus Ambrose to Theodosius, c. 390, after the punitive massacre in Thessalonica: "I prefer God to my sovereign ... if you purpose being present, I dare not offer the Sacrifice." The emperor was readmitted to communion only as a penitent sinner. 50) 50a) 50b) Roman Christian, end of 4th cent., Christ with Apostles, apse mosaic, Santa Prudenziana, Rome (CGB '86) Same, detail of Christ (video uses detail from CGB V50a) Same apse mosaic, central portion (CGB '86) Premature also the Dark Age surmise. Since it was just under the Dominate restoration of order that the Christian arts enjoy a last Græco-Roman harvest, clothing the fall of earth and faith beyond time in a lingering ripeness of earthly form — an outward ease of style, a shadowed inwardness of person. So Jerome Romanizes scripture: Lamentations: O Vos omnes, qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus; and Matthew: Venite ad me omnes, qui laboratis, et onerati estis, et ego reficiam vos. So Augustine (epitomizing Roman Christianity) retires for meditation to the villa of a patrician friend. a51) 51) Roman Christian, late 3rd cent., Christ healing a woman with an issue of blood, Catacomb of Saints Pietro and Marcelino, Rome Same, Christ Healing, detail (video returns to whole; not dig.) The gentle nostalgia of this classical autumn, coupled with mystical faith, its twilight transcendence of Virgil's lachrimae rerum, is magically evoked by the passage from the Confessions (IX, 10) where, shortly before his mother's death, Augustine speaks with her of the Kingdom of Heaven: it fell out... that she and I should stand alone leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden within the house where we now lay, at Ostia by Tiber, where ...we were recruiting ourselves for a sea voyage. There conferred we hand to hand very sweetly... June 1996 Early Christianity 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The impressionistic touch — "we two ... leaning in a certain window" — at one time focuses the personal poignance 52) Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Starry Vault mosaic, Mausoleum of Galla Placida, Ravenna and carries it over into symbol; the wayfaring sequestration become a window (as earthly life is) where "forgetting those things which are behind, we reached forth unto those things which are to come." "Earth conquered," said Boethius, "gives the stars." — "Superata tellus sidera donat." a53) b53) 53) Roman, c. 120 A.D. (orig. 27 B.C.?), interior with skylight, Pantheon, Rome (CGB '86) Same, Pantheon, exterior from rear (CGB '86) Same, Pantheon, interior; video uses V53 (CGB ‘86); not dig. What lay behind was the somber nobility of Platonic Greece and Ciceronian Rome. The meditation we are to read recalls in thought Plotinus' paean to the One (Ennead V), as in its vaulting periods Republican rhetoric. The change we have seen in statuary, from weighted pagan consciousness to the Christian lightening into transpersonality, is parallelled by the miracle which lifted this brooding dome of the Pantheon a54) Roman, early 3rd cent., Baths of Caracalla, Rome (video and digital: CGB Va54) b54) Hagia Sophia, 502-37 and 558-62, from the park to the south, Constantinople (CGB '77);+ V & dig. detail 54) Same, Hagia Sophia, interior with a shaft of sunlight 54a and 54b) Other views of Hagia Sophia interior (CGB '77) (video uses upper detail from a57 instead of 54b); dig. all (CGB '77) onto a centralized basilica like that of the Baths of Caracalla, windowing the whole into the apocalyptic vision of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It is the ultimate achievement in art of imperial Christianity, as Augustine's Confessions and The City of God are in writing; these, with the body of chant, loom over the Dark Ages with comparable June 1996 Early Christianity 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History magnitude. How the powers of earth plead earthless devotion —Augustine with the Ambrosian he loved: Music: Ambrosian Chant, "Ubi sunt", (Milan), ARC 2533 284 (A,8) We said therefore: if to any man the tumults of the flesh be silenced, if fancies of the earth and waters and air be silenced also: if the poles of heaven be silent also: if the very soul be silent to herself, and by not thinking upon self surmount self: if all dreams and imaginary revelations be silenced, every tongue and every sign, if whatsoever is transient be silent to any one — since if any man could hearken unto them. all these say unto him, a55, 55, and, slide only, 55a) Same, more interior views (all CGB '77) We created not ourselves, but he that remains to all eternity: if then, having uttered this. they also be then silent (as having raised our ear unto him that made them) and if he speak alone; not by them but by himself, that we may hear his own words; not pronounced by any tongue of flesh, nor by the voice of the angels, nor by sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a resemblance; but that we may hear him whom we love in these creatures, himself without these a56, 56, 56a) More views of Hagia Sophia interior (like as we two now strained ourselves unto it), and in swift thought arrived unto a touch of that eternal wisdom which is over all — could this exaltation of spirit ever have continued, and all other visions of a far other kind been quite taken away, and this one exaltation should ravish us, and swallow us up, and so wrap up their beholder among these more inward joys, as that his life might be for ever like to this very moment of understanding which we now sighed after: were not this as much as Enter into thy Master's joy? But when shall that be? Shall it be when we shall all rise again, though all shall not be changed? (end Ambrosian) a57) 57) Long exposure of Hagia Sophia, ribs of dome (CGB '77) (video shows lower detail from 56 instead); not so dig. Italian Byzantine, 526-47, Mosaic of Abraham and Angels with pillars in the foreground, San Vitale, Ravenna (CGB '48); + V & dig. detail June 1996 Early Christianity 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We have brought sound and image to a thought which denied them. But what else were Augustine's words? So, for his theory of allegory and his theory of history we cannot avoid art-parallels. Christian architecture treats the material building as the City of God; Christian history makes all space and time the sacrament of God's will. Both these transformations rest on the mode of symbol —the mystical identity of likeness. At the close of The City of God, by incorporating the classical myth of the Four Ages and of eternal recurrence into the Biblical progress from Creation to Judgment, Augustine shows the later West how to make an unfolding revelation of the temporal. 58) Same, San Vitale, Chancel So the church of San Vitale, irradiated by alabaster panes, gold mosaics and precious stones, shapes a glorified body both literal and symbolic: "And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." a59) 59) Same, San Vitale: mosaic, Moses and the Burning Bush, whole Same, detail (video puts the wholelbetween details); not so dig. Such is the anagogical method which descends from Augustine to the Middle Ages and to Dante, transforming literature into a field of resonances. The City of God rests on the sort of symbolic projections which Paul made of Abraham's children by the flesh and by the spirit, and which would later lead Joachim de Floris to the germinal heresy of the Third Kingdom. As God to Moses from the bush already of pentecostal fire: "Take off your shoes, for this is holy ground." 60) 60a) Roman Christian, 432-440, Santa Maria Maggiore, Nave, Rome (CGB '86) (video takes two details from V60); dig. one detail from 60 for 60a Same, Santa Maria Maggiore, view with altar and ceiling (slide show) All this while the chant of the early church (to be codified by Gregory in the 6th century) had also been remaking its heritage — though the transience of music has left almost nothing of the wealth of Greek and Eastern song. Gregorian, too, by the same transience was finally harmonized and debased. So the solid basilicas of Rome have taken on an ornate veneer: the altar and coffered ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore. June 1996 Early Christianity 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though one has only to look at the mosaics on the triumphal arch 61) 61a) Same, mosaics to the left of the triumphal arch (dig. 61a) Same mosaics, detail, center, from Christ and the Magi (dig. 61z) to be in touch with the original. Not so in music. Plainsong as we hear it had to be recaptured in theory and performance by the monks of Solesmes Abbey. There are style problems, as with any restored art. But the practice they aimed at was not of the Dark Ages — not the Gauls and Germans crushing the melodies in their throats — but of Roman Christianity. a62) 62) 62a) Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Two Stags at the Fountain of Life, Mosaic. Mausoleum of Galla Placida, Ravenna [slide and dig.] Same, detail of left stag Same, Galla Placida, Doves at the Water of Life [video order: 62a, 62] There is none of the rhythmic beat and drive of later Romanesque and Gothic. The subtly modulated pulse, or ictus, does not initiate the note but crowns its center. Thus liberated from stress (and by their modalities from tension and release) Gregorian melodies float or soar in a series of arches within arches, melismas into phrases, chants, responses, an entire service, as effortlessly soul-enfolding as the vine and fountain of life: "Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum." (Jerome's church-softened Latin one with that art and chant.) 63) 63a) View from the Aventine, the park by Santa Sabina, morning (CGB '86) Roman Christian, 422-32, Santa Sabina Apse, from the park (CGB '86) After the second World War had silenced the traffic of Rome, one could climb the Aventine, in the spring, say, the morning of Palm Sunday, and at sunrise from the little park over the Tiber look out on Rome under the pouring song of the nightingales; then enter the Church of Santa Sabina, which, of all in Rome, best preserves the fifth century. To hear Gregorian there is to stand 64) Same, interior, left colonnade of Nave (CGB '86) at an Augustinian window. June 1996 Early Christianity 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Subdued light filters through alabaster, down the antiphonal of columns, the undulation of arches, along the shadowy retreat of aisles; it lies like a liquid on the marble floor. a65) Italian Byzantine, 5th cent., Mausoleum of Galla Placida, interior from the entrance, with tombs, Ravenna for 1st 65, copy of 2nd 65) Same, toward the entrance, arches and Shepherd Mosaic (video first shows detail of arches; so dig.) Or there is the transmutation of the grave in the Ravenna Mausoleum of Galla Placida: Against the ego-display and drama of later music, consider the greatest contrast Gregorian admits of, the "Christus factus est pro nobis" — a veiled modulation, the tragic opening mitigated by the suavities of prayer, the exultant close restrained by resignation. It begins "Christ was made obedient for us unto death, even the death of the cross." The phrase hangs in the silence, a pain that is not pain but soothed to acceptance. 1st 66) Same, Ravenna, The Orphic or Shepherd Christ, whole mosaic A pause, and then: "For which God has exalted him and given him a name above all names." It is the Resurrection, the leap from dark — but listen for it: the simple change of range, a faint shift of figuration, for the solemn drop on "crucis," the insistent pulse and soar of "exaltavit illum", 2nd 65) Again, 65, Mausoleum toward the entrance, with Shepherd Christ form a contrast as subtly mysterious as the emergence of the Orphic Christ — there — in the recess of the Galla Placida tomb. 2nd 64) Music: Again, 64, Santa Sabina Nave (CGB '48) Gregorian, "Christus factus est," old Solesmes album (five phrases), V-M 87, I, 5 For 3rd 65) Again, a65, Tomb chamber from entrance (video uses detail of arch from 65); not so dig. 2nd 66) Again, 66, Orphic or Shepherd Christ (video crops to center) 67) Same, Shepherd Christ mosaic, detail of the Christ June 1996 Early Christianity 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 68) Italian Byzantine 521-47, ceiling mosaic, lamb with vine, San Vitale,Ravenna (CGB ‘48); + V detail (so dig.) (fade Gregorian) The symbolic vine, angels, and lamb — in the amber suffusion of this San Vitale ceiling, sacrifice and triumph soothe the Ausonian dusk of that age. a69) b69) 69) Upper right detail of 69 Lower left detail of 69 Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Sacred Landscape, from Pompeii, Museum, Naples (video: whole, left detail, and again whole); dig. a, b, then whole Ausonius — Waddell says — in his fields of Sorrowful Lovers (Silva Myrtea) from a phrase or two of Virgil's, has created the twilight world of Western Europe: They wander in deep woods, in mournful light Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies, And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams, Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings. Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna Inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos, Quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent Fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores. How far that twilight retains its pagan glow, the search for a parallel teaches: we have had to go back 300 years to the first illusionism of Pompeii. 70) 70a) 70b) Roman, 3rd cent., Moselle wine-ship, detail of cheerful sailor, Trier Imperial Baths, view from north, Trier, Germany Double: Roman heads [A] lst cent., from Ostia, and [B] 4th cent., from Via Appia [slide only, while video returns to cheerful sailor] Though the Mosel wine-ship of the third century may serve for Ausonius' poem on that river, its grapes and wine. Rolfe Humphries has translated the opening: What color are the shallows, now that evening Moves the late shadows forward, and the river Is dyed with the green mountain? All the ridges Swim in the ripple of motion, and the vine Trembles, and is not there, and under water June 1996 Early Christianity 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Its cluster, seen through glass, is magnified. There was Ausonius, luke-warm convert to Christianity, writing into leisured old age of the warmth and wine of Gaul. And what art will suggest his loved pupil Paulinus, called from that earthly affection by the Christian siren of eternity? 71) 71a) 71b) Late Roman-African, 5th-6th cent.(?), Statue from Dejemila Museum, Algeria Same, detail of the head Roman Christian, 6th cent. & ff, interior, from aisle into nave, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome (CGB '86) Perhaps one of those precursive statues from Augustine's Africa. Not that they beggared be in mind, nor brutes, That they have chosen solitudes and deserts For their dwelling: but their eyes are turned To the high stars, the very deep of Truth ... And whatsoever wars on the divine, At Christ's command and for his love, they hate... So wrote Paulinus (translated by Waddell) and then, with a last great but impersonal protest of love, "Ego te per omne quod datum mortalibus et destinatum saeculum est" ("I shall hold thee through all chances and fates"), he withdraws into the silence, the service of St. Felix at Nola: "Spring wakens the birds' voices, but for me/ My Saint's day is my spring." It is the retreat into spacelessness, the current of the time. a72) 72) Italian Byzantine, early 5th cent. A.D., interior, detail of windows and cupola, Baptistry of the Orthodox, Ravenna Same, mosaics of cupola (c. 450 A.D.); + V detail (so dig.) In the mosaics of Rome and Ravenna it has been brought visibly before us. Startling to see a representational art with a long tradition in the life of this world, even while retaining its realistic surface, become possessed by an entirely non-representational and symbolic spirit: the bodies stiffen and remove themselves from the flux of things; the eyes widen and grow unfathomable (they were sublunar orbs before; now they gaze down from the Empyrean); the colors are spectral, gold and blue veils; the symmetry is final, stylized; 73) Italian Byzantine, 534-39, San Apollinari in Classe, Apse, Ravenna: + V & dig. detail (both from Sam Adams' slide) June 1996 Early Christianity 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History nothing is valid in its own right, but as it speaks the known and unknowable divine: the monogram, the lamb, the dove, the cross, the throne, the living font and well. Not Christ nor any of his disciples continues as a man; they are caught in the timeless aspect of their being, neither acting nor suffering, yet suffering in a victorious and eternal act — Eliot's "at the still point of the turning world." a74) 74) 74a) Italian Byzantine, 6th cent., Head of a Prophet, San Apollinari Nuovo Ravenna Italian Byzantine, 6th cent., Head of Archbishop Maximillian, detail of Justinian Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna From same mosaic, Justinian's attendant (Bellisarius?) Yet all the residual frames of representation remain; and it is a sensation which takes us to that world's heart to see these haunting sixth century eyes, longing as the late Romantic, yet dogmatically resolved, indifferent, cold, implacable, a trifle cruel, and yet none of these precisely, since none of these applies at that remoteness of vision — "an image out of Spiritus Mundi" — to see these eyes, of which the soulfulness is vacancy, gazing from the still lush trappings of imperial technique — this is the unforgettable impact of the developing Byzantine. 75) Christian Gaul, 5th-6th cent., mosaic vault, Baptistery, Albenga, Italian Riviera It is as if we saw the Christian spirit divesting itself of classical consciousness, preparing for the Dark Age agony, the fallen world and unquestioning faith beyond, the stripped intensity and paradox of blessing. 76) Gallic, 1st-2nd cent. A.D.(?), Man-eating monster, Avignon; + V detail (not dig.) While the Grendel of the North pressed at the ramparts. Since before Caesar, barbarians had been coming into the empire and being tamed; but as the pressure gained on the power to absorb, the ruptures came: 410, Alaric's sack of Rome; 455, the Vandals; and then, pushed by the Huns, the Goths and Ostragoths, and all the others. a77) Constantinople, c. 400 A.D., "Rubens Vase," carved agate, Walter's Art Gallery, Baltimore June 1996 Early Christianity 26 �C.G. Bell 77) Symbolic History Same, close-up of the satyr's head Salvian, a Roman Gaul of the early 5th century — age of this agate vase Rubens once owned — marvels how the broken successor realms cling to the bacchic insouciance of carefree times: "peace and security have vanished from the whole Roman Empire ... Where is the man who fears death and yet laughs? ... You might say the whole Roman people is saturated with sardonic herbs. It is dying and yet it laughs ..." Even Augustine had enjoyed the retrospective villas of that past. 78) Merovingian (Lombard), 7th cent., bronze plaque of a horseman, from a shield, Historical Museum, Bern With Gregory, a hundred years later, we have crossed the divide: Soon afterwards the wild nation of the Lombards jumped at our throat and mowed down the inhabitants of that country. The cities have been laid waste, the fortresses destroyed, the churches burned, the monasteries torn down; the fields are abandoned by human beings and without cultivation ... a79) 79) German Barbarian, 7th cent., Warrior's Gravestone, from Niederdollendorf, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn Merovingian Tombstone, 7th c., Priest with book, Museum, Bonn June 1996 Early Christianity 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Wild animals have taken possession of places where multitudes of men lived before. I do not know what is happening in other parts of the world, but in this country where we live, the world not only foretells its end but manifestly displays it to our eyes ... Since all temporal possessions have fallen away from us, we must strive with greater eagerness for things that are eternal. (Dialogues VIII, tr. C. Mackauer) This is the rock gorge that lies between Christian antiquity and the Christian West. 80) Italian Byzantine, 521-47, San Vitale (dusk, lighted), Ravenna Music: Gregorian, from the Kyrie, (Solesmes) V-M 87, I, 1 But from that, or any other, time of troubles, how soul would look back to those refuges of Christian love and art, quietly sheltered in the last corruption of imperial power. So after the Second World War, I wrote in this Ravenna, of this San Vitale: From the crushing of Rome this peace flowed like honey; But what ripens on our tree of pains past or to come? June 1996 Early Christianity (close Kyrie) 28 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Christianity, Symbolic History, Part 6 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 6 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_06_Early_Christianity Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/402dd66e701475e471e3da3ee2611b66.pdf 78c2b4166bf5eef919de4333b5e60660 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 5. The Search for Rome CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised June 1996 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 5. The Search for Rome a1) 1) Piranesi, c. 1748, "Vedute di Roma," The Forum, engraving; + video detail Piranesi, c. 1765, same, Baths of Caracalla, engravinq; + video detail Music: Monteverdi 1642, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Finale, Vox SVBX 5212 Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv'st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. Behold what wreck, what ruin, and what waste, And how that she, which with her mighty power Tamed all the world, hath tamed herself at last, The prey of time which all things doth devour... Va2) Piranesi, c. 1759, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Venus, engraving = dig. 1b 2) Piranesi, c. 1774, "Vedute di Roma," Temple of Saturn, engraving; first, video detail; for dig. Va2 stands as b1 above; while 2 has no dig. detail The English poet Spenser, about 1590—lines echoed from Spain, 1610, Quevedo: Buscas en Roma a Roma, O peregrino! Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas... Both translating the French of Du Bellay, from forty years before Spenser: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois... Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement... 3) Piranesi, c. 1775, "Vedute di Roma", Branch of the Aqua Claudia, engraving; + video detail (not dig.) Du Bellay, varying the Italian of Castiglione, forty years earlier still: June 1996 The Search for Rome 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine, Che'l nome sol di Roma ancor tenete... Colossi, archi, teatri, opre divine... Arches, theatres, divine works of that Rome, which Goethe, two hundred years later would seek: a4) 4) Piranesi c. 1770, "Vedute di Roma", Baths at Hadrian's Villa, engraving Piranesi c. 1760, "Vedute di Roma", Arch of Constantine and The Colosseum, engraving; first, video detail (not dig.) Saget, Steine, mir an, o sprecht ihr hohen Paläste Ewige Roma... Speak, you stones, and you high palaces; speak Eternal Rome! (music up, then fade) Though what speaks again and again is not, as with Greece, the primary phenomenon, but the historical reverberations: Piranesi, Monteverdi's court of Nero and Poppea, the regal pomp and arcane luxury (while we range the Empire: 5) 5a) Roman (African) Sabratha c. 200 AD ff., Baths of Oceanus and Temple of Isis Roman (African) 1st-2nd cent. AD, Lepcis Magna, Auditorium of the theatre Sabratha, Palmyra— Music: Monteverdi, Poppea, cont., end of the March a6) 6) 6a) Roman (Asia) Baalbek c. 210-217, Temple of Jupiter Roman (Asia) Palmyra 2nd - 3rd cent. AD, Temple Gate and Colonnade (video uses horizontal variant, V6; dig. vertical ) Roman (Asia) Palmyra 1st - 3rd cent. A.D., "Street of Columns" 7) 7a) Graeco-Roman, 1st cent. AD?, Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican Same, detail of couple; + closer V detail (not dig.) (begin Duet) returning to the Roman Hellenism Nero loved). 8) The Roman Forum (CGB '48) June 1996 The Search for Rome 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When Rome spoke to Gibbon he was looking out over the Forum from the steps of what was once the Capitol. This view, with sheep grazing then, was before him; Va9) Roman Christian 5th cent. ff., Front stairs, Santa Maria in Ara Coeli (CGB '86); called 8za on dig.; but in fact dig. 9a 9) Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave, (left) Columns and aisle (CGB '86) and at his back, from the church of Ara Coeli, a basilica raised, like so many, on Classical columns, came the chanting of the barefoot friars—why not a hymn by Fortunatus? Music: Fortunatus c.606, Salve Festa dies, Solesmes, Decca 7542A That anomaly moved him to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For 2nd 8) Roman Forum and Palatine, seen from Arch of Septimius Severus For it is always over the Dark Age gulf that Rome looms most compellingly—"giants in the earth in those days"—as the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer broods: This world, through the wisdom of God, has wasted, So the pleasure of the proud has utterly perished, And the wonder-work of giants crumbles worthless. V2nd 9) Again Santa Maria, Interior, Nave into Choir, (CGB '86) = dig. 9zb 10) (music) Roman Christian c. 470, Mosaic bust of St. Victor, Sant'Ambrogio, Milan Classical arts and lore first came to the West encapsuled in monastic Christianity—this mosaic bust of St. Victor, in Milan. 11) Roman Christian c. 330, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, from Sarcophagus of Adelphia, National Museum, Syracuse June 1996 The Search for Rome 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet even in that rendition to the timeless and spaceless, inherited suavities attest a vanished earthly command. (fade Fortunatus) a12) 12) Roman 1st c. AD, glass cameo, The Portland vase, British Museum, London; + V detail (so dig. = 12b) Pompeii 1st c. AD, Dionysiac scene (glass), House of Fabius, Naples Museum; first, V detail (dig. adds detail = 12za) In the words of Yeats: "a more gracious time has gone." Though of the music that ravished Greece and Rome, we have only snatches: an Epitaph of Seikilos: "As long as you live, be cheerful." Music: Seikilos Song, 1st c. AD, J.E. Butt, private recording — A time when wine and love and poetry and every spring and grove were sacred to a god. Horace: gratia cum Nymphas geminisque sororibus audet ducere nuda choros— which Johnson rhymes: The spritely Nymph and naked Grace The mazy dance together trace. But the search for Rome cannot bog down (though Rome almost did) in vain regret for the soft arts of the Hellenistic twilight. How to summon from the shades the might of Rome itself? 13) Athenian 447-432 BC, Parthenon, NE corner, Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77) 13a) Same, Parthenon, Head of Selene's Horse from the East Pediment (CGB '77) The art-road was easier when the search was for Greece. There, a sheer vitality declares and celebrates itself. Not the Acropolis only, but drama, philosophy, even history, as the Greeks lived and told it, take the voice of Pericles: We are the school of Hellas...Wonder unending of after ages shall be ours. We have made sea and land the highway of our daring, and everywhere—for evil or good—left deathless monuments … . June 1996 The Search for Rome 5 �C.G. Bell 14) V14a) Symbolic History Roman AD 72-90, Flavian Arena (Colosseum), interior, Rome (CGB '86) Same, Flavian Arena, interior, another view Where Rome escapes from its monuments, its historians, even from its poet Virgil, leaves us burdened with the gloom of its own shadow, struggling in a world which, like Lucretius' universe, wears out and breaks down [II, 1148 ff.]: In this way the walls too of the great world Around us shall wear out and come to ruin, Stormed by successive years and time's decay. 15) V15a) Same, outside view (video shows details only, above, then below) Same, Colosseum, outside (old photo); dig. 15 = 15z, this = 15za Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian, records: I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject matter... (Tacitus, Annals IV, 33, tr., Church & Dodribb) Music: a16) Monteverdi, 1642, again Poppea, close of Prologue, Goehr, Zurich Opera Society, MMS-2028 Roman 306 AD, Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine, from Capitoline Hill (CGB '86) Another view of Basilica, with vestal statues Same, another view of statues (CGB '86); dig. omits 16) V16a) How shall we fasten on the form that vaulted over that failure, not just "the wide arch of the ranged empire", but the morale that held it—in the words of Pliny, "the boundless majesty of the Roman peace: Immensa Romanae Pacis maiestas"? If there was a music of Roman power, it is lost; we have had to let Monteverdi restore it. And of course he has restored, within outward pomp, 17) Roman (Flavian) c. 50-100 AD, Male Portrait Bust, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome; first, video detail (not dig.) (close of Prologue) June 1996 The Search for Rome 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the imperial decay. (music to Ottone's opening words: "E puro io") When Romans of that time thought to recover the truth about themselves—the strength which despotism and luxury had plainly compromised (Fade Monteverdi)—they took a clue from Livy, that moralizing historian (or from Virgil, for that matter): 18) Roman 4th-3rd cent. BC, Warriors, Bronze handle of a Cista, Villa Giulia, Rome; + V detail (dig. waits for 2nd 18) they looked to their stern beginnings in military virtue, a time of legendary Horatios at the bridge, or of ""Troius Aeneas, pietate insignis et armis"; though these beginnings are not so early as Troy, or even as Sparta and Athens. It is crucial that these disciplined, almost primitive foot-soldiers are of the 4th or 3rd century BC, when the Greek cities are already in political decay. 19) Attlc (Kleitias) c. 570 BC, Landing of Theseus' Companions, from François vase, Museo Archaeologico, Florence; + V detail (here dig. waits) If we go back two or three hundred more years (here a scene from the tale of Theseus), we find the Greeks, too, keen for Ares, but with a spirit as different, as Homer is from Virgil. This preconscious vibrance can only loosen, as individuation ripens, into Plato's "fair and spangled" state, where "everything is ready to burst with liberty." 2nd 18) Detail of 18, Roman 4th-3rd c. Warriors; for dig. = 19za But the Roman discipline seems to take up where the Greek left off; it is postconscious, post-individual. Against the Macedonian phalanx, the Latin soldier with his shield, spear and short sword, was a fighting independence, self-bound into the moral collective. As if the Classical world had two phases, the Roman ordering and constrictive, 2nd 19) Detail of 19, Landing of Theseus' Companions [video then briefly returns to Roman Warriors]; dig. here doubles details of 18 & 19 against the exploratory and liberating Greek. So Hegel contrasts "the multiform variety of Greece" to "the crushing Destiny" of Roman power. June 1996 The Search for Rome 7 �C.G. Bell 20) Symbolic History Ionian (Magna Graecia) c. 460 BC, Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne, Thermae, Rome Under the weighty vaults of the Roman Thermae, Greek originals smile out (this Ludovisi Birth of Aphrodite), like Persephone ravished to the underworld, sojourners in the darker shade. 21) V21a) Roman c. 10 AD, Ludovisi Juno, National Museum. (Thermae), Rome Same, another view, detail; not dig. Here even the gods are stern, Juno, constrained, like her sober Romans (thus Jove in the Aeneid): (I, 279-283) Harsh Juno too, Who now with terror tires earth, sea and sky, Will turn to kinder counsels, and with me Cherish the Romans, masters of the world, The togaed nation. So it is decreed. (CGB using Rhoades) a22) b22) 22) Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Musing Woman ("Domina"), from Dionysiac Frieze, det., Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii Cyprian late 4th c. BC, Female head, terra cotta, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia Graeco-Roman late 1st c. BC?, Terror-Stricken Woman, detail, Great Frieze, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii Music: Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch, St. John's, Santa Fe The cyclical modification of human development seems here to confront us. It is a question of introspective personality, with the somber weight it lays on the soul. The distinction is less of Greek and Roman than of early and late; though what the Greeks matured —the subjectivity which was their "principle of decay" (Hegel) and which the chromatic fragment from Euripides wonderfully expresses (close Euripides)—the Romans had to contend with, had to order. Almost any head from the 4th century BC down, would present us (as does this Pompeiian one from the Villa dei Misteri, 1st century BC) with self-awareness like a palpable thing. June 1996 The Search for Rome 8 �C.G. Bell 23) Symbolic History Kleophrades Painter c. 500 BC, (found Vulci), Maenad in Ecstasy, Antique Collections, Munich And the leap back to almost any before 500 BC gives the effect of having opened a drain, from which that shadowing selfhood pours, to leave the crystal clarities of the tribal and pre-personal—of myth. (If only a comparable music could be picked up from the groves and columns of Olympia.) Va24) 24) Etruscan 2nd half of 6th c., Reclining Couple, Villa Giulia, Rome Etruscan 509 BC, Apollo from Veii (terracotta), head, Villa Giulia, Rome In fact, the two phases had been run through on Italian soil by those puzzling Etruscans, whose non-Indo-European language and mysterious origin (more Thucydides' Tyrhennians than Herodotus' Lydians), did not prevent their paralleling, almost from year to year, the Greek maturation of consciousness; so that this smiling head, or the contemporary tomb paintings from Tarquinia, wear a kind of Greek stamp of 500 BC, and of archaic impersonality. 25) Etruscan 4th c. BC (or after?), Head from a sarcophagus, Carlsberg, Copenhagen Whereas this sarcophagus portrait, though Italian in realism, is 4th century in awareness—like the latest paintings, near the present graveyard, under the hummocked wheatfields of Tarquinia. This is the private responsibility with which Rome began, and for which it had to frame a universal law and moral discipline. 26) Spanish (Punic?) 3rd c. BC?, Lady of Elche, Prado, Madrid We yield to the temptation of beauty (though there is disagreement about the Lady of Elche's date) to hint that the conscious and sensuous ripening was Mediterranean, and that after 400 BC (or for a guess, 3rd century) it was felt also in Graeco-Punic Spain. 27) Double: [A] Hellenistic 3rd c. BC, Head of Alexander, British Museum, London, and [B] Etrusco-Roman, 3rd. c. BC?, called Junius Brutus, Conservatori, Rome; + singles [slide V & dig. order: 27A; 27; 27B] June 1996 The Search for Rome 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though to sense how Rome could enlist that inwardness which had become the liability of Greece, a direct contrast will be most instructive—and from the very time that Polybius undertook to account for the Greek decline and Roman rise. Set the idealized rapture and refined yearning of the Praxitilean and Alexandrian—its worlds to conquer turning into dream (as Alcibiades' did, and even Alexander's)—against the equal selfawareness of the so-called elder Brutus (who expelled the kings and left his example like an injunction to his namesake)—but an awareness energized and disciplined by will. For the wistful impulse of the Greek, the reality of control—there lies the secret of the plodding, slow, inexorable march of Rome. Thus Hegel, in one of his most powerful distinctions: The Roman state is not a repetition of such a state of individuals as the Athenian Polis was. The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil. 28) Roman c. 70 AD, Male Portrait, Museo Capitolino, Rome;+ V det. (not dig.) Everywhere in the art record of that responsibility we read "the crushing destiny" for which the world, as Hegel also says, was "sunk in melancholy"; so that even today we cannot walk the portrait halls of a Roman museum without being bowed by that burden of loss and heaviness, as if we too had to pay for the formative struggle which lay like a pall upon the human spirit. a29) b29) 29) V29a) Roman 1st c. AD, Arch of Titus, among trees, Rome Same, Triumphal chariot, detail, Arch of Titus, Relief Same, Jews led Captive (70 AD), detail, Arch of Titus Same, The Arch of Titus, (upper portion) (dig. omits) Music: Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, again the pomp of the Finale, Vox SVBX 5212 (through slide a34) Under that brooding, the question becomes imperative: "rigorous toil" for what end? The search for origins gave us brazen warriors. Titus' triumphal arch on the Forum celebrates the sack of Jerusalem, the Jews led in chains, the seven-branched candelabra among the spoils. Does the guidance of Jove (Aeneas, "Jovis monitis") reduce to a doggedness of military conquest, of which the facade is Ara Pacis, the altar of peace— heavy virtues extolled without the vibrance or intellect of Greece? June 1996 The Search for Rome 10 �C.G. Bell a30) 30) Symbolic History Etrusco-Roman 5th c. BC, She-wolf of Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori Same, detail of head, with fangs From the wolf origins praised from Livy down—hidebound severity, and outward fierceness: killjoy Marcus Cato, censor, whose morals did not preclude avarice, crying for the destruction of Carthage at every meeting of the Senate: "Delenda est Carthago"; murderous Marius, boasting of ignorance: I never studied Greek; I never wanted to. What I learned was more for my country's good: to strike the enemy, stand close guard, bear hunger, heat and cold, sleep on the ground, fear nothing but a coward's fame. (Sallust, Jugurtha LXXV, 33) 31) Roman 3rd c. AD, Battle with Barbarians, Ludovisi Sarcophagus, Museo Nazionale, Rome Same, detail of barbarian dying (not dig.) V31a) —even to this 3rd century AD Ludovisi Sarcophagus with the battle between Romans and Barbarians—the central theme of the "togaed race", in life and art, is war. Of course peace is intended, peace and law, all the virtues which Caesar, in Shaw, calls Rome's gifts to the world in exchange for a few ornaments: a32) 32) 32a) Roman 114 AD, Trajan's Column, Piazza Del Foro Traiano, Rome Same, detail of the Frieze Same, closer detail (video shows various details; dig. one) there is the good emperor Trajan, of the adoptive line, whose happy rule Gibbon so praised; but observe his most conspicuous monument, the column with its 650-foot-long coiled frieze of the Dacian campaigns, how it falls together, over a gap of a century and a half, with Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars: (from II, 23-28) ...the 9th and l0th legions drove the Atrebates from the high ground to the river, and when they attempted to cross, pressed after them sword in hand, and killed a great many… crossing… and pushing on, though the slope was against them… . But the enemy, even in their despair, displayed such heroic courage that, when their foremost ranks had fallen, the next mounted upon their prostrate comrades and fought standing on their bodies... June 1996 The Search for Rome 11 �C.G. Bell 33) 33a) 33b) Symbolic History Roman, late 2nd c., Column of Marcus Aurelius, detail, execution and burning, Rome; + video detail (not dig.) Same, detail, massacre of barbarian prisoners Same, detail, rape of barbarian women The battle was over; and the Nervian people, nay their very name, was brought to the verge of extinction... Even Marcus Aurelius, philosopher, is commemorated by such a column, to a detail of which we have shifted while reading Caesar. That was most of his life, laboring and fighting in a last Roman effort to extend, hold and consolidate. Without those notes in his book of somber meditations: "This among the Quadi on the Danube"—the soldiers, while he wrote, executing prisoners perhaps, or burning villages—who would have tied the scenes of the Column to those Greek expressions of the Stoic ideal: "to keep the divine Genius within pure and unwronged, lord of all pleasures and pains." a34) Roman c. 166-180, Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, the Capitol, Rome (whole from below) (fade Poppea Pomp) b34) 34) 34a) Same, Equestrian bronze, detail of Marcus Same, Head of Marcus Same, closer detail of head [so dig.; V to detail with horse, from a34] Though the face of the equestrian Marcus speaks more—that bronze work preserved through the Dark Ages because the Christians thought it Constantine, and on their side. Music: Monteverdi, 1642, Poppea, Lullaby, "Oblivion," Opera Soc., MMS2028 Those lonely Aurelian eyes are not at all like Constantine's eyes of staring dogma, yet they are barometric signs of something that was working in the Christians' favor: Wilt thou then, O my soul, ever at last be good and simple and single and naked, showing thyself more visible than the body that overlies thee?... Ever be fulfilled and self-sufficing, longing for nothing? As if there were two persons representing two Romes, the outward of public power (itself a wedded pair of war and law), and the inner of these shadowy musings. June 1996 The Search for Rome 12 �C.G. Bell 35) 35a) Symbolic History Roman, c. 176-9, Marcus Aurelius Sacrificing, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + video details (dig. one detail) Græco-Roman (Athens) 160 AD, Portrait of Annius Verus, son of Marcus Aurelius, Louvre; + V detail (not dig.) That separation of outward and inward, body and spirit, is the melancholy which pervades the late classical; and buttressed against it, never denying it, the Roman and Stoic command: Be like a headland of rock, on which the waves break incessantly, but it stands fast, and around it the seething of the waters sinks to rest. Under the titanic vaults of Rome, such depths were forming. For Virgil, the romantic transformation of the Odyssey yields to the god-given task of rule. For Hegel, the compulsion of rule foments inwardness: ...the world is sunk in melancholy, and it is all over with the natural side of Spirit; yet only from this could arise the supersensuous, the free Spirit in Christianity... (fade Lullaby) Va36) 36) Etrusco-Roman 1st c. BC, Terracotta Portrait, profile, Villa Giulia, Rome Same, frontal view (dig. shows frontal view only) Early Rome was a force in the world, but it was not yet world-historical. It deepens to that when the rather plain humanity of the Latin citizen of the Republic, a now legally defined private person, becomes, in the accession of empire and of Alexandrian consciousness, the focus of a double crisis, the class and power struggle of the Civil Wars, and the temptation of luxury and the softening arts. a37) 37) Graeco-Roman 1st c. BC?, Villa dei Misteri Frieze, Pompeii Same, closer view (CGB '80); + video detail (not dig.) Marvelous arts at their best, and it would seem quite above politics—though the strictures would apply to sybaritic Pompeii, as to Aeneas lapped in Dido's arms: "Heedless of empire, by base love enthralled." Yet the Villa of Mysteries is as startling a height of Greek art on Italian soil as Lucretius' Epicurean poem. The parallel is instructive, though they seem opposite at first: Lucretius denying these gods, these June 1996 The Search for Rome 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History mysteries; while he celebrates a super-mystery of atomic nature ruled by Love, the alma genetrix invoked as "Te, dea." 38) Same freeze, detail of Ordeal and Bacchante; + V detail (not dig.) ...we are all sprung from heavenly seed; all have the same father, by whom mother earth...conceives and bears goodly crops and joyous trees and the race of men... A thing therefore never returns to nothing... rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap of mother earth; but then goodly crops spring up...and trees laden with fruit...and the leafy forests ring on all sides with the song of new birds... (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, 991 ff; & I, 248 ff., Munro, tr.) a39) 39) 39a) Again frieze, Reading the Ritual, detail Same, close detail of face (Initiatrix) Same, another portion of the frieze (for which video has two details, from VA&B of 39a); dig. whole 39a Music: Again Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, Therriault & Lynch Though like all expressions of post-Euripidean soul, the Villa of Mysteries and the De Rerum Natura betray the loneliness and torment at the heart of things, as when Lucretius writes of the frenzy of love: ...they pine away by a hidden wound, at a loss to know what they really desire...feasts are set out, perfumes, crowns and garlands..all in vain, since from the very fountain of delight, a bitter drop wells up, to pain amid the flowers. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, IV, 1117-34 adapted from Munro) (end Euripides) Fitting, St. Jerome should record of Lucretius (how factually no one knows): June 1996 The Search for Rome 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ...driven mad by a love-potion, after he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, a number of books… he killed himself by his own hand in his forty-fourth year. The despair of reason might almost have been potion enough. 40) 40a) 40b) Roman terracotta head c. 50 BC, Man of the Republic, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail (not dig.) Hellenistic, 1st half of 2nd cent. BC, Head of Flamininus (?), Delphi Museum, Greece; first, video detail (not dig.) Roman 1st c. BC, Unknown Man, Glyptothek, Munich If the Boston museum bust is of 50 BC as claimed, it shows us an aesthetic patrician who has lived through the troubles of Lucretius' time (III, 70 ff) : "while men … amass wealth by civil bloodshed and greedily double their riches, piling up murder on murder." Those eyes could have seen the Forum massacre of ten thousand men gathered to protest Sulla's corn laws; Spartacus' Slave War, put down after two years (71 BC) with like violence: five thousand fugitives killed by Pompey, six thousand slaves crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Perhaps, like Cicero's refined friend Atticus, he took the philosophic way of withdrawal from the state, regretted by Plato and praised by Lucretius, in the image of looking from land to a navy distressed at sea (De Rerum Natura, Book II, opening): ...to hold the lofty and serene positions well fortified by the learning of the wise, from which you may look down on others wandering abroad and going astray...the rivalry of birth, the struggle night and day to reach the summit of power and be masters of the world. (De Rerum Natura, II, 7-13, Munro, tr.) Va41) 41) Dioscorides of Samos 1st c. BC, Street Musicians, mosaic, from Villa Cicero, Pompeii, National Museum, Naples Hellenistic late 3rd c. BC, Old Woman Drunk, Capitoline Musuem, Rome; + V detail (not dig.) It was only in that Rome, glutting itself on the spoils of the Hellenic East—not wealth only, but the doubts and sophistications, the sensational vulgarities and refinements of art—the city, as Sallust said, "become a sink into which there poured all who June 1996 The Search for Rome 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History were in any place notorious for crime or vice"—it was then, in war and successive purges, in the corruption and breakdown of republican institutions— a42) Vb42) 42) 42a) Graeco-Roman c. 50 BC, Pompey the Great, Glyptothek, Copenhagen Roman 1st c. BC, Republican Bust, Antique Collections, Munich; not dig. Roman c. 60 BC, Portrait of a Patrician, Museo Torlonia, Rome; + V detail Roman c. 40 BC, Cato of Utica, Rabat Museum, Volubilis, Morocco that great personalities arise—Cato, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Agrippa—called forth by the imperatives of a threatened world. Now the portrait bust, Rome's chief contribution to Classical art, becomes a record, not merely of the warts and wrinkles, but through that surface, of momentous needs and changes in the soul. Let this type of eroded and embattled Roman rigor stand for Cato, inflexible as he. But it must reach beyond itself to catch those last hours as told by Plutarch. I do not mean (against the sweetness of Socrates' talking and falling asleep in the shade of his hemlock) Cato's bungling suicide, so that he had to drag his guts out and tear them with his hands; but rather what won him a place in Dante's theology: that he advised his son to withdraw from politics, and so passed his last evening reading Plato on immortality. a43) Roman c. 50 BC?, Marble bust of Cicero, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail; not dig. 43) Roman c. 50 BC, Cicero, Capitoline Museum, Rome; first, video detail ; not dig. That was in 46 BC. Caesar had just prevailed over Pompey. Cicero's letters are our best window into Roman failure. Where the official portrait shows his other side, the public front of success devoted to the higher aim—as his rhetoric sounds the obligation of Plato's Republic, to which his translation gave that Latin name: Res publica, the commonweal. His advice to his brother on provincial rule rings with the key words: peace, clemency, mildness, humanity, justice (pax, clementia, mansuetudo, virtus, humanitas, justitia), to be taken up in chorus by responsible Rome. In his highmindedness, Cicero had actually believed he could save the Constitution by a "concord of orders." a44) 44) Roman, c. 50 BC, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail (not dig.) Same, another view; + V detail (also dig. detail) June 1996 The Search for Rome 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The breaking of that hope spotlights his wry and self-searching grandeur—an introspection paralleled in this bust of an Immolator. Cicero writes Atticus in 49 BC (Feb. 27): Caesar and Pompey have not aimed at the honor and happiness of the state, but at absolute power... Both want to be kings... Maybe you have been looking for a little consolation. I cannot see any. We could not possibly be worse off than we are, more wretched, ruined, disgraced. And to Paetus after Caesar's triumph (46 BC) I think I know well enough what will happen: those who are in power will have their way, and power now will always go by the sword... Whoever could not put up with this, was in duty bound to die. (It is the braver example of Cato which haunts him here.) But since I, hero and philosopher in one, took life to be the best thing after all—why, I cannot but love a man whose kindness has let me have it. Though even if he were really eager for a free constitution, he has no power of action, so deeply has he entangled himself... We are slaves to Caesar and Caesar slave to the times... Prepare for the worst, and bear what is to happen. 45) V45a) V45b) 45c) V45d) Roman c. 50 BC, bronze head, called Caesar, Museo Nazionale, Rome Cleomenes of Athens, c. 50 BC, Roman Orator, Louvre, Paris Roman 1st c. BC, Nymph & Satyr, Archeological Museum, Venice Detail of 45, so-called Caesar Roman 1st c. AD, Portrait of an Elderlv Man, Vatican With the bronze called "Caesar" in the National Museum in Rome, the bitterness of tyranny and proscription comes to a focus of grim involvement. As in Catullus' poem scourging Caesar, Pompey, most of all the parasite Mamurra, depravity and blame whirl in self-wounding fury: The man who can face this, the man who can take it, Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain. Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it? How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom, Like a white pigeon, a soft-skinned white Adonis — June 1996 The Search for Rome 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Pansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it? You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler. And was it for this, Rome's only great general, You conquered the remotest island of the West, To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra? See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of Spain Hear Tagus, gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony? For this, like in-laws, father and son, You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city. (CGB) 46) 46a) Double: [A] Greek (Phidian?) c. 440 BC, Older Riace Warrior, detail, Reggio Calabria; and [B] Roman c. 45 BC (copy?), bust called Julius Caesar, Vatican Double: [A] Again, Riace Warrior; [B] Again, bronze called Caesar, cf. 45 Let this Greek 5th century BC Riace Warrior (left), beside the Vatican bust probably of Julius Caesar (right), raise the question another 2000 years of debate will not end: how far Caesar's private ambition bodied forth an Alexandrian awareness of his world-calling, by one-man rule to reconstitute a vitiated Rome? In 60 BC, when he gave up the triumph won in Spain, to become Triumvirate Consul and so form an army by the conquest of Gaul—did he launch Lycurgus and Alcibiades upon a time always more darkened to cynical excess? And eleven years later, threatened by Pompey and the Senate with prosecution, when he took his army across the Rubicon ("Alea jacta est"), what die was cast? Did a last Greek flagrance of mind venture itself on the great-souled spendthrift and demogogue—already doomed by senatorial conspiracy to subserve the cautious weight of Augustan rule? 47) Roman c. 40 BC, The young Octavian, Museo Barracco, Rome; + V detail "His virtues be execrated, for they have ruined my country," said Cato. That was of Caesar. But there was a tide, which Machiavelli defined for all who came after him. Cicero too blamed individuals, accidents, had painfully to discover that the new Triumvirs would not relinquish power. His last letter to Brutus (43 BC) is of disappointment in this Octavian, by whom he was to fall in the purges of that year, victim of the man he had hoped to guide: June 1996 The Search for Rome 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But what grieves me most even now, as I write, is that where the Republic has accepted me as a surety for that youth—almost, indeed, that boy—it hardly seems that I can make my promise good. 48) 48a) Roman, c. 30 BC?, Head of Augustus (Octavian), marble, British Museum, London; first, video detail (not dig.) Hellenistic Roman c. 20-10 BC, Bronze head of Augustus as Idealized Greek hero, British Museum, London; + V detail (not dig.) Here is Plutarch's account of the calculating schemer, not quite suppressed in the official portraits: And now, more than at any other time, Cicero let himself be carried away and deceived, though an old man by the persuasions of a boy. He joined Octavius in soliciting votes and procured the good-will of the senate, not without blame at the time on the part of his friends; and he too, soon enough after, saw that he had ruined himself and betrayed the liberty of his country. For the young man, once established, and possessed of the office of consul, bade Cicero farewell; and, reconciling himself to Antony and Lepidus, joined his power with theirs, and divided the government, like a piece of property, with them. Thus united they made a schedule of above two hundred persons who were to be put to death... (It is the scene Shakespeare shows us in Julius Caesar.) 49) Roman, c. 20 BC, Augustus, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V detail (not dig.) How quickly the August image smoothes and idealizes itself, enacts in life and art the poetry of Virgil: We have reached the ultimate age foretold by the Sibyl's song; Again the great cycle begins; the first time returns. The virgin Justice descends; Saturn's reign is restored: From heaven to earth he comes, of the new world the firstborn. (CGB using the Loeb) In a Rome harrying itself by civil war, others shared in the myth of an age of gold. Horace invites us to sail to the Blessed Isles. (Epode, XVI) June 1996 The Search for Rome 19 �C.G. Bell 50) 50a) 50b) Symbolic History Roman 13-9 BC, Ara Pacis, east relief, Tellus Italia, with Air and Water, Rome (CGB '86) Same, Ara Pacis, whole altar as reconstructed Same, Tellus relief, central figure (black and white); dig. pans on 50 "Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled earth with sheaves." But Virgil turned his entire creative output to making that vision history. And with such sway, that the cold genius of Octavian, and the artists of his chief work, the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace, convert the dream façade into the truth of Rome: Behold how the great world threatened under its cloudy dome, The land and far-spread seas and the sky's fathomless home, How all created things rejoice in the time to come. (CGB) The Eclogues so begin it, leaping from actual abuse and decline (the land-grab of 41 BC in Eclogues I and IX), to prophetic paradise. In the Georgics we go from "tot bella per orbem"—"the globe all war, the fields rot in neglect" (in I), to the praise of Italy and rustic happiness (in II): 51) V51a) 51b) Same, detail of Tellus-Italia (CGB '86) Roman c. 100 BC, Relief from the altar of Domicius Ahenobarbus, Louvre, Paris (dig. omits) Again Ara Pacis, whole Tellus relief (as in 50) Here blooms perpetual spring... twice teem the flocks... Hail! land of Saturn, mighty mother thou Of fruits and heroes... still the year o'erflows With young of kine, still Ceres' wheaten sheaf Loads with crops the furrow, bursts the barns... Such life the Sabines led...Etruria thus To greatness grew, and Rome with circling walls Clasped to her single breast the sevenfold hills. The Aeneid too, though its theme is war, rests on that recovered Arcady. Evadner's Latium (Book VIII) was Saturn's refuge from Jove: he gave it laws; "Under his scepter were the fabled golden years." But we have heard in the prophecies of Book VI: "Caesar Augustus, a god's son, shall rebuild the golden age through Latian fields once June 1996 The Search for Rome 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ruled by Saturn." So of course Italy, as bountiful Tellus-Gaia, is central to the Altar of Peace. a52) b52) 52) Same, Ara Pacis, west side, Aeneas at the Sanctuary of the Penates (black & white) Triple: [A] Greece c. 600 B.C., Colossal head of Hera, Museum, Olympia; [B] Roman 1st c. AD, head of Juno, Thermae, Rome; and [C] early Christian, 3rd cent., detail of seated Christ, Thermae, Rome Again Aeneas' sacrifice from Ara Pacis (CGB '86) (video reverses 52 and a52; not so dig.) The Great Wheel is a destiny involving gods, nature and man. We have considered nature. As for the gods, Polybius had been puzzled to note that superstition, for the late Greeks a vice, was the moral strength of Rome (religion changing roles with cultural need: for the Homeric Greeks, life-force; for the Romans, discipline; for the Christians, mystical hope). But by the time of Virgil, Roman faith was as undermined as Roman agriculture. So pious Aeneas' dependence on the gods, whose agent he becomes ("jussa divum exsequitur" — IV, 396), was also a creative leap, by which the reliefs of the Ara Pacis begin with this (damaged) Sacrifice of Aeneas; 53) 53a) 53b) Same, Ara Pacis, south side, Sacrifice by the Family of Augustus (CGB ‘86) Same, detail of Augustus leading the procession (CGB ‘86) Same, detail of family and friends of Augustus (CGB ‘86); + V det.; not dig. and end with Augustus, as Pontifex Maximus, leading his family and friends (the family of state) in an offering for peace. The repeated prophecies of the Aeneid are fulfilled: Jove to Venus in Book I: "The togaed nation, masters of the world...Then wars shall cease, the rugged time grow mild"; Jove to Aeneas, in Book IV, of the mission of his line: "to rule over Italy...and to law's bidding make the whole world bow." And of course the prophecy of the Underworld, and the future carved on the shield. Gibbon remarks on Augustus' skill in playing Roman citizen and leader of the Senate. And perhaps the most touching thing about the Ara Pacis is that so pompous a fulfillment of divine and world destiny remains a simple gathering of wives and children, relatives and friends— June 1996 The Search for Rome 21 �C.G. Bell 54) 54a) 54b) Symbolic History Same, Ara Pacis, detail of above, Head of Maecenas between other heads (CGB ‘86) Same, closer detail Double: [A] Greece, 590-80 B.C., Cleobis detail, Delphi; and [B] Augustan, 13-9 B.C., Aeneas sacrificing, detail, Ara Pacis. [Earlier V54b — doubling Peplos Korê and Antonia Minor from Ara Pacis — revised ('96) to this 54b.] old Maecenas, Virgil's loved patron, touched with lachrimae rerum, as when Augustus and Octavia, reading in the underworld canto those predictions of their Golden Age, came to the lines on the death of Marcellus: "Manibus date lilia plenis"—"give hands full of lilies"—and broke into tears. Strange how Homer is reversed. The instinctive life which was affirmative there, has turned to weakness, to the romantic longing which made Virgil's voice falter at Dido's line ("since this name only, of guest, survives that of husband"); while what was negative in Homer, Destiny, against which Greek life smilingly pitted itself, has become with Rome the heavy hope. 55) 55a) 56) 56a) 56b) Roman c. 20 BC, Prima Porta Augustus, whole statue, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86) Same, another view; + V detail (not dig.) Same, Prima Porta Augustus, waist up (CGB '86); + V det. of 55a (not dig.) Same, detail of armor only (CGB '86, color; or black & white); copy of Faust 14 Same, detail of head and shoulders That is the pronouncement which stands in Book VI, at the center of the epic: (after Humphries) ...Rome, that glorious city, Will bound her power by earth, her pride by heaven... ...These are Iulus' children... Caesar Augustus, son of a god, founder of An age of gold...he will extend his empire Beyond the Indies, beyond the normal measure Of years and constellations, where high Atlas Turns on his shoulder the star-studded world... Others, no doubt, will better mould the bronze To the semblance of soft breathing, draw from marble June 1996 The Search for Rome 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The living countenance; and others plead With greater eloquence, or learn to measure, Better than we, the pathways of the heaven, The rising of the stars: remember, Roman, These are your fine arts: to rule the people Under law, to impose the way of peace, To spare the humble, and war down the proud. It is as if the Prima Porta Augustus had been made to fulfill that command. And as Aeneas takes up the shield carved with the future of Italy from Romulus and Remus to the defeat of Marc Antony—Antony, unlike high-souled Aeneas, captive to his African Dido: "with horrors, an Egyptian wife"—as Aeneas, uncomprehending but "proud and happy, lifts to his shoulder all that fortune, the fame and glory of his children's children"—Augustus here assumes his symbolic armor: under the gods of the sky, the conquered earth reconciled by Rome. How fitly the stone mouth might sound Augustus' account of his own reign, the Res Gestae, inscribed late in his life on monuments over the empire -- 57) Roman 312 BC and after, Via Appia, Queen of Roads that realm of ordered power: provinces, arches, aqueducts, law, radiating like Roman roads from the Principate center. 58) Roman, 5 BC, Tropaea Augusti, La Turbie, Monaco (restored 1934) When I was nineteen I collected an army on my own account and at my own expense, by the help of which I restored the Republic to liberty...I had to undertake wars by land and sea, civil and foreign, all over the world, and when victorious I spared surviving citizens... 59) Roman, completed 13 AD, Theatre of Marcellus, Rome I built the Curia and the Chalcidicum which adjoins it, the temple of Apollo, the temple of the Divine Julius, the Lupercal... I constructed the Flaminian Road... with all the bridges except the Mulvian and Minucian... I built a theatre to bear the name of my son-in-law, Marcellus... 60) Roman (Spain), c. 100 AD, (Trajan) Aqueduct, Segovia (CGB '66) June 1996 The Search for Rome 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I cleared the sea of pirates...I extended the frontiers of all the provinces of the Roman people... 61) Augustan wooden arch, rebuilt in stone under Tiberius, Orange, S. France Twice I triumphed with an ovation; in my triumphs were led captive before my chariot nine kings or children of kings... 62) 62a) 62b) Roman c. 10 BC, Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, Thermae Museum, Rome Same, upper detail Roman I5-37 AD, The Gemma Augustea, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; + V detail ( not dig.) I transferred the republic from my power to the will of the Senate and people of Rome. For which good service I was by decree of the Senate called by the name of Augustus... in recognition of valour, clemency, justice, piety... The old Republican watchwords invoked to close down the Republic. Characteristic that he never mentions the command of the Praetorian Guard. As Cicero said: "Power now will always go by the sword." A reliance which would shrink later emperors to puppets of their own arms. The whole achievement of Virgil and Augustus being, in one sense, a romantic dream. a63) 63) Roman c. 10-20 AD, Bucolic Landscape, detail, from Villa of Agrippa Posthumus, Museo Nazionale, Naples Roman (Augustan) c 10 AD?, Fresco, Ulysses among the Laestrygonians, Vatican Library, Rome; + V detail (to the right; so dig.) Resolution could not shore up the psyche. Again the fragment from Euripides. Music: Euripides 408 BC, Orestes fragment, last part The Hellenistic illusionism of escape — "Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding," (end Euripides) bred of the civil wars: Horace's Blessed Isles, Virgil's Mincian Arcadia — flows through the ivory gate of the Aeneid, appears in the haunted Odysseus landscapes, June 1996 The Search for Rome 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History where the facts of Homer take the shades of Virgil: like Polyphemus glimpsed through mist as he wades into the sea, groans, and laves the gored socket of his eye (Aeneid III). 64) 64a) Roman late 1st cent. BC, Portrait of a girl (terracotta), Staatliche Museen, Berlin ; + V detail (so dig.) Graeco-Roman Africa c. 40-50 BC, Cleopatra, Cherel, Algeria; + V & dig. detail Under the tender modeling of this Augustan girl, ideal as the Ara Pacis, romantic person ripens toward imperial (ultimately Christian) longing. Why else would Milton have chosen the Fifth Ode of Horace for translation (and made it the only Latin poem native to English), but for some renouncing hunger that rocks the smooth surface of its Hellenism?— What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odours Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave, Pyrrha, for whom bindst thou In wreaths thy golden Hair, Plain in thy neatness; O how oft shall he On Faith and changed Gods complain: and Seas Rough with black winds and storms Unwonted shall admire; Who now enjoyes thee credulous, all Gold, Who always vacant, alwayes amiable Hopes thee; of flattering gales Unmindfull? Hapless they To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd Picture the sacred wall declares t' have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern God of Sea. a65) 65) 65a) Roman (Pompeii) 70-79 AD, Atrium, House of the Vetii (rebuilt) (CGB '89) Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a Girl, Nat. Mus., Naples Graeco-Roman 1st cent. AD, House of the Vetii Frescoed wall What had made one-man rule inevitable but the corruption of the Republic? And where was its deepest seat but in the sensuous flagrance and softening nostalgias, to which the houses of Pompeii more richly attest than the stripped fragments of Graeco-Roman song: "Calliopeia". June 1996 The Search for Rome 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Græco-Roman 1st cent. AD, Calliopeia Hymn, J.E. Butt (close) In that cleavage between private wish and public facade, we look under every rich carpet (or in this case, wall painting) to find cockroaches. 66) Roman, c. 38 BC (or later?), Mural of a garden from the Villa of Livia, Thermae, Rome Roman 1st c. AD, Livia Drusilla, Augustus' wife, Vatican Museum, Rome; + V detail ( so dig.) Another detail from the Villa Livia mural Same, another detail 66a) V66b) 66c) This garden scene is from the Prima Porta Villa of Livia, in the spirit of Virgil's fruitful Italy. It was probably painted about 38 BC, when Augustus dumped his first wife Scribonia (mother of their notorious Julia), and had Livia divorced from her husband (father of Tiberius), to espouse her imperious charms. Suspected of various crimes—the premature death of Marcellus and other near heirs, and even of the death of Augustus— she inherited a third of his property, and became joint-ruler with her son, until her dominance drove him to the queer retreat of Capri. It is the beginning of the fevered conversion of sex into power, so disturbing in imperial Rome. And poor old Agrippa, Augustus' loyal "architect of Empire", had to divorce the wife he loved and marry that now widowed and lusting Julia. Such the nobly robed family of the Altar of Peace. 67) 67a) 67b) Roman (Flavian), late 1st cent. AD, Portrait of a youth, British Museum, London Egyptian (Amarna), c. 1370-60 BC, Head from a harp, Louvre, Paris Again 67, Flavian Youth, detail; + closer V detail ( not dig.) It is worth jumping forward here, a few generations, to pick up a face that, of all faces, gives a probable insight into Julia—this Flavian youth, for whom the Principate splendor has not solved the inner why. Not since the old thousand year culture of the Nile had anything of such rich satiety appeared. Petronius Arbiter might have put him in the Satyricon; but he bridges time; for Lucretius had already given the description of his ennui: The man who is sick of home issues from his mansion, and is no better off abroad. He races to his country house... yawns as he reaches it and June 1996 The Search for Rome 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History sinks into heavy sleep, seeks forgetfulness, or in haste goes back to town... In this way each flies from himself, hates himself, because he is sick and does not know the cause. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III, 1060 ff., adapted from Munro's translation) Va68) Roman copy of Greek, 3rd cent., Hermaphrodite (from the rear), Louvre, Paris (Mattress by Bernini) Same, another view, (CGB '80) Same, frontal view (CGB '80) b68) 68) That malady now, with all its symptomatic excess, seized on the heart of empire. In the hypocritical position of trying to reform and stiffen the moral codes, "the divine Augustus", Seneca tells us, "was forced to exile his own daughter, Julia, who had surpassed in lust every infamous meaning of the word, and had covered the imperial home with scandal." Ten years later it would be the granddaughter—Julia's Julia. Since Ovid, having written The Art of Love, was banished at the same time, there were hints of a supervised experiment in postures. ("Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?") 69) 69a) View from Posillippo, over Nisida & Baia's Bay to Cape Miseno etc. (Beny) Lake of Avernus, near Cumae, north of Naples (CGB '84) Works of art, however, will not guide us to the cruel and jaded sensualities of which we read in the satirists or the gossiping historian Suetonius. Imagination can only grope backward from the present scene of Baia on the Bay of Naples, to the luxurious Roman spa, senators lolling in litters and gilded boats, or with women in the warm pools of Avernus, under showers of roses thrown by lascivious dancers. (So Seneca.) 70) 70a) View of Capri from the Villa of Augustus towards Tiberius' Villa (CGB '80) Ruins of Tiberius' Villa, Capri (CGB '80) Across the bay lies Capri, where Tiberius fled embittered, covered with sores, scabs and pustules. Suetonius: He had assembled from all quarters girls and perverts... who invented monstrous feats of lubricity... to inflame his feeble appetite. (Not to mention those unweaned children he called his little fishes.) June 1996 The Search for Rome 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History They still point out the scene of his executions, from which he used to order that those who had been condemned, after long and exquisite tortures, be cast headlong into the sea before his eyes, while a band of marines waited below for the bodies and broke their bones with boathooks and oars, to prevent any breath of life from remaining in them. 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) View through mist across the Forum to the Palatine Roman, 28 AD, Bust of Caligula, The Louvre, Paris Rome from Forum to Palatine (CGB '86, underexposed; dig. omits.) Rome, The Palatine from across the Circo Massimo Flee, like the sick patrician, back to Rome, past the Palatine, then tiers on tiers of colonnades, where Tiberius' successor, mad Caligula, walked. Suetonius: For this man, who so utterly despised the Gods, was wont at the slightest thunder and lightning to shut his eyes, muffle up his head, and if they increased to leap from his bed and hide under it... He was terrified also by strange apparitions... Therefore weary of lying in bed awake during the greater part of the night, he would now sit upon his couch and now wander through the long colonnades, crying out from time to time for daylight, and longing for its coming. 72) 72a) 72b) V72c) 72d) View of Vatican gardens, with St. Peter's dome Terraced fields outside Jerusalem Model of Rome 1st - 4th cent., (Gismondi), Museum of Roman Civilization, Rome Byzantine, c. 1000, Martyrdom of St. Ignatius (c. 107), Menologium of Basil II, Vatican Library Vatican Gardens (CGB '84) What can we do but flee again, across the Tiber, into Nero's gardens. We find ourselves at the heart of Christendom. For Peter—in fact or faith—was martyred here, and the Church rose over his blood. How remote this Vatican garden from the place of persecution Tacitus describes: Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate... but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judaea, where the mischief June 1996 The Search for Rome 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History originated, but through the city of Rome also, whither all things horrible and disgraceful flow... In their deaths they were made the subjects of sport, for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when day declined burnt to serve for nocturnal lights. Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle... mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer... (Tacitus, Annals, XV, 44, tr. Church & Brodribb) 73) Roman 72-90 & 312-316, Colosseum seen through the Arch of Constantine; + V detail ( not dig.) Again Colosseum, arches from within V73a) The Rome we have been in search of lies like the city itself, range upon range and vault opening under vault. Through the first layer of military force we have come into the arch of responsible rule. Deeper in that pile of enslavement and law, we enter the treasure chamber of privacy. The first impression is almost to drive us back appalled. 74) V74a) 74b) Roman Bust, c. 66-68 AD, Nero, Museo Capitolino, Rome; or V74 Roman, 14-37 AD, Grimani Relief, Lioness with her Cubs, Museum, Vienna Pompeii, c 70 A.D., Erotic wall painting, National Museum, Naples We seem to be witnessing one of those movies of the life of Christ, where the debauchery of Rome suggests a new Babylon. Tacitus: Nero (who polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence)...had a raft constructed on Agrippa's lake... the crews arranged according to age and experience in vice. Birds and beasts had been procured from remote countries, and sea monsters from the ocean. On the margin of the lake were set up brothels crowded with noble ladies, and on the opposite bank were seen naked prostitutes with obscene gestures and movements... (Tacitus, Annals XV, 37; tr. Church & Brodribb) a75) 75) Roman, 1st cent. AD, Patrician carrying busts of his ancestors, Capitoline Museum, Rome Roman, c. 150 AD, Young Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Museum, Rome; + V detail (also dig.) June 1996 The Search for Rome 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But Nero and Paul were not the only contenders in the Roman vault of personality. The pagan moral force rallied again and again. Perhaps never before or since was such a battle waged in the psyche. And with each recovery the outward empire was reordered, but against longer odds, and the soul under deeper shadow. With Marcus Aurelius the beauty of classical form masks an inwardness where solitude and dark have become habitual. So his Meditations Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away, its perceptions dim, the fabric of the entire body prone to decay, and the soul a vortex, and fortune incalculable, and fame uncertain. In a word, all the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim's sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. What then is it that can help us on our way? One thing and one alone—Philosophy. (tr., C.R. Haines) Va76) 76) 76a) Roman (Hadrian) 120 AD, Pantheon, from the Piazza, Rome; not dig. Same, closer view (CGB '86): V, detail only Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, horizontal slide, copy of E. Xian V53) We have relied on the portrait bust to voice the inner struggle. But architecture, too, that monumental enclosure of space, conveys, in its very language of thrusts, tensile nobilities. Rome's greatest building, the Pantheon, combines a columned porch, perhaps of the time of Augustus, with a dome built under Hadrian, the first huge dome ever constructed, forming the most impressive and best preserved Roman interior. As Hegel says: under the pain inflicted by Despotism, spirit, driven back into its inmost depths...seeks for a harmony in itself, and begins now an inner life. a77) 77) 77a) 77b) Pantheon, from the West side (CGB '86) Pantheon, interior (CGB '86, vertical slide); V takes details only, above then below; dig. whole, then upper detail Byzantine (Justinian) 502-537 & 558-62, Hagia Sophia, Dome (interior), Constantinople (CGB '77; copy of E.Xian 55) Michelangelo, c. 1550-90, Dome (interior), St. Peter's, Rome June 1996 The Search for Rome 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At the center of all that arching of aqueducts and bridges, amphitheatres and mammoth baths, enclosed in the bend of the Tiber and the utilitarian plainness of huge rubble walls, opens this round-shelled, eye-lighted sphere, first massive solution of the symbolic inner room. To enter it is to share a space pregnant with the moral deepening of Rome. As the private person glimpsed in brooding portraits fills the frame of universal law, so this luminous closure invests the cement walls of its outwardness. And as the subjective morality of the West was first explored in the conscious responsibilities of Rome, so this dome generates a long line, through the spatial withdrawal of Byzantine, to the proud assertions of the Renaissance and later West. 78) 78a) 78b) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacombs of St. Calixtus, Rome Roman Heads, Double: [A] 1st c. AD, from Ostia; and [B] 4th c. AD, from Via Appia, both National Museum (Thermae), Rome (CGB '86) Again, Catacombs of St. Calixtus, another view Music: Gregorian Easter Service Alleluia Mode 7, Angel 35116 From Aeneas down that struggle under stoical command: "Be like a headland of rock," had shaped the deepest reality of Rome. But after Marcus Aurelius, it required more than those heavy-eyed searchers for gnosis could supply. Obligation and destiny shifted from Aeneas Jovis monitis to Augustine's "a broken and a contrite heart, the Spouse, the Cup of our Redemption." But when the soul-sick Roman went down into the Catacombs, it was into a crypt that had long been forming under the imperial walls, a brooding place of consciousness, which Christianity would hail, with solemn hallelujas, as the birthplace of light. a79) b79) 79) Roman-Christian mid-3rd cent., fresco detail, Shepherd with scroll, and flock, Hypogeum of the Aurelii, Rome Same, another detail, Head of the Apostle Paul Roman-Christian 4th c., Bust of Christ fresco, Cemetery of Comodilla, Rome Between the opposites of an age there is a kind of creative play. The surrender of Christianity, the pride of Rome, these form the axis on which Western history is strung. Here, the promise of the City of God (I Cor. 15, 19-20): June 1996 The Search for Rome 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept... (End Gregorian) 80) 80a) Roman end of 1st c. BC, Agrippa, Uffizi, Florence Same, close detail of face There, the military might behind the Prima Porta Augustus, Augustus' soldier, who engineered his rise, honest Agrippa—yoked opposites of our world: ...Remember, Roman...to rule the people Under law, to impose the way of peace, To spare the humble, and war down the proud. How the 17th century, from Monteverdi, through the court of Louis XIV, to Augustan England, swells with that trumpet voluntary. Music: June 1996 Jeremiah Clarke (once thought Purcell), 1700, March, called "Trumpet Voluntary" (close), Bach Guild HM-31 SD The Search for Rome 32 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Search for Rome, Symbolic History, Part 5 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 5 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_05_The_Search_for_Rome Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6ec9e50d138dcd6c02b8f9819a4e61ce.pdf cb959b19a3172760105b584379b43098 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 4. The Alexandrian Melt CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 July 1995 Last Revised June 1996 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 4. The Alexandrian Melt a1) 1) Hellenistic from Rhodes, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, from a distance, side view, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + dig. horizantal detail Same, Victory, nearer from the other side (CGB '80); V returns to detail of a1 (this slide lost; dig.uses other images) Music: Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn V-LM/LSC 6057 From the wind-blown transport of the 190 B.C. Victory of Samothrace, a flight as of the Cloud Chorus in Aristophanes' bitterest comedy: (423 B.C.) Eternal Clouds, let us appear, let us arise from the roaring depths of Ocean, our father; let us fly towards the lofty mountains, spread our damp wings over their forest-laden summits, whence we will dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred earth, the murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the sea, which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams… 2) Same, Victory, front view (and detail); video shows two details instead — to be versed by Oscar Wilde, "Cloud-maidens that float on forever,/ Dew-sprinkled," and re-sung by Shelley: I am the daughter of Earth and Water And the nursling of the Sky… — the carved rapture no doubt paralleled in Greek music as well, before it had weathered to neumes on Delphic stone. (fade Hymn) From that, 3) Coptic (from Bauit), 6th cent., St. Menas and Christ, encaustic, Louvre, Paris Music: June 1996 Yemenite Jewish, Hymn for Hasha'na Rabba, close, History of Music in Sound, V-LM/LSC 6057 The Alexandrian Melt 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the Coptic flattening of anchorites in the Egyptian desert; as if Plotinus' "cut away everything" and "we rub the eye and it sees the light it contains — truest seeing," had joined the cry of Synagogue chant. (close of Jewish Hymn) The break to such earth-denial, 4) Victory of Samothrace, night-lighted, from the side; + V details from such earth-claim, is as startling as any in history. And yet the West, in less than a century, has turned in music from Franck's romantic wingings (Les Eolides): Music: 5) Cesar Franck, 1876, Les Eolides (climax), London CS 6540 (fade) Coptic, Christ and Abu Menas, detail, Louvre to the encaustic reduction of Varese. Music: 6) 6a) Edgar Varese, 1936, Density, solo flute (to 1st pause), Col. MS 6146 (fade) Attic, c. 560-50 B.C., Marble Sphinx, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail Greek (Naxos), c. 550 B.C., Sphinx, detail, Museum, Delphi [Slide only] Could the very Sphinx, who smiles from the Archaic Acropolis the Persians would sack, have answered how far that transformation was latent in Dionysian and Socratic Greece, how far an outcome of Alexander's fusing East and West (those earthdespising sages, Calanus and others, he sought beyond the Indus; Hebrew scriptures seeded from Eleusis, reaching from Egyptian bondage and Ikhnaton's one-god zeal toward Hölderlin's second Dionysus, sacrificial Syrian of "Bread and Wine")? Could the Sphinx herself have told, or was it her wisdom only to propose the question? Since where in history has such an antinomy been proposed without requiring for its answer: Both in one! 7) Greek, Lindos Acropolis with 4th cent. Temple of Athena June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Face two ways, toward the sheer Acropolis of Lindos on Rhodes: the island Pindar praised in a golden ode, where in Hellenistic times the Victory of Samothrace was carved — the columns of the 4th century B.C., though the rock had been a sanctuary of Lindian Athena from its seizure by the Dorians, "descended," as Pindar says, "of old from … the widely ruling race of Heracles." 8) 8a) Paul's Harbor from Lindos Acropolis, Island of Rhodes (Simpson) Greek, c. 460 B.C., Ruins of Zeus Temple, Olympia (CGB '77) But if we turn — the temple now to the right, asserting columned Greece — it was into the harbor below that Paul sailed on his way to Jerusalem. His great encounters, Euroclydon and the Shipwreck, when the viper warmed by fire fastened on his hand and he felt no harm, occurred in Crete and Malta on the final voyage to Rome. Yet here, by the ruined temple over his storied Harbor, the second letter to the Corinthians sounds that overthrow: Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 9) Cyprus, Neolithic, 6th millenium B.C., andesite idol, National Museum, Athens Take a stand nearer the center of that world-polis where Alexander thought to embrace in Macedonian vigor and Athenian enlightenment everything Persia had ruled, from age-old Egypt to hither India — a stand, say, on the island of Cyprus — and from there, as in a partial derivative, scan the time manifold: first, this 6th millenium gray volcanic idol: what cropped out, with tribal agriculture, from the whole family of man. 10) Cyprus, 3000-2500 B.C., seated figure in stealite, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia How varied the time scale of history. Almost 3000 years were required for the transition to the symbolic sophistication and polish of this soapstone seated idol, on the threshold of the Bronze Age, contemporary with early Sumer and Egypt and suggestively with Cycladic pre-Greece. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 3 �C.G. Bell 11) Symbolic History Mycenæan, 13th cent. B.C. Rhyton from Kition, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia By the 13th century B.C., the Cycladic had focused to the Minoan; the Minoan, spreading over the Aegean islands, had sowed Greece with the Homeric citadels of the Mycenæan, then embroiled in the Trojan War. Even in Cyprus, this faience Rhyton testifies to that culture, though the island was also in contact with mainland Syria, and was ruled from New Kingdom Egypt, then at its Rameses Second peak of imperial power and style. 12) 12a) Cyprus, Iron I 12th cent. B.C., Horned God, bronze, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 13th cent. B.C., Osiris, Tomb #1, Dier el Medineh, Thebes By the next century this horned deity of bronze hints at the hardening of a time of troubles, the folk-wanderings which brought in the Iron Age, and with Mycenæan decline, the dominance of Asia. Yet the first Greek is nascent here, and who is this with head (or helmet) horned? Dionysus, born by the myth in Bœotian Thebes, to Cadmus' daughter Semele, is also called "Horned Bromius," god of earthquake and violence. But Cadmus was a Phœnician, bringer of the alphabet; Dionysus, too, in Euripides, has returned to Thebes, a new god, from triumphs in Asia. While his origin, for Herodotus, is that older Thebes of Egypt; he is Osiris, its lord of rebirth from the grave. The cradle of Greece already resembles the Alexandrian melt — though in Yeats' double-cone, under a change of sign. 13) Cypro-Archaic, early 5th cent. B.C., Bearded head with laurel leaves, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail The folk-wandering brought in the Greeks — the Cyprian hero Cinyras, from the time of the Trojan War. By the beginning of the fifth century, this laurelled head carries the archaic smile over into what has suddenly become the Olympian pride of all Greece. 14) 14a) Cypro-Hellenistic, end of 4th cent. B.C., Female head, Cyprus Museum, Nicosia; + V detail [Slide only] Cyprus, 4th cent. B.C., terra cotta head of a man, on loan to the National Museum, Athens June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against it, the fourth century of Macedonian rule and Academic philosophy, witnesses, in Cyprus as elsewhere, a soft ripening of art and soul. In Aristophanes' Frogs, the ghost of Aeschylus blames Euripides. As if those choruses of pain and escape — the chromatic fragment from Orestes, Music: Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault and Lynch, St. John's, Santa Fe or what Gilbert Murray gleaned, as from the Bacchae: Where is the home for me? O Cyprus, set in the sea, Aphrodite's home in the soft sea-foam, Would I could wend to thee; Where the wings of the Loves are furled, And faint the heart of the world! — had seduced all of the Hellenic name. 15) (end Euripides) Cypro-Roman, 3rd cent. A.D, Mosaic pavement, Triumph of Dionysus, detail, Villa Paphos, Cyprus A Classical continuance of over six centuries, though the power-center has shifted to Rome. How heavy now, in this 3rd century A.D. mosaic pavement from a Cyprian villa, the mystery of Dionysus has become. As Yeats writes: "In pity for man's darkening thought/ He walked that room and issued thence/ In Galilean turbulence …" 16) Roman Christian, 1st half of 4th cent. A.D., Daniel in the Lion's Den, mosaic detail, Mausoleum of Centcelles, near Tarragona, Spain No wonder if in the same century, or the early fourth — though our example is from Tarragon, across the Mediterranean — mosaics would shift from villa leopards of the wine god to mausoleum lions of Daniel's Bible victory. 17) Danubian, c. 5500 B.C., Fish-mouth man, Iron Gate, Yugoslavia If we range now, expanding the cut explored in Cyprus, what lies at the base, from China and India to Europe, is the neolithic idol — 6th millenium B.C., from the Iron June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Gates of the Danube, whence the Indo-Europeans would flood the South, this so-called "Fish-mouth man," weightiest of all. 18) Peloponnesian, 6th millenium B.C., female idol, National Museum, Athens Beside it at the same time, but from Greece, the Peloponnese, a female form is a miracle of grace; as if dawn clarity was already welling from what would become Classic soil. Without the implied world community, and kindling within it, an Aegean light, there could have been no Alexandrian dream — much less the astonishing fact. 19) Mesopotamia (Susa), end of 4th millenium B.C., Vase with saluki hounds, Louvre, Paris Three pots will display at a glance both the wide-spread common ground. and the lyrical birth of the proto-Greek: here, end of the fourth millenium, from Mesopotamia, a vase with stylized natural forms, at the top, cranes, then saluki hounds, below, the ibex, huge-horned; 20) Chinese, 3rd millenium, B.C., Jar with spiral design, Museum of Eastern Art, Oxford, England Chinese, third millenium, the abstract spiral of sea and growth already hinting, in this infolding, at Yin-Yang; 21) Minoan, c. 1800 B.C., Spouted Pithos from the old Palace of Phaistos from Crete, early second millenium, this Minoan refinement and delight, sprung from the world base, like Aphrodite, ocean-born. 22) Egypt, Dynasty III, c. 2660-50 B.C., Statue of King Zoser, detail, Egyptian Museum, Cairo But a thousand years before Minos' Palace, with the beginning of Aegean traffic in the bronze of the new age, and in complementarity with the stupendous rise of Old Kingdom Egypt (here King Zoser, Third Dynasty — time also of that idol from Cyprus, the seated figure we saw in the shape of a cross), June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 6 �C.G. Bell 23) Symbolic History Cycladic, 2800-2200 B.C., from Keros, Harp Player, National Musuem, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.) Cycladic carvings in crystalline marble (this luminous Harp Player in the Athens Museum), refine something so free and fresh, so Apollonian, we almost hear the Bard singing of Ilium, or Alcaeus and Sappho hymning wine and love: Deathless Aphrodite, throned in flowers, Daughter of Zeus, guileful enchantress… Fight by my shoulder. (CGB) Yet as always, cross-fertilization was required. The Hellenic could not have arisen from the Cycladic alone. 24) Egypt, Dynasty V, c. 1500 B.C., Cattle fording a canal, detail, Mastaba of Ti, Sakkara As Herodotus would discover, Egypt was for the Greeks the deepest source of gods and arts, of civilization. Fifth Dynasty tomb reliefs from 2500 B.C. already pursue the joyful representation of natural forms — this painted relief of cattle fording a stream, from Sakkara, where the zig-zag overlay at the base marvellously suggests the flow of water. 25) 25a) Hellenistic (Attic), c. 150 B.C., Horse found off Artemisium, National Museum, Athens Same, front detail (CGB '77) Though the leap from that to the Hellenistic animal, effects (as in the Alexandrian mathematics and science which culminated in Archimedes) a hyperbolic approach toward modernity. What startles in this Attic horse dredged from the sea is not simply the mastery of life-sized free-standing bronze, but that two centuries before Christ we sense the restless search and psychic liability of the later West — the calculus tug of Eudoxus' method of exhaustion. 1st 26) Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of Peace, whole, Standard of Ur, British Museum [Note: 26-29 reflect the '93 revision of the slide show; in the video, the same material is not yet so well ordered — digital now bettered] June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 7 �C.G. Bell 27) Symbolic History Sumerian, c. 1650 B.C., Face of War, Standard of Ur, British Museum, London Same, close detail 27a) Meanwhile, from the start, the whole civilized theatre was preparing, by a multiple first thrust, for the empires Alexander would assume. There the Greek would not be the only rebel scion of Egypt: how many of the prohibitions and purifications Herodotus noted in Thebes, surface also in Leviticus? And where are we headed, as early as the Pyramids, in the art of Mesopotamia? — this inlaid "Standard of Ur." That the two faces are paired, this a scene of battle, 2nd 26) 2nd 26a) 2nd 26b) 2nd 26c) Peace, close detail Mycenæan, 15th cent. B.C., Gold cups, National Museum, Athens Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., fresco, from Akrotiri on Thera or Santorin Michelangelo, c. 1525-34, Medici Tombs, San Lorenzo, Florence the other a victory feast, might point to the Vaphio cups, Cretan or Mycenæan, opposed reliefs of bulls wild and tame; or the discovered Theran fresco of an expedition, where some see a contrast of Peace and War. In Homer, there is the Shield of Achilles, with its alternate cities of law and marriage, of siege and death; or, in the classically inspired West, Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, with the "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" of Milton. a2nd 27) 2nd 27) 28) 29) Double: Standard of Ur, details of Peace and War Same, wider detail from War Same, wider detail from Peace Same, Double: more embracing sections of Peace and War Music: Hurrian Cult Song, c. 1400 B.C., Ugarit Cuneiform Tablet, University of California But what the "Standard of Ur" brings to mind is not that Greek tradition, but the faithchronicles of the Chosen People — their songs of war and victory, as Miriam's "Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath truimphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea." Yet the oldest Biblical texts, like this Ugarit hymn, hopefuly reconstructed from cuneiform, are dated a thousand years after that Ur of the Chaldees from which Abraham, father of Israel, is said to have migrated. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Creation in Genesis stands in some relation to that of the Babylonian fragments, with its first stirring on the waters, its confusion and conflict of gods, revolt of Darkness, viper, and dragon. a30) 30) 30a) Mesopotamian, c. 2100 B.C., from Girsu (or Lagash?), terra cotta head of a divinity, Louvre, Paris Ur, Dynasty III, c. 2500 B.C., Ram caught in a thicket, British Museum, London Same, detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Biblical Flood, with Noah's Ark, owes more to the account preserved in the British Museum tablets from 3000 or so B.C. But what the Hebrew successors of old Sumer have effected, after Egyptian exile, in scriptures actually contemporary, from Achaian epoi down, with Greece, is the transformation of a capricious polytheism to the postIkhnaton unity, moral justice, ultimately the mercy of Jahwe. So the Ram caught in the flowering thicket, of gilded wood and polychrome, also from Ur about 2500 B.C., might be waiting, vicarious averter of the sacrifice of Isaac, when God tempted Abraham: (Genesis 22) And Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called … "Lay not thine hand upon the Lad … And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. 31) Indus Valley, c. 3rd millenium B.C., Priest-God-King from Mohenjo-Daro; + V detail; also dig. Music: Hurrian cult song, continued, lyre That ancestor civilization of the third millenium had also its Indus Valley cognate, at the limit of the vast area Alexander would march over and his Seleucid successors would Hellenize. And here too the cult affinities (as in this Priest-God-King from Mohenjo-Daro) are with what, later, in the god-seeking Semitic east, would both absorb and be polarized against the philosophy and art of the Greeks. Disheartening that for all that pre-Hellenic fabric, stretching from Egypt and the Aegean, around the Fertile Crescent to Persia, Bactria, India — and over the thousand years from these beginnings, a32) 32) Egyptian New Kingdom, Dynasty XVIII, 1422-11 B.C., Tuthmosis IV, Tomb of Djeser-ka-re-seneb, Woman at her toilet, #38, Necropolis, Thebes Same, Tomb of Nakht, Women Musicians, #52, Necropolis, Thebes 32a) 32b) Same, Tomb of Menna, #69, Necropolis, Thebes Detail of slide 32 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History through the tomb-paintings of New Kingdom Thebes — we have only one cult song from Canaanite Ugarit on the coast of Syria, time of Ikhnaton, a conjectural harmony for voice and lyre. What different music these houris of the Nile would have sounded. (close Hurrian song) Amid such luxuries the Israelites were slaves. We think of the oriental love poems associated in the Bible with the amorous yoke of Solomon: "ships of Tarshish bringing gold and silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks": Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine … I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. … A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts… Yet Solomon lived five-hundred years after the scribe of this 18th Dynasty tomb; 33) Græco-Roman from Pompeii, c. 30 B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus. Naz., Naples; first, video detail; so dig. and the canticles named for him are commonly assigned to the third century B.C., when the theocratic pocket of old Judah was invaded from all sides by the Hellenism of Alexandria, the new sensuality of carving and fresco, of which a final luminous flourish would be preserved in Pompeii. What Greek bloom has touched the interpreted God-love of the Song of Songs? Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb; honey and milk are under thy tongue. … Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. 34) 34a) Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., Youth with Mackerel, National Museum, Athens Minoan from Knossos, c. 1500 B.C., Fresco of bull-jumping acrobatics, Herakleion Museum, Crete Meanwhile the culture which would conquer Israel and be conquered by it from within had come to its first Aegean birth — a keenness to which the second, and Homeric, would return. The frescoes of maritime Thera, buried under volcanic ash about 1500 B.C., the bullfights and natural forms of Crete (from the time of New Kingdom June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Egypt) open, in cyclical history of soul, the glad possibility of a late-period cultivation of sensuous yet airy delight — like Impressionist verve in a Europe of Symbolist pain. 35) Egyptian, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1480 B.C., Temple for Queen Hatschepsut, near Thebes That whole horizon of Aegean pleasure, with the luxury of musical houris, in her Nile temple the Amon-begetting of Queen Hatshepsut, Ahmes awoke at the perfume of the god and laughed in the face of his majesty — whatever Herodotus tallies in the Greek debt to Egypt, 36) Egypt, New Emp. Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton, Colossal Head, Egyptian Museum, Cairo pales under the one-god stare of Ikhnaton (about two centuries before the Trojan War). What that enforces is the other debt, of Hebrew prophecy: Amos, by 750: Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning … The Lord is his name … Isaiah was not much later, though the writing continued over centuries — preparing for a saviour child: "Behold a virgin shall conceive" … "unto us a son is given" … "a man of sorrows … wounded for our transgressions …" 37) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1304-1237 B.C., War relief of Rameses II, Rock Temple, Abu Simbel; + V detail (not dig.) But the New Kingdom extravagances of soul and flesh rested on imperial war, and here too Rameses II smiting his enemies in the rock temple of Abu Simbel is more tied to the oldest "Wars of the Lord" stratum of the Bible — the Ark Song of Moses: Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee; Deborah's Song in Judges: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead — a38) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, 1301-1235, Columned Hall, Great Temple of Amon, Karnak 38) Another view of the same Since ancient times the forest of carved columns in the Great Hall of Karnak near Thebes has been called one of the Wonders of the World. It was built over dynasties, but centrally during, and to commemorate Rameses II's wars with the Hittites, who were fanning out from the highlands of Turkey. Yet this pillared hall marks the crisis of Egyptian conquest and temple construction. The "eternal treaty" of 1820, here inscribed, set Egypt on the long decline before Assyria. What else would have permitted the Exodus of the Jews or their settlement in the Promised Land? 39) Hittite, 14th cent. B.C., Lion Gate, detail, wall of Hattusas, central Turkey For the Hittites, too, it was the turning-point toward the 1200 B.C. overthrow. Though even at their prime (this 14th century Lion Gate in the four-mile wall of Hattusas) they exhibit, after the civilizing Old Kingdoms, the primitive force of imperial legatees, fortified against troubles to ensue. a40) b40) 40) Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., The Lion Gate Mycenæan, c. 1200 B.C., Warrior Krater, National Museum, Athens Same, slide detail of Warriors (video takes detail from b40) The 1500 B.C. explosion had wrecked Santorin. The accompanying quake and tidal wave must have shaken naval Crete. Mainland Mycenae — with its own Lion Gate and Cyclopean ramparts, or this Krater of marching Warriors — also suggests the heavier fate of the Successor Power, a power soon to spend itself in the Trojan Wars and homecoming disasters which would feed tragic myth. From these rowed myrmidons of 1200 B.C., 41) 41a) 41b) Anatolia, c. 800 B.C., Terra cotta relief of Phrygian soldiers, Ankara Hittite, c. 1250 B.C., Frieze of Warrior Gods, Yazilikaya, Anatolia Phrygian soldier, detail of 41 June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to these of Asia Minor four centuries later, the power collapse and folk-wanderings invite a range of ephemeral shifting kingdoms. Between the Hittite and Egyptian retreat and the more savage reversion of Assyrian rise (about 900), Phoenicians and Philistines, Ammonites and Moabites strove; even Israel established the archetypal Kingdom of David, with Solomon's palace and temple, as if to imitate on their own the monuments they had slaved to build under Rameses II. While to the north, Ionians, Lydians, Phrygians jockeyed with more barbaric Scythians in the shiftings Herodotus resumes. a42) 42) 42a) 42b) Assyrian (Nimrud), 883-859 B.C., Statue of Assurnasirpal II, British Museum, London Assyrian relief, 7th cent. B.C., Sacking a city, British Museum, London Assyrian, 668-630 B.C., Sennacherib's Palace (Assurbanipal), Conquest of Elam, detail, British Museum, London Same, another detail, Defeated Elamites prostrate themselves "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" … "I slaughtered them," said Ashur-nasir-pal (ninth century), "With their blood I dyed the mountains red like wool … Their young men and their maidens I burned in the fire" And (as in this 7th century Assyrian relief) "I carried off their spoil and their possessions. The heads of their warriors I cut off, and I formed them into a pillar over against their city." In 854 B.C. his son Shalmaneser III smote the Aramæans of Damascus and of Hamath, allied with Ahab of Israel, who took the field (Assyrian record says) with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 men. The already divided Jewish kingdoms of North and South were bled, subdued, dismembered. 43) 43a) Assyrian relief, c. 700 B.C.(?), Elamites taken into captivity, Louvre, Paris Babylon, early 6th cent. B.C., Reconstruction of Ishtar Gate, detail, Museum, Berlin When Sennacherib assaulted Judah about 700 B.C. (time of this relief of Elamites led into slavery), he boasted of taking 200,000 prisoners. Though the great symbolic bondage for the Jews, that punishment of which Isaiah warns, did not stem from Assyria, but from the brief Chaldean empire of Neo-Babylon, its great city called the most glorious of the ancient world. (Psalm 137): June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion … a44) 44) Persian, 5th cent., Ruins of Persepolis, column, and Staircase of Apadana Persian, 522 B.C., Darius I as Gilgamesh, Great Palace, Persepolis Then the Persians captured Babylon, 539 B.C. and Cyrus freed the Jews and restored the temple of Jerusalem. "Jahweh's annointed" Isaiah calls him. While Herodotus, from the other side, heard Greek tidings: that Cyrus had been exposed as a child, like Oedipus, for an oracle; and that Haparchus, his champion, had been fed his own children, like Thyestes. Here, in the ruins Alexander would make of Persepolis, Darius I, who also favored the Hebrews and attacked the Greeks, fights a lion monster as Gilgamesh, Asian Hercules and harrower of hell — cover for the horse-trickery that bungled to Marathon. 45) Celtic (Halstatt), 7th cent. B.C., Grave cult wagon from Strettweg; Landesmuseum, Graz The Persians, in passing, had subdued Thrace and Macedon. But north and west lay the Indo-European pool of past and future invasions — this Celtic cult wagon, of the 7th century B.C., a bronze death goddess and her retinue. Had not Indics, Hittites, Persians, Lydians, Lycians, Phrygians, Greeks, Umbrians, Latins, poured down from that death-and-life source? But between that Austria 46) 46a) 46b) 46c) Ionic, 7th cent. B.C., Gift of Naxos to the Sanctuary of Delos, Terrace of Lions (CGB '79) Same, detail of a lion (CGB '79) Attic, c. 600 B.C., Kouros, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '79) Post Cycladic, 625-20 B.C., Melian or Parian(?), Amphora found in Delos, Apollo drawn by winged horses, National Museum, Athens and its Aegean radiant, the day-spring had occurred, which the island of Delos would commemorate, as in this 7th century B.C. Terrace of Lions, facing the sacred lake and the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History palm tree where the golden-haired Apollo, with Artemis, was born, as in the Homeric Hymn: Blessed Leto, rejoice, for you bore glorious children — Apollo who shoots from afar and Artemis who loves arrows — Even in rocky Delos under the Cynthian Hill, Near to a palm-tree that stood beside the waters of Inopus. In the Iliad, no calm Apollonian: (Lattimore) Lord of the silver bow who set your power about Chryse and Killa the sacrosanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos … . Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver. 47) 47a) 47b) Attic, about 530 B.C., Black-figured chalice of Exekias, Dionysus' Sea Voyage, Munich Same, upper detail Same, lower detail As charged as the later child of the Thunderer — this 6th century bowl of Exekias, with the "Homeric" hymn: I bring to mind Dionysos, son of burning Semele, On a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, A stripling with dark eyes, long hair and purple robe. Tyrsenian pirates seized him, hurried to their doom. Wind filled the sail, the crew hauled tight on either side. Strange sights came upon them: sweet and fragrant wine Filled the ship's black hull; ivy twined the mast; A vine with clustered grapes spread out along the yard; The god from the bow scowled and roared as a lion; The sailors leapt as one into the foam-bright sea, Changed to dolphins … (CGB, using Loeb) As Ovid, six centuries later (?) details: All — back arched and body blackened, flippered Hands, legs gone to torso, crescent tailed — Dove and leapt in spray, spouting water. (CGB) 48) Egypt, 2510 B.C., King Mycerinus and his Queen, Fine Arts, Boston June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Historically, it was from late Egypt that Greece must have learned; but what it reenacts is the spirit of the beginning. One would be hard-pressed to answer where art has scaled such an Olympus as the Homeric poems — whether in the dawn-power of 4th Dynasty Egypt (Mycerinus with his Queen, 1200 years before the Trojan War), 49) 49a) 49b) 49c) Attic "Kroisos," c. 525 B.C., Funerary Kouros, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, mid-front, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Another view of 49, "Kroisos" (CGB '77) Attic, 510-500 B.C., Hermes, the Cecropides, and boy Erichthonius, Acropolis Museum, Athens or in those god-souled and muscled Kouroi of the 6th century Attic, at least two centuries after Homer, though about the time the Athenian text of his poems was prepared. If what we seek is the Homeric cognate, it must appear where the man-god, however inspired from Egypt and Asia, strips to the canons of human excellence, of Aretê. At about the same time David, whom the Renaissance would remake after the Greek model, was humanized by the Deuteronomist, how differently: "a youth, ruddy, and of fair countenance," facing Goliath: Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied… — To be met thereafter by the women dancing like Bacchantes to tabrets and song: "Saul has slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands." a50) 50) Ionian relief, c. 525 B.C., North Frieze, Siphnian Treas., Mus. Delphi (CGB '77); + dig. detail: lion Ionian, c. 525 B.C., Siphnian Treasury Frieze, Gigantomachy, another detail, Museum, Delphi (v + dig. first, closer detail) As when a lion, murderous, springs among the cattle … And their flanks heave with terror; even so the Achaians Scattered in panic before Hector and Zeus, the great father. (Iliad, XV, 630 ff, Lattimore) As when a ravening fire breaks out deep in a bushy wood… June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So Atreus' son, Agamemnon, roared through the ranks Of the Trojans in flight… (Iliad, XI, 155 ff, Lattimore) How high Homeric metaphor, like this Archaic freize (of the Syphnian Treasury at Delphi) lifts the earth-misery of town-destroying man: Godlike Achilles, lamented by his immortal mother: To a bad destiny I bore you in my chambers … your life must be brief and bitter beyond all men's. (Lattimore) Joshua's attack on Jericho, events also of around 1200 told centuries after, shuns that tragic detachment of the Olympian: at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. And the city shall be accursed … and all that are therein … only Rahab the harlot shall live … Because she hid the messengers that we sent … So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets, and … the wall fell down flat… 51) Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Odysseus and the Cyclops' Ram (gilded bronze), Museum, Delphi; + V detail From the other, the homecoming myth of Odysseus, this escape from the cave, tied to the Cyclops' ram — how remote the holiness of Israel: Joseph, with his cloak of many colors, his bondage, fortune, and delivery, a chronicled exemplum of the Chosen: be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life… As God reveals to Jacob: fear not to go down into Egypt: for I will there make of thee a great nation… Yet those radical opposites, to blend in the Alexandrian melt, must have precipitated together from one Egyptian, near-Eastern and Aegean matrix — the daughter Agamemnon sacrificed for war, Iphigenia, "strong born," of the same name with that Yepthe-genia sacrificed in Judges, the Daughter of Jeptha, "mighty man of valour." June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 18 �C.G. Bell 52) 52a) 52b) Symbolic History Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giants, from Hecatompedon, old Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77) Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77) Same, detail of Giant (CGB '77) Out of Greek myth comes also tragedy, that Dionysian-Apollonian knot of divine terror and reconciliation which Greek art suggests in its Gigantomachias — this from the sacred Pediment of the Hecatomb temple on the Pisistratid Acropolis — the Battle of Athena with the giants — on the line that leads to the cry of Oedipus, which we, no more than Yeats, can translate: ιου, ιου; τα παντ' αν εξηκοι σαφη… Ω φως, τελευταιον σε προσβλεπσαιµι νυν O! O! All brought to pass! All truth! … Light, I look my last upon you, Found in bloodshed, birth and marriage all accursed. (CGB) How much more faith has given in the translation of Hebrew pain: Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived… a53) 53) 53a) Parthenon, 447-32 B.C., (from the Propylean) Athens (CGB '77) Modern realization of the interior of Phidias' 447-432 B.C. Parthenon Greek (post-Phidian), c. 340 B.C., Head of Zeus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston A clue to some synoptic harmony of the ancient world that the Book of Job, dramatizing Jeremiah's debate with God's justice: "wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" (a legend coming into the Bible perhaps from Babylon), seems to share the 5th century with the Athenian climax of the same tragic inquiry — its cognate in art the temple celebration of dangerous yet healing divinity: this reconstructed Parthenon Athena, shielded and shod with myths of battle, and on the pedestal, Pandora tempted to the God-given box of grief for man. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind and said: Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee… Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? … He is a king over all the children of pride. But "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning"; and the same blind Oedipus of whom the chorus had said: ιω γενεαι βροτων… O generations of men, how I count you equal with those who live not at all! walked at Colonus, into immortal Light. 54) 54a) Hellenistic (Pergamum), 180-160 B.C., Battle of Athena and the Giant Alcyoneus, with Gê and Nikê, Staat. Mus., Berlin Same, detail left That Typhœan wrestling darkens from the 6th century through the Periclean 5th to the Hellenistic pride of this Pergamum. What if Attic enlightenment idealizes its Olympians against the Apollyon-winged and serpent-wreathed pathos of nature's giants? Are not all whelmed in weightier struggle — as when Lucretius espouses Promethean Epicurus against these very gods? When human life lay, crushed by religion, grovelling on the ground… a man of Greece first dared… unbar the gates of nature… for each thing define its deep-set boundary mark. …Religion trampled in turn, we, by his victory are exalted to the stars. a55) b55) 55) Selinunt, 7th-5th cent. B.C., Ruins of Temples E, F, &G, Sicily Sicilian Greek, c. 480 B.C., Giant Atlas from Zeus-Temple, Agrigente, Sicily Same, another view (video also adds a detail of b55) Greek measure, with its warnings against hybris, cannot hide the risk of Greek daring. When we stand among the ruins of the mightiest temples at Selinunt, or here at Agrigento, where Atlas, one of the Giants who supported the great entablature, was thrown by earthquake, we gauge, through Olympian worship, the deeper than Oriental excess — as Telemon Ajax, in The Iliad, contends with the gods. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nor can the Jehovah submission of Jerusalem obscure at the other center the prophetic assumption of what, through the visions of Isaiah (28:1) — "The Lord … shall punish … leviathan, that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea" — through Daniel's great Image of Man, Ezekiel's Beasts and the Valley of Dry Bones, was working toward Christian Revelation — a56) 56) Greek, 6th cent. B.C. to 132 A.D., Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens (CGB '77); video: upper detail only Same, another view (CGB '77); video: lower detail only as when the “Dies Irae” and the City of God first loom in Zephaniah (626 B.C. and after): The great day of the Lord is near … a day of wrath … a day of waste and desolation … of clouds and thick darkness. … Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice … O daughter of Jerusalem … In Athens the gigantism overweens in the Olympieion under the Acropolis (here its southwest corner, with a human figure). We tend to blame this disproportion on Rome, since the temple was restored and finished by Hadrian. But the Seleucid Antiochus had poured vast sums into a Hellenistic reconstruction, following the ground plan (though not the Ionic order) of a temple begun by Pisistratus, 6th century B.C. tyrant of Athens, under whom the Homeric poems were also said to have been ordered. a57) 57) Greek, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-32 B.C., Horsemen, Frieze, Parthenon (CGB '77); + V detail (shown first) The Parthenon, of half the size, is both the peak of affirming dignity, and (like the Periclean Funeral Oration and the Disaster Oration) the turning point to an almost sighing caress. In the most beautiful of the Horsemen, as he looks behind him, archaic and early classical dream toward the elegiac sweetness of Praxitiles — as if this ripeness of face, this perfect fall of robe, enacted at once both Sophocles and Euripides. The book of Ruth is of the time: Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History people shall be my people, and thy God my God. … The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. But where the acme of the prophetic arrow? a58) 58) 59) Double of the two slides to follow Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê 674, Acropolis Museum, Athens Praxitilean, c. 300 B.C., Head of a Girl, from Chios, Fine Arts Museum, Boston What the Parthenon straddled was the watershed between Archaic and Hellenistic personality — that outward and inward softening, which no words need describe. But if words were required, the maturation of consciousness would take us from Sappho's sharp mystery (though blurred in Leonard's translation): Death shall be death forever unto thee, Lady, with no remembrance of thy name Then or thereafter; for thou gatherest not The roses of Pieria, loving gold Above the Muses. Even in Hades' House Wander thou shalt unmarked, flitting forlorn Among the shadowy, averted dead. to Poseidippus' moody 2nd century B.C. poem about Sappho, and her brother Charaxus' passion for Doricha, in Egypt (here Lucas' Tennysonian shades not inappropriate): Long since your bones have mouldered; long Doricha, the binding Of your curls, long all the fragrance from your robe has passed away, That you flung round fair Charaxus and caught him in its winding And breast to breast lay drinking, until the dawn was grey. But the white page of Sappho lives on and lives for ever, Proclaiming your name also, your name thrice-blest, the while That Naucratis shall remember, while ships shall breast her river, Standing in from seaward to the long lagoons of Nile. 60) Attic (after Calamis?), c. 400 B.C., Head of Apollo, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; also dig. Music: June 1996 Euripides fragment again, 7th phrase to close The Alexandrian Melt 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Louvre Apollo, that 400 post-Phidian and Euripidean hunger invites not only the rise of Macedon, but, in the polarization of the ancient world, the seed of another assurance. For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. But for the flooding in of Habakkuk's tide, the human — here as in the Platonic dialogue still rich with sensuous person and residual delight — must be hollowed by centuries of Alexandrian ease and Roman rule. 61) Attic, early 4th cent., B.C., Grave stele, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Yet the soulful turn had been taken. Fourth-century Attic tombs assume the mood which in the Greek Anthology pervades the late Classical. Plato voiced it in the epitaph Shelley would translate as "Morning and Evening Star": Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled; Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendor to the dead. 62) Greek, c. 335 B.C., Fresco of a woman, Vergina Tombs, Macedon (dig. + detail) We pick it up from the Macedonian graves supposedly of Philip and his family, this lately discovered fresco of Ceres (or, of the woman mourned), the earliest preserved example of Greek painting. It was also in Macedon that Euripides died, having written Iphigenia in Aulis — this chorus translated by H.D.: But still we lament our state, The desert of our wide courts, Even if there is no truth In the legends cut on ivory Nor in the poets Nor the songs. Thus every fresh vigor as it takes up Greek rule, must take up the brooding of late Greek consciousness. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 23 �C.G. Bell 63) Symbolic History Græco-Scythian, early 4th cent. B.C., Warriors from a gold comb, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V. detail (also dig.) There will be flashes of life-renewal, as Greek skills pour to the barbarian tribes (here the craft of the goldsmith adapted to the Scythian north of Thrace); but like the early art of Rome, it is postconscious. Whereas the Celts of the 7th century funeral car had not entered Zechariah's Judgment ground of sophistic soul: In that day, saith the Lord, I will smite every horse with astonishment, and his rider with madness … . 64) Attic, 320-310, Grave stele of Aristonautes, Warrior, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail (also dig.) As the pre-Roman force of this Attic soldier's tomb (c. 320 B.C.) may remind us, Greek arms were never more distinguished. The century opened with the Anabasis of Xenophon and his 12,000 stranded mercenaries, on the march through the whole of Persia to the sea — "Thalassa!" — "to show the Hellenes they could bring their paupers over here and make them rich." By 370 Epaminondas of Thebes had invented the phalanx of fifty shields deep which Philip II of Macedon and Alexander would apply. The Greek polis, however, had lost the helm; and without knowing it, all those warring souls were swept in the vortex of Daniel's four kingdoms yielding to the vision of the ram thrown down by the goat: The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough he-goat is the king of Graecia, and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king (Alexander). 65) Greek (Macedon), c. 335 B.C., Ivory head (Philip II?) from Vergina Tombs, Macedon; + V detail; not dig. In this ivory head, presumably of Philip with his blinded eye, we read the halfcynical spread of shrewd Attic enlightenment among the northern Greeks. Philip had been born the year the Spartans took the citadel of Thebes by treachery; as a Theban hostage he had watched the tricky bickering of Hellas. His kingship saw the Phocians mint the treasures of Delphi for their war. His death would touch off the sort of motherplotting so rife in later Rome (his son by Cleopatra murdered in her lap and she forced to hang herself). June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 24 �C.G. Bell 66) Symbolic History Later replica of Greek (Cresilas), 440-430 B.C., Bust of Pericles, British Museum, London Far from the Athenian ideal of Pericles, the high truth of his words: Our constitution … favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy … the laws … afford equal justice to all … in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation … although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflexion … 67) Attic (Leochares), c. 340-330 B.C., Portrait of the young Alexander, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; so dig. Before this Leochares Alexander we might ask if Olympia had yielded herself indeed to Homeric Zeus as serpent. Hegel: The Greek life is a truly youthful achievement. Achilles, the ideal youth of poetry, commenced it; Alexander the Great, the ideal youth of reality, concluded it… the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced… Both appear in contest with Asia … But that absorbed Greek rapture goes flat in the apocryphal First Book of Maccabees: Alexander… went through to the ends of the earth and took spoils of many nations… whereupon he was exalted, and his heart was lifted up… And after these things he fell sick… and parted his kingdom… and then died… and evils were multiplied in the earth… 68) 68a) Roman copy from Lysippos, 330-325 B.C., Azara Herm of Alexander, Louvre, Paris Same, detail This portrait after Lysippos of Alexander, older and sadder, may admit more of the mission Plutarch was to summarize: ("Fortunes of Alexander," Loeb) He believed he came as a heaven-sent governor… for the whole world… he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great loving-cup, as it were, men's lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life. He bade them consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth… June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How desperately Hegelian the self-willed means. Barr: Part of the myth he had… created before this year of 323 was that of blood and agonizing death, of depopulation, of drunken orgy and barbarous vandalism, of an insane striving for world conquest, and above all of the paranoiac… hybris of a man determined to be God. Though the last irony is of a self-mocking Achilles — that he foresaw, on his death, a great funeral contest. 69) Muslim (Shiraz), 1410-11, Iskander and the Water Nymphs, MS Addit. 27261 f 286, British Museum, London; + V & dig. detail One would think the facts of Alexander marvel enough: his leaping into an Indian city and fighting on, almost mortally wounded; his pouring out a helmet of water in the Gedrosian desert, unwilling to drink before his thirsting men. Yet by the 2nd century A.D., history, forgery, and folk myths had fused in the Romance of Alexander, to spread through twelve centuries and from India to the Atlantic. Here (above) as Iskander, crowned Muslim, he has crossed the Eastern Sea and come to a lake on an island, where with a companion he spies on the water nymphs at play. It was a conquest beyond his dreams. 70) Chinese (from Chin-tsun), Lo-yang, Honan, 4th-3rd cent. B.C., Mirror with gold and silver inlay of a hunting scene History is the myth of the actual. What East-West links are implied by hunts, in bronze enchased with gold and silver, from Chinese Honan, about the time of Alexander, when Grecian goldsmiths were bringing realism to such Scythian scenes, we can only guess. 71) Chinese (or Alexandrian) 2nd c. B.C. - 1st cent. A.D. (?), Painted glass cup from Begram, Musée. Guimet, Paris; + V & dig. detail But in two centuries the refined arts of Alexandria had spread and seeded their like along the silk route, through Bactria and Kabul to China — witness this vase of Greek God-rapes, Europa, this Leda, found in Begram, Afghanistan, and published as both Hellenistic and Oriental. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 26 �C.G. Bell 72) Symbolic History Lucanian Greek, S. Italy, c. 380 B.C., Dolon Painter, Calyx Crater, detail, Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes, British Museum, London Greek sculpture seems mostly epic or tragic. But vase painting, from the 5th century on (here about 380, Dolon ambushed by Odysseus and Diomedes) can marvellously catch the grotesque — as from Aristophanes: Dionysus and his servant in the Underworld: Slave! take up your load again!/ (Servant): Before having laid it down?… Hire one of the dead, who is going to Hades… /(Dionysus): Hi… you dead fellow there! Will you carry a package to Pluto for me?/ Is it very heavy? — You will pay me two drachmae./ Two dear!… Here are nine obols./ (Dead Man): I'd sooner go back to earth… a73) 73) China, Sung; Chou Chi-ch'ang, 1184, Arhats bestowing alms on beggars, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Same, closer detail Where is that vase-finesse of caricature line most pursued? It would be ridiculous to look for Greek influence in a Chinese silk painting more than a thousand years later; indeed the advance of international time, style, consciousness, tells in every wrinkle and tatter of this Sung calligraph. But what lies definitively between the older Chinese and this 74) Japanese, late Jomon, 4th cent. B.C. (?), Clay figurine from Iwatsuki, Nakazawa Collection, Tokyo is the penetration of the Orient by the Hellenistic seated on Buddhism. What else effected the upheaval between the clay figurines of B.C. Japan 75) Asuka, 552-645 A.D., Bodhisattva, National Museum, Tokyo; + V. detail and the 6th-century arrival (here in bronze) of the blessing Boddhisattvas? Even Alexander might have been startled by the magnitude of that oblique conquest. But the Japanese refinement June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 27 �C.G. Bell 76) Symbolic History China, Northern Wei Dynasty, 465-75 A.D., Sandstone Buddha, Shansi, China came from China — this smiling Buddha of warm rose sandstone at least a century earlier; the Chinese 77) Indian, Gandhara, 2nd-3rd cent. A.D., Gray schist Buddha, British Museum, London came from India — this Gandharan Buddha from the 2nd or 3rd century, the trading peak of the Antonine Empire, and it testifies in the curves of lip and hair, the plane of forehead continued to the nose, to the Alexandrian heritage; while these heavy eyes have translated into nirvana the moody search of late Græco-Rome. 78) Alexandrian Bronze, c. 1st cent. B.C., Perfume vase, head of Negro youth, British Museum, London Although Alexander was concerned about the source of the Nile, he pursued it only in thought. Yet here, too, the civilization which bore his name reached out through centuries to set up realms of thought of which he was hardly aware. It seems pure accident when Hellenistic bronzes of Negro youths (this head as perfume jar) 79) African, Benin, S. Nigeria, 15th-16th cent., Head of a queen mother, bronze, British Museum, London find Nigerian cognates, up to 15 centuries after, in Ife and (here) Benin. But surely the metallurgic mystery had spread from Egypt and the upper Nile through Meroe and the Berber North, to Ghana, Mali, and the lower Niger. The Yoruba are migrants from the north and east, ultimately from the outreach of Alexandria. 80) Acropolis of Athens, 5th cent. B.C. and ff., from Philopapou Hill (CGB '77); + V detail Every family tree has its own center, from which it expands back in geometric progression to the roots of all ancestors, and forward to the limbs and branches of all heirs. Until Paul preached in the Areopagus, Athens was Hellenistic center. Behind lie the springs of Celtic North, Crete, Asia, Egypt; before, the vast acculturations under Macedon and Rome. Even here, below the Parthenon, those tiered arcades — of the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Theater of Herodes Atticus and the Stoa of Eumenes — hem the Periclean with GræcoRoman mass. 81) Attic, 5th and 4th cent. B.C., Theatre of Dionysos, south of Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77); + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail In that same complex under the Acropolis the theater of Dionysus, its wooden benches replaced (in Alexander's time) with stone, housed for that "School of Hellas" the heart of ritual drama revealed in Aeschylus' Suppliants: O Land of Hills, of all-just veneration, What must we suffer? ιω γα βουνι, πανδικον σεβας, τι πεισοµεσθα; A veneration which, from this small center, still spreads over the world. 82) V82a) Roman, Istrian, 1st-2nd cent. A.D., Vespasian's Arena, detail, Pula (CGB '77) Same, a wider view (CGB '77) [video file]; not for dig. And when Rome flung its arches and vaults around the Mediterranean (here in Dalmatian Istria — like the Colosseum itself, and built under the same Vespasian), everywhere in that pomp 83) 83a) Roman, 484 B.C., 117 B.C., rebuilt by Tiberius 6 A.D., Temple of Castor, Rome Roman Forum, B.C. to 4th cent. A.D. (CGB '48; copy of Rome 8) rose the temple reminders of what was deeply bedded in Greece — as these Corinthian columns of the Temple of Castor in Rome, reach back, from Tiberius' 6 A.D. rebuilding — through the 117 B.C. construction, to the original, 484 B.C., in the great century of Hellas. It was that community which prepared, through the Alexandrian, for New Jerusalem. 84) Egyptian Obelish, set up 10 B.C. by Augustus, Circus Maximus, now in the Piazza del Popolo, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail, shown first June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 29 �C.G. Bell 84a) Symbolic History Same, another view, evening silhouette (CGB '86) And as Alexander in the conscious wedding of Greece, Africa, and Asia had gone to the Oasis of Siwah in the Sahara and become the child of Ammon, whom the Greeks called Zeus — so it was in the cards that Augustus should fetch from Egypt this obelisk to be erected in the Circus Maximus (whence Sixtus V would move it to the Piazza del Populo) — symbol of the incorporation of civilized history into the world-city of Rome. 85) Alexandrian, 1st cent. B.C.-1st cent. A.D., Head of Homer, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; V: detail only For its poetic source that whole culture looked to the blind bard who sang of Ilium. Yet Homer's poems — like this imagined portrait, like all those smooth Apollos and Venuses the Renaissance would praise as Greek — must have been somehow ripened and softened by Athenian and Alexandrian editing, culminating in Aristarchus about 150 B.C. (where earlier papyri vary among themselves and from our text). 86) Greek, c. 640 B.C., Ivory "Daughters of King Proitios"(?), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; + V detail, shown first; not dig. Art, even a century after Homer (this ivory, thought of King Proitios' daughters, who boasted of their beauty and, maddened by Hera, roamed ten years lusting for men), would hardly have stirred such academic praise as The Iliad did in Joseph Andrews: agreement of action to subject… manners… diction… propriety… This is sublime! This is poetry! If for Homer, Fielding could have been offered epoi of the Geometric Age, would "propriety" have been his word? 87) Greek, perhaps 1st cent. A.D., style of 500 B.C., bronze, Apollo of Piombino, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; not dig. In the bronze Apollo of Piombino, such clean archaizing, with imperial sensuousness, had led to datings from about 500 to the 1st century B.C. Now coins discovered in the core seem to prove it later still (despite the Dorian inscription on the foot), a pastiche from the 1st century after Christ. Was Homer somehow refined for his civilized role? June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 30 �C.G. Bell 88) Symbolic History Double: Hellenistic, 3rd cent. in Roman copies: [A] Sophocles, Lateran, and [B] Demosthenes (from Polyeuctus bronze), Vatican, Rome; + V detail of the pair; so dig., no singles In the columned agorae of the Hellenistic cities, from Athens to Pergamum, Alexandria to Rome, the cultural heroes took their places with the gods: here Sophocles and Demosthenes, now in the Lateran and Vatican — the Periclean poet (two centuries later) asserting Athens proud and free; Demosthenes, his Philippic struggle for a freedom past. Though both, for Rome, enforced the civic claim: Virgil to shape a poem of such command; Cicero to sound high-minded rhetoric against a foregone loss. 89) Hellenistic copy, 1st cent. B.C.(?) from 4th cent. original, Bust of Euripides, National Museum, Athens Among these defenders of the old, the new men of 400 B.C. appeared: Thucydides, realist historian; Democritus, Atomic inquirer; old Oligarch Aristophanes, mocking his own values; this tragedian of disillusion, Euripides, to ride the tide of a more broken age. a90) 90) Hellenistic, 3rd-2nd cent. B.C.(?), Portrait of Socrates, British Museum, London [red background]; video: detail only Same, another view (black and white); dig. to detail of a90 Though the man who cut the deepest swath of search ("wisest and justest and best") was the one most driven to internalize the laws: "Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God before you." Symptomatic, that in so seemingly Apollonian a reasoner as Socrates, the Dionysiac strain of God-rapture should reveal itself, even to the Silenus appearance and the aulus of Marsyas — as Alcibiades says in the Symposium: My heart leaps within me more than that of any Corybantian reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear (his words). If the new Socratic love moults the wings of the soul toward the immortal possession of the good — a91) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rameses II as Osiris, Rock Temple of Gerf Housein, Nubia; + dig. detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 31 �C.G. Bell 91) Symbolic History Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Death Temple of Rameses II, Thebes had not Dionysus implied such things in his mysteries? It is Herodo–tus who traces him and his rites to the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris: for the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, excepting Isis and Osiris, the latter of whom they say is the Grecian Bacchus … I maintain that Melampus… having become acquainted with the worship of Bacchus through knowledge derived from Egypt (I believe from Cadmus, the Tyrean) introduced it into Greece. Here Rameses II, as Osiris, stands by the piers of his funerary temple, arms folded in the mummy cross with which he dies and wakes from the grave. The temple is in upper Egypt, near Homer's Thebes of the hundred gates, where through each gate two hundred fighting men come forth to war with horses and chariots — surely the name-city of Boeotian Thebes, where by the Greek myth Dionysus was born of the thunderer and burning Semele. a92) b92) 92) Leonardo da Vinci, 1511-15, Bacchus, Louvre, Paris Attic (Vulci), c. 500 B.C., Kleophrades, red fig. Amphora, Dionysus, Munich Pakistan, 3rd-2nd millenium B.C., Nude male, stone, from Harappa, National Museum, New Delhi In Euripides' Bacchae (c. 406 B.C.), the god is soft, plump, effeminate (as doomed Pentheus mocks him — or Aristophanes' Charon: "Will you have the goodness to place yourself there, pot-belly?"). But he is also the bull-horned Bromius of earthquake and violence. He has returned to Thebes from Asia, like Alexander, having planted the vine of his worship to the shores of the Indus. This fleshy nude from the Punjab might hint at that — the first art work (2000 B.C., before the Vedic entry) where incarnate stone speaks itself Indian. What tie to the Greek mysteries of tragic rebirth, the claim that Lycurgus, Sparta's first lawgiver, had gone (like Alexander later) as far as India, to talk with the naked wise men there? 93) Greek Mosaic (Macedon) c. 300 B.C., Dionysus on a panther, from Palace, Pella; + dig. upper detail June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 32 �C.G. Bell 93a) Symbolic History Hellenistic Mosaic, second half of 2nd century B.C., Dionysus riding a panther, house of the Masks, Island of Delos (video uses detail of 93) In this mosaic floor from Pella, the ecstatic god, with thyrsus, and grapegarlanded, rides the Persian Panther. So Pentheus: I am also told a foreigner has come to Thebes from Lydia, one of those charlatan magicians, with long yellow curls … flushed cheeks … the spells of Aphrodite in his eyes. Strange prototype for the other Syrian of grapes and grain. Yet the tie, in Euripides, to Christian wonder is such, that resistant Arrowsmith, in the first Chorus, for one "blessed" ("makar" in the Greek) has produced a rhythmic Beatitude of nine: Blessed are those who know the mysteries of god. Blessed… who hallows his life… Blessed… who wield … the holy wand of god… Blessed, blessed are they: Dionysus is their god! Immortal child of woman and Zeus, who also mingles West with East. a94) b94) 94) Raphael, 1513-14, Liberation of St. Peter, central prison scene, fresco, Stanza d'Eliodoro, Vatican [Slide & dig.] Same, center with left side, guards by moonlight Same, detail of center with right side, Peter's escape When his Asian Bacchantes are captured and bound, the ropes fall off and they are free; so the chains would fall from St. Peter when (as Raphael shows it in the Vatican) "a light shined in the prison … the angel raised him up … And his chains fell off from his hands." Or when Bacchus himself is imprisoned in Pentheus' stables, such earthquake and lightning tear the fabric: Dionysus: Let the earthquake come! Shatter the floor of the world. Chorus: Look, the palace is collapsing! — Dionysus is within. Adore him! as at the Gospel death of Christ, or when Paul was deliverd in Macedonia: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang … And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken … all the doors were opened, and everyone's bands were loosed. a95) 95) 95a) Double of 95 and 96: [A] Etruscan, c. 470 B.C., fresco detail, Triklinius' Grave, Tarquinia; and [B] Etruscan, 3rd-1st cent., B.C., Charon, detail, Villa Albani, Rome From a95A, Triklinius' Grave, detail Etruscan, c. 475 B.C., Music and Dance Fresco, Tomb of the Leopards, Tarquinia Also in Etruscan tomb painting, deeply impregnated by the Greek, 400 B.C. divides the old Dionysiac rapture of common myth from its sophistic cultivation — an urbane surface troubled by soul-search. The dancers and musicians of 5th-century Tarquinia (here from the grave of Triklinius, about 470) keep the rapture of Pindar, clear as the "Water is best" with which he opens the first Olympian Ode: Αριστον µεν ‘υδωρ; or the lyring and dancing of the First Pythian Ode (Lattimore): "Golden lyre, held of Apollo… the singers obey your measures." 96) Same as B of a95, Charon As the Dionysiac in Euripides' Bacchae, so the Underworld is revolutionized in Aristophanes' Frogs (about 405 B.C.). So too this later Etruscan Charon caricatures legend. (Aristophanes): you will reach the edge of the vast deep mere of Acheron… There is an ancient ferryman, Charon by name, who will pass you over in his little boat for a diobolus… you will see snakes and all sorts of fearful monsters… then a great slough with an eternal stench … 97) Etruscan, c. 4th cent. B.C. (?), Satyr from funerary urn, Orvieto; + V detail, shown first; dig. detail after What Aristophanes wrote is called "Old Comedy," but already the old Satyr grotesque grows sophistic — like this 4th-century Etruscan satyr. Thus, when Dionysus, in hell, beshat with fear, requires a sponge; (Xanthias) "O you most cowardly of gods and men!" (Dionysus) Cowardly? … I got up, and moreover I wiped myself clean." June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History New Comedy applies that personalized grotesque to commoner situations, as when the Curmudgeon in the Menander play discovered not so long ago, drives in the servant: Look out! watch it! clear out, everybody! make way! A lunatic is chasing me, he's mad!… Showers of rocks and flying clods! Help, murder! 98) Attic, early 3rd cent., Assumed portrait of Menander, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Yet the urbane gaze of Menander, through and beyond the phallic faun, sets the new comedy off from the old. Even the grotesque drops scurrility, leaves political lampoon; like classical Homer, it assumes propriety; most of all, where the comic issue in Aristophanes had been a civic god-paean and bacchanal, it takes up now what comedy has clung to ever since, the private assuagement of romantic love — such an idealization as Plato's of the Forms, Alexander's of world polis, or as this portrayed face of Menander. 99) Hellenistic, c. 325-300 B.C., Aphrodite, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston And what could compensate in Epicurean cosmopolis for the ebb of instinctive force, but the heightening (as also with our world) of conscious dream? So in Menander's play the Curmudgeon is reformed: "I recognize how wrong I was"; the true lover — "I mean to take her in marriage, with no dowry and to love her forever" — persuades the girl and even his own father; the closing song and dance is of civilized victory. In joy or grief, some romantic loading has occurred — 100) Greek (Cyprus), 4th cent. B.C., Veiled woman, head (Demeter?), Louvre, Paris; + V close detail, which the slide show replaces with 100a, Hellenistic (Pergamum), 2nd cent. B.C., Sleeping Fury, National Museum, Rome, and 100b, 1st half of 2nd cent. B.C. female head, Græco-Roman Museum, Alexandria (cf. Cycles 39); dig. follows slides show: 100a & 100b this 4th-century veiled woman from Cyprus, with Meleager, translated by Herrick: That morn which saw me made a bride, The evening witnessed that I died. Those holy lights, wherewith they guide June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Unto the bed the bashful bride, Served but as tapers, for to burn,. And light my relics to their urn. This epitaph, which here you see, Supplied the epithalamy. The mythic Pheonix Herodotus had doubted and Tacitus would almost acclaim — aspires, a soul-search, from the sensuous itself: I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh… upon the handles of the lock … I sought him, but I could not find him… I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick with love. 101) Hellenistic (from Patras), c. 200 B.C., Bronze Aphrodite, British Museum, London; + V detail; not dig. detail But Jerusalem was still a suppressed pocket, Hellenism a vague malaise of refined delights: Aphrodite, like any dancing girl, bathing or coming from the sea (had Degas seen this 200-B.C. bronze?). In poetry, what had begun with 6th-century Anacreon, spread through the Hellenistic, to bog down in rhymed translation: Depicted thus, in semblance warm, The Queen of Love's voluptuous form Floats along the silvery sea In beauty's naked majesty … Around her pomp the Nereids play, And gleam along the watery way. 102) Greek (Tanagra), c. 280 B.C., Girl with a dulcimer, Louvre, Paris; + V detail, shown first; so dig. 102a) Greek (Tanagra), c. 250 B.C., Woman in outdoor dress, British Museum, London (video shows detail only); not so dig. Such mood-shadowed pleasure is nowhere more exquisite than in the late 4th and early 3rd century BC figurines from Tanagra. Music: June 1996 Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Seikilos Epitaph, History of Music in Sound, RCA-V-LM-6057, Side IV, Bd.3 The Alexandrian Melt 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Their persuasion to joy is elegiac, as in Seikilos' musical epitaph: "Be happy!" (end Seikilos) Or in the germ of Marvel's "To his Coy Mistress" — Asclepiades, 3rd century B.C. (Fitts): You deny me: and to what end? There are no lovers, dear, in the under world, No love but here: only the living know The sweetness of Aphrodite — a103) Hellenistic (Delos), c. 100 B.C., Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, upper detail, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) 103) Same, Aphrodite, Eros and Pan, whole but below, But in Acheron, careful virgin, dust and ashes Will be our only lying down together. The fetching Delos Aphrodite, who threatens Pan with her slipper as she smiles on him, is in that vein Catullus also would mine: "My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love" — "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus". But when Marvel takes it up, the dynamic of Puritan service and secret love (perhaps for his pupil, Lord Fairfax' daughter) gives the argument of "dust and ashes" a reach unmatched by pagan Eros: Deserts of vast eternity ... then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity ... 104) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C.(?), Pastoral relief, Antikensammlungen, Munich 104a) Same, Pastoral relief, detail Amid all this mingling of sensuous play and soul-search, the eclogue appears with Theocritus, 3rd century BC Sicilian Greek, mewed perhaps in Alexandria, cultivating (like this Munich relief) the loved nostalgia of the pastoral: Sweet are the whispers of yon pine that makes Low music o'er the spring, and, Goatherd, sweet Thy piping... A genre which would become Roman (Virgil's "Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas") then Christian and Renaissance ("A shepheards boye (no better doe him call") until the sixteen-year-old Pope would manner it: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thyrsis, the music of that murmuring spring Is not so mournful as the strains you sing. Nor rivers winding through the vales below, So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow... 105) Chinese (Ming), 15th cent. (?), Scene cut in jade, detail (J.H. Crawford, Jr.); + V detail (replaced in slide show by 105a: Chinese, Ma Lin, 1246, Listening to the Wind in the Pines, Hanging scroll (cropped), Palace Museum Collection, Taichung); also dig. 105 & 105a Perhaps the richest heirs to Theocritan nature were the Chinese, ages after, as in this Ming landscape cut in jade. Also in Chinese poetry, the pastoral refuge has been spontaneous: Li Po: When you ask why I dwell here docile Among the far green hills, I laugh In my heart, my heart is happy. The peach blossom watches the river running But remains content. There is a better Heaven and earth than in the busy world of men. a106) Hellensitic (Alexandrian, terra cotta), 3rd cent. B.C.(?), The Dwarf, Louvre, Paris 106) Hellenistic, 2nd cent. B.C., Boy pulling a thorn from his foot, Antiquarium, Berlin; + V & dig. detail "Multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors". In the Alexandrian search, with Eros and Pastoral Pan came the picturesque, novelaceous, ugly — this 2nd century B.C. boy drawing a thorn from his foot, those pre-modern poems composed to make shapes on the page, or Meleager, lst century B.C., "On Mosquitoes": (Fitts) Squealshrilling Mosquitoes, fraternity lost to shame, Obscene vampires, chittering riders of the night: Let her sleep, I beg you! and come (If you must come) feed on this flesh of mine. (O useless prayer! Must not her body charm The wildest, most heartless, most insensate beasts?) You hear me, devils, I have warned you: June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History No more of your daring, Or you shall smart from the strength of my jealous 107) 107A) 107B) hands! Double: [A] Egyptian, c. 375 B.C., Elderly Man, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; and [B] Hellenistic, early 2nd cent. B.C., Portrait (Flamininus?), Musuem, Delphi Again, Elderly Man Again, Portrait No wonder the Israel counterpole darkened by 200 B.C. to Ecclesiastes. But as this Egyptian portrait, somewhat before, and the Greek, somewhat after, imply, the rebellion from mosquito-poem cleverness was everywhere a possibility. The Ecclesiast himself must have heard of Cynic, Stoic, Epicurean. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher... all is vanity... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be... and there is no new thing under the sun... in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth... and behold, this also is vanity... 108) Roman (end of Republic), c. 30 B.C., Aristius Sarcuto, from a monument to him and his wife, British Museum, London (CGB '77) 108a) Roman Portrait, c. 50 B.C., bust, Immolator of the Republic, Vatican Gallery, Rome (copy of Rome 44: CGB '86) From the perspective of Alexandria, the Rome of this late Republican portrait was another Hellenistic city, though it spoke Latin and was infused with a stronger will to power and a deeper stoical struggle than the rest. So where Athens had been the counter pole to Jerusalem, Rome now becomes the absorptive complement. Ecclesiastes: I made me great works...I gathered me also silver and gold... So I was great...Then I looked on all the works that my hands hadwrought, and on all the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun... 109) Roman Egypt, 2nd cent. A.D., Mummy encaustic portrait from Hawara, British Museum, London; + V detail; not dig. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How that deepening obverse of vanity (this encaustic from Roman Egypt) cries for faith: Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth... or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken... — to separate Nirvana soul from Gnostic body writhing on its cross. Euripides' Phaedra poignance and Racine's primal curse: Between Le ciel mit dans mon sein une flamme funeste, Seneca hardens that action to a blind Roman storm — a110) Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes, later 2nd cent. B.C.(?), The Laocoon, head detail, Vatican, Rome 110) Same, Laocoon, whole 110a) Same, upper detail (video takes detail from 110) Theseus piecing together the torn disjecta of his son, as he commands of the self-murdered queen (Studley): Stop hir up hurlde into a Pit, let heavy clodds of ground Lie hard upon hir cursed hed. The Laocoon has lost ground since Lessing. Yet the combat of soul which had informed tragedy, and was peaking, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, to a War of Light on Dark, forged this last pain of the human family battling the Olympian snake. When Seneca's Tudor translator Studley, for one word, "Flammae" in the Latin, raps out a Peter Quince line: "The flashing flames and furious force of fiery fervent heate", he stretches a bombast which was there — such over-wrought pathos as, from Scopas through Pergamum to Rhodes and Rome, has tempted art critics to the term "Hellenistic baroque". June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 40 �C.G. Bell 111) Symbolic History Græco-Roman (Herculaneum), c. 70 A.D. (after Timomachus c. 50 B.C.?), Medea, National Museum, Naples; + V detail, shown first; no dig. detail Euripides' Medea may have moved that way, far more this 1st-century A.D. painting; yet Jason's cry for his slaughtered children is lyrical: If only I had not begotten them, To see them thus destroyed by you! The chorus rounds out the close: Zeus sends many fates from Heaven; What was past hope, god fulfills; The thing looked for, does not happen; The thing not thought, is what god wills. Such the outcome of this matter. (CGB) 112) Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Portrait bust in the Republican manner, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 112a) Roman, c. 50 B.C., Bronze portrait, "Caesar," detail of face; National Museum, Rome In Seneca, a rhetoric weighty as Tacitus' Rome twists the Gordian knot of pain to stark cleavage: Through the vast spaces of high aether go: Bear witness, where you ride, there are no gods. per alta vade spatia sublimi aethere; testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos. To seed the blood revenge of Kid: And there live, dying still in endless flames, Blaspheming gods and all their holy names. 113) Detail of 111, Medea; + V closer detail; no closer dig. Music: June 1996 Greek 2nd cent. B.C., 1st Delphic Hymn, Chromatic parts, LM LSC 6057 The Alexandrian Melt 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If only we could trace the same pathos, in the lost wealth of accompanied song, from the Euripides fragment, through these chromatic phrases of the First Delphic Hymn, to the music Nero would have played and sung, while Rome burned. (fade Delphic Hymn) 114) Græco-Roman (Villa Boscoreale), c. 40 B.C., A Philosopher, National Museum, Naples; + V detail; so dig. Could the frescoed philosopher from the Villa Boscoreale, with his Cynic staff and cloak, sustain that darker surf on the headland of rock? If Epictetus managed: Look at me, without city, house, possesions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children...only the earth and heavens, and one poor cloak. And what do I want?...Who, when he sees me does not think that he sees his king and master? Seneca, for all his Stoic books, became a byword for graft and indulgence — until he rallied at last to the death Nero demanded. 115) Roman (Pompeii), 70-79 A.D., House of the Vetii, Atrium (CGB '80) V115a) Same, wall paintings 115b) Same, Phallic Fountain Through the ease of the Pompeiian House of the Vetii, who could trace the chthonic swell, rooted in Greek mind and Dionysiac reversibility? Would the paintings, in the style of Nero's Golden House, suggest that intemperance, or the phallic fountain those omnisexual bouts and banquets Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon enacts near here? 116) Græco-Roman (Pompeii), 1st cent. A.D., Pastoral scene, National Museum, Naples; + V details; dig. lower detail Even the Pompeiian landscape teems with illusion, hungry for Seneca's godpresences in nature: When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, ...does not the stillness and gloom strike you as with the presence of a deity? Or when you see a cave in the rock of an over-hanging mountain, is not your soul suffused with a religious awe? We worship the sources of great rivers, erect altars where a rush of water bursts from the earth, and certain pools we hold sacred for their still and somber depths. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1344, Pool Garden of Hojo (Abbot's Quarters), Tenryu-Ji Temple, Kyoto 117) Japanese (Muromachi), c. 1543, Guest Hall, Monastery of Myoshin-Ji, Kyoto Was it more than the chance of barbarian invasion which threw down in the West that sacred hedonism of gardens and villas, while beyond the stretch of Alexandrian dream, such idolized blessing of dwelling and nature could sustain itself a thousand years — this Buddhist guest hall and garden in Kyoto, Japan? a118) 118) 118a) 118b) Roman, 118-34 A.D., Hadrian's Villa, vaultings, Tivoli (CGB '86) Same, Hadrian's Villa, Canopus, or pool (CGB '86) Same, another view Roman bust of Hadrian, 117-118 A.D., Ostia Museum Roman Hellenization reached its 8-mile opulence in Hadrian's Tivoli Villa. If the articulation of vaults and domes, like the Pantheon, looks forward, the arcades, pools and statues respire Greek nostalgia. Here Hadrian, under whom the drawing back and walling in of the Empire had begun, wrote his dying poem: "Anima vagula, blandula ..." Fleeting and caressing soul, Body's guest and companion Where are you off to? What place, stripped and ghastly, Will house you, not, as once, jocund? (CGB) Yet when could Hadrian have been called "jocos"? June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a119) Græco-Roman, 130-38 A.D., Statue of Antinoüs, Museum, Naples; + V detail 119) Another statue of the same Antinoüs, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77) 119a) Same, Antinoüs, Delphi, detail of head; dig. no a119 detail; detail of 119 Was it when he first met the beautiful Bithynian youth, Antinoüs, his love; or in Athens finishing the Olympeion; or on the administrative travels they made over the empire? Hardly that superstitious one up the Nile when Antinoüs drowned himself in the river, and Hadrian stricken, built temples and set up statues as to a god — Theocritus, Lament for Hylas: the voice came faint from the water, and near as he was, he seemed far off. Bion for Adonis: "He is lost to us, lovely Adonis ..." Moschus for Bion: "Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin the dirge" — the sequence from which Milton would form "Lycidas," and Shelley "Adonais": "I weep for Adonais — he is dead." 120) Roman (Africa), Augustan 9-8 B.C., Ruins of Leptis Magna, Tripolitania 120a) Same, Leptis Magna, another view, dark against the light How often in the market pomp of the imperial cities, Palmyra, Antioch, Alexandria, this Leptis Magna on the coast of Africa, soul, from a morning of human possibility, must have looked, by the mere breath of evening, into the vacuity that would send a shudder through Augustine: and I became to myself a land of want — et factus sum mihi regio egestatis. Slowly the empire of this Augustan city would ripen to that confession. a121) Double, which the video separates into A121, Augustan love-vase, terra cotta from Arezzo, now Archaeological Museum, Barcelona; and B121, Græco-Roman, Boscoreale skeleton cup, Louvre, Paris. Slide show, video and dig. repeat these as 121 and 122. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two vessels, probably Augustan, the Arezzo terra cotta bowl, now in Barcelona, with its tender love-making, and the Boscoreale silver cup with piping and dancing skeletons and a mask of Euripides, reminder of the Infernal contest in The Frogs. The Virgilian "Copa Surisca" brings them together. Here the beginning and end (Waddell): Dancing girl of Syria, her hair caught up with a fillet; Very subtle in swaying those quivering flanks of hers ...half-drunk in the smoky tavern... And what's the use, if you're tired, of being out in the dust and heat, When you might as well lie still and get drunk on your settle?... Set down the wine and the dice, and perish who thinks of tomorrow! Here's Death twitching my ear, "Live", says he, "for I'm coming." 123) Græco-Roman (Pompeii), late 1st cent. B.C., copy of Hellensitic painting, Satyr and Nymph, National Museum, Naples; + V detail; no dig. detail Yet that Græco-Rome can mount, with this Pompeian Faun and nymph to the symbolic sky — as in the adventures of The Golden Ass the legend of Cupid and Psyche appears: Thus poor Psyches being left alone ... was blowne by ... Zephyrus ... and brought downe into a deepe valley ... of fragrant flowers ... — a last pagan cognate for the meeting of the Song of Songs: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse... a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. 124) Raphael and School, 1517, Loggia of Psyche, Farnesina, Rome What Raphael, in the neo-Platonic Renaissance, would begin in the Farnesina Gallery — the labours of the soul (Psyche) for immortality. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 45 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Surely if Raphael had completed the earthly scenes below — that night when her lamp wakes the winged god — this hall might be the wonder work of Renaissance; 125) Claude Lorrain, 1664, Psyche before the Castle of Cupid, National Gallery, London Or there is Claude's dream-glory of Psyche before the Castle of Cupid: Shee espied likewise a running river as cleare as crystall: in the midst of the wood well nigh at the fall of the river was a princely Edifice, wrought and builded not by the art or hand of man, but by the mighty power of God... Renaissance and Baroque bowing to the imperative of Apuleius' vision. 126) Roman, 270-275 A.D., a stretch of the Aurelian Wall, Rome (CGB '86) For hundreds of years Rome had required no walls but the limes of the worldempire. But the incursions of the Marcomanni and Alamanni proved the city vulnerable. When the Emperor Aurelian, from 270 to 275, pressed the construction of the twelve mile buttressed circuit with towers every hundred feet and huge fortified gates, what were those Hellenized Romans walling in and what walling out? 127) Roman (Gaul), 1st cent. A.D., restored statue of Augustus, Roman Theatre, Orange, France This lst-century Augustus in the arched stonework of the Theater, not in Rome at all, but Orange, in that Province to be named for the barbarous Franks, may symbolize what was hopefully walled in — what Caesar had inherited from Alexander, and the Legions from the Macedonian phalanx: the claim of an armored might which would pacify and civilize, spreading the arts of Greece. Yet how graceless that power has become. 128) Epigonus of Pergamum(?), 220-210 B.C., Roman copy, Ludovisi Death of a Gaul and his Wife, Thermae Museum, Rome; + V details; no dig. details If what was to be walled out were the savage tribes of the North, they had also changed since the funeral wagon bronzes of the wild 7th century. In this Roman copy of a 3rd century B.C. ex-voto, celebrating Attalus I of Pergamum's victory over the already June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 46 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History invading Galatians, the wife stabbed and self-stabbing Gaul bear witness that the courage walled out was admired within. 129) Roman (Antonine), 180-92, Miracle of the Rains, Marcus Aurelius' Column, detail, Piazza Colonna, Rome 129a) Same, a closer detail With the Antonines, Stoic reason, that stronghold of Rome, opens to a hunger for God's aid. This Miracle of the Rains, with Jupiter Pluvius and the flood-destroyed foe (carved on Marcus Aurelius' own column) speaks what was bringing in the Testaments, Old and New. And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True … And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations … a130) Roman, 136-8, The Deification of the Empress Sabina before Hadrian, Conservatori, Rome 130) Roman, 160-161, Apotheosis of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail; no dig. detail What mystery scenes of Imperial Apotheosis now assume — Hadrian witnessing his negelected Sabina lifted from the pyre, or this relief, where the great winged angel of death and rebirth bears Antoninus Pius and Faustina skyward. All it lacks is faith, the substance of things unseen: For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you. a131) The Sea of Galilee, Boats by the shore (Video shows here slide 131, Caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls) b131) Roman (Jewish), 4th cent. A.D., Gold Glass: symbols of Temple and Torah 131) 1st cent. A.D., Caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls (V uses a detail.) 131a) Khibbet Qumran before 68 A.D., Isaiah Scroll There are discoveries of spirit so germinal as to effect the entire sequent history of the world and all its arts, yet so inward as to give at the surface hardly a sign of the June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 47 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History incandescence in which they are conceived. Such the Hebrew ferment leading from the prophets through the Essenes to John the Baptist, Christ with his disciples, and Paul. Blake, who required visual arts, had to derive the whole Greek fruit of the Muses of Memory from the inspired lost originals of the Temple of Jerusalem. It seems more telling that the visual clue should be only these cliffs and caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls, occupied perhaps by the Khirbet Qumran from the 1st century B.C. into the1st A.D. — the desert, some think, to which Jesus withdrew — earth polarized, in the Commentary on Habakkuk, between "the wicked priest" and that "teacher of righteousness" put to death, it seems, between 65 and 63 B.C.; or in The War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness, to the phrasing Jesus invokes in John: "Walk while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you … become sons of the light." 132) Roman-Syrian, 1st cent., A.D., Trinity of Palmyra (Agli-Bal, Baal-shamin, Malak-bel), Louvre, Paris; + slide & dig. detail 132a How peripheral to that center is the carved Trinity of Palmyra, Syria, 1st century A.D., though its frontal hardening from Classical toward Byzantine implies the widening of the old tragic gulf toward a doomsday separation — what was turning the cultured luxury of the Alexandrian to the matrix of search the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Papyri have unconvered, where Jewish and Neo-platonic, Hindu and Buddhist (those Indian missionaries reported in Alexandria from at least the 1st century A.D.), with cults from Egypt and Persia, astrology, magic, pneumatic, and apostolic Christianity — all strove for what the name implied, for hidden truth, for Gnosis. 133) Syrian-Jewish, 3rd cent. A.D., Ezekiel frescoes, detail, Synagogue, Dura Eurotus; + V & dig. details (cf. slide detail, 133a) By the time of the Gospels, even Judaea, for all its stiff-necked recalcitrance, was Hellenized, writing in Greek, and, in the Dura Eurotus Synagogue frescoes two centuries later, transforming Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones ("Son of Man, can these bones live?") into a Greek mystery, with Psyche and her Iris-winged souls. And yet that Jerusalem pocket, fertilized by the Alexandrian, had given birth to what was conquering, from within, its Græco-Roman conqueror. As Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 121): There is a subtlety in the fact that God learned Greek when he wanted to be an author, and that he didn't learn it any better. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 48 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As radical Tertullian would ask: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" To which history had more radically answered: "Everything!" a134) Roman, c. 200 A.D., Persephone's Return to Hades, House on the Caelian Hill (later dedicated to SS. John and Paul), Rome b134) Same, Persephone, upper detail 134) Same, Persephone, close detail (video & dig. show various details) Music: Stravinsky, Sacre du Printemps, I, Col MG 31202 (opening for four slides, and close for last three) What could be closer to us than the great civilized melting pots, late-cycle crucibles of outward skill and inner search? Yet we do not always love most what is nearest. To catch in New Kingdom Egypt, or in the Rome of this 200-A.D. detail from the Persephone myth, an image of our own condition — that moody pride and sensate soulfulness of which orthodox Irenaeus accused Valentine's Gnostics: that they called the Biblical Creator a demi-urge and his church a whited sepulchre, themselves led by intuition into vagaries of pagan thought and sexual license — to glimpse that in a frescoed face, at once lures and repels: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Eliot's "April is the cruellest month." 135) 135a) Roman Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant, "La Donna Velata," head, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome Same, whole figure; + V detail Is it easier when pagan "proud dejection" assumes the saved upward glance of this third century Christian orant? — We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. (I John) When Pico, at the Renaissance height of Florence, would voice the radiant heresy of divine man (by his own will, beast, angel, or God), he had only to free the incarnate identification of Augustine: (Meditations XV, 3) Thou didst assume a human rather than an angelic nature and didst glorify it with the robe of immortality, raising it above all the heavens, June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 49 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History above all choirs of angels, above the Cherubim, above the Seraphim, to the right hand of the Father. 136) 136a) Boedas of Byzantium, c. 300 B.C., bronze Orant, Staatl. Mus., Berlin Same, Orant, detail; + V closer detail; dig. half, then whole, then close detail And as the Christian Orant rests on the Greek tradition of gleaming and sensuous prayer — this 300-B.C. bronze by Boedas of Byzantium, with Socrates under the plane tree: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one — so that Augustine rests on the Psalter, a collection forming through the Greek centuries: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honour … . O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! 137) Asian Greek, 1st cent. A.D.(?), Fertility Artemis, streets of Ephesus When Paul spoke in the Græco-Roman city of Ephesus (on Homer's Ionic coast) and the silversmiths cried for two hours "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," the apostle of faith opposed, not by Olympian power (the outward and the inward at one) but by a fertility idol with tits down her belly, "in Sion also not unsung" — whoever could have opened his eyes there, would have seen in both poles of the confrontation, the quake and subsidence of the Greek island of temporal and human command. (fade Sacre du Printemps) a138) 138) Greek (Epidaurus) C. 380: marble, Aesclepius, National Museum, Athens Coptic, 5th cent. A.D., Angel contending with a demoniac Leda and the Swan, Coptic Museum, Cairo, Egypt; plus video (and digital) details Who could have dreamed, in the liberality of Plato's Athens, and looking back to the Periclean Banquet with Socrates, that the Doctrine of Ideas, nature's changeless substratum and essential truth (with even in music the condemnation of the sensuous June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 50 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History major and minor modes, to be banned from Gregorian) — would boil down, after nine centuries, to this Coptic war on the Greek Genetrix, Leda mounted by the Swan. Music: Again, Rite of Spring, toward close of Part I, Col. MG 31202 Though as always in the psyche of repression, one wonders how far the paranoiac angel (Leda's foot on his genitals) is battling; how far, like Boccacio's Alibech in the same ascetic desert, rushing to put his own devil in hell. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 51 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History No wonder the Gnostic heresies of God feminine and copulative: "I am androgynous… the womb… the glory of the Mother"; "I am first and last… the whore and holy one… wife and virgin… mother, daughter" — were suppressed until the Egyptian papyri discovered in our time. 139) Double: [A] Again, 138, Angel and Leda; and [B] Greek vase (Attic?), later 6th cent. B.C., Ritual Phallic Dance, Louvre, Paris (video repeats 138, or 139A, then returns through the double to the close); dig. holds double What like force in opposites: the Coptic 5th-century A.D. denial, against this ritual phallic dance, Attic, 6th century B.C. In our time, too, the drive to the primitive and abstract sweeps the sensuous arts in its sway. Would it be, as with Eliot, some Hollow Man return to the deserts of the Thebaid: "Concentration/ without elimination… Desiccation of the world of sense/ Evacuation of the world of fancy"? Or would Yeats 2000-year changing of the tinctures send it in reverse — his history the beat of great alternating wings, our Christian sun cycle of the abstract One to yield again to the myth-moon, 140) Again, 139B, ritual phallic dance; + V & dig. details the multiform Dionysian influx, for which the old Yeats made himself an incarnate priest, undergoing the Steinach grafting of ape gonads, for the rejuvenation of his last poems. 1 "News for the Delphic Oracle" — after rejection of Platonic and Christian paradises — has this close: Down the mountain walls From where Pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam. 1Since the above — medical testimony has turned the rumored Steinach to a vasectomy, physically ineffectual, though it seems to have heightened the poet’s erotic symbology. June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 52 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is said that in Yeats' manuscript, "Copulate" is a four-letter word. Indeed, the early Greeks had only those common words: Aristophanes: βινειν βουλοµαι. (end Rite of Spring, Part I) June 1996 The Alexandrian Melt 53 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 54 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Alexandrian Melt, Symbolic History, Part 4 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 4 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_04_The_Alexandrian_Melt Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/177a5cd2324e38d6fb42351bf0c49645.pdf 82f9693bbf5fb99e364278cebfa89342 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 December 1995 Last Revised June 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 3. Greece: The Tragic Myth and Deed 1) Attic, c. 460 B.C., Zeus or Poseidon, bronze, Nat. Mus., Athens; video pans to V1a, head and shoulders, then to 1b, waist up (both CGB '77) Our aim is to see the fourfold pattern of god-given power, superhuman act, fall, and inner ripening, fulfilled in the myth and arts, the history and thought of Greece. If Greek culture excels them all, it is because it risked most of all. Its assault on darkness had no cover but the morale of its own phalanx. It countenanced none of the priestly protections of Egypt or the theological double-talk that has buttressed the Christian West. In act and mind these men ventured on freedom — a city, as Pericles said, open to the world; they ventured in the open, man against fate. No wonder the fire so quickly burned its containment. As Heraclitus said: "What are men but Gods dying, what the Gods but deathless men?" 2) Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Icarus, Mus. Nat. Naples Their mythology in this anticipates their history. Nowhere are there more legends of the fall of daring, and no people enacted it as nobly as they. For three Biblical examples — Satan, Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel — Greece affords dozens. Three come to mind in the category of flight: Phaeton and the sun-chariot, Bellerophon thrown from Pegasus, this Icarus, from Roman Pompeii, twilight of the culture Homer began. 2nd 1) Again, Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and upper body (CGB '77) June 1996 Greece 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A pathos of history that the Periclean Zeus-Poseidon holds the silence from which it rose from the sea. Since music, that art the Pythagorean brotherhood made a cosmic measure, of which witnesses attest the ecstatic power, only survives, unaccompanied, in fragments of Hellenistic mood: 2nd 2) Detail of 2: Fall of Icarus Music: Hellenistic, 1st cent. A.D., Epitaph of Seikilos, Decca 20156 this epitaph of Seikilos, like the Pompeian Icarus, reminder of a mythic fall. (end music) a3) 3) Double: [A] Dorian, Magna Graecia, c. 430 B.C., Wounded Niobe, Thermae, Rome; and [B] Pergamene, 210-200 B.C., Marsyas, Louvre, Paris Greek, c. 550 B.C., The Naxos Sphinx, Museum, Delphi (CGB '77) The fate of hybris: Semele embraced Zeus in his divinity and was consumed; Niobe boasted against Leto and became a stone weeping for her destroyed children; Marsyas was flayed for vying with Apollo, Laocoon was killed with his sons by the serpents of Poseidon. Even the fate of Oedipus, as Nietzsche stresses, falls on one who had answered the riddle of the Sphinx. And among a variety of Giants and Titans who fought Zeus or tried to storm heaven, comes the greatest, Prometheus, who has given his name to all such attempts — the thief of fire, bound to the rock, a vulture's prey. a4) Attic, c. 520 B.C., Athena vs. the Giant Enceladus, Hecatompedon Pediment, Acropolis Museum, Athens (as of 1938) 4) Same, double (from two CGB slides; as of 1977) V4a) Same, detail of Athena (CGB '77) 4b) Same, detail of Enceladus (CGB '77) These Greek accounts are not just more numerous than the Biblical; they are different in kind. The Jews bet on Jehovah; the Greeks (520 B.C., Athena and the Giant Enceladus) play both sides: defiant will against avenging power. In that tension tragedy is born — of the greatness which enobles as it destroys. With Satan, only the name, "Light-bearer," and the line "O Lucifer, brightest of the sons of morning, how are thou fallen," give the scapegoat and serpent of evil a trace of ambivalence (Babylonian?). Where the Greek archetype is Prometheus. June 1996 Greece 2 �C.G. Bell a5) b5) 5) Symbolic History Attic, c. 570 B.C., Calf Bearer, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Ionian, c. 477 B.C., Charioteer, detail, Museum, Delphi (CBG '77) Same, head and shoulders, profile What, then, of classical measure? Is this an art of excess? Nietzsche's Dionysian "joy even in destroying"? Surely, Greek daring arises in a cult of limitation, with all its tribal warnings against hybris. Even the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus is nominally on the side of Oceanos: Know yourself and reform your ways to new ways… You are not yet humble, still you do not yield to your misfortunes. The chorus, as always, speaks the mean: It is a sweet thing to draw out a long life in cheerful hopes, and feed the spirit in the bright benignity of happiness: but I shiver when I see you wasted with ten thousand pains, all because you did not tremble at the name of Zeus; your mind was yours, not his, and at its bidding you regarded mortal men too high, Prometheus. (Grene) 6) 6a) Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Falling Lapith, from Zeus Temple, Olympia Attic (Phidias?), 447-32 B.C., Pediment fragment from the Parthenon, torso, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77) But before the play ends, both chorus and audience join in the pathos of the halfgod's cry: Bright light of the sky, and you, with swift Wings, winds: springs of rivers; numberless Laughter of the waves of ocean; earth, mother Of all, and all-seeing eye of the sun — Look and behold, what I from the Gods Here suffer, I, who am born of the Gods. (CGB) June 1996 Greece 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ω διος αιθηρ και ταχυπτεροι πνοαι, ποταµων τε πηγαι, ποντιων τε κυµατων ανηριθµον γελασµα, παµµητορ τε γη, και τον πανοπτην κυκλον ηλιου καλω ιδεσθε µ' οια προς θεων πασχω θεος. 7) Greek, c. 470-56 B.C., Head of a Seer (profile), from the East Pediment of the Zeus Temple (now in the Museum), Olympia In that tragic involvement lies what Hegel called the deepest intuition of the human mind, that from suffering and destruction comes spirit: Oedipus as saving seer; Prometheus Unbound; from the burning body of Semele, Dionysus, god of the vine and tragic art, in the end of immortality. 8) 8a) Greek, c. 470 B.C., Zeus and Ganymede, terra cotta, Museum, Olympia Same, detail (upper half) There is a profound trust here in vital seizure, human or divine — as in this rape of Ganymede. So in the last chorus of Antigone, Dionysus, "Son of the Thunderer, born of Iachos, God of many names," is invoked for the cleansing of Thebes, though the purification that immediately falls is the death of Antigone, of Haimon, and Creon's queen: "Come with clement feet down the long slopes… Thou Son of God, blaze for us." A chorus of breathing fire: ω πυρ πνειοντων χοραγ αστρων, to the manic Lord: τον ταµιαν Ιακχον. 9) Greek plate, c. 490 B.C., Brygos painter, mænad, Munich Even Plato, unwilling celebrant of the irrational, praises, in the Phaedrus, madnesses which are divine gifts: Again, where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families, owing to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance for those who are in need… June 1996 Greece 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the Bacchae, sacred destroyers, an ultimate mystery for Euripides. 10) 10a) Græco-Roman, 2nd cent. A.D., Hercules leads Alcestis from Hades, Celeia Museum, Yugoslavia Double: [A] Christian, end of 3rd cent., Adam and Eve, Catacombs of SS Peter and Marcellinus, Rome; and [B] later 3rd cent., marble: Jonah from the Whale, Museum of Art, Cleveland Music: Mesomedes of Crete, c. 130 A.D.(?), Hymn to the Sun, old Decca 20156 (A) And it is in the language and image of those mysteries (this 2nd-century A.D. Alcestis harrowed from the dead by Hercules, as no doubt the chant of the Synagogue absorbing the classical hymn, as here to the Sun by Mesomedes, Hadrian's favorite, rounded toward Gregorian) that the Bible tragically regenerated itself, completing the Old Adam with the New, the tree of Redemption from the tree of the Fall, Moses lifting the snake on the cross to heal the sickly Hebrews, Jonah jubilant from the death and hell whale. Had not Tacitus weirdly recorded, of the year 34 A.D., how the phoenix had been born of its ashes in the east? (fade Mesomedes) 11) Attic, 447-32 B.C., Parthenon from Philopappos Hill, Athens (CGB '77) But before the regenerative daring, which appears at the beginning of Greek culture and ripens like a natural fruit, could mediate for the New Testament, it had to run its Hellenic course. There we follow it, in art and history — the tragic myth completed by the tragic deed. As Plato says in the Laws, "We will not need tragedy in our city, because we live in tragedy." Va12 or b12) - b12) used Mycenae, c. 1500 B.C., Palace ruins, two views (CGB '77) 12) Cretan, c. 1450-1400 B.C., Throne Room, Palace, Knossos Telemachus is amazed at the palace of Menelaus: See what a blaze of polished copper and gold and electrum and silver and ivory goes through this echoing hall. Surely the mansions of Olympian Zeus must be like this, one great glory within… (Odyssey, tr. T.E. Shaw, Book IV) June 1996 Greece 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The fateful sequence began before Homer with the fruiting of Greek myth out of the Cretan and Mycenean fall. It is that past, going back even to Knossos and the East, that is treasured in epic memory. In the Odyssey the bards already sing of Ilium. a13) Cretan or Mycenean, c. 1500 B.C., from the Vaphio Gold Bull Beakers, Nat. Mus., Athens: the Tame Bull cup; 13 or V13) Both cups, of Bulls Tame and Wild 13a) Details, Tame and Wild, from the same Menelaus' gift — "a wrought mixing bowl of solid silver doubled with gold about the rim. Work of Hephaestus" — or the cup of wrought gold Alcinous gives Odysseus (Book VIII), might have been found in the Vaphio tombs (Sparta) with the golden Beakers of Bulls, Tame and Wild, work of Hephaestus indeed. These were also objects of trade or pillage, probably Minoan, about 1500 B.C. But for Homer, fine things come from Syria. The King of Sidon, says Menelaus, gave it to him. The Dorian invasion has erased the possibility of such workmanship in Greece. 14) Cretan, c. 1300 B.C., Bull sacrifice from Hagia Triada Sarcophagus, Heraklion, Crete We can never know what details from the Homeric poems are storied antebellum splendors. Ritualistic dependence on the gods seems essential for tribal Achaians of a time of troubles — how the Iliad from beginning to end reeks with the smoke of sacrificial hecatombs. But for an illustration, we must go to Crete from the time of the Trojan War itself (Hagia Triada), observing, however, that the male-oriented Greek would take over what is here the priestess' role. 15 ) 15a) Cretan, c. 1600 B.C. (or a forgery?), Ivory Snake Goddess, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: whole Same: detail from the hips up Curious that the names of the goddesses Athena and Hera (called, as if she were ivory, "of the white arms"), like the wonderful Greek word for the sea, "thalassa," are not Greek at all, nor Indo-European. Hera's wedding to Zeus must fable some blending; Athena's owl and Apollo's snake suggest a mystery root beneath the Olympian; and the first Greek art ties to this Cretan past, to which Homer seems to richly near. June 1996 Greece 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Schubert, 1824-26, String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, Death and the Maiden, near close, 2nd movement, West L. 5052 (And if the Boston ivory must prove a marvelous fake, is it not — as Alexandrian editors smoothed Homer to their taste — that we later romantics hail our own Schubertian refinements as pre-Homeric Greek?) a16) b16) 16) Reconstruction of 13th cent. B.C., Nestor's Throne Room, Pylos Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1360 B.C., Nefertiti, Museum, Cairo Double: details of [A] Thera, 16th cent. B.C., full-breasted woman, fresco; and [B] Greek Geometric, c. 700 B.C., Warrior, bronze: both, National Museum, Athens (detail of Cycles, 3rd 31) For there was a refinement to which Homer was heir — the frescoed palaces of Pylos, Tiryns, Thera. Could the poet's own time have supplied him with that Helen who in the Odyssey comes from "her high-coffered, incense-laden room" and, after alluding to her Trojan vagary, mixes in the wine a pleasure-drug of subtle potency which she had from Egypt? Yet for Homer, all that waned luxury is caught up in another view of life, another bareness and another drive. 17) 17a) Attic Geometric, c. 740 B.C., Krater from Dipylon Gate, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) Same, detail of Funeral Procession (CGB '77) What is in fact contemporary with Homer focuses the question: which age does he reflect? Sunset or dawn? Dawn came earlier to his Asian Miletus than to mainland Greece. Against the human fullness of the Iliad, the Attic funeral vases of 800 B.C. seem strangely abstract. Yet the geometric patterns shared with the Hallstatt culture of the Danube may remind us of the primitive in Homer, those repeated epithets, "swift-footed Achilles" and the like — all the great formalities of saga-craft which led Coleridge to say: "There is no personality at all in Homeric poetry," and, "Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides." 18) 18a) Sardinian, 8th-6th cent. B.C., bronze chief, Cagliari; + V detail Argive or Etruscan, early 7th cent. B.C., Krater, Naval Battle, Conservatori, Rome June 1996 Greece 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For between Helen and her bard had come the Iron Age of stern reversion. This 8th century Sardinian god-chief might step from any Pelasgian island to voice what Nietzsche called the "satyr wisdom": Condemned to sorrows and to toil we live, Rest to our labors death alone can give. Hesiod, from barren Attica. Or the proverb echoed by Theognis and Herodotus and Sophocles: "Best of all things not to be born… next best to pass as soon as possible the gates of Hades." That pessimistic ground sounds under Olympian Homer: …We to whom Zeus Has assigned suffering from youth to old age, Suffering in grievous wars, till we perish to the last man. (Iliad, XIV, 85-7, tr. McCarthy, from Weil's French, ) Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it, There is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is. (Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 446-7) 19) 19a) Greek, c. 750 B.C., small bronze warrior, National Museum, Athens Athenian jar, mid-7th cent. B.C., Polyphemus blinded by Odysseus, Eleusis Museum, Greece Something lifts the Greeks from that ground, sends them, even as they chant its burden, smiling into battle over the wine-dark sea. The heroes to be broken by the gods in that "Poem of Force" fight the gods themselves. Apollo cries in the voice of alarm: …give back, son of Tydeus, and strive no longer to make yourself like the gods in mind, since never the same is the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk groundling. (Iliad, Lattimore, V, 440-2) What makes Homer a revelation for Greece is less the old luxury than the new force. It is the tremendous knotting of the primitive paradox by which pessimism and resignation are swept forward in a rush of vital faith. Like a magnet or electric charge, that flexed field of spirit carries the incalculable energies of the Greek way. 20) 20a) Greek Geometric, c. 725 B.C., Oinochoe, Shipwreck, Ant. Sam., Munich Chalcidian (Inscription Painter), c. 540 B.C., Greeks vs. Trojans, National Museum, Melbourne June 1996 Greece 8 �C.G. Bell 20b) Symbolic History Gift of Naxos to Delos, 7th cent. B.C., Terrace of Lions (CGB '77) It is the gift of this vitality that terrors are seized and affirmed as fierce delights. An 8th-century shipwreck against the battle-deaths of the Iliad: Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth with the pitiless bronze, so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way clean through below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered, and the teeth were shaken out with the stroke and both eyes filled up with blood, and gaping he blew a spray of blood through the nostrils and through his mouth, and death in a dark mist closed in about him. (Iliad, Lattimore, XVI, 245-50) Homer makes us like Zeus: …rejoicing in the pride of his strength… looking out over the city of Troy and the ships of the Achaians, watching the flash of bronze, and men killing and men killed. But the earliest Greek art has little to match Homer's richest descriptions: As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness 21) From Hagia Triada, Crete, c. 1500 B.C., Harvest Vase, Herakleion and all the high places of the hills are clear and the shoulders outjutting, and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from heaven and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the shepherd; such in their number blazed the watchfires the Trojans were burning there in the plain… a thousand fires, and beside each one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight. (Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 555-63) For anything of comparable evocation we have gone back, centuries before the Trojan War, to that Cretan miracle of "The Harvest Vase." Va22) 22) 22a) 22b) June 1996 Corinthian, c. 650 B.C., Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome Same, detail of horsemen and hunt Attic, c. 570 B.C., "François Vase," Mus. of Archeology, Florence Rhodian, later 2nd cent. B.C., The Laocoon, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86) Greece 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But could we not have gone forward? Into the 7th century, when Corinth brings the Minoan to a Greek rebirth — the Homeric wonder of beauty and elan: And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high places. (Iliad, Lattimore, VIII, 564-5) For Homer's art relates three ways: to the Aegean past, the Geometric present, the Archaic and Classical future. We can never know how far the softer harmonies of the eighth century poem reflect its sixth century Panathenean shaping from the oral body of epic song; thus Cicero: "Peisistratus is said to have arranged in their present order the books of Homer, until then in confusion" — not to mention the second century redaction by which Aristarchus produced the final Homeric canon. 23) 23a) 23b) Attic vase, end of 7th cent. B.C., Hercules and Nessus, Nat. Mus., Athens Rhodian plate, c. 600 B.C., Menelaus and Hector fight over the body of Euphorbus, British Museum, London Corinthian, c. 640-30 B.C., Chigi Vase, top detail: Battle of hoplites, Villa Giulia, Rome As the seventh century advances, vase scenes (our clue to lost painting) coin the epic and tragic myths — here Alcides killing Nessus, Alcides himself to die by the curse of the centaur's blood — one of those fatal justices to be praised, an Iliad blending of terror and delight: …and the iron tumult went up into the brazen sky through the barren bright air (Iliad, Lattimore, XVII, 424-5) — Achilles with his choice of life or fame, where the very word for excellence, αρετη, points to Ares, War: And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers. Lattimore, II, 453-4 and XI, 13-14) (Iliad, τοισι δ' αφαρ πολεµος γλυκιων γενετ', ηε νεεσθαι εν νηυσι γλαφυρησι φιλην ες πατριδα γαιαν. June 1996 Greece 10 �C.G. Bell 24) Symbolic History Attic, c. 600 B.C., kouros, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '79); + V detail In Homer, the antinomies stand clean and immediate. There is no rationale to vindicate the Gods or to validate suffering: no ripe Sopohoclean "No cause for tears." In the paradox of energy, the gods vindicate themselves. This youth, about 600 B.C. — type of the Archaic Apollo, python-slayer, Marsyas-flayer, god of light and justice and of the darts of pestilence, the sharp smile not of the lips only but of the whole sinewed and triangularly jointed form, shoulders, belly, knees — has the unaccountability of myth — aflame, like his sister when she caught Peleus' son by the hair; he turned about and straightway knew Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining." (Iliad, I, 197-200) a25) 25) 25a) 25b) Corinthian, 6th cent. B.C., Temple of Apollo over fields, Corinth Same, near, facing the corner (CGB '77) Same, less near, corner from within, against mountains (CGB '77) Hera-Temple, Olympia, c. 600 B.C. (oldest preserved) (CGB '77) Though already in Homer fierce vitality receives classical design, as in the twogabled temple, perfected by 600 B.C. — at Corinth, or among the groves of Olympia. So in the blind bard Herodotus placed four centuries before his own time, the force that built the city state, that sowed the Mediterranean with colonies, and in Thales and Anaximander raised the "Why" of natual philosophy, seeks its own harmony — between tragic antinomies, the temple of justification. Such in the Iliad is the resonance of pathos that arches from the parting of Hector and Andromache: For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish… (Iliad, Lattimore, VI, 447-8) to Priam's begging Hector's body of Achilles: I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through; I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children. (Iliad, Lattimore, XXIV, 505-6) Which Achilles grants in companionable sorrow: Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals… (525) But bear up, old man, nor mourn endlessly in your heart… (549) June 1996 Greece 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is said, old man, you too were happy once (543) — Και σε, γερον, το πριν µεν ακουοµεν ολβιον ειναι. Since already, in the death of his friend and foreknowledge of his own fate, Achilles has risen to the kind of insight which would become the catharsis of Attic drama: "Why I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals." (XVIII, 104-5) a26) 26) 26a) Polymedes of Argos, c. 590 B.C., from Cleobis and Biton, Delphi, Museum: Cleobis(?) Same, the pair; + V detail Same, Cleobis(?), detail (all, CGB '77) The Greek myth, in all its vibrance of paradox, one could call the gift of the gods; but its human containment and use becomes the Promethean work of man. Both polis and tragedy ask moral reconstruction of the divine. Solon: "The works of hybris do not endure for man." By "the will of the blessed immortals… justice is certain to come in time." That warning he applied to the rich of sixth century Athens, channeling private daring into a proud republic of freedom under law. And when asked by Croesus who was happiest, he mentioned the Cleobis and Biton still seen at Delphi, who pulled their mother in a chariot to the shrine in Argos, and received the gift of death in their prime of youth and filial service. How could Solon foresee that the communal deflection of heroic energy might make the city state itself the new Prometheus? a27) Attic, c. 570 B.C., Triton, Pediment of Hecatompedon, Acropolis Museum, Athens 27) Same, nearer, facing the heads (CGB '77) The incorporation of the ancient curse would lead in drama to the Eumenides and Oedipus Colonus. So the snake, brute and terror figures of mythology are enshrined in the Olympian Acropolis. Socratic reason has not yet excluded them. Nor in thought the shaping daemon of contradiction. Pythagoras: Void… enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things… In Heraclitus most of all the sphinx-triton of the fire-sea is smiling: June 1996 Greece 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The way up and the way down is the same… In the same rivers you can and cannot step… All things take place by strife… Changing, the all finds rest — µεταβαλλον αναπαυεται. 28) Cretan, c. 1600 B.C., Smaller Snake Goddess, Knossos Museum (light against dark) 28a) Same, detail (light background) But that grappling with the dark centers in tragedy. The dire enigma of the divine, come down from the Snake Goddesses of Crete and the East, the terrible tales of heroes hounded by arbitrary fates, have now to be tamed, as Apollo takes over "the hallowed huge cave" (Choepheroe) of the Python. It is under that Apollo that Orestes becomes a snake to cleanse his house: Clytaemnestra "dreamed she gave birth to a snake… gave it her breast to suck… the creature drew in blood along with the milk." Orestes: "I turn snake to kill her." 29) Attic, late 8th cent. B.C., terra cotta Snake Goddess or Fury, found in the Agora From eighth century Athens comes this terra cotta Snake Goddess turned into a Fury: "Women like gorgons… wreathed in a tangle of snakes." The Libation Bearers invoke them in Aeschylus: The death act calls out on Fury To bring out of those who were slain before new ruin on ruin accomplished. (Choephoroe, 402 ff.) a30) 30) 31) Greek, c. 590 B.C., Gorgon Pediment, Corfu; detail: Gorgon's head Same, center and right, Gorgon, with the hero, Chrysaor Same, pediment cropped: Gorgon, Chrysaor and panthers The task is, as in the sixth century pediment of the Artemis temple at Corfu, how these Gorgon powers of night and the underworld ("we have chosen overthrow of houses, where the Battlegod grown within strikes near and dear") are to be instituted in the state: Let the old murder in the house breed no more. June 1996 Greece 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Choephoroe, 805) It is from the old divine order to the new — under Promethean reconciliation — as this hero Chrysaor springs from the Gorgon's blood. So Athena wins the Furies to their own sacred cave: I promise you a place of your own, deep hidden under ground… where you shall sit on shining chairs… to accept devotions offered by your citizens… (Eumenides, 804 ff.) We have begun to quote Aeschylus with the art of the centuries before him. a32) 32) 32a) Attic, c. 550 B.C., Korê wearing the Peplos #679, Acropolis Museum, Athens Attic, c. 520 B.C., Korê #670, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Attic, c. 500 B.C., Korê #674, detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens Meanwhile, the marvelously preserved series of Athenian Korai shows in the glory of marble the softening and humanizing of myth. Before 500 B.C. — the lyric sharpness of Sappho: ∆εδυκε µεν α σελαννα και Πληιαδες, µεσαι δε νυκτες, παρα δ' ερχετ' ωρα, εγω δε µονα κατευδω. (The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is the middle of the night; time passes, and I lie alone.) — flows like an oriental hybris, into Pindar's matured celebration of pan-hellenic triumph. a33) Vb33) 33) 33a) Double: [A] Archer, Darius I, 532-486, Frieze, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (details) Attic, c. 480 B.C., Kouros, Acropolis Museum, Athens (CGB '77) not dig. Attic (Kritios?), c. 485 B.C., Youth, Acropolis Museum (CGB '77) Double: as in a33, but three Archers and the whole Kritios For triumph intervenes. 480 B.C.: after Xerxes had lashed the Hellespont, rebuilt his bridge and crossed with his hundreds of thousands — when the Persian spy, looking down on the pass of Thermopylae, saw the Spartan youth combing their long hair, and June 1996 Greece 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History foretold a pushover — he did not know that, for the time at least, there was power in that beauty, an order of reason in that freedom. Simonides: Stranger, bear this message to the Spartans: We lie here, to their bidding, self-persuaded. (CGB) Ω ξειν αγγελλειν Λακεδαιµονιοις οτι τηδε κειµεθα, τοις κεινων ρηµασι πειθοµενοι. And perhaps this Ephebe attributed to Kritios could have told a profound observer that the world-empire of Persia stood no more chance than the Chthonic gods against Olympian light. 34) Greek, Aegina, c. 490 B.C., Head of Athena from the Temple of Aphaia, Glyptotheque, Munich Herodotus' proud account is of the victory of an ideal: "Free they are, O King, yet not wholly free; for law is their master… What their law bids them, that they do." For the tragic stage, Aeschylus viewed the event from Susa, 1200 miles away. Strange, to make the chorus of Persian calamity a praise of Greece: "Hellas own no mortal master, and her sons are ever free." 35 35a) Same, Archer, Glyptotheque, Munich Same, detail Or the narrated catastrophe of Salamis (where Aeschylus fought), when the Athenian ships at dawn attacked the Persians in the straits, reverse itself in the "proud paean of Hellenic might." No play more bristles with warnings against hybris. But what of Greek hybris? Athens had just converted the Delian League into an empire, secured the Bosphorus for the import of grain and export of wine and oil, and was embarked against Egypt, oldest kingdom of the world. Does Aeschylus blame the vaunt in which he shares — the civic overweening which would run its course 36) Attic, 460-50 B.C., bronze Zeus or Poseidon, detail, head and shoulders, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) through the life and death of Pericles, to shipwreck on Sicily? June 1996 Greece 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Or was it more than one could expect of a people, to see that the achievement of measure and clarity and reason, of joyfully ordered freedom, of drama and philosophy, of civilization, was itself the boast of Prometheus: "I caused mortals to cease fearing doom… I placed them in blind hopes… besides this, I gave them fire" — their greatness and their flaw? 37) Greek, 470-456 B.C., West Pediment of the Zeus Temple (cropped); + V detail The Orestes trilogy is from the same years as the Zeus Temple in Olympia. In the west pediment, centered in Apollo, the attempted bride-rape by the drunken centaurs, against the Lapith defense aided by Theseus, sets brute nature and barbarism against the Hellenic and rational. Yet once violence is loosed, the pediment becomes such a net of destruction as weaves through the Agamemnon and Choephoroe: (Lattimore) The struggling masses… knees grinding in dust, the end will be destiny… (Agamemnon, 64 ff.) a38) 38) Same, West Pediment, Old Lapith Woman Same, East Pediment, River God Alpheios or Kladeos Since the old Lapith women who held the corners, a lamenting chorus to the tragedy, have been renewed at a later date, we draw from the other pediment this river god who might almost be the watchman "crouched like a dog on the roof of the Atreidae," under the destiny of the wheeling stars, looking for the beacon that should herald joy: Now let there be redemption from distress, the flare burning from the blackness in good augury. (Agamemnon, 19-20) Though what it heralds is the death of Agamemnon. 39) Same, West Pediment, broken centaur head; following Va39, that head, with surrounding fragments (Va39, not dig.) The habitual warning ignored — "Let no lust seize on these men to violate what they must not" (Agamemnon, 341-2) — as we move inward: "The curse… wrings atonement from those high hearts that drive to evil" (Agamemnon, 374 ff.). And where is June 1996 Greece 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the outlet from this "spider's web," this "web of death" — "fenced in these fatal nets," "the nets of ruin fence-high beyond overleaping." (Agamemnon, 1048, 1375, 1492) 40) Same, left: Girl, and Centaur stabbed by Lapith; + V detail (dig. det. first) Good and bad are caught in the same destiny: "Who shall claim he was born clear of the dark angel?" (Agamemnon, 1341-2) "I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony/ he buckled at the knees and fell." (Agamemnon, 1384-5) And the chorus: "The bitter glory of a doom that shall never be done with; and all through Zeus… what here is without God's blessing?" 41) Same, Kneeling girl caught by the hair; video uses Va41 and V41a Though "grace comes somehow violent" (Agamemnon, 183): Cassandra — "she who swanlike cried aloud her lyric mortal lamentation out": "Alas for the wretchedness of my ill-starred life… pain flooding the song of sorrow." (Agamemnon, 1444-5 and 1136-7) a42) 42) Same, right: Biting group Same, right: Biting group, another view Violence in the pediment climaxes in the biting group to the right, the boy-murder to the left. And in Aeschylus: "A house… God hates… the shambles for men's butchery, the dripping floor." (Agamemnon, 1090-92) "The drops come thicker, still fate grinds on yet more stones the blade for more acts of terror." (Agamemnon, 1534-6) "The ghastly food whose curse works now before your eyes." (Agamemnon, 1598) "Who shall tear the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin." (Agamemnon, 1565-6) 43) V43a) Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, head Same, left: Centaur nearest to Apollo, body Yet as we move toward center, the figures and faces of struggle and revenge take on choral dignity: "Yet from such as this the God, if he will, can work out strains that are fairer" (Choephoroe, 340-1), — even the centaurs, as if they too were justified: "War strength shall collide with war strength, right with right" (Choephoroe, 461); "the cure" begins to show "through the fierce wreck and bloodshed." (Choephoroe, 475) 44) Same, right: Perithoos' Bride Deiadameia, and Centaur Euritian June 1996 Greece 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In that middle play (The Libation Bearers), Orestes and Electra — "Hear me Earth, hear me, grandeurs of Darkness" (Choephoroe, 399) — assume the beast to serve the oracle: "For we are bloody like the wolf" (Apollo also called Lycian, the wolf-god) "and savage born from the savage mother" (Choephoroe, 421-2) 45) Same, Deiadameia, detail, head and shoulders The ultimate outrage, the mother-murder, becomes for the chorus "temperate things done in the house" (Choephoroe, 786): "with a great cry of Father, when she cries Child, go on through with the innocent murder." (Choephoroe, 828-30) 46) Same, Apollo, with Centaur to his right; V46) Same, Apollo, detail only (dig. omits) Already we are under another sway — though for Orestes pain must flower: "I grieve for the thing done, the death, and all our race… My victory is soiled and has no pride." (Choephoroe, 1016-7) As the Furies come: "On this house… the third storm has broken… Where shall the fury of fate be stilled to sleep, be done with?" (Choephoroe, 1065-67) 47) Same, Apollo, head and shoulders Only the divine can rule the Furies: "Do good, receive good, and be honored as the good are honored." (Eumenides, 868-9) "Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black wave/ and live with me and share my pride of worship." (Eumenides, 832-3) Thus in the temple, as in the trilogy: "The power that holds the sky's majesty wins our veneration." (Choephoroe, 960) 48) 48a) Still from the temple of Zeus, Olympia, c. 460 B.C., Metope: Athena, Heracles, and Atlas, Olympia Museum Same, detail So far the Promethean daring of Athens and Greece seems to have operated within the containment of tradition and under the guidance of a god — as Athena here helps Hercules hold up the sky, while Atlas brings the apples of the Hesperides. June 1996 Greece 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Even Empedocles, though Arnold thought he began "the dialogue of the mind with itself," seems in his fragments still carried on the sacred wave: Twofold is the coming into being, twofold the passing away of perishable things: for combining both begets and destroys, and what was combined is itself scattered, being now united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife… 49) Myron, c. 450 B.C. (Roman copy): Discobolus, Thermae Museum, Rome But when thought in Protagoras had made "man the measure of all things," and in Democritus had left only atoms and the void; when Gorgias turned Sophism into doubt: "the criterion of truth is destroyed; there is no criterion, either of Being, or of the possibility of its being known or communicated to others" — the method of Greek inquiry (as in Aristophanes' Clouds) has undercut the divine sanctions on which the laws of the state and their veneration rested. a50) 50) Parthenon, 447-32, B.C., from the Propylaean, Athens (CGB '77) Same, Southwest corner with Metope, Athens (CGB '77) When does Sophistic question strike at the confidence of Aeschylus and Olympia? I remember a lecture by Blanckenhagen on the Parthenon, supreme achievement of Pericles and Phidias, finished a few years before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. He treated it, as some do Oedipus, as a jibe at cruel gods. The metopes, seen here at the top, were of battle on all sides: 51) Same, Metope 1, Lapith and Centaur, Athens Lapiths against Amazons, Trojans against Greeks, giants against gods. After the pediment of Olympia, these conflicts seem as stripped as the brunt of Democritus' atoms. 1st 52) Same, East Pediment, south side: Helios' Horses, Dionysus, Demeter, Korê, Iris; British Museum, London (CGB '77) The great East Pediment, with its richly robed figures (where the horse-drawn chariot of Selene sinks to the north, and that of Apollo rises to the south) must present the central theme of Aeschylus, the coming of the new order of Athena and Apollo. Is it, as in Aeschylus, a theodicy? June 1996 Greece 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 53) Same, part of the Frieze seen between columns, Athens The frieze, which runs around the whole temple under the porch of columns, shows the preparations for the pan-Athenian procession, with the procession itself to the sacrifice. It ends on the East a54) 54) 54a) Same, East Frieze, Hera and Zeus, British Museum (CGB '77) Same Frieze, Sacred Peplos, Athena and Hephaestos (CGB '77) Second century copy of Phidias, 447-438 B.C., gold and ivory Parthenon Athena, National Museum, Athens with the gods, who talk among themselves, unconcerned, in the detachment Protagoras had confessed of them, and been banished by the Athenians, though a friend of Pericles: As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life… Especially Athena (she had no altar in the Parthenon) turns her back to the offering. The gold and ivory Athena from the sanctuary is known only in tawdry copies, but she was shown in her aspect of terror — on her shield the battle with the Amazons, on her shoes with the Centaurs, while on the pedestal the story of Pandora replaced the other battles — the cruelty of the gods in preparing evil for man. 2nd 53) Metope from the Parthenon, Centaur and Lapith, British Museum, London (CGB '77) Is the usual view of the temple merely the vulgar view? Was the secret message of Pericles and Phidias the indifference of the gods and the futility of sacrifice? (So far, Blanckenhagen, as sophistic advocate.) a2nd 52) Parthenon, West front, looking north, Athens (CGB '77) 2nd 52) Same, East Pediment: Leto, Diane, Aphrodite, British Museum, London (CGB '77) 2nd 52a) Same, closer detail (CGB '77) June 1996 Greece 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Of whom the work asks the question: if in futility, why so harmonious, so rapturous a celebration? We have forgotten the paradox of tragedy itself. Hesiod told the story of Pandora as a case of divine malice — Hesiod, from the Greek age of belief: "I will give men an evil thing, in which they may… embrace their own destruction." The force of irresponsible gods, who have still to be worshipped, is the dark wisdom of ritual. Of course, as reason penetrates that matter, there will come a breaking point when the Gordian knot of stark faith cleaves and one is left with 3rd 53)Same, North Frieze, detail: youth leading a horse Sophoclean vindication: "His destiny has found a perfect end"; or Euripidean doubt: "The gods intended nothing but my woes and hate to Troy." Both stand, with the Parthenon, at a peak of perfection; a kind of pathos and backward looking attends any such cadence, where instinctive action melts into the ripeness of thought. For 2nd 54) Same, Robed horseman, looking back, British Museum (CGB '77) On such a knife edge of tragic and sceptical possibility, it is not easy to say which has been chosen. Not even the contrast of Sophocles and Euripides is as clear as stylehistory makes it. But what speaks in the Parthenon is less hidden message than manifest art. And in that, as in Oedipus Rex and Coloneus, the sacred has been made human; 55) 55a) Same, East Pediment, Dionysus, British Museum, London (CGB '77); + V detail Same, East Pediment, Horse of Selene, British Museum, London (CGB '77) in the beauty of ritual, the paradox of God and man rises to a Dionysiac crest. With the Peloponnesian War, the sequence of aspiration, hybris, fate, and ruin spreads from myth and drama into history. No author has seen the tragedy he lived through with such devastating clarity as Thucydides. In Pericles' Funeral Oration, from the first year of the war, we take the wings of Man in his Pride: We are the school of Hellas… the wonder of present and future shall be ours… we have forced sea and land to be the highway of our daring… realize the power of Athens, feed your eyes upon her, till love of her fills your hearts; and when all this greatness shall break upon you… remember… honor in action… June 1996 Greece 21 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) Symbolic History Double: Riace Bronzes, c. 440 B.C.: [A] Younger, side; [B] Older, back; Reggio Calabria Mus.; (For Riace slides, V has variants.) (dig. adds Older, side; Younger front) Same, another view of the Younger, head to hips (V. varies these) The Riace Bronzes, keen as the reported Phidian warriors, Delphic commemorators of Marathon, are the greatest Greek discovery since the Athenian ZeusPoseidon came from the sea. How they hold the divide between that Funeral Paean and the Disaster Oration, in which (after the defeats of the second year of the war and the outbreak of the Plague, B.C. 430) Pericles bared the expediency of the vision: What you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe. In the daring of Athenian mind, the fall is foreseen and celebrated: even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever be forced to yield, still it will be remembered… a city unrivalled by any other. 57) Attic, c. 435 B.C., Grave relief, battle scene, Villa Albani, Rome "War the rough master" having carried off Pericles and left self-seeking factions, the followers of Phidias, exploiting the techniques of the Parthenon, move through this Albani Battle relief 58) Attic, 430-25 B.C., Greeks vs. Amazons, Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze, British Museum, London toward whatever style of crisis the late century Phigalian freize exhibits. The ideal falls away from such moral and political turmoil as Thucydides describes, 427 B.C., the Revolution in Corcyra (and perhaps here we are closer to the frenzy of some Euripides): For 2nd 57) Head and shoulders of Older Riace Warrior (dig. shifts order) 2nd 57a) Again, Riace Warriors: Older, front; Younger, back Words had to change their ordinary meaning and take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice… Frantic June 1996 Greece 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected… For 2nd 56) Attic, 394-3 B.C., Dexileos Stele, Keramikos Museum, Athens Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished… The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. For 3rd 57) Same, lower right detail It was the license Sophism had already bred, "making the worse appear the better cause" — Thrasymachus' "justice is the interest of the stronger," which in 416, a time of truce, infects Athenian policy in the outrage against Melos: 2nd 58) Another detail: Phygaleia (or Bassae) Frieze We shall not trouble you with specious pretenses… since you know as well as we do that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must… That was the hybris which led the next year to the madness of the Sicilian campaign. 59) 59a) Scopas and others, c. 350 B.C., Amazon Frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, detail, British Museum, London Same, another detail How great the ambition which overreached itself, Alcibiades, most brilliant and corrupt of Socrates' admirers, betrayed to the Spartans: We sailed to Sicily, first to conquer, if possible, the Siceliots, and after them the Italiots also, and finally to assail the empire and city of Carthage. [Then] we were to attack Peloponnese… and so rule the whole of the Hellenic name. We have leapt from the Phigalian frieze to that of Halicarnassus, its 350 consequent, in the orgiastic manner of Scopas; but Alcibiades, too, had leapt ahead, launching — as from Darius (Herodotus VII, 9) "We shall bring all mankind under our yoke" — the dream which Alexander would make less visionary, but which would only be actualized by the disciplined advance of Rome. June 1996 Greece 23 �C.G. Bell a60) 60) Symbolic History Ionian, c. 400 B.C., Stele of Crito and Timarista, Mus. Rhodes; + dig. detail Attic, c. 400 B.C., Funeral Stele of Hegeso, Nat. Museum, Athens; as above In pride and sorrow, Thucydides records the Sicilian disaster: This was the greatest Hellenic achievement… at once most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army — everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. What could follow that wreck of the outward polis, its laws and values, but an inward, tragic fruit, as in the myth of Phaëthon's fall, in the garden of Euripides, where Phaëthon's sad sisters by his grave Weep into the river, and each tear Gleams a drop of amber in the wave… We feel it in the one fragment of music left from Euripides — as performed at St. John's by Therriault and Lynch: Music: a61) 61) 61a) Euripides, 408 B.C., fragment from Orestes, 1st Chorus, Theriault and Lynch, St. John's College, Santa Fe Attic (Ionian), c. 420-15 B.C., Erechtheum, N. Porch from the East, Athens Same, N. Porch from the West (CGB '77) Erechtheum from the Southwest, with the Porch of Caryatids (end Euripides) Or in Hecuba's poignant almost-justification: Had He not turned us in His hand, and thrust Our high things low and shook our hills as dust, We had not been this splendour, and our wrong As everlasting music for the song Of earth and heaven! (Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women) In the Euripidean close of the century, the Erechtheum had caught in architecture the lyrical Ionic yearning of the Hippolytus chorus of escape, which Gilbert Murray made a masterpiece of nostalgia: June 1996 Greece 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Could I take me to some cavern for my hiding In the hill tops where the sun scarce hath trod… a62) 62) Same, Erechtheum, detail of a Caryatid Parthenon, 447-38 B.C., Frieze, Profile of a boy, Acropolis Museum To the strand of the daughters of the sunset The apple tree, the singing, and the gold… Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth In God's quiet garden by the sea. But the frieze of the Parthenon, in the reverie of all ripeness, of all acme, had already reflected such moods, and it was with that outward betrayal and inward deepening that Socrates ended and Plato began. a63) b63) 63) Peloponnesian, c. 400 B.C., (from Benevento), Bronze head of an Athlete, Louvre, Paris Double: Ancient replicas of 4th cent. B.C. portrait busts: [A] Socrates, Thermae, Rome; and [B] Plato, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England Another view of a63 The seeds of the fourth century and of the Hellenistic, and even of Hellenized Rome, lurk in that 400 B.C. crisis, the gilded youth of Athens gathered (as in the Symposium) around the questioning Silenus-Socrates (whose cloud-house Aristophanes would burn) — Silenus-Socrates, to open, as votive statues did, to the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Let that team of Plato-Socrates describe, in the eighth book of the Republic, what had happened in that Athens, and would happen (as Thucydides says) "as long as the nature of man remains the same": When a democracy has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, anarchy ends by infecting everything. The father descends to the level of his sons; the master fears and flatters his scholars; old and young are alike; and all things are ready to burst with liberty. Such is the fair and glorious beginning out of which tyranny springs. 64) 64a) Hellenistic, 162-50 B.C., Demetrius I of Syria(?), Thermae, Rome Same, detail of head The people have always some protector whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. Some he kills and others he banishes, always stirring up war that the state may require a leader. Who is valiant, June 1996 Greece 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History high-minded, wise, is the enemy. So freedom, getting out of all order, passes over into the bitterest form of slavery. Here a Hellenistic king, perhaps Demetrius I, complements the gilded youth, Alcibiades, say, at the banquet of love. 65) From Zeus Temple, Olympia, 470-56 B.C., West Pediment, Theseus head Let Demosthenes, trying to rouse the Athenians against the menace of Macedon, make the contrast of old and new. (Here the old in art: Theseus, from Olympia) 66) 66a) There must be some cause… why the Greeks were so eager for liberty then and now are eager for servitude. There was something… which overcame the wealth of Persia and maintained the freedom of Greece… Lysippus, 336-2 B.C., Marble replica of bronze Agias, detail, head, Delphi Same, statue from the hips up (CGB '77) Something, the loss of which has ruined all… What was this? Simply that whoever took money from the corrupters of Greece was universally detested… But now all such principles have been sold as in the open market, and those imported by which Greece is ruined and diseased… envy where a man gets a bribe; laughter if he confesses it… the usual signs of corruption. Art courting that new private world — a fourth-century marble after Lysippus. 67) 67a) Attic, c. 380 B.C., Stele of Ktesileos and Theano, Nat. Museum, Athens Same, detail of Ktesileos, upper left Conceive the pity of this degradation. Platonic cave: Greek outwardness has become the Behold! Human beings in an underground cave, chained, facing away from the fire and from the light. Figures bearing images pass behind them, and before them is a wall where shadows are thrown. They have lived there since childhood, prisoners, as we all are. For them the truth will be nothing but the shadows of images cast on the wall of a cave. So the late-classical search is on: how to rise from the cave of matter to the light. Though as long as power operates in pagan forms, there will be the stern duty of return to the cave — the paradox and pathos of the human lot. June 1996 Greece 26 �C.G. Bell 68) 68a) 68b) Symbolic History Sicilian (Selinunt), c. 460 B.C.(?), detail of Hera, Museum Palermo Magna Graecia, c. 460 B.C., detail from the Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne, Thermae, Rome Attic, c. 500 B.C.(?), Athena in gilded bronze from a vessel, Acropolis Museum, Athens But it is not the tragic paradox, which enfleshed and worshipped dangerous divinity — this fifth-century Hera unveiling herself on her wedding night, mysterious as the destroying Aphrodite of Sophocles' Antigone (Yeats): Overcome — O bitter sweetness, Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl — The rich man and his affairs, The fat flocks and the field's fatness, Mariners, rough harvesters; Overcome Gods upon Parnassus; Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend, By that great glory driven wild. Pray I will and sing I must, And yet I weep — Oedipus' child Descends into the loveless dust. 69) Roman, 1st cent. A.D., from Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Cnidus, Cloister of the Thermae, Rome (CGB '86) It was exactly that ambiguous divinity that Socratic and Platonic reason objected to — no paradox, no cruelty in the divine; so the world cleaves into tawdry outwardness, the itch of passion, against the soul's search, that leaning of the alone to the Alone. 70) Video double; slide & dig. singly: [A] Corinthian, mid-7th cent., Hunt from Chigi Vase, Villa Giulia, Rome; and [B] Hellenistic, c. 330 B.C., Alexander Sarcophagus, Lion Hunt, Istanbul Museum June 1996 Greece 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What was charged with spirit becomes counterfeit. The Homeric hunt of the Corinthian seventh-century jug: Odysseus telling of "the boar's gleaming tusk that ripped his leg while he hunted Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus," turns in the Hellenistic "Alexander Sarcophagus" — for all Aristotle's validation of imitated sense and passion — to one of the vigorous exertions of the Cave, the skilled mimesis of a slaughter yard, a shambles. Va71) From mosaic, c. 200 B.C. after late 4th cent., Battle of Alexander and Darius: Double: details of the two; but videoed singly Same, the whole mosaic, National Museum, Naples Double: [A] Apollonius of Athens, mid-1st cent, B.C., Bronze Boxer, Thermae; and [B] Hellenistic, late 3rd cent. B.C., Drunk Woman, Capitoline 71) 71a) The glow of Alexander has filled Hegel and all with raptures; but in the mosaic copy of the fourth-century painting of his Battle with Darius, we are again thrown into the cave-realm Arnold would write of: "And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." How much more with the Hellenistic cult of the ugly: Apollonius' Boxer, the Louvre Dwarf, the Capitoline Old Woman. 72) 72a) Attic, c. 320 B.C., Figure from Stele 2574, Nat. Museum, Athens Closer detail: face of same figure What does the just soul do in such a state? One would like to legislate, of course, "to save the country as well as oneself." That was what sent Plato on those bootless missions to Sicily. But Socrates had already given the pensive description (and example) of what was to come (Republic VII), comparing the philosopher in an evil time to one fallen among beasts: who seeing the madness of the many, and that no politician can be honest and no champion will defend justice, is like a man who, in a driving storm of dust and sleet, retires under the shelter of a wall, content if he can live his own life pure and depart in peace, and with fair hopes. 1st 73) Attic, 410-09 B.C., Nikê loosening a sandal, Acropolis Museum June 1996 Greece 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Euripides fragment, what is transcribed as chromatic was perhaps in the enharmonic or quarter-tone mode. The haunting phrase (with two indicated instrumental entrances, unison to fifth) conveys a style of passion, expressive as the robe of this 410 post-Phidian Nikê. Music: Repeat from Euripides, Orestes fragment, closing phrase 74) Rhodian, c. 190 B.C., Victory of Samothrace, Louvre, Paris (end music) As that agitation dominates the Hellenistic, it often reappears — thus the 180 B.C. Victory of Samothrace. 75) Gilded bronze krater, c. 330 B.C., Museum, Thessalonikê It relates to the Dionysiac art of Scopas, suggested in this fourth-century cinerary krater from Macedon, For 1st 76) Late copy of 300 B.C. Portrait of Alexander, Museum, Pella as also in Hellenistic portraits of Alexander, this, pursuing the ardour of Leochares. 2nd 75) Center-spread of 75: Krater (from Derveni tomb, Macedon) The most ambitious piece of Greek music that survives is the First Delphic Hymn of the second century, which with its original accompaniments must have been a rich display piece, 2nd 74) Again, Victory of Samothrace, another view with chromatics in the last section like those of the Euripides chorus. Nothing will revive the wealth of Greek music, not even a private 1930's recording of the melody by Mr. Butt; 2nd 73) Again, the Acropolis Nikê relief (CGB '77) but with such images as we have seen, it may be our best hint at one of the great emotional delights of the Platonic cave. (The words are post-Pindaric, of the shrines of Greece.) June 1996 Greece 29 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, sung by Mr. Butt 3rd 74) Side view of the Winged Victory of Samothrace 3rd 75) A Dionysiac detail of the same Derveni Krater 2nd 76) Pergamum, c. 270 B.C., Portrait of Alexander, Istanbul Of course with this School of Pergamum Alexander we are again in the cave which outwardness had become — "swept with confused alarms." Plato had sketched (Republic IX) the fate of the tyrant (the man Thrasymachus had called happy): he is, in his waking state, what others are in their worst nightmares, enslaved, friendless, afraid, and mad. 77) Leochares, 340-30 B.C., Demeter from Knidos, British Museum (CGB '77) Against it we project, from the lifetime of Plato, the Demeter of Knidos, to keep up the oscillation — over the gulf of wider cleavage — from the more futile frenzy of action, to the searching pathos of thought, seeking by recollection: beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of other things. (Symposium) 78) Roman, 211-17 A.D., the Emperor Caracalla, Conservatori, Rome It was only under the universal empire of Rome, and five hundred years after Plato, that the deepening and darkening of the cave reached its limit in the soulless burden of the outward law; a79) 79) Statuette of the Young Christ, 3rd cent., upper half, Thermae, Rome Same, closer detail (head) Music: Pre-Gregorian, 3rd-5th cent.(?), Sanctus, Mass for the Dead (Solesmes) Decca 7532 A only then that the wing-sprouting soul made a final break with pagan outwardness. When it did, although its creed was of Christ's passion, it shunned the Classical style of passion as far as it could (until the Renaissance for profound theological reasons would tie onto it again); it leaned to neo-Platonism, even to the heresy of denying God's pain. And in art, the tenderest early-Christian moments June 1996 Greece 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (close Sanctus) 80) From Tegea, c. 360 B.C., Head of Hygeia, National Museum, Athens are in loving relation to that soft style of the ideal, which the followers of Phidias, most of all Praxiteles (in touch with Plato), ripened as a tragic fruit from the rise and fall of Promethean Greece. So Socrates in the Phaedrus: There was a time when… we beheld the beatific vision… shining in pure light, pure ourselves, not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about… prisoned like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of scenes which have passed away. June 1996 Greece 31 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Greece : The Tragic Myth and Deed, Symbolic History, Part 3 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 3 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_03_Greece--The_Tragic_Myth_and_Deed Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/49c247870aadcaadae2b046af7369729.pdf 38b9e96ccff1883716c1ffcaae0b6674 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 2. Cycles CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 July 1995 Last Revised June 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 2. Cycles a1) 1) California Coast, Panorama, Wall Poster (Sandra) Ocean waves under rowed clouds (Jean Coureaux) Sounds: Of the beach: waves and gulls Nature appears under the organizing image of the one-many, sequence within sequence, parts building into wholes: the trees of a forest, rowed condensations of cloud, wave on wave of the sea. The resonant necessity lies deeper than ocean, farther back than water, in the conceptual stuff of energy. The paradox roots there: that energy must be at one time the entire and continuing substratum of the world, and each embodied and failing particular — that star, this flame, this breaking wave — our referents for the whole. (fade ocean sounds) 2) 2a) Organic complex: tropical growth, Chiapas (CGB '71) Small pendulum clock from Bavaria, 1959, C.G. & D.M. Bell Sounds: Birdsong: The mockingbird And since every actual energy can only exhibit itself in the rush and consummation which is its death and manifest being, energy in the larger sense (the realm of nature), is only to be maintained by constructive incorporation and transcendence of repeated falls. This imposes on the organizing cosmos simultaneous models of the arrow and the wheel: the wheel of fatal recurrence spiraling into an arrow of transformational thrust — that being in fact the essence of time: those periodic same ticks of the clock, so numbered that the future succeeds the past. (fade birdsong) a3) 3) 7/1995 Spiral nebula: M. 83, Centaurus Group (D. F. Malin) Jean's sequence of spiral nebulae (The Universe Around Us) Cycles 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As the very concept of wave implies, these groupings — which we see frozen in spatial array (stars in clusters, into galaxies, to the cosmos) — claim, with likeness of structure, likeness of temporal succession, exhibited from the least atomic parts upward in an inwrought chain or stair. 4) 4a) Forest oak from below, Mt. Huitepec, Chiapas, Mexico (Doug Hall, c. '74) Double: [A] Teilhard de Chardin, Tree of Life; and [B] Diagram of human development; both, Phenomenon of Man So it is not surprising that the biological chart of evolution with its branches of adaptive radiation, species rising, climaxing, and being replaced, narrowing to fossils living or extinct, should assume the shape of a tree; or with Teilhard de Chardin, a plant infolding at the summit to the lotus-crown Omega. In human history Hegel has most radiantly detailed, by a four-fold upward pulse, the self-realization of Spirit in time; but for those cyclical pulses he has also compellingly stated the law of decay. a5) 5) Roman stucco, c. 160 A.D., Head from the tomb of the Valerii, Vatican Roman, 2nd(?) cent. A.D., Portrait of a man, engraved glass, Mus. Civ., Arezzo Music: Greek 1st cent. A.D., Epitaph of Seikilos, J.E. Butt, priv. rec. A face, a music, from the introspective decline of the Græco-Roman world; (end Seikilos) and here is Hegel: The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies. But this fruit does not fall back into the bosom of the people that produced and matured it; on the contrary, it becomes a poison draught to it. That poison draught it cannot let alone, for it has an insatiable thirst for it: the taste of the draught is its annihilation, though at the same time the rise of a new principle. Thus the draught of inward-looking, a debility in this Arezzo head (Augustine's "abyssus humanae conscientiae"), would be a point of departure for the Christian private soul. October 1992 Cycles 2 �C.G. Bell 6) Symbolic History Double: [A] Magdalenian, c. 16,000 B.C., Bison, Altamira, Spain; and [B] Levant, c. 7000 B.C., Abstract hunting scenes, Cerro Felio, Spain. (Also shown singly.) All organized unfolding has its ups and downs; but the great cycles of soul which Hegel took from Vico and passed to Spengler and Toynbee — are they limited to the overreaching West, or as inescapably repetitive as Spengler's formulation? Can the masterful animal paintings from ice-age caves (Altamira, 16,000 B.C.) record lost Promethean stirrings, Cro-Magnon peaks of individual emergence? And do the cryptographic scenes of the chase from eastern Spain 9,000 years later, in their sophisticated doodling, betray late-cycle reversion to some cult of the symbol? There are too few points to establish a curve. 7) Double: [A] Aurignacian, c. 25,000 B.C., Ivory "Venus" (Lespugue), Mus. de L'homme, Paris; and [B] Laussel, c. 20,000 "Venus" with horn, Mus. d'Aquitaine From earlier still — these beginnings of magic and art — the radical ivory curves of the fertility fetish from Lespugue (about 25,000 B.C.) oppose the horn-brandishing massive stone flesh of Laussel (perhaps 5,000 years later, with abstract against representational. There is no fiercer cleavage in civilization, linked somehow to the transcendental bypass, against realistic cultivation, of the outward and physical. Who knows if all history has oscillated in that tension? We hardly understand its working in ourselves, much less in prehistoric images. 8) Double: [A] Ifê, before 13th cent., woman's head, clay, Ifê Museum, Nigeria; and [B] Contemporary Congo, Bakwele Mask, Mus. des Arts Africains, etc., Paris. [Also shown singly.] Music: Senegal Dance prelude, 21-string lamine Kora, Arion FARN 91018 What mystery of humanist rise and fall may underlie the pre-Renaissance appearance (left), in the Nigerian centers of Ifê and Benin, of those wonderful clays and bronzes of modulated touch, in an horizon which has everywhere reverted (as from the subtleties of the 21-stringed Senegal kora) (fade Senegal kora) Music: October 1992 from Witch Doctor Dance of the Baoule, Olympia Atlas 6110 Cycles 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the catalepsy of the voodoo mask, the beat of the Witch Doctor Dance? (fade Baoule Dance) Perhaps the limit of such reduction 9) 9a) Alaskan Eskimo, recent, wood and fur mask, Kukokwim River, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. Double: [A] Tusyan mask, Upper Volta, fiber and seeds, Müller Museum, Geneva; and [B] Max Ernst, 1934-5, Bronze bird head, Gal. Beyeler, Basel Music: Yurok Basket Song (A. Figueroa), New World Records 297 (b-6) is in the conformity of placation rites Rasmussen recorded from an Eskimo shaman: …we explain nothing, we believe nothing… We fear dearth and hunger in the cold snow huts. We fear… the old woman at the bottom of the sea who rules over all the beasts of the sea… We fear sickness and evil spirits, the souls of the men and beasts we have killed …Therefore, our fathers have inherited from their fathers the old rules of life… We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we hold to the rules, that we may live untroubled. Could that be the primitive ground from which every civilization (as Oedipus plowed the mother) must arise — the ground perhaps of its modern return? Yurok song) (fade October 1992 Cycles 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet it remains doubtful whether the Stone Age, Africa, early America, or the Far East (though that would require another study) presents such affiliation of cultural surges as strikes us in the West. a10) 10) Triple: [A] Dynasty IV, c. 2700 B.C., Boston Reserve Head; [B] Dynasty XII, c. 1850 B.C., Sesostris III Head, Cairo Museum; and [C] Dynasty XVIII, c. 1355 B.C., detail, golden coffin of King Tutankhamen, Cairo Double: [A] Egypt, 1st Dynasty, c. 3,000 B.C., King Narmer tablet; and [B] Dynasty XVIII, c. 1352 B.C., relief, King Tutankhamen's chair; both, Cairo Museum The type of cyclical progression is set by the earliest example, the Egyptian — a rise and fall where each phase seems to generate, by a kind of fugal necessity, the phase to follow; so that a whole civilization, spread over a changing population and through two thousand years, proceeds, like an animate being, through a threefold oneness of beginning, middle, and end: a pattern so right and beautiful it stands as a paradigm for later cultures. First is the unity, as clear through all style-change as that of any species or nameable grouping in nature. Everything from this First Dynasty victory tablet, of preindividual and primitive force, to the New Kingdom subjective luxury of King Tut's carved cedarwood chair (right), bears the recognizable stamp and character of Egypt. a11) 11) Triple, Egypt: [A] Old Kingdom, detail of diorite Khafre; [B] Middle Kingdom, Sphinx of Amenemhet III; [C] New Kingdom, limestone Ikhnaton, detail; all, Cairo Museum Egypt, Dynasty IV, c. 2540 B.C., Chephren, front upper half, Cairo Museum And yet this pervasive unity is broken into three distinctive parts (the Egyptians, said Vico, dividing their history into ages of gods, heroes, and men), three epochs, separated, like geological ages, by intervals of upheaval — though each, bridging the intermission, picks up the threads of the same drama. There is an Old Kingdom (third millennium) of discovery and keen individual emergence — Khafre (or Chephren) gazing with vital calm beyond death. 12) Egypt, Dynasty XII, c. 1820 B.C., Amenemhet III head, Cairo Museum October 1992 Cycles 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History There is a Middle Kingdom (early second millennium) of somber control, the saddened pre-Stoic fort of Amenemhet III. 13) Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., colossal Ikhnaton from Karnap, Cairo Museum There is a New Kingdom (later second millennium) of opulent extravagance and spiritual unrest: Ikhnaton just before he broke with the religion of the state. However these phases may relate to those of subsequent cycles — Second 11) Profile of Khafre (or Chephren), same subject as 11 the Old Kingdom youth in the shelter of belief, to the early and fifth century Greek, or the Western Gothic and Renaissance; Second 12) Again, Amenemhet III, detail of 12 the weighty responsibility under darker self-knowledge, perhaps to Republican Rome, or with us to Milton and the shadowed baroque, or perhaps to an art of communist discipline still in the course of being born; Second 13) Again, Ikhnaton, detail of 13 Second 13a) Triple, same as a10 the New Kingdom of imperial display, novelty, and mystical yearning, to any age of latecycle luxury, whether Græco-Rome, or the recent or future West — however sketchily these relations hold, the three Egyptian phases — dawn-life, embattled will, sensuous repletion with spiritual search — have a kind of inner logic and credibility. 14) Egypt, c. 3000 B.C., pre- or early dynastic lion, Berlin The logic unfolds on closer scrutiny. It is from the stone age of pre-conscious cult, with all its primitive bareness and primitive strength, that the Old Kingdom (c. 3000 B.C.) takes its origin, a tribal worship of natural powers and brute gods. 15) Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2650-2500 B.C., Pyramids of Gizeh October 1992 Cycles 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In four dynasties and four hundred years, we climb to a conquest of stone and an art never to be surpassed in affirming faith. The largest pyramid, of Cheops, is behind; center is that of Chephren. We have just seen him in the severity of diorite smiling the immortal well-being of the personal awakening in the ritualistic frame. The smaller pyramid in front is of his successor Mycerinus, Va16) 16) Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2510 B.C., King Mycerinus and goddesses, slant view of whole, Cairo Museum Frontal view of same: King Mycerinus between goddesses (Video: detail only) who, touched with the same radiant command, advances through time and eternity, supported on either side by the goddesses Hathor and Parva. It seems that only the birth period of a culture, its age of tragic joy, can blend such formal strength with representational immediacy, such solemn grandeur with vernal delight. 17) V17a) Egypt, Dynasty V, c. 2400 B.C., Seated Scribe, Louvre, Paris (with detail) Same, detail of the head. By the 5th Dynasty, the individual release, shifting from the more than human to the here and now, reaches a climax of realism in the Seated Scribe, the living variety caught in the instant and actual. Like any such cresting, this shows the incipient weakness of the merely particular, against those cult figures borne through time by eternal powers. 18) 18a) 18b) Egypt, Dynasty VI, c. 2500 B.C., King Pepi, head, copper, Cairo Museum Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty VI, c. 2280 B.C., Ur-khuui head, Cairo Museum; and [B] Roman, c. 60 A.D., head of Corbulo, Capitoline Museum King Pepi, detail of 18 (video from 18) A weakness which, in the sensuously refined copper statue of King Pepi I of the 6th Dynasty about 2300, reflects itself for the first time in history in a ripeness of nostalgic person — a relativism tied to the collapse of the Old Kingdom in wars and feudal anarchy. Telling, that 600 years of dynamic rule should close with Pepi's soft art of consciousness; prophetic also of all later fruiting of religious solace out of public disaster, that the first preserved work of Egyptian literature, the debate with his soul of a man weary of life, should be ascribed to Pepi's reign or soon after, when "The gentle man October 1992 Cycles 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History has perished, but the violent man has access to everybody." It is Plato's "no politician is honest," Yeats' "mere violence is loosed upon the world." But can the Old Kingdom already smack of Rome? The poem ends: Death is before me today Like the recovery of a sick man, Like going forth into a garden after sickness … Death is before me today As a man longs to see his house When he has spent years in captivity. a19) b19) 19) Egypt, Dynasty XII, 1842-1797 B.C., Sphinx of Amenemhet III, Cairo Mus. Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty IV, 2510 B.C., Mycerinus and Consort, Boston; and [B] Egypt, Dynasty XII, 1850 B.C., Senusret (Sesostris) III, Cairo Mus. Senusret III, head, Cairo Mus. (Same as [B] of b19) That is the inherited disillusion and conscious flaw with which the Middle Kingdom has always to reckon; and it could deal with it only by an equally conscious and labored control. The least weakening, and the state yields again to war and invasion. To go from the fresh earthly joy of the Old Kingdom to this assertive Senusret III (Dryden: "Heroic virtue did his actions guide"), or the others who resurrect the Kingdom of Egypt as by an act of will from the grave — is like the shift Hegel speaks of from Greece to Rome: "The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil." Does such heavy regimen always bind the fragments of first introspective decay, as Rome post-Alexandrian Greece? Va20) b20) c20) 20) Detail of b20, Thutmose III, profile of head Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, 1482-1450 B.C., Thutmoses III, Cairo Museum Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450 B.C., Lotus and Papyrus, detail, Temple of Karnak Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, 1482-1450 B.C., Thutmoses III, Head, Deir al Bahari Where then is the resemblance between the New Kingdom and the empires of Alexander and Napoleon? Can parallel lines cross: an Egyptian Alexander succeed Egyptian Rome? Or must we take to Spengler's procrustean bed, where this Thutmoses October 1992 Cycles 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History III lies down with dark Tiberius, and in the West with whatever the next millennium is to bring? In any case, it is after a second period of anarchy (200 years, culminating in the Hyksos invasion), that the pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, taking the war chariot from the invaders, carve out by conquest an empire and bureaucratic rule of more blatant material splendor than Egypt had known before. How different the sophisticated imperial smile, from that instinctive and eternal smiling of the Old Kingdom. Thutmoses' face is a stylized mask of display, though under its regal conformity lurk the strains of romantic flagrance. 21) Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450-25, B.C., Userhet hunting, Tomb 56, Thebes And now for the first time we have an almost slick art of marvellous technical facility applied to imperial theatrics. Not the decorations of Brighton Pavilion (for George IV), nor of the steamship Normandy are more brilliant — while these tomb carvings have the advantage of being real. Yet their reality is as earthly-thin as the surface of the relief. a22) 22) Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1450-25 B.C., Semenkhkara and the Princess Meritaten smelling lotus, Berlin Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Queen Nefertiti, Cairo Museum That life is a veil of appearance — harpers and dancing girls, nobles smelling lotus bloom; there is commerce and prosperity, the multiplication and refinement of pleasure. Under that surface mounts a hunger which produces in the busts of Nefertiti the most romantic of all depictions of woman — sensuous lips, raised chin, and wishful eyes, as if desire must always increase with the repletion on which it feeds. a23) 23) 23a) Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton and Nefertiti, with their daughters, relief, Cairo (color) Same, detail, Ikhnaton, daughter, and sun-orb Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Colossus of Ikhnaton, head, Cairo Museum Finally, in the Amarna representations of her mystical pharaoh husband Ikhnaton, the sensory longing and disillusion which undergird the whole New Kingdom, whiplash October 1992 Cycles 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History in a personal one-god revolution: Ikhnaton expressionistically distorted, a pentecostal priest under the inspiring rays of Aton. He wrote: I shall breathe the sweet breath Which comes from thy mouth. I shall behold thy beauty every day. It is my desire that I may hear thy sweet voice Even in the North Wind, that my limbs may rejuvenate with life Through love of thee. Give me thy hands, holding thy spirit, That I may receive it and may live by it. Call thou upon my name through all eternity, And it shall never fail. Surely this was a point of departure for the Hebrews who had entered Egypt in the Hyksos period and would leave it under Moses a century and a half after Ikhnaton. A lesson in the uses of adversity that perhaps the most crucial turn in religious history should spring from what could so easily be called the sickness and degeneracy of the revealed person of Ikhnaton. 24) 24a) Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rock Temple, Abu Simbel, with colossal Rameses II statues Egypt, Dynasty XIX, c. 1250 B.C., Rameses II smites his foes, relief, columned hall, Abu Simbel Ikhnaton's immolation of romantic ego to the mystical divine, for which he would have changed the worship of Egypt, sacrificing empire, self, and all, was suppressed after his death. As Jeffers says, "protest, a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens." His successors beat back to a more fatuous imperialism, trying to shore up a demoralized kingdom — Rameses II's giant attempts to outdo the vaunts of Thutmoses III. As his Pentewere temple inscription runs: Mine is the strength of a hundred thousand. I fall upon them like a raging fire and lay waste their serried ranks: as a falcon among fowl I sweep down on them; I strike and do not weary of striking. a25) 25) 25a) '92 insert: Egypt, Dynasty XXVI, c. 600 B.C.(?), head of a Saitic King Egypt, Late Dynastic, c. 135 B.C., The Great God Bes, Louvre, Paris Faiyum, Egypt, C. 100 A.D., Portrait of a man in a blue toga, encaustic on wood, Pushkin Museum,Moscow October 1992 Cycles 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From that conventional pomp we take a five century slide through the hollowness and nostalgia of the Saitic Kingdom to the reversion ("in my end is my beginning") of the beast-god Bes. Beyond are hybrid refinements — out of Egypt, by Greece and Rome. The vital course was run: "consumed with that which it was nourished by." 26) Mesopotamia, Early Dynastic (Fara phase), 2900-2685 B.C., Abihil, alabaster, Louvre, Paris Music: Ugarit, c. 1400 B.C., Hurrian cult song, University of California Through its long history, Egypt was not isolated; and the pattern of one-many, where we began, would lead us to ask if Mesopotamian Ur and Sumer, from the time of the Old Kingdom and soon after (or even the first cities of the Indus) shared in that phase of keen discovery? — 27) 27a) Babylonian, 18th cent. B.C., Stele of Hammurabi from Susa, detail, Louvre, Paris Sumerian (Babylonian), 18th cent. B.C., Hammurabi or donor, Awil-namor, from Larsa, Louvre, Paris whether Neo-Sumeria and Babylonia (Hammurabi's Stele of Laws) parallel the Middle Kingdom of duty and obligation. Was the blood–stream and nerve-net of trade (as later in Europe) sufficient to actualize so interwoven a history? Here music, too, should offer a discovered analogue; but the chordal interpretation of the Hurrian cult song from an Ugaritic cuneiform is so hypothetical, who can believe this tune the old cow died by is quite what Ezekiel would object to in the "dark Idolatries of alienated Judah?" (cut Hurrian cult song) 28) 28a) Cretan, c. 1600-1500 B.C., Palace of Minos, detail, Knossos (CGB '77) Minoan, c. 1500 B.C., Youths bearing jugs, fresco from Knossos, Mus. Herakleion, Crete Certainly the cultural web proliferates as we advance toward the New Kingdom. And suddenly from maritime Crete comes an art (c. 1500 B.C.) which seems to telescope what had gone before and to anticipate Egyptian luxury to follow. Its natural freedom and airy humanity suggest a Minoan Age of Joy; yet that brief and sensuous smile attends October 1992 Cycles 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the matured and sophisticated empires — ships bearing wine and oil and spices from Egypt and Asia Minor to Greece and Troy. Here is an island peak of the submerged continent from which the Homeric poems must in part derive. a29) 29) V29a) Mycenean, c. 1225 B.C., "Tomb of Agamemnon," Mycenae, Peloponnesus (CGB '77); dig. adds vb29, domed interior Mycenean, c. 1500 B.C., The Lion Gate, Mycenae, Peloponnesus Same, detail The excavations on Crete and at Mycenae spurred a cyclical rethinking of Homer, as in Kazantzakis' new Odyssey and in Yeats: "A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead." Against the threein-one of Egypt, the pre-Hellenic seemed divided like Græco-Rome into a Minoan phase of discovery and a weightier power-phase involving a new conquering people centered in Mycenae. Here the invading Achaians, absorbing Cretan skills into a zone of ruder force, built to Aegean hegemony, reducing the island of Crete itself to a tributary. The Lion Gate of Agamemnon's city "rich in gold," carved four centuries before the Trojan War, sets a type of the "successor power." 30) Cretan (Knossos), c. 1500 B.C., "La Parisienne," fresco, Mus. Herakleion, Crete; + V detail Against which the art of waning Knossos has the sophisticated elegance of the Hellenistic or recent European — indeed, this precious lady has been called "La Parisienne." Assume she also lived in Troy; since by the 12th century of the Trojan upheaval, all over the Aegean, such refinements must have been on the point of yielding to inner violence and barbarian vigor. 31) 31a) Peloponnesian, early 7th cent. B.C., Palladion, detail, Museum, Olympia Attic, 740 B.C., Geometric krater from Dipylon Gate of the Kerameikos, Nat. Mus., Athens (CGB '77); v. upper part; dig. whole and detail October 1992 Cycles 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Soon after the Trojan War — in that time of troubles when Egyptian scribes recorded, "the islands of the sea are restless" — Achaian Mycenae fell before fresh Greek tribes from the north, culminating in the Dorians. So we reach the Dark Age birthplace of Homeric myth; as Yeats says in A Vision: "I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda … And that from one of her eggs came Love and from the other War." I had not read Yeats when I went to Crete and Greece in 1939; but when I saw the 8th century Greek Geometric — purpose renewed in the cleansing reversion to primitive force — For 2nd 30) Minoan, gold ring, 15th cent., B.C., ritual scene, from Knossos, Mus. Herakleion, Crete For 2nd 31) Greek, Geometric, c. 700 B.C., warrior from Thessaly, Nat. Mus., Athens For 3rd 30) Aegean (Thera), near 1500 B.C., full-breasted woman, fresco, detail, Nat. Mus., Athens For 3rd 31) Double: [A] 3rd 30: full-breasted woman; and [B] 2nd 31: Greek geometric warrior 3rd 31a) Greek (Delos), 7th cent. B.C., Terrace of Lions, detail (CGB '77) after the almost cloying sweets of Knossos (thinking of our own time and of late Rome), I began unconsciously where Yeats had left off, with a poem affirming "The Geometric Style": Penance is, to pay for trespass, only The path to pardon, and pardon's fullness not Built but on hunger, wherefore Rome fell And Cretan softness. Mournful stood many, As when the whip strikes, self-wielded. Well May the lash be longed for and lamented. What Sage can affix our blessing, of pain or gladness? Who gives his life finds it; paradox, such Is our wisdom, and ends with grasping, lifeless In conquest, as who runs and drops dead. Touch No string of sorrow; the sweet sound rots To the core. What is lost? Death. And ahead penitence, Pain, crudeness, desert earth or worse, bare plots Of stone, now known our last defendence. October 1992 Cycles 13 �C.G. Bell 32) 32a) Symbolic History Greek (Spartan), c. 600 B.C., colossal head of Hera, Museum, Olympia Ionian (of the islands), c. 550 B.C., attributed to Archermos of Chios, Nikê from Delos, marble, National Museum, Athens (CGB '77) By 600 (this colossal Hera at Olympia), the smiling keenness of the archaic leavens the monumental bareness. As Simonides says: "Pray to the gods; with the gods is power." What is individual and earthly is just nascent in what is common and divine; yet the more alive for that containment. Of this force which in politics and thought was already remaking the inner and outer worlds, Hölderlin writes: So the gods of heaven come in, with such deep trembling Down through the shadows their day-spring breaks among (translation: CGB) Denn so kehren die Himmlischen ein, tiefschütternd Aus den Schatten herab unter die Menschen ihr Tag. 33) men. gelangt so Attic-Ionian, c. 520-10 B.C., Korê 675, + detail, Acropolis Museum, Athens No sequence could illustrate as richly as the Greek the refinement, out of the style of force, of a lyrically sensuous art of joy. The driving sharpness slowly slacks the string; so pointed peaks wear to an alluvial plain. The blend of primitive ground and individual emergence gives 6th century Ionic korai a Sapphic poignance of delight, with which only the Western Gothic can be compared, though in another flight of spirit. 34) Greek, c. 450 B.C., Poseidon Temple; and c. 550 B.C., Hera Temple (behind), Paestum (CGB '85); + dig. closer Poseidon Temple But since the triumph, tragedy, and inner deepening of Greek culture, expressed in the resonances of thought, poetry, and the arts, requires at least a separate study, we trim to the fewest cyclical hints: how vibrant, against the later consolidation of Rome, that exploratory wave which sent Greek colonies over the Mediterranean, raising temples on the headlands of Sicily, Africa, Italy, France, and Spain. 35) Attic, c. 460-50 B.C., Poseidon (or Zeus), bronze, National Museum, Athens Thus we reach the acme, the mid-5th century of Pericles. In the perfection of the representational and humanistic, every personal emotion and feature is still borne on the October 1992 Cycles 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History cresting of common faith and inherited laws. Like the great tragedies, especially of Aeschylus, this Panhellenic and Olympian art is a reasoned vindication of the gods. 36) V36a) Praxiteles, c. 340 B.C., Hermes with the infant Dionysos, Olympia; first, V detail Double of full-length 35 and 36 There is almost no parallel for the swiftness of Greek fruition. Music: Euripides, 408 B.C., chromatic fragment from Orestes, Therriault and Lynch, St. John's College, Santa Fe What reared free city-states led them to the value-rending Peloponnesian War; the first shoots of philosophy flowered in a sophistic questioning of everything; speculative tragedy, which celebrated the gods in Aeschylus, in Euripides doubts and complains (here the chromatic fragment which survives from his Orestes). From the fifth century B.C. to the fourth is from the strength of the Periclean Zeus-Poseidon to the softness of this Praxitelean Hermes. (end Euripides) a37) b37) 37) Detail of 35, Poseidon (or Zeus): head Detail of 36, Hermes: head Double: [A] a37, head of Poseidon, and [B] b37, head of Hermes From the paean of the civic man-god — as Sophocles wrote in the Antigone: "Many a wonder lives and breathes, but the wonder of all is man" — "Πολλα τα δεινα, κουδεν ανθρωπου δεινοτερον πελει;" — to the relativizing mellowness of an art so sensuously ideal that the strength of stone seems to dissolve in a dreaming mist. What Arnold called "the dialogue of mind with itself" has begun. Against the fifth century of tragic drama, the fourth seems a century of thought. In Plato, the subjective search — a civic weakness — is also the first fruit of a meditative detachment of soul which would open catacombs of inwardness under outward Greece and Rome. 38) Hellenistic, mid-3rd cent. B.C., Barberini Faun, Munich The Barberini Faun, mid-3rd century, drunk and lechered out, shows one drift of Hellenistic art, the conspicuous, even ugly exploitation of sensate variety. It is the sort of October 1992 Cycles 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History license moralists would later deplore when it came flooding from Greece into the sink of imperial Rome. But if we ask: what is that spraddled faun dreaming of? 39) 39a) Hellenistic, 1st half of 2nd cent. B.C., female head, Alexandria Double: [A] Egypt, late Dynasty V, Mathythy, Chief of Royal Farmers, Brooklyn Museum; and [B] Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1362-52 B.C., goddess head from tomb of Tutankhamen, Cairo Museum it might (as in Mallarmé: "Ces Nymphes, je veux les perpetuer") reveal a complementary aspect of the Hellenistic — a sensuous feminine form of romantic, almost spiritual idealization. Between the titillation of appetite and the increasingly soulful search beyond, the late Greek is strung. Does this art of conscious extravagance and nostalgia correspond to the first Egyptian decay at the end of the Old Kingdom, under Pepi, or to the more phthisic novelties of the New Kingdom? It is the genius of cyclical history not to resolve questions so precisely phrased. a40) 40) Double: [A] Late Hellenistic (copy of c. 300 B.C. original), Alexander, Pella Mus.; and [B] Etrusco-Roman 3rd-2nd cent. B.C., called Junius Brutus, Conservatori, Rome Single, Brutus from a40 And yet in the same centuries, more to the center of the Mediterranean, a nation was rising to power which would enact, if any would, the Middle Kingdom part of disciplined control. When the Greek second century historian Polybius set himself to explain how the Greeks and Carthaginians had fallen into such debility, while Rome had conquered the world, not all his reasoned analysis of constitutions would serve; he had to invoke crescive morality, that where the Greeks were corrupt, the Romans of the time of Scipio (or of this portrait, often called the elder Brutus) were at a peak of communal dedication. Yet what we read in the portrait is that the dedication is post-conscious. Rome, as successor-state, has not begun at the primitive ground of the pre-individual. Greek awareness has been taken over, with all its liabilities, but in the hardening grip of stoical self-rule. October 1992 Cycles 16 �C.G. Bell 41) Symbolic History Double: [A] Egypt, Dynasty XII, c. 1860 B.C., Senusret (Sesostris) III, Met., New York; and [B] Roman, c. 60 B.C., unknown republican, Glyptothek, Munich How desperately that grasp would be needed, would be put to the test, patrician portraits of the late Republic (right), under the temptations of power and in the throes of civil war, make no doubt of. But the stress in which they are formed testifies not only to the trials and vices of empire, but to the fighting strength of Rome through moral crisis. If we have reached here a point of parallel with the Middle Kingdom (left), it will teach us how radically, in the spiral of personality, the Roman, with its realistic (and legal) establishment of a responsible private citizen, is from the brooding, still masklike record of Egyptian consciousness in Sesostris III. 42) Roman, c. 10 B.C., Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, head, Mus. Naz., Rome Curious, how the torment and force of the late Republic seems ironed out by the proclamation of Augustus — the smooth Virgilian statement of a golden age. Yet even through its most pious idealization, the sensuous and weighty consciousness makes an almost Napoleonic advance. Has our Middle Kingdom of Republican Rome become, with the Principate, a New Kingdom? October 1992 Cycles 17 �C.G. Bell 43) Symbolic History Roman, c. 14 A.D., Pont-du-Gard, near Nîmes, Provence In what Pliny called "the boundless majesty of the Roman peace" (to which the German chieftain: "The Romans make a desert and call it peace"), Augustus' proclamation spread, in public buildings, roads, and aqueducts, from Britain and Gaul to Africa and Asia — after the temples of Greece, engineering feats of a utilitarian civilization. Yet that whole outward empire, like the arched city itself, level upon level and vault opening under vault, encloses what Greece and Rome had ripened: a44) 44) Roman, c. 66-68 A.D., Bust of Nero, Capitoline Museum, Rome Roman, 66-67 A.D., Nero, obverse of coin, American Numismatic Society the abyss of conscious personality, which, as the Classical fall looms, becomes a dæmonic battleground, as if the world, polarized, had produced at one birth the Christian faith and the Nero of this Roman coin, climaxing the outward rule and inner crisis of the Julio-Claudian line. Though what Suetonius writes of Caligula caps Nero's bloodier angling in the lake of darkness: Finally seized with a mania for feeling the touch of money, he would often pour out huge piles of goldpieces in some open place, walk over them barefooted, and wallow in them for a long time with his whole body. 45) Roman Egypt, 1st-2nd cent. A.D., portrait of Eirena, Alexandria; + V detail And now from all over the Hellenized empire, especially from Egypt and the East (here Alexandria), under the façade of order which so impressed Gibbon: "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous" — we catch the private citizen, in the tenderness of lonely withdrawal, the old late-kingdom syndrome of sensory repletion and super-sensory desire, gazing from banqueting halls, peristyles, tombs, wide-eyed, beyond time and space. Music: 46) 46a) Greek, 1st cent. A.D., Hymn to Calliopeia, J.E. Butt, priv. rec. Roman, c. 50 A.D. (Herculaneum), Egyptian cult scene, Museum, Naples Same, detail (video from 46) October 1992 (end Hymn to Calliopeia) Cycles 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While from the first century on, little scenes testify to the coming in of mystery cults from the East — as Eliot says: When there is distress of nations and perplexity, Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgeware Road — Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Asia Minor, in that labyrinth, a twine of immortality. 47) Roman, 260-68, portrait of Gallienus, Museo Nazionale, Rome By the third century, imperial power (here Gallienus) is assuming the stylized mask of symbolic and superhuman sanction, the features hardening and thinning to an illusionistic surface, through which the lost soulfulness and almost satanic search records its pain. a48) b48) 48) Roman Christian, c. 3rd cent. A.D., catacomb tombs Roman Christian, c. 250 A.D., fresco, room of the Velatio, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome detail of b48, mother and child Music: Gregorian, Sanctus IV° from Mass XI (Solesmes) London 5632 And now, from the catacombs beneath that power-vault, taking the earthly darkness as the medium of its life, comes the Christian transformation of temporal estrangement, the burial cave become a place of birth. Yet this art, like early chant or the Meditations of Augustine, still wears the crepuscular softness and personality of the Classical world. (fade Gregorian Sanctus) October 1992 Cycles 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The direction of soul has changed; but body is not yet stripped; the wheel has not come full circle 49) Roman, 3rd cent., funeral stele in Barbarian style, Museum, Varna to the ground of radical force. Though everywhere on the borders of the empire the cleansing, savage bath waited for what Vico would first formulate: barbarian renewal by sanctified violence, the cyclical return of "the pure and pious wars of the heroic peoples." 50) Græco-Roman, c. 50 A.D. copy of 2nd cent. B.C., Aphrodite Kallipyge, Mus. Naz., Naples; + V detail Here, on the verge of the Christian West, let us note that the West also is a one among many, itself part of an evolving world context, into which, in our day, it is fatefully reabsorbed. Strange, that late Classical luxury — such art as this Aphrodite Kallipyge, Venus of the Sweet Arse, from Nero's Golden House — spread through the conquests of Alexander as far as the Ganges — Music: 51) 51a) 52) Indian Classical Pahadi (Dhun), sarangi with tabla, V-LM 6057 Indian 8th-10th cent., Tree Goddess from Madhya Pradesh, Gwalior Double: [A] 51; and [B] 52 (video doubles wholes, slide show details) Rheims, c. 820, Gospel Book of Ebbo, St. John, Epernay; video: detail only would inspire an Indian culture of rejuvenated vitality and religious joy (this 8th century tree goddess from Madhya Pradesh). As if from the Greek source two civilizations had diverged, both centered in the sacred, but one sanctifying the Eros of nature and sex; (fade Indian raga) Music: Gregorian, c. 1000, from Easter Alleluia, (de Van) AS 81-B the other repudiating body and world, time, space and touch (or trying to, though it worshipped an incarnate saviour) — in its Dark Age strength (this Gospel book of Ebbo, from Rheims just after Charlemagne) dissolving all sensory forms into symbolic calligraphs — both arts of energy, both mystical, but the Western of ascetic denial, the October 1992 Cycles 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Indian affirming the godhead of flesh. Of these, we turn to the more dæmonic release of the cyclical West. 53) German, c. 1060, Werden Crucifix (bronze), head, Werden a.d. Ruhr The West, which by the year 1000, pared by the folk-wanderings of the Dark Ages to the abstract acerbities of spirit (this angular Werden Christ), is again at the upswing of the wheel of individuation. As Vico says: "We have observed the marvelous correspondence between the first and the returned barbarian times." (fade de Van Gregorian) 54) 54a) Bœotian, c. 600(?) B.C., large archaic head, Nat. Mus. Athens (CGB '77) Double: [A] 54; and [B] 53 And yet a Greek almost geometric head from the start of Classical culture, against the Western, attests again to the Hegelian transformation over sixteen centuries. The clean and impersonal, the Homeric energy of the Greek, is replaced in the Germanic — for all its reductive stylization and automatic surrender of person to faith — with the most intense and paradoxical core of mystical person, a selfless selfhood of god-bearing spirit. It is the reshaping of man himself. 55) For 1st 56) Amiens, West Front, c. 1236 ff., photographed in the rain (CGB '74) Church at Assy, c. 1940-45, altar tapestry, Apocalypse, (J. Lurçat), French Alps If 1000 was the Dark Age base of the cycle, in 200 years and all over Europe the great cathedrals (here Amiens) are looming up into the rain and fog, witnesses to the buttressing and incorporating theology of stone. From then until now (say, 750 years), the Christian and post-Christian West has gone on. We mean to study it, century by century, in some detail. Here we pose three cyclical questions: 57) 2nd 56) Phidias, c. 435 B.C., Parthenon Frieze XLII, youth holding a horse, British Museum, London; + V detail (to follow 2nd 56) Rheims, c. 1240, statues from the West front, France (CGB '74) Remembering the Greek, can we locate the Western peak of man in his pride? When does the dialogue of mind with itself begin? And third: Where are we now? October 1992 Cycles 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fauré thought to compare the Parthenon age in Greece with that of the cathedrals in France. But the mastery over stone, inherited from the Classical, seems to have fruited early in the West. And what of personality? The saints of Rheims, in their timeless stance, are far from the Phidian ripening where individuation goes over into softening consciousness. 2nd 55) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., Notre Dame from Southeast, Paris (CGB '53) 2nd 55a) French Gothic, 1240-60, Bourges, W Portal, Last Judgment (CGB '84) 2nd 55b) French Gothic, 1194-1225, Chartres, N. Transept, interior (CGB '59) V3rd 56) Detail of Rheims, W. Front, statues (or video from 2nd 56) For 2nd 57) Double: [A] Parthenon detail, and [B] 56, Rheims statues, detail Thirteenth century literature, scholastic philosophy, the organa of the school of Perotin — those bare-fifths chords sounding the mystery of faith — hint how structural, severe, and transhuman the cathedrals are. Music: Perotin, c. 1220(?), four-voice Sederunt, last quadruplum, close (Cape) Archive 14068 (end Perotin) This force is sacred and hierarchical; beside the Phidian touchstone, we sense it as barely resident in the articulations of space, time, and cause. 58) 58a) Giotto, 1304-6, Resurrection, Arena Chapel, Padua; + V detail Same, detail of Christ At the start of the next century, Giotto speeds the recovery of space and human drama in painting. The glory of the art is beyond question; but the olive-eyed enigma, the haunting blend of smiling and grief, hint how far the moods and modalities still hang in the eternal frame. a59) 59) 59a) 59b) Jan van Eyck, c. 1430, Annunciation, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '60); Same, detail (video uses this detail only) Jan van Eyck, 1437, Madonna and Child, middle panel of triptych, Dresden Gallery Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1427-9, Altar of the Lamb, angel playing organ, St. Bavon, Ghent, Belgium; dig. adds angels playing instruments October 1992 Cycles 22 �C.G. Bell 59c) Symbolic History Same, choir of angels, detail only Another hundred years: van Eyck, 1430; and the representational achievement is almost complete: space and earthly things, jewels, robes, flesh; yet the smiling korai of the 6th century B.C. seem nearer than Phidias. Is not the charm of this art the tentative grace with which it accepts a Medieval sanction rather than assert its own? So with Dunstable (or the Flemish musicians who follow him) — equally unassuming, though as humanized in melody and chord. Music: Dunstable, 1435, Ave Maria, opening, (Syntagma) Seraphim SIC 6052 a60 ) Piero della Francesca, c. 1455, Death of Adam, Legend of the True Cross, S. Francesco, Arezzo (cropped) 60) Detail from left side of a60 (fade Dunstable) By the mid-fifteenth century in Italy (Piero della Francesca), partly through classical revival, partly through the growth of native awareness, we sense a first resonance with earlier peaks of emergence — individual ripening framed in the solemnities of common faith. 61) Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty IV, c. 2700 B.C., reserve head, Kunsthistorisches Mus., Vienna We look back to the sure serenities of Fourth Dynasty Egypt, searching through all that has changed — that purity against the cross-currents and paradox of the West — for signs of resemblance, dim as faces traced in clouds. 62) 62a) Ionian of Magna Graecia, c. 460 B.C., Birth of Aphrodite, Ludovisi Throne, Thermae, Rome; + V detail (or Va62, whole, and V62a, head) 1992 insert: Double: [A] Detail of 62; and [B] Botticelli, 1477, head of Flora from the Spring, Uffizi, Florence Or to the ecstasy of the first Classical Greek, about 460 B.C., the Birth of Aphrodite from the foam, the archaic smile softened and humanized, carried over into a rich fruiting of joy: like the early Renaissance blend of Botticelli, but in a world of how unflawed an immediacy. October 1992 Cycles 23 �C.G. Bell 63) 63a) Symbolic History Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, Louvre, Paris Same, detail (video may take this detail from 63) Place it for a moment, as Pater did, beside the most famous Western smile, of 1503-5 (also softened from our archaic, the angel smile of Gothic), and let Pater emphasize how far we are from mere recurrence. How would those white Greek goddesses, he says be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there … the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias … 64) Raphael, 1509-10, Leonardo as Plato, School of Athens, detail, Vatican Music: Archadelt 1539 and Ortiz 1553, viol setting of "O felici occhi," (Wenzinger) Archive 14075 Though Leonardo, here shown as Plato in Raphael's "School of Athens," must mark as nearly as anyone the first conscious Western peak of a man of infinite possibility, believing in himself and his power to comprehend the all. Yet how long that visionary hope would continue. Shakespeare's Prospero is a hundred years later than this 1510 philosopher. a65) 65) 65a) 65b) School of Athens, central figures School of Athens, whole School of Athens, architecture of the hall English, c. 1600, anonymous portrait of Shakespeare, National Portrait Gallery, London Even more perhaps than with the "Leonardo" head (center), the grandeur of a new order permeates the whole. That Renaissance dream of a vaulted heroic space, in which the utopian life of man would be conducted, stands as a compelling symbol for the Baroque, the 18th century, down to the Age of Revolution. While the airy basilica sounds with the music of noble chords, which flowed from Renaissance Italy over Europe — here an Ortiz ricercare on Archadelt's "O fellici occhi." October 1992 Cycles 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How far after 1500 is the Periclean height to be plotted? If great tragedy is made the clue — life affirmed in destruction itself — the focus shifts to 1600 England; or if the reasoned justification of the ways of God to men, to the century after, of Milton and Leibniz — though even in its formulation, the method of reason would precipitate Pascalian doubt. (end Ortiz) a66) 66) 66a) [Not Video] J.B. Neumann, 1743-8, lower stair, from the side, Schloß Brühl, near Cologne Same, from under the stair 1992 insert: Same, facing the stair Music: J.S. Bach, c 1720, Cello Suite #6, Allemande, close, (Casals) Angel COLH 18 Precision escapes us. Yet one thing is clear: as long as the heroic baroque maintained itself in Europe — and in Germany it kept up a rearguard action well into the rococo of the 18th century — human life (however limited to the few and eroded by convention) was still conceived as treading such vastly vaulted halls. (close Allemande) Music: Bach, c. 1720, cont. Cello Suite #6, start Courante, (Casals) Angel COLH 18 Yet if we search that palace of Clemens Augustus in Brühl for the portrait of its builder-owner, seeking as it were an inhabitant for such luminous spaces, 67) Georges Desmarées, c. 1750, Clemens August, Schloß Brühl, with frame we find his wigged and robed exsufflicance already an object of Lilliputian ridicule. If there was a Western summit, Bach must have fortified its verge. Under the thrust of 18th century satire a new search was beginning, Revolutionary and Romantic. (fade Bach) 68) Aelbert Cuyp, 1660-4, Horsemen and Herdsmen, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); + 68a, same, detail (CGB '75) Music: October 1992 Rosenmüller, pub. 1670, Sonata #2, 2nd movement, close, (S. Marlowe, etc.) Esoteric 517 Cycles 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To gauge that introspective shift, set (with the tensile harmonics of Rosenmüller) this 1660 landscape by Cuyp — a baroque celebration of Cartesian space, a space like God's sensorium, irradiated by the divine attribute of light, a world where men live and move in the ceremonies of will and cause — (end Rosenmüller) 69) C.D. Friedrich, 1808-9, Monk by the Sea, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin; + V detail; +69a, same, detail of sky Music: Beethoven, 1825-7, A Minor Quartet, Opus 132, Adagio, close, (Budapest) Columbia M5S 677 against the space of Goethean Sehnsucht, "Allein und abgetrent / Von aller Freude/ Seh' ich ans Firmament / Nach jener Seite," which Friedrich visualized in 1808-9 — a solitary monk by the misty sea, the phenomenal infinite become, as in Kant, as in Beethoven's "Heilige Dankgesang," an alienating barrier, a veil of Maya, through which spirit reaches, in loneliness, beyond space and time. For Noumena. (end Beethoven) 70) 70a) Gustave Courbet, 1845-6, Man with a Pipe (self), Museum, Montpellier Same, detail (video has detail only) 1845, Courbet Self, and the now familiar features of romantic sickness strike home: the sensuous Narcissus, hanging over the watery mirror in self-love and despair. Nor is the job of drawing the cyclical parallels left to us. We have only to quote Flaubert's famous letter of 1860: I am turning to a kind of aesthetic mysticism. When there is no encouragement to be derived from one's fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. 71) Byzantine (Ephesus), 5th cent., Eutropius head, Kunshistorisches, Vienna (Fifth century Byzantine) If society continues on its present path, I believe we shall see the return of such mystics as have existed in all the dark ages of the world. The soul, unable to overflow, will be concentrated on itself. We shall see a October 1992 Cycles 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History return of world-sickness, beliefs in the Last Day, expectations of a Messiah … 72) Roman, late 1st cent., Flavian youth, British Museum, London; + V details (A Flavian youth, first century A.D.) But all this enthusiasm will be ignorant of its own nature, and the age being what it is, what will be its basis? Some will seek it in the flesh, others in ancient religions, others in art; humanity, like the Jewish tribes in the desert, will adore all kinds of idols. 73) 73a) Van Gogh, 1889, Self with bandaged ear, Block Collection, Chicago 1992 insert: Van Gogh, 1889-90, Last Self Portrait, detail, Jeu de Paume, Paris; video returns to 73, detail (V73b) We were born a little too early; in twenty-five years the points of intersection of these quests will provide subjects for masters. Then prose (prose especially, the youngest form) will be able to play a magnificent humanitarian symphony. Books like the Satyricon and the Golden Ass will be written once more, containing on the psychical plane all the lush excesses which those books have on the sensual. "Twenty-five years" — to the fin de siecle of Rimbaud, or of this Van Gogh. What began then was an art, a thought, a politics of rupture, fiercely breaking with earlier canons and norms. 74) Egypt, Dynasty XVIII, c. 1370 B.C., Ikhnaton, profile relief, Berlin Perhaps only once in history has a cleavage gone so deep into the fabric of a civilization. The Amarna sculptures of Ikhnaton with their twisted outcry, the cultivation of some superhuman stigmata, point to such a crisis in the soul. Yet what was there recorded must have been isolated and mild 75) 75a) Picasso, 1937, Weeping Woman, Collection Penrose, London Picasso, 1937, Weeping Woman, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts beside the awareness of total and global catastrophe which has racked the World War West — Picasso, with Carillo October 1992 Cycles 27 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Carillo, c. 1925(?), from Cristobal Colon, 1/4, 1/8, etc. tones; old 78 Columbia 7357-M As we have said, all this must be studied in detail hereafter. But in the midst of a stress which has presented itself alternately (or even simultaneously) as an explosion into Nietzschean light or into Spenglerian dark, it remains to ask: where are we? which way will the anguish move? (fade Carillo.) October 1992 Cycles 28 �C.G. Bell 76) 76a) a77) 77) Symbolic History Double: [A] Roman Christian, late 4th cent., Christ with Apostles, Catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus, Rome, and [B] Roman, c. 50 A.D., Claudius as Jupiter, Vatican Salvador Dali, 1955, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Double: [A] Hellenistic, 3rd cent. B.C., Alexandrian bronze, head of a boxer, Collection Dutuit; and [B] Rome, 69 A.D., Emperor Vitellius, Uffizi, Florence Claudius as Jupiter (same as B of 76; video shows detail only) Toward the frenzy of catacomb religion? Or to a world ordered in the blatancy of deified power? Or are these, as with Rome and Christianity, always complementary motions? The answer attends a prior question which the looseness of our parallels has left unresolved: whether what we have been living through is the first seizure, as in Old Kingdom Egypt or sophistic Greece (Rome being still to follow), or is the hollow agony of that self-wounding empire? Yet how could it be the latter when so far no successor state has asserted the discipline of world-rule? We have been following the West and forgotten the world. 78) 78a) V.I. Mukhina, Russian 1937, Worker and Woman, Exhibition Ground, Moscow Same, detail (video may take this detail from 78) There was a republic in the 'twenties and 'thirties which gave a Polybian interpretation of the cycle (or sickle) — one half of civilization falling while the other rose. Music: Shostakovich, 1927, 2nd Symphony, close, (Moscow) MHS 824958Z And many looked, in liking or dread, for a future Pax Slavica. But in the more than Faustian frenzy of that time, that art, with the war which followed and the coming of the atomic age, it began to appear that the whole cyclical investigation had come too late, when cyclical possibility had ended — or had shifted its entropic predictions to the globe. (end Shostakovich) October 1992 Cycles 29 �C.G. Bell 79) Symbolic History Triple, but first singly: [A] Chinese ceramics, 1st-2nd cent., jar with dragon shapes; [B] Sung 12th(?) cent., Celadon, Kuan ware; [C] c. 18th cent., under Emperor Ch'ien Lung, porcelain objects Any art or craft admits of the cyclical. In the shapes and glazes of Chinese ceramics, we might trace a maturation, from the severe strength of a first or second century jar with dragon whorls, through the serene perfection of Sung celadon, and so to the eclectic novelties produced for export under the 18th-century emperor Ch'ien Lung. To describe such a sequence, from pre-personal strength, through individuation, to refined unrest, might seem to relate it to the great Western cycles of consciousness; though the drama here is more of technique, than of soul's art-mirrored self-search. 80) 80a) Chinese (Ming), 1506, Shen Chou, self at 80, Peking Museum; + V detail Sojono, 1954, self, Museo de Arte Orientale, Rome; + V detail Since the very individuations of the Orient — Taoist, Confuscian, Buddhist (this 1506 self-portrait of Shen Chou at the age of 80) — held the distance and reserve of figures on a mystic scroll. No doubt each temporal thing carries the stamp of its period; yet in some sense that old East was, as Hegel insisted, a-historical. How fateful then — from Communist posters to this 1954 self-portrait by Sojono, Indonesian trained in Rome — how fateful to trace the contagion of Western ego — the whole world seeded with that conscious fever, come up from the Sphinx of Egypt, through Promethean Greece and Incarnate Christianity, to the power and risk of today. If this was already the hatching-ground of an earth-cycle, what had the cycles taught but their own impermanence? Sound: Waves and gulls 80+1) Again, ocean waves under rowed clouds [See 1]; or CA coast, (CGB '83) 80+1a) Again, California coast [See a1] For where were the barbarians in whose clean force we could bathe? Would they not also have ecological destruction and nuclear bombs? Or could we afford those continuing Trojan Wars? It was make or bust for the world, and one could only hope Gertrude Stein was right when she wrote: "We cannot bust. Thank you." October 1992 Cycles 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though how to avoid it has become no clearer than when, in a poem from the end of the last war, I saw the whole race: (fade sound) at the cliff's cornice, leaning into space. Yet the breath-furrowed ocean of time remains indeterminate, the searching paradox, for which no cyclical history can extrapolate tomorrow's Now. October 1992 Cycles 31 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cycles, Symbolic History, Part 2 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 2 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_02_Cycles Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ae9a46b154338df3252909758589a082.pdf 1f889c62c20bc4cf9adaed30d2fedd40 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 1. Nature: The Perceptive Field Part I 1) Sunrise on the Lacanha River, Chiapas, Mexico (CGB) Sound: Various frogs, superimposed; Sounds of the Night, Houghton Mifflin Where to begin with what rounds on itself, a skein of endless complex — as if Heraclitus' metaballon anapauetai, "hurled about it draws to rest," were crisscrossed, augmented and diminished, within and without, interfused, like water glints, like the cries of frogs. But that is to have begun already, with uncertainty, the amorphous swim of a tropic stream — Thales, "all things come from water." (end frog cries) 2) Human Embryo, 6.5 weeks, Photographed by L. Nilsson, Time-Life Reproduction, from April 30, 1965 Sound: Heartbeat of CGB — stand-in for embryonic pulse Goethe's homunculus in the wide sea. And what other source do we find, if we grope systematic thought to its pre-child or pre-historic origins; organic body to Harvey's embryonic pulse (fade heart); 3) Orion Nebula, U.S. Naval Observatory suns and worlds to the turbulence of galactic foam — that chaos which seems in Genesis either God's first work, or the primal dark on which his spirit moves. 4) Monet, 1914-18, Water Lilies, Sunset, detail; Orangerie, Paris Music: Debussy, 1903-5, La Mer, near end of second movement, Columbia MS 6077 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In art, that all-beginning may have waited for the end: the dream-erotic meltings of Mallarmé's "Faun," "on the air drowsy with tufted slumbers," Rimbaud's "le Poème/ De la Mer, infusé d'astres, et lactescent," that "sea, infused with stars, and lactescent," to which Debussy gave tone-color; in painting what swirls through this post-Impressionist Monet, symbolist Redon, the Fauves, to the whirlpool abstracts of Kandinsky's Jugendstil. (Fade Debussy) 5) Jean Goujon, 1548-9, Nymph, Fontaine des Innocents, Paris Music: Francesco da Milano, 1536, Fantasia, Lute, Archiv 2533 73 (#6) The commitment of early art (as of early music and thought) had been to the crystalline; as if what it took to rear a culture out of nature — Egyptian, Classical, this Renaissance nymph from a fountain by Goujon, or the lute fantasies of Francesco da Milano — were the eternal clarity of reason, to set a temple of Parian marble over the Hydra flux. 6) Attic c. 500 B.C., Head of Korê #674, Acropolis Museum, Athens The Greeks had expressed it forever, the sheer wonder of form's discovery. For that shared logos of the intelligible, we would almost risk all. But we can no more rest our thought on that Acropolis than in the reed bed of the faun. All history exists, and we carry it in our cells. (Fade Milano) a7) b7) 7) Very Large Array, from southeast, New Mexico (CGB '87) Circumpolar star-tracks over Anglo-Australian Reflector Parabolas of Very Large Array, at sunset, San Augustin plains, New Mexico, Smithsonian, July 1978 We are not our own embryo sculpting instinctive walls. The senses fell or were channeled before we were men, mammals, reptiles, while we were still awash in the Cambrian seas. Nor is it with the bare senses that we perceive. There is the lidless eye of Palomar. The radio parabolas of mile-long arrays, of which computers are the sorting nerves, scan the sky for quasars and black holes of cosmic death and origin. 8) 7/1995 Micro-organic decomposers in a pond, Smithsonian, January 1978 Nature: The Perceptive Field 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Even the tropic pool opens to the recess that terrified Pascal and delighted Leibniz with the suspension of structure within structure forever — the microscopic stair of live automatons. Surely the first (though almost mind-dissolving) task of every fresh art and thought is to yield to the breathing of that organically transformed Pythagorean void: 9) 9a) Giant spring near Pujiltique, Chiapas, reflections (CGB '78) Same, detail with ripples (CGB '78) Void enters into the heaven itself from the infinite air, as though the heavens were breathing; and this void defines the natures of things … Then, on the liquid interface, one sees circles, geometric waves that spread in the very flux of universal water. A calculable curve has arisen from the amorphous itself, its propagated sinusoids the cancellate of whatever countless indeterminacies give the molecular slide of fluidity. Clear as the cut of an archaic Apollo, Euclid smiles over the surface of the Heisenberg pool. a10) 10) Colonies of Volvox (CGB scrapbook of clippings) Volvox, large globular green algal colony, with daughter colonies, Natural History, April 1975 Focus down, like Leeuwenhoek. Somewhere in the water you find Volvox, at the divide between proto- and metazoan. (Whip your reason like the black horse; tell it, "nameable divisions are not lost because they fuse.") You behold the root antinomy of one and many over which mind and nature have been stretched from the start: the sphere of cohesive oneness, yet visibly many, a colony of flagellate eye-spot cells. Such the granules you see glistening, while the entelechy, barely taking up seat in and over them, reproduces itself: those dark seedlings of other colonies, that swell until they break the mother sphere — so death came into the world — another polarity thrust upon us before its time — in one sense real, in another merely the abstracted limits of the life-death field. 11) 11a) Globular Cluster in Hercules, M.13, Hale Observatory Same, detail of the center We have looked into the pond for a globe smaller than Pascal's smallest mite. Now into space, if not for the largest, large enough, the globular cluster in Hercules, part 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of our galactic system, only 40,000 light years away, with several hundred thousand stars, the brighter, giants like Betelgeuse; even the faintest seen, larger and brighter than our sun. Consider the tug in and out of a configured thing. Contrary desires in a one are insoluble; tension in substance is transrational. Thought must resolve that paradox in the one-many (no other road), and for the senses, world-structure everywhere concurs. As one matter the whole is drawn in; as many stars accelerated by that entropic fall together, it fights entropy, thrusts out; the resultant is a pulsing boundary in space. a12) 12) Vasopressin molecule, hormone and neurotransmitter; image: Tripos Association of St. Louis, Scientific American, October 1985 Rhenish MS c. 1400, "Aurora consurgens," Zentralbibliothek, Zurich; + V detail The same with an atom, molecule, elastic billiard ball. Lucretius' indissoluble atoms could never have been validated for force-interplay. If he had known the axiomatic field, he could have proved his atoms mystical. So as our search deepens, what were called atoms, then primary particles, sign their dissolving, an interplay of parts, the whole from bottom to top workingly aswim — the many and one even of the soul, which Plato suspends over the whole of the Republic. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the alchemists, melting ancient and Eastern experience in the alembic of mythic science, visualized the fusion of androgynous opposites, as fixed and volatile, in the clutch of the blue eagle, rising over the heap of its own dead: "Aurora consurgens." 13) 13a) 13b) Overtone nodes of a sounding metal plate, traced by salt grains (CGB '78) Another example, but more dissonant and chaotic (CGB '78) El Greco c. 1575-77, Pieta, Museum of Art, Philadelphia: V, detail only Sound: From the vibrating plate So music rises from the tensile one-many of vibrating ratios — that art which more than all others imitates the universe itself; as if from this bowed and sounding metal plate, where salt grains have danced into the still nodes between overtone waves (those damped chords you hear above the fundamental), the whole interplay of harmony were stretching acoustic space, from the tugs of dissonance, ratios forever jagged and incommensurate, toward the proportioned accords of Pythagorean one and two, two and three (End sound) — but so sensuously embodied that in a Gesualdo cadence our very guts are entrained in the raging desire and fulfillment of Schopenhauer's "primordial being." Music: a14) b14) c14) 14) Gesualdo da Venosa, 1611, "Dolcissima" close (Deller) VICS-1364 (Close) Circular array of fern fronds, Chiapas (CGB '78) "Self-squared Fractal Dragon," Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry of Nature Newton's Principia, Lemma XI, with "horned angle" in red Red and green leaves of the madron, Chiapas (CGB '78) The departure of modern from classical (that is, post-Socratic) intelligence is clear. For the ancients, paradox is reason's shipwreck; for a modern, the polar delineation of its natural field. Whatever clarity we draw from the amorphous becomes the pole of an antinomy. If that, for the claimants of cosmos-order, puts the mind in a bind (like the "horned angle" Euclid set up as a pillared mark beyond which human daring should not seek), for us of the infinite and infinitesimal it is not an end but a beginning, not a tie-up but a calling. Through all seasons the red and green leaves of the madron flaunt those metabolic opposites, photosynthesis and digestion, which every plant to some degree combines. We 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History might assault the tree: "Do you build up or tear down? You can't have it both ways. Why don't you decide?" It grows in the vast abrupt between. 15) 15a) Double rainbow over Cerro Gordo, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '68) Rainbow, looking east from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '81) Indeed Aristotle was warm when he wrote, of the Meno paradox of learning: "The soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process." But Nature, too, is constituted for high process; if not, soul would not be here. The rainbow-covenant of no total flood is written in water; it reads: "Forms are emergent" — though between "form" and "emerge" the copula is contradiction. Here the nameable states, distinct to our very senses: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet (which we round on the color wheel like the musical octave; whereas in the continuum the extremes disappear into ultraviolet and infrared), these colors, the Pythagorean tones, the God-given numbers, all resonant responses, crown the relative with absolute emergence from degree. And that spectrum is mathemable. Who would not wonder at such beauty's formulable slide? 16) 16a) Stream flowing through vegetation, Chiapas (CGB '78) Joseph Cornell 1950s(?) "Dovecote" construction, artist's studio, Flushing, New York 16b) Mandelbrot, "Gaussian Hills that Never Were," Brown Function, from Fractal Geometry of Nature 16c) Detail of 16: the flow of water Pascal says, "There are no limits in things; laws would put them there and the mind cannot suffer it." But both nature and mind would limit, and both can and cannot allow it to themselves. Born to flux, can thought only solidify? Aristotle's Analytics: Matter and Form, Nature and Art; Kant's "Experience consists of intuitions which belong to the sensibility, and of Judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding" — one pretends to think that way, makes a brave show; but is it not dried up from the start? As Nietzsche laughed at poor old Kant: "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? And what was actually his answer? By virtue of a virtue — but unfortunately not in five words …" 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If Thinking with a capital T turns out impossible, Pascalian despair is not the only answer. Water-skaters skate on water. They use, indeed, the plasticity and surface tension which make those ripples models for the equational physics of electricity and magnetism. 17) 17a) Quartz crystal against ivy leaves (CGB '78) Crystal cluster among ivy leaves, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78) But if water and solid are not the polarity of free and bound, what is? Does the antinomy of determinism against sponte sua equally characterize all things? How could it? Billiard ball physics is real; living choice is real. There is a gradient of predictability, as between crystals and leaves. Just so in nature the undergirding of number comes to the surface, crops out as from the amorphous mottling of vines. We say by statistical cancellation; but it was here the ancients seated gods and angelic intelligences — in the regularity of the stars. Here, too, Galilean physics contrived those equations which have lured all knowledge in their wake. While the universe of flow and growth laps those rocks like water, weaves over them like fronds. a18) 18) Columnar basalt: Devil's Post Pile, Bishop, Colorado (Anders Bro '81) Igneous rocks: obsidian, basalt, granite, pegmatite, gneiss (CGB '78) "God forbid," said Blake, "that knowledge should be limited to mathematical demonstration." 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Within rock only, and not all rock, but the rock element made by fire, of like mineral composition and from the same region, runs the pentad from glassy obsidian, center, blown from a volcano, cooled so fast it has no time to find the lattices of solid; lower left, basalt, the same lava flowing out, cooled in mass, amorphous; left and above, intrusive granite, its quartz, feldspar, and mica, under slower earth-cooling, sorted out, like salt and pepper; diagonally below, pegmatite, that granite under long heat and pressure enlarging its separate crystals; then upper right, gneiss, just such a granite buried and remelted deep under, pulled and stressed like taffy, showing in igneous rock the fluid lines of water. 19) 19a) 19b) Sedimentary rocks, with concentric markings (CGB '78) New Mexico marble, from a panel in the State House, Santa Fe (CGB '88) Judge Percy Bell's 10-carat fire-opal (CGB '81) Pascalian despair? Among the fathomless inventions of nature? Those fire-rocks come to the surface; rains and streams wash them down; out of clay and sand and the lime-gathering seas, new rocks are made, sedimentary. But now, like an alluvial stream ox-bow-bending in the figure-of-eight infinite curves, whatever water has shaped bears the print of water; even when mottled limestone, touched again by intrusive fire, crystallizes in the branching tongues of marble. Wherever polarities are set up, by us or by Nature, they have continually to be swallowed in one, mirrored, reversed, transcended; or polarity itself falls into a stasis — like Pascal's "skeptic Archesilaus, who" (by holding to his skepticism) "became a dogmatist." 20) 20a) Pacific Ocean, calm, low swell, Mazatlan coast, Mexico (CGB, morning, April 24, 1978) Another view of same But mind and nature have deep inescapable axioms. As Waller said of age: "The seas are calm when the winds give o'er;" and Aristotle: "Surely the substratum cannot cause itself to move." 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That axiom, which physics calls the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, is Eleatic. At Elea, they gave it unconditioned, the logic of identity, that Being remains what it is. Applied to process, it became impractical: since no Being can come from non-Being or go into another Being, change cannot exist. We hedge and fudge, but never escape the hydra of the axiom, as that no substance, conceived as one, can stir itself. The ocean needs the wind. And if the wind should die, as here on the Pacific, the waves work less and less. 21) Yen Hui, 14th cent., China, Wave and Moon, private collection Ah, but the contrary axiom enters (for the mind is stretched over more antinomies than Kant troubled himself with): that disparates cannot interact; the contrary is validated for interplay only as subsumed under the one: if wind and water were not matter in motion, neither could affect the other. Now they are one again, and "the substratum cannot cause itself to move"; the closed system comes to rest. Sunlight must be brought in to touch it off, the vector of impingement. But if light and matter are not kindred energies, both electromagnetic, there is no means of contact. The blend dies again, that heat-death which rational physics extrapolates from closed systems and from half the axiom to the unformulable whole. Better the Chinese 14th century Yen Hui, who painted waves as spirit, mystical self-movers, at once the matter and impinging power. a22) 22) Turbulent galaxy, M 82, Ursa Major (changed ‘96 to Centaurus Α) Sierra Club, Galaxies Detailed negative image of M 82 (changed ‘96 to new color image of M 82, Sci. American, Feb. '96) But what else has the physicist done, unwittingly, with that all-pervading and vitalizing flow of energy, both substratum and élan vital? He may repudiate the words; but how to characterize a cosmos of infinite energy transformations under paradox, each parcel in its descent thrusting up another, or returning in its own gyre, where total mass release attends the relativity sink of a black hole. In this exploding galaxy, M. 82, in the Big Bear, where hydrogen filaments spread 14,000 light years above and below the galaxy from some collapse and mass conversion of innumerable suns a million and a half years ago — will the habit of living in a gravitational field instruct us which transfers of energy, in that curved space, are up and which down? 23) 7/1995 Image reversals in facing mirrors, relief plaque of Christ and athlete (CGB '78) Nature: The Perceptive Field 9 �C.G. Bell 23a) Symbolic History Gorilla Diorama, Museum of Natural History, New York City (CGB '79) Since our whole experience is like the image-reversals in confronting mirrors, here a two-sided plaque my Mexican albanil gave me, Christ and athlete, Christ and athlete, alternate forever. Pascal pursues such dipoles, but not far enough: "They do not know that it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek." Reflect it again: the quarry validates the chase — as Erasmus had said: "Thus all things are presented by shadows; yet this play is put on in no other way." And what of a world evolved by such play? Suppose Kant's antinomies are reflected back on his prior reasoning. His certainty that "the order of the appearances we entitle nature we ourselves introduce" becomes one of Maxwell's asymptotes: the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate; and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter. — asymptotes abstracted from the temporal curve. a24) 24) James I. Gilbert, c. 1950, Dunes Wanderer, Ann Binyon, Chicago (CGB '81) Detail of same (CGB '52) Music: Beethoven, 1822, Coda of Sonata 32, Op. 111 (Schnabel) V-LCT 1109 The first division might seem of self and other, though until Descartes went into that room with a stove, no one had done much with it. It has come easy since; but not every subjective doubt pulls from the Eleatic axiom self as eternal thinking substance, world as formulable and extended substance, both secured by God as infinite substance and eternal rational cause. And all with the unanswerability of Euclid, so long as the equations are not held to the sliding ambiguities of any actual self, doubt, or world. Of course, the Eleatic principle is true; causal reasoning rests on it. But in Pascal's quaint phrase, the conclusions are false because the opposite principles are also true. If only Pascal had leapt from there to the "Eureka" that, in baring the irreducible polarities of soul and body, essence and relationship, one and many, particle and field, he had made a first move toward showing existence as creatively adaptive within the antinomies of the perceptive ground. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 10 �C.G. Bell 25) Symbolic History Long-nosed gar in the Chicago Aquarium (CGB '60) [Slide show and Dig. use alligator gar (CGB '60)] For, against the Eleatic axiom (in causal form Descartes' proof that his own reason must come from a reasoning God: "since what is cannot be produced by what is not"), we cannot deny that the whole reasoning content of the world has evolved through Silurian seas where the highest and brainiest were lungfish and ganoids, primitive as the belching armor-plated prehistoric gar — though to watch him gorge, dumped in a minnow bucket upside down, is to grant his life urge. 26) L. Nilsson: Human Fetus, about 8 months, Life, April 1965 We need not ask the fetus to know, in every consciousness, the change of state and flux of form for which Leibniz defined perception as the passing and manifold in the one and simple. It was that coming-to-be of what-was-not that drove Kierkegaard, desperate Eleatic, to mediate the creative by the one allowed ex nihilo, the birth of the eternal in time. But that moment is everywhere, and everywhere decisive, if everywhere causally prepared. The cosmic breath and emergence is the death-birth of God. 27) Human sperm swimming, as toward egg, Life, April 1965 Thus reason stretches over the field of fact. Hegel, all out for generation in time, keeps one dialectic foot, like the old oyster in Alice, firmly in the oyster bed. Spirit is immortal, an essential now… The grades it seems to have left behind, it still possesses in the depths of its present. When sperm, which mill about until the egg is sensed and then ("our soul is restless until it rest in Thee") turn heads all one way, up the long stream, like salmon, are they purposive? "It would be foolish," says Aristotle, "to deny purpose because we do not see the agents deliberating." Where then does purpose stop? Do stripped homunculi bear the organic future? Which one, of each 200 million? We can only answer: "Yes, and then again, no." V2nd 26) Detail of 26 [Slide variant: fetus at 28 weeks] 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Demonstrable purpose proves almost purposeless: "I'm going to move that book;" and I do. But creative purpose is the knowledge groped for in the Meno: "Unknown, my own." As embryology repeats phylogeny, Beethoven's Opus 111 coda relives his sketchbook gropings for the revealed. Second 27) Closer view of 27), sperm swimming; + V detail Second 27a) Fertilization, sperm penetrating human ovum, Life (Fade Beethoven on first tonic note) How can purpose repeat? How modulate the currents of predictive mass? 28) 28a) Eucalyptus tree, Casa Pellizi, east of San Cristobel, Chiapas (CGB '74); + V detail Sunlight through redwood forest, Smithsonian, July 1978 Forty years ago in a valley by a stream, I watched a flight of grackles from a tree. I saw stream, clouds, winds, and light swept down in the formulable currents of Carnot's law. But the tree rose, building with light into leaves; birds fountained up the air, Ventadorn's "lauzeta," heightening desire into song. Was it the old Emersonian rapture? And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. I needed a base in physics. And there it was, at the heart of Newton's laws, as simple as inertia: motion self-opposed. I wrote: All matter, systems, worlds, and living things express the need of energy to buttress against its own decay; in this sense cosmic history is a heightening and unfolding of the perceptive ambivalence of energy, that its activity is the fall by which it dies, its life in time a transcendence using and used by the destructive urge. 29) Male antelopes lock horns, Africa, Reader's Digest Publications Music: Beethoven, 1826, from 2nd movement, F major quartet, Op. 135, Columbia M5S 677 When the buck antelope, Uganda Kob, lunges forward, spurning the ground, Earth's rotation is proportionately changed; when he leaps up, Earth's lesser leap down 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History rocks the universe on minute gravitational waves. If two come together, the system is balanced in the dynamics of elastic rebound. Then they lock horns, slightly splaying the ground in static strain. They ride a mathemable clockwork — not only those creatures, but the muscles cunningly flexed on the hinged and levered bones. (Fade Beethoven, Op. 135) No wonder, as Bacon said, knowledge becomes power. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Here the polarity of sex is organized over the primal one of the force laws: "Equal and opposite," 30) Bell girls pushing a car (CGB '78); + V detail and "Force equals mass times acceleration." Leonardo had stressed the mystery of force: "in conquering, it destroys itself." Newton computes, as if the enigma were not there. Music: Again, Beethoven, Op. 135, 2nd movement But it is, as in Beethoven's last quartet the most dynamic effect is of one voice leaping through static chords. (Fade Beethoven) In the motion of a body, the force we think of as cause cannot be applied until mass times acceleration, its assumed result, meets it in counterforce. Hegel's root antinomy of gravity and spirit lurks in this paradox of inertia, that mass resists motion only by moving. 31) 31a) Sockeye salmon up a fall on Alaska's Russian River, Audobon, November 1975 Salmon migrating up river, from The Mating Game When the sockeye salmon, after a life in the ocean, seeks the high streams of his birth and reproduction, he renounces his life of growth with its desires, gives up feeding, turns from silver to red, and grows the great hooked jaw useful only for his quixotic chivalries. Where streams rush down, he plunges up, fighting and leaping to the pools, not of his own, but of the kind's continuance — a symbol, against that falling water, of anti-entropy. But when Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," he treated that upward sacrifice (as in Aristotle the form of one rank becomes the matter of the next) as the abandoned call of flesh: Music: Again, Beethoven, Op. 135 The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas … Whatever is begotten, born and dies … 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field (Fade Beethoven) 14 �C.G. Bell 32) 32a) Symbolic History Byzantine mosaic, 10th cent., Justinian presents his church, Constantine his city, to the Virgin; Church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople German, c. 1060, Werden Crucifix, detail, Werden a.d. Ruhr Music: Leonin, 1260-90, Deum Timê, Cape version, As 65 Against which — as we turn from Beethoven to Leonin at the spirit-center of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic — Yeats invokes the mosaics of Hagia Sophia ("Sages standing in God's holy fire") for "the artifice of eternity": Consume my heart away, sick with desire, And fastened to a dying animal, It knows not what it is … 33) Tibetan Tanka, 17th-18th cent., Museo d'Arte Oriental, Rome East becomes such a school of sublimation: that the serpent power coiled at the base of the spine in the Muladhara Chakra be released to rise through the other chakras to the thousand-petalled lotus of the brain, which opens into transcendental consciousness, Samadhi. 34) English Romanesque and Perpendicular, 1079-93 and 1366-1404, Nave and Vault, Winchester Cathedral (CGB '74) For the West, that terraced ascent is incarnate in the vaultings of Gothic, an upward raising of stone by downward gravity, of which Hegel makes a symbol: "Thus the passions … fortify a position for right and order against themselves." (Fade Leonin) 35) Sand and coral debris, beach near Cozumel (J.P. Coureau) Between gravity and spirit, inert and vital, determinism and freedom, is there a natural stair? The fragments of a coral beach define a base, nature morte, unorganized as Lucretius' atoms, those shards of ships he pretended would come together. "On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing." Against that mere aggregate, 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 15 �C.G. Bell 36) Symbolic History Etch pits in cadmium sulphide, Scientific American, September 1967 the crystals of true atoms, where inner structure reaches up through electron bonds to the lattice shown in these cadmium sulfide etch pits, are already workingly alive. But the ties have found too soon the perfect order of the hexagon; between atoms and macro-crystal there are no thresholds, no subdivisions of the vital chain. If entropy is disorder, this is a specter of the contrary required. 37) Model of a molecule of myoglobin, Scientific American, December 1961 In this three-dimensional model, the protein myoglobin seems to have bridged the field between disorder and form, a polymer both unique and periodic, a structured complexity of 2600 atoms, in coils of amino acid and other links around a molecule of iron, ready to play a living part in storing oxygen in the muscles. How much we could learn of structure (as of thought and society) from this product of a search which polymerized the primal seas. 38) Alexander Calder, c. 1940, "Little Spider," K. Perls, New York "In 1932," said Calder, "a wooden globe gave me the idea of making a universe, something like the solar system. That's where the whole thing came from." He calls this mobile "Little Spider." But whether centipede, tree, galaxy, or macromolecule is left unclear, provided it catch the swing of life in what must remain a machine — the parts, by Leibniz' criterion, not machines ad infinitum. a39) 39) High speed photo: a fanned flame, Smithsonian, July 1979 Curves found in nature (drawn and photographed by CGB, 1978) Compare it with the curves we trace in nature, as Pythagoras found the outcrop of tone-ratios and made number the first principle of things. It is not such a Kantian wonder; our equations describe what occurs: conics, here dark blue, how bodies move in force-fields; sinusoids, here red, how motions spread in the elastic; the green of growth and decay, change proportional to size, as wrapped on itself, a spiral; and the bell curve — orange and black (Bell born on Halloween) — the distribution formed in a one-many, tending to center and tending to spread. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 16 �C.G. Bell 40) Symbolic History Spider web, morning, Huitepec, Chiapas (photographed by Doug Hall) If each globe of dew outlining this spider's web were of elastic ether, it would draw to a point and spread to all; let that Gaussian curve oscillate: it becomes a damped wave — the electron, set at the base of nature like a mystic one. Every force-play hints at that: this orbed mesh hung in the catenaries of triangular tension. Such the adaptive geometries of soul and world. 41) 41a) 41b) Double: Chambered nautilus, with fossil Eutrephoceras, Natural History, February 1975 Sundial shell, Architectonica granulata (CGB '81) Monolithic calendar stone, 16th cent., Aztec; Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City So the spiral nautilus, with a fossil forebear from ninety million years ago. If cells divide at a rate, he will grow like compound interest; curl him round a point, his shell is a logarithmic spiral. But it is not pure; he began as a finite creature, and his growth must end. Einstein's: math not certain as referred to reality, or if certain, it does not refer. But what do we mean by refer, but that? — the congruence of metaphor — though of course on the spectrum that leads from science to myth, the knowledge of things unseen. 42) Sunset from Bahia Kino with Alcatraz Island, Sonora (photographed by Enrique Franco, Mexico City) The early Greek mind caught it all in one, like a god in marble. Empedocles: Hear first the four roots of all things: bright Zeus (fire), life-giving Hera (air), Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis (water) who moistens the springs of men with her tears. Those elements are archetypal in thought and world. Our science found ninety two (now more), but the Greek four remained, cutting across ours as "change of state": earth as solid, water liquid, vapor air; we tried to stop there, but could not avoid, as the sun-fire came to Earth, an ionized fourth, plasma. And still they go round in the wheel of transformations: 43) Grass burning before setting sun, Chiapas (CGB, May '78) Heraclitus: 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fire lives the death of earth, air the death of fire, water the death of air, and earth of water. But when one sees in Chiapas at the end of rainless winter and the burning season, how the sun sets through a haze where everything goes to flame, the four yield to the first: "The greatest of these is fire" — from which things come and to which they will return (already the whirl where the supreme itself is a pole: Ormazd and Ahriman, entropic up and down, fire through the fabric of leaves, the tiger stalking herds). What structures underlie the polar states? Plato stressed number: the triangular pyramid of fire, 44) Fountain with five-petalled flowers, Chiapas (CGB '78) the twenty-sided icosahedron of water. Bernal at the University of London spent his life searching that way. Against the regular coherence of crystals built on space-filling lattices of three, four, six, he found the clue to the liquid state, irregular, but coherent, incompressible, but shifting, in the number five, pentagonoids, which could never fill space without sliding one on another. So the old myth of water as life-source would bring from those always failing and slipping fives, these floating petalled forms — 45) Double: [A] Computer-graphic image of DNA, and [B] a section through the flower-body of Crespis, or Hawksbeard with radiolaria and starfish — alien to the inert perfection of the mineral. In the ten-fold star of this computer-graphic image of DNA, left: oxygen red, carbon green, nitrogen blue, phosphorus yellow; and beside it a section through the composite bud of Hawksbeard — it is as if we saw, from chromosome to flower, the upwelling of the pentagonal. As Thoreau says of the leaf-forms in thawing clay: No wonder that the Earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labours with the idea inwardly. a46) 46) 7/1995 Protozoans: Paramecia dividing, Smithsonian, January 1978 Pre-Cambrian: Tribrachidium heraldicum, Scientific American, March 1961 Nature: The Perceptive Field 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So nature labors with number. Every one by in and out becomes a dyad: oblate dividing star, head and tail of paramecium, worm, fish. Where Pythagoras' female two opens, it must leave a birth-gulf between: three. The flower trillium. Or in this PreCambrian fossil, unlike anything we know, an attempted animal pin-wheel of three tentacled arms. 47) 47a) Rectangular crystals of Barite, Natural History, February 1978 Dwarf cornel, Dogwood family, Flowering Plants of the World Four is everywhere, the Timaeus cube for earth, Plato's most solid form; this barite crystal, bonded like the post-and-lintel temple, or stable quadrate Rome. There are fours in flowers too, cornel, with its four white bracts, though it may leaf and fruit in fives. 48) Snowflakes in colored light, Natural History, January 1972 Then the tyranny of frost. "There they lie," writes Thoreau, "like the wrecks of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies … these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven's floor, and they sing, melting as they sing, of the mystery of the number six, six, six … " But suppose they change their tune as they thaw, from the rigor of six, 49) Melting icicle, National Wildlife, February-March 1973 to a deeper mystery, the fluctuant, all-mothering five? — this icicle lapsing down to a drop pulsing as it falls. Over that change of state, Earth's life and climate hang: the great specific heat, the heat of fusion, the saving wonder that water grows denser as it cools, sinking in convection, until four degrees centigrade, then rises, expanding to the insulating shell of ice. Not only ice-skaters bank on that film. To avoid the Germanic dialectic of opposites, William James seized on plasticity, as with water slowed to a jell, hung between flux and form. a50) b50) 50) 7/1995 Bumblebee on thistle flower, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Carpenter ants milk aphid "cows;" same reference Horseshoe crabs on a beach, Natural History, February 1975 Nature: The Perceptive Field 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The laws of nature he saw, with Peirce, as the fixed habits of matter. And we were fixing ours, under the infinitesimals of will. "Organic matter," he writes, "seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity." Those spiraling chains of polymers culminating in the genetic molecule of DNA have brought the paradox of inertia to a creative threshold: they move by resisting; they continually change and hold. At one limit the horseshoe crab has settled in for three hundred million years. 51) 7/1995 Lion-tailed macaque, India, International Wildlife, 1973 Nature: The Perceptive Field 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History At the other, some strange unrest has pushed toward new orders before the last have spent themselves — from sea to land, to lurching dog-toothed reptile, to mammals biding their time through the expansion of dinosaurs. Then, as Teilhard de Chardin says (and we read it in the expression of this Indian lion-tailed macaque) "in the case of the primates… evolution went straight to work on the brain." 52) Cells, onion root tip (X 1,500), Scientific American, September 1961 Can the whole transcend without reduction of the parts? Even the growing tip of an onion root rests on cell alignments which seem almost crystalline; until we note the cell nuclei in all stages of mitosis and chromosome replication, the one-many raised from abstract to a vital mix of generation in the tensile one. 53) 53a) Weaver ants folding a leaf, Scientific American, December 1977 Same: using their web-secreting larvae Evolution walks a knife-edge where each collective tends to harden like coral reef, hive, or swarm. So weaver ants, in a triumph of caste breeding and cooperation by chemical and tactile signals, turn themselves into a chain to fold a leaf, which they will use their own web-secreting larvae to sew. Each myrmidon has paid the price of togetherness, as like, you would say, 54) Oak leaves, with variants of duck oak, Quercus nigra (CGB) as the leaves of a tree. Yet these to the right come from one water oak growing in the Mississippi yard of my childhood — visibly stretched between Spanish and willow oak; while various oaks are sampled on the left. When scientists who refuse to think say molecules of a kind are all alike, they mean we do not yet distinguish them. But as Leibniz knew, no formed thing or moment can have the configuration of any other. 55) Honeycomb of wild bees, Natural History, June-July 1976 From those generic dogma-words, "table" and "chair," to species and period styles, it is a question of abstracting the forms which crown the relative. The honeycomb, even of wild bees, suggests the repetitive mechanization of the hive, the whole insect freezing, as into hexagons. But what of the moral and individual bee, 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 21 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) Symbolic History Bee flying between stalks of grass, Natural History, October 1966 Bee hive, von Frisch Dance, Encyclopædia Americana navigating by solar coordinates, with his spatial sense and interior clock externally corrected; or when he returns to the hive to report his flower-find by the von Frisch dance, in which distance is given by the number of dance loops, direction by the angle at which he cuts across, quantity of nectar by body waggles as he cuts? "Instinct" — we mouth it as a dog a dry bone. But inwardness is there, with memory and choice, Blake's "Vast world of delight, closed to your senses five." Though our senses give us the clue. 57) 57a) From airplane window, flying over the Caribbean (CGB '56) Double helix of DNA, O=red, N=blue, C=green, P=yellow; computer generated, Scientific American, October 1985 Think of Quincy Wright's metal masses rising against gravity and coming down across the ocean. The physicist traces air pressure under the wing against downward weight, the laws are in order; the chemist the energy of fuel against propulsion, all determined, no purpose there; nothing unexplained but some minute forces applied to levers in the pilot's cabin. Here the physiologist takes over, tracing energies through the body, carbon cycle, triphosphate; as in Leibniz' mill everything is accounted for but for some negligible nerve signals as the muscles contract. Now the neurologist; and he finds entropy and conservation everywhere preserved, except perhaps for third-order infinitesimals at the synapses of the nerves. The flight of the plane has been mechanically accounted for, Wright says, "except for something like an infinite regress of infinitesimals. Yet the whole was according to plan." Soul, a hazardous inference from patterns of energy (where each "energy" is in turn such an inference from such configuration) has been hunted down layer after layer of the organic stair. But it is just the feedback organization of that stair which triggers soul's choice. a58) 58) Pedestrians from above, 48th and 5th Avenue, NYC, Scientific American New York City, c. 1928, Lower Manhattan from the air, Encyclopædia Britannica As we approach the unorganized, statistical cancellation yields predictive law. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Look down, in the noon rush, at a New York intersection. Count the numbers going in each direction, each on his own, sponte sua. You cannot predict for the individual any more than for electrons in a wire; but you can write a current equation which from day to day will hold rather well. Until an army comes, marching behind a leader; he turns, they follow; the statistical laws are broken. Organization has loosened determinacy. We seem almost in touch with a complementarity shared by nature and mind. 59) 59a) Long bolt of lightning, Natural History, June-July 1977 Bolts of forked lightning, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Music: Bach, 1749, Art of Fugue, close of last unfinished fugue, Rogg (Organ), Angel SB-3-766 Yet even physical lightning, like a Bach fugue, cuts the creative path of history, an indeterminate solution in the determinizing field. The friction-belts of rain build up the potential to its breaking point of 100 to 1000 million volts. But the precise when and where rest on the particular of some Napoleon ion, building its chance momentum to a surge that creates more, starting the bolt down, though it zigzags at every unpredictable crisis of pressure and the velocity of another leader ion. It delivers the charge, which overshoots and in microseconds strikes back up and down the now blazed path (embryology repeats phylogeny), though even there sometimes breaking away — no absolute congruencies in space or time. So Bach's last fugue forges the inevitable, but so uniquely that what he left unfinished must remain that way. (end Art of Fugue) a60) 60) Detail of chick embryo, 5 days (CGB '87) Whole of same (CGB '81) Thought abstracts to the stripped antinomies; while nature elaborates its nets between — rete mirabile: the beating pulse of a chick embryo furrowing the yolk with vessels, bringing back nutrients to build the form. In the enigmatic marriage of essence and relationship, we see, in a richer whole, what Leibniz saw when he wrote: According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible) there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and yet both body and soul act as if each were influencing the other. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The last clause feeds science, such an organism as the embryo itself: to map the complex of thresholds and feedback relays, of enzymes and organizers, by which both whole and part evolve. 61) Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, from Apollo VIII, Weltraumbilder But the cosmos is the embryo, and every grouping in it swung in a great catenary from the limit of inert aggregate toward self-determining transcendence. For in every grouping, to some degree, the organized whole passes what could have been predicted from the parts. Even this Caribbean hurricane, photographed from Apollo VIII, is a form through which material swirls; if it did not hold a kind of self-shaping life of its own, it would not even be real. a62) 62) Moscow, Cathedral of St. Basil and Red Square Hitler at the Nuremberg rally, 1938, Life: Second World War History is full of those vortices. When chemicals were linking toward polymers, cells toward the metazoan, or now, when society swells with the supra-individual and collective, evolution could not occur if, through each grouping, incipient soul did not set up its circuits, altering the probability nexus of the parts. Nineteen-thirty-nine Germany was so organized that when Hitler screamed on the air those puny decibels threw huge masses of men, tanks, and planes into motion. It is not Kant's separate aspects, phenomena determined and spirit free; the nerve nets of actuation spell out Leibniz' "as if each were influencing the other." Each does, though each is inferred from the field. Part II 63) 63a) 7/1995 Cluster of galaxies in Virgo, 4-meter telescope, Chile, Scientific American, November 1978 Galaxies: core of Coma Berenice supercluster, Schmidt telescope, Scientific American, March 1982 Nature: The Perceptive Field 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the depths of space, a cluster of galaxies, each comparable to our entire Milky Way with its billions of suns. At these distances, ten million light years and beyond, the red shift attests the always swifter expansion of space itself. By the Einstein curvature of that space, the antinomy Kant proved from reason itself, that space must be both finite and infinite, has been fused, a curved return of closed infinity. By the suspension between the bang fifteen billion years ago and Hoyle's steady state (or perhaps a pulsing oscillation), the polarity of time, too, stands unresolved — that is, bridged. 64) Ion-glints from atoms in the tip of a tungsten crystal, Scientific American, June 1957 If we drop with Pascal into the infinitesimal which he could only imagine, we arrive, beyond microscope and electron microscope, at this scattering of an ion beam from atomic shells in the tip of a tungsten crystal, where everything we have said of crystal alignment comes again to the fore. But these are glints, not atoms. Do they prove that atoms "are?" We cannot tie down that "are." Like everything else, atoms well from situations, in this case rather abstract ones. Newton thought matter could not be hard unless formed of harder atoms; for where else, to the causal Eleatic, could hardness come from? We must conjure it up, an ingression, from inter-atomic vacuities by which these ion glints seem crowded. 65) 65a) Sub-atomic tracks in hydrogen bubble chamber, Scientific American, 2/64 Tracks of meson, muon, et al., Scientific American, 7/83 But it is not as Eddington thought that the particles are real and the table appearance. Appearance and reality are asymptotes of our experience. So in a cloud or hydrogen bubble chamber we catch traces of the smaller particles from which those assumed atoms come into and go out of being like jellyfish, like all the groupings entelechy rides on: these streakers from bottom to top, negative K mesons of three billion electron volts from the Bevatron, barely bent to the positive right; to the left one knocks up a proton; center, an electron dislodged from a hydrogen atom spirals in the field. In other cloud tracks, these two, once called primary, yield to whole families of wave-particle evanescencies. As Pascal and Leibniz saw, no bottom anywhere. How else, where the axioms are contradictory? 66) 7/1995 Star spectra from objective prism, Random House, Astronomy Nature: The Perceptive Field 25 �C.G. Bell 66a) Symbolic History Nebulae: Orion and Horsehead, Sierra Club, Galaxies Put a spectroscope to the sky. The stars refract in color. Those rainbows, magnified, bear dark absorption lines, signatures of elements in the stellar atmospheres They vary with stellar types and temperatures; but the elements turn out the same as ours. Over a cosmos of a billion light years and trillions of suns, the building from subparticles to the chemical elements is akin. One form-urge everywhere. 67) Organic matter from Orgueil Meteorite of 1864, Lamp, 1962 In the clouds of dust and gas called nebulae, the spectroscope picks up now the bands of organic radicals, hydroxyl, methane, cyanogen, ammonia, root structures of life. As soon as atoms cool and fill their electron shells, they take up chemistry. You can say no God is needed, or say God is there — suit your temperament; but the Orgueil meteorite, which fell in 1864, has carbonaceous chondrules with what some have called "microfossils" suggestive of pre-life. 68) Spiral galaxy M. 31 in Andromeda, Sierra Club, Galaxies So the same work of building seems to spring everywhere from the nature of things: the divine theater Bruno saw when he broke the crystalline, geocentric spheres. Here, descending from the space-curved whole, we graze our near neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, older red giants in the center and in the elliptical companions, newer stars forming in the spiral arms. a69) 69) Star formation: Bok globules (dark) in the Lagoon Nebula, Sagittarius, Scientific American, June 1977 Same, Eta Carina Nebula, Sierra Club, Galaxies In our own similar galaxy we see what must be suns in the making, here in the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius, where the gas and carbon dust collapses to small Bok globules, dark against the background glow. In other hydrogen-rich regions, huge shock waves plow through, as in a mackerel sky, sowing the cloud lumps from which giant stars fall into glowing. a70) 70) 7/1995 Sun during a major solar eruption, from Skylab orbiting space station in 1973, Sierra Club, Galaxies Plasma jets over sun surface, NASA, Natural History, November 1975 Nature: The Perceptive Field 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Hydrogen fusion kindled at the compressed and heated core transforms mass into radiation (as Newton had speculated, "Nature a perpetual circulatory worker"); it heaves up through the vast mass, setting the surface (as here of the sun) cycloning in promontories of plasma — the radiant from which Earth, sheltered and beleed in space, receives the energy for its terraced life. a71) 71) Professor Barnard, 1911, Jupiter, as from one of its moons, Splendour of the Heavens Saturn, Catalina Observatory, Scientific American, Solar System As for the solar system, ejected from the sun or condensed with it from the same cloud, where the old collision theory made it an incredible accident, we, maximizing its likelihood, observe minute perturbations in the motions of nearer stars. And how to have thought it rare where the great planets, too, have their systems, Galileo's Jovian satellites, or the moons and planetesimal rings of Saturn. Though we do not know what chemistry has evolved beneath those frozen ammonia and carbon dioxide clouds. 72) Imaginary landscape on Mars, Splendour of the Heavens No doubt something remote from the life we look for. The hope for planets commensurate with ours has so far let us down. Here is an imaginary landscape of Mars from The Splendour of the Heavens of the '30's, when Schiaparelli and Lowell had drawn the elusive canals, and Edgar Rice Boroughs made the dying planet a seat of romance. 73) Martian landscape radioed by Viking, Newsweek, July 1976 Though the cratered waste seen from our space probes had more the look of the moon (no green fields, no canals); and this landscape Viking radioed home, July 1976, has the reality and wonder of desolation. It is not even clear what the search for microorganisms in the soil has revealed. One can still call soul ubiquitous; but the lurching Mars man is not there. 74) 7/1995 Craters on Mercury, photographed March 1974, by Mariner 10, Scientific American, The Solar System Nature: The Perceptive Field 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What the Moon, Mars, here Mercury share are the overlaid impact craters, where, from the start of the solar system, meteors of all sizes have gashed down, melting the rock and throwing up mountain walls. a75) 75) Meteor Crater, 40 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona Impact crater in northeast Quebec, The Solar System Even the Earth, cushioned and eroded by air, has the not too ancient one in Arizona, and from 200 million years ago this forty-mile-wide depression still to be traced in the Canadian Shield. 76) Earth-rise on the Moon, NASA, Random House, Astronomy But our Earth, viewed from the airless and waterless Moon, has the look of a paradise, so far as we can tell (though we are prejudiced) the only paradise in this vicinity: ocean and forested land gleaming through its cloud. 77) Aurora Borealis, photographed by T. Lorgren, Anthroposophic Press True, it has natural deserts and its polar north. There the bending in of the magnetic field displays in the colors of the Aurora Borealis how almost exposed we are to the bombardments of space, the solar wind, a flux of charged particles, ionizing and fluorescing the air. 78) San Andreas Fault, California, Natural History, January 1972 Exposed, too, to volcanic violence — those great tectonic plates that make up the Earth-crust shifting and drifting, crunching one into the other, cracking in flaws, heaving up mountains and lava — this San Andreas Fault, which the young rely on, at any moment, to sink California under the sea. 79) Angel Falls, Venezuela, Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature Music: Beethoven, 1807-8, Symphony #6, "Pastoral," opening, Vox PL 6960 It means something about the balance some call "dynamic homeostasy" that from the bath of space rays, the violence of colliding continents and eruptive orogeny, Earth is so soothed and contained that the age of Goethe and Beethoven could think its mountains 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the peaceful work of water, slowly carved, as in this more than half-mile leap to the Great Plain of Venezuela. What an Eden for the self-search — from organic chemistry to social man — of the whole infolding Biosphere. (fade Pastoral) 80) Birth of volcanic island off Iceland, Natural History, March 1967 Earth, air, fire, and water. When the volcanic island of Surtsey rose from the ocean south of Iceland, those elements were again proclaimed. And now one remembered Oparin's coacervates, the colloidal droplets he explored as the origins of life. Let the primal seas receive from the reducing pre-oxygen atmosphere of water-vapor, methane, ammonia, nitrogen, and the carbon oxides, the various amino acids which Miller and Urey brought from them by electric spark. Let that soup thicken to a jell in the pools of hot volcanic rock; 81) 81a) 81b) Pre-life, self-organized microspheres, Natural History, 1968 Pre-Cambrian: assumed stromatolite beds, North West Australia, Scientific American, October 1981 Same formation, wider view then rains wash it back into the polymerizing seas. That protenoid rounds, as here, into microscopic, double-membraned, osmotic spheres, which absorb amino acids, can grow, can bud. Give them a billion years in the warm seas, their working molecules trying all the links and ties of carbon synthesis. Enzymes produce starch and maltose by the energy of the glucose-phosphate bond. So came the master invention, the earliest photo-synthesis, hydrogen sulfide splitting carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen by the energy of light, transforming the globe from that reducing matrix of polymers to another of green and purple sulfur bacteria oxygenating ocean and air. Thus to photosynthesis directly from water, as in blue-green algae, fossilized in sediments more than three billion years old. 82) Giant amœba, Chaos chaos, swallows a paramecium, Natural History, October 1967 The buttressing of particles from the antinomies of energy, of atoms into molecules, molecules into adaptive polymers, polymers into cells, — stromatolite banks 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of oxygen releasers — culminates in nucleated cells, eukaryotes, passing genetic variation by sexual mating, each cell a kaleidoscope of rudimentary search, perception, choice, of self-determining act — though this giant amœba, hunting and ingesting a paramecium, bears the generic name of "Chaos chaos." 83) Spore stalks of slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum, Scientific American, December 1959 In existing slime molds, the amœba goes social, reaches toward the metazoan. A spore in a moist place emerges, feeds, divides: a colony of free-moving protozoans; they exhaust the habitat; in a cluster one secretes acrasin; as the signal touches others they converge, secreting more; like iron filings drawn to a magnet, eddies of cells swirl in: a slug that creeps, then sends a stalk into the air; some dry into a stem for the common good; others turn to a fruiting body, others to spores; the head breaks; each seed-amœba bears the pre-fungoid whole. 84) Moon coral, Favia pallida, Audubon, September 1976 The social polyp proliferates into coral — advance that falls back, as to sessile plant, almost to mineral, an undifferentiated one-many; yet they build a skeleton of limestone which makes them, as in the Great Barrier Reef, the most ponderous of living things. 85) The Cambrian Sea, Spring Books, Prehistoric Animals With the Cambrian seas the fossil record known to Darwin begins, invertebrates of all families, sponges, coral, jellyfish, worms, sea lilies, brachiopods, trilobites, (ancestral in the great crustacean, scorpion, spider line); and among them, overshadowed, chordates, evolving to first fish. 86) Upper Carboniferous, with Meganeura, etc., Spring Books Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, then the Carboniferous — over much of the Earth, these swamps of great club mosses and tree ferns, our source of coal; spiders and insects, huge cockroaches and dragonflies, and again, just emergent, from lungfish who had crept to land and become amphibians (stegocephalian hardheads), 87) 7/1995 Upper Carboniferous and Lower Permian, Edaphosaurus, Spring Books Nature: The Perceptive Field 30 �C.G. Bell 87a) Symbolic History Double: [A] South African, Permian, Moschops (Archaic pre-mammalian reptile), Spring Books; and [B] Same, Triassic, Cynognathus, Wiley & Sons the first true reptiles, waiting their turn. And hardly have those sprawling reptiles (this herbivorous sail-fin) appeared, when theriodonts, in the Permian, hoist up on four legs and differentiate dog-like teeth, giving rise, by the Triassic, to mammals. 88) Jurassic and Cretaceous, Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, New York City But as if each had to be tested by the tyranny of the past, mammals waited, through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the surge of reptiles into every habitat. In the swamps, brontosaurus, seventy feet long and weighing, say, thirty tons. While the ancestral possum cowered in the trees, though Brontosaurus was a plant eater. 89) Mounted skeletons: Allosaurus over Brontosaurus, American Museum of Natural History, New York City (CGB '79) And would allosaurus have had time for anything as small as those mammals? When one stands in the New York museum where the one hundred million year old skeleton still ravens over brontosaurus, those Berkeleian questions of external reality — whether science has invented a world from its own cognizance — no more arise than if the brute should take out after us. 90) Upper Cretaceous, Sea of Kansas, Pteranodon and Tylosaurus, Spring Books Never was more adaptive radiation: up into the air, back to the ocean. The inland seas of the last Cretaceous, 60 million years ago, swarmed with short- and long-necked plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, while pteranodons glided above and swooped down for fish. 91) Fossil Archæopteryx, Humboldt University, Berlin, National Geographic, August 1978 Perhaps the active dinosaurs had already developed warm blood and a more efficient heart. By the Jurassic, the most beautiful of fossil forms had appeared, that toothed and feathered dinosaur-bird link called archæopteryx, found in the Bavarian limestone in 1861. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 31 �C.G. Bell 92) Symbolic History Archæopteryx and small dinosaur, Spring Books Here, too, a step toward a later style was taken before the former had run its course — over the final Earth-grab of dinosaurs, these birds (with primates) just held their own. Sound: Birdsong Had they already begun to practice song? 93) Birds: Rufous fantail by its nest, Australia, International Wildlife, 5-6/73 Though in soul, the toothed lizard bird must still be a long way from what nesting with its sacrifice brought to the eyes and musical throats, not to mention the migratory intelligence, of our birds — here the Rufous fantail of Australia, caring for her young. (cut birdsong) 94) Reptile: Alligator, National Wildlife, February-March 1973 The reptiles that survived the startling general extinction at the end of the Cretaceous are cold-blooded, sluggish, and primitive, relics of a state of being before that of the dinosaurs. Of course, we should preserve them in the swamps and bayous; but to go from this Permian reminder 95) 95a) Jan "Flower" Brueghel c. 1610(?), Paradise, Berlin-Dahlem Grey wolves howling, R. Fiennes, The Order of Wolves Sound: Wolf cries, American Museum of Natural History to the golden age of ancestral grazers, of cats and dogs, mild Miocene, is like coming to that Paradise where painters (here Velvet Brueghel) have brought together the birds and mammals nourished in familial care. And already they cooperate in perceptive packs and herds — wolves, almost as Kipling made them, with the roots of law and justice and their stirring language of cries. Though surely they did not lie down with the lamb. (fade wolves) a96) 96) 7/1995 Porpoises, open-mouthed pair, Reader's Digest, Marvels of the Animal World Same, pair rubbing noses, Chromolux Nature: The Perceptive Field 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And, against the marine reptiles, how much the mammals returned to the sea fit the Greek myth of Arion, whom a dolphin carried to the shore. Who knows what that intelligence (a brain larger than man's and with more neuron connections, though free of manipular use and control) may hold in contemplation of ocean depths and soul's contours; how much express in a language as liquidly mysterious as the music of the hump-backed whale? 97) Army ant queen groomed by workers, Natural History, December 1975 While army ant workers groom the swollen queen, her body all fat and eggs, of which she can lay a hundred thousand, for workers specialized in size and task. Have they weirdly anticipated how our mammalian "propinquity and property of blood" must socialize? 98) Megalithic building c. 1910, Africa, Roder, Paideuma, 1944 As late as 1910 Schröder photographed these megalithic builders in Africa, the whole tribe, with sled and roller logs, dragging a stone dolmen to the village for a monument. What self-renouncing frenzy of togetherness 99) Bronze age, especially c. 1650 B.C., Stonehenge, photographed by Ant. Miles set up the monuments of prehistoric Europe, Stonehenge, effected, as in the Nias photograph by a population yoked into one by overmastering spirit — what we read of in Romanesque church-building, nobles and all with yokes on their proud necks, in orgies of penitential zeal: "The Lord thy God is a consuming fire." 100) Moslems at Mount of Mercy, Saudi Arabia, Natural History, 1973 In the Moslem world, penitents of all nations and tongues still convene at the Mount of Mercy, near Mecca, reminder of the tornadic faith that roared through history, sweeping horsemen over Asia and North Africa and into Spain. Are these powers real? With the god-visions and prophet texts that entrain them? As real as tornado, or the gene, on which somatic building rides. Augustine and Pascal thought only Christianity had miracles; 101) 7/1995 African tribesmen practicing image magic; Dial Press, Encyclopædia of Witchcraft and Magic Nature: The Perceptive Field 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History but miracle is the inner truth of every generating myth. Faith, like soul, is caught in the paradox of all energy, a configuration-riding formaloid, which can always be analyzed away. These African tribesmen with their image magic know as well as Rotarians at the business of the day that what they have in hand is real. And what else, against entropy and natural decay, microbes and tropical parasites, holds those breathing dark bodies together but cascades of mythic power? — the very laws of nature, habits of matter. a102) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Last Judgment, Autun Cathedral 102) Great Serpent Mound of American Indian Adena-Hopewell Culture, Newsweek, Sculpture Thus Jung on the god and devil loci in the group unconscious: There is nothing for it but to recognize the irrational as an everpresent psychological function … its contents … psychic realities, real because they work. To combine Cartesian outwardness with Blake's creative imagination where all deities reside, is a task for the Superman, that means, for each and all. Yet to see once, clearly and distinctly, the Earth heaving into the thirteen-hundred foot ambivalent snake shrine of the Adena-Hopewell culture in 1000 B.C. Ohio (Christ, too, the snake Moses lifted on the rod), is to know that we have outlived that dry single vision a patient of Jung's once expressed: Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God. a103) Golden orb spider with grasshopper; Reader's Digest, Amazing World of Nature 103) Female black widow spinning web, Natural History, February 1973. [In video, 103 both precedes and follows a103. ] If history is mythic and the Word its catalyst, "sweet science" must embrace myth and word. When Blake thinks gins and poison, he sees spider, real as a black widow sliding on its web: 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We beheld the infinite Abyss… the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey… Though like all, the spider is dual: Swift's caricature of the soul-spinning modern, which Whitman affirms: "A noiseless patient spider … Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul." 104) Kali ordeal by fire, Orissa, India, Natural History, January 1974 104a) Strip-mining Appalachians, East Ohio, Natural History, November 1974 Has the complementarity of good and evil begun with us? To avoid the anthropomorphic is to avoid philosophy, since anthropos, too, came up the stair where his art and knowledge, love and morality got their natures and their names. This Orissa devotee of Kali, swung through fire seven times each way, is on the sublime sacrificial tree that leads from the lock-jawed salmon, the bird feeding her young, through Greek tragedy and the Paschal victim, to whatever mystery we enact in our crucifixion of the world. O for a dialectic like Archimedes' lever. 105) Conjugating bacteria, supermale colon bacillus and round female, Scientific American, June 1961 Sex has been the deepest cleavage in the creative one, well of ideal and gross, delight and pain. Here colon bacilli, electron-magnified a hundred-thousand times, erect from phallic supermale to round female a comic kissing-bridge for chromosomes. Now wherewith sholde he mak his paiement, If he ne used his sely instrument? So the Wife of Bath; but Chaucer's Creseyde says "Who yaf me drynke?" (Over the corpse-littered fields of Troy.) Music: 106) 7/1995 Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Potion & ff. (through slide 110), from RCA-V 6700 Conjugation of snails, Helix pomatia, Natural History, 8-9/77 Nature: The Perceptive Field 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Who has brought off that loved war like snails? — where both are male and female, equal, hermaphroditic. They fuse, each shooting into the other wounding and sperm-bearing calcareous darts. So they retire to gestate and lay eggs. A balance in the Amazonamachia which has reduced males sometimes to parasitic captives, females to sessile breeding sacks. 107) Crickets mating, female on male, Natural History, June 1979 Or the tension can become Heraclitus' lyre. The male cricket, after fighting off others, rubs his wing covers, stridulating violins — vulnerable, since mate or predator may hear. He sings until she covers him, feeding on juices secreted by those musical wings. 108) Hellenistic mirror case, love scene; Fine Arts, Boston Human love was never more natural than in the Eros Kalos tradition of the Greeks, where sex, with all its dark roots in birth and death ("To die, with thee again, in sweetest sympathy"), mirrors the open gladness of Aphrodite. As with everything Greek, one wonders if civilization reached its acme in that prime. How much, for later gains, we risk and pay. 109) Indian, c. 11th cent., Mithuna couple, Khajnraho Temple, Madhya Pradesh, India True, the East has raised the Hellenistic pleasure to a Nirvana rite; but the carved ecstasy leaves their multiplying billion in the lurch. 110) Boecklin, Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, Munich (CGB '59) And whatever dislocation has torn the Christian West has wrenched natural desire to the Wagnerian and perverse. As post-Romantic Boecklin's Triton blows his brooding conch over the waves, this nereid fondles the sea-beast supermale. Such the Europe Freud found flooded with neurotic sex. (Fade Tristan) 111) 7/1995 A fallen spruce in the forest, Sangre de Cristo, near Santa Fe (CGB '78) Nature: The Perceptive Field 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What of the other of the love-death pair? Death in nature withers away, that flowing in and out the Stoics would make it — the fall and decomposition of a tree. As with force and counterforce, death needs its opposite — life-consciousness. 112) Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1517, Death and the Lady, Museum, Basel; + V pan detail Against the Renaissance inflaming of the will to live, the converse outrage sharpens a dance of death. But the most macabre Holbein, or this Baldung Grien, is Leibniz' perception, a breaking wave in what abides. Skelton: No man may him hide From Death hollow-eyed … With his worm-eaten maw And his ghastly jaw … To whom then shall we sue? 113) Italian-American, c. 1890(?), Angel through leaves, Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York The death arts of Egypt still gaze through the change. And even this 19th-century girl in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, wreathes the sadness of forever in a transience of leaves. Death comes to be in conscious Being, its ground the I AM, by which it is contained: "Sail out, eidolon yacht of me." 114) Ben Ortega, 1967, Christ with spread arms, (CGB & DMB) In the West, Love-Death took incarnate seat in the God-Man — mediation of the yoked antinomies. When Ortega takes from an arroyo a branch where lignin striations record the stress and twist of cleavage (so that, as Heraclitus says, struggle becomes father of all things) and, using these zygote swirls, shapes a Christ, he works the tension of nature to the symbolic sacrifice — racked from rock to sky for the song of men and angels: Who would praise the peace eternal Must tune his harp in the war of its fibers. 115) 7/1995 Botticelli, 1500, Mystical Nativity, National Gallery, London; + V details Nature: The Perceptive Field 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Such the archetype of our dynamic. A balanced antinomy is sterile, whether in thought or act. The One that holds antinomy becomes the arrow. So in Botticelli's Mystical Nativity of 1500, the foreground devils retreat, trampled, stabbed to the ground; angels embrace mortals in imminent revelation. The good-evil rift is suspended in God, whose coming is past, future, and now. The spiral of time was never so implemented. 116) Donatello, c. 1460, Christ before Pilate, with two-faced attendant, Bronze Pulpit, San Lorenzo, Florence; + V detail The contradictions of Socratic reason were fused in the man-god. By the Renaissance, that faith-containment is shifting to existence; life itself begins to gather the polar fields. In Donatello's Christ before Pilate, the Janus-faced servant looks both ways, as to Jerusalem and Rome. Is not the word "double-mindedness" quoted twice from James in the Mass of Donato's patron saint? Already the horns of dilemma are the strength and tragic flaw of the Christian mind. 117) Raphael (and Giulio Romano), 1518, Michael vs. Satan, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Music: Beethoven, 1805-8, Symphony #5, close, (Karajan) Deutsche Grammophon LPM 18804 The myth of Lucifer applies to every spirit which can say "I am." Being, displaced from the center, can only act from its own center, initiating creative history. God had no way to operate but by granting freedom — which in evolution means the miscarriage of adaptive quest. The civilization which moved from Raphael's Overthrow of Satan to Milton's near glorification; 118) Goya, 1815-24 (published 1864), Modo de Voler, from Los Disparates and then to the Promethean reversals of the Age of Revolution: Beethoven, Goethe's Faust, Blake, this Goya dream of flying — that civilization, more than any other, had risked the experiment of the new, leaping from progress by chromosomes to progress by the coup of law, equation, word. (end Beethoven Fifth) The wheel turned to an arrow 119) Fountain from yard sprinkler (CGB '78) must turn again with the wheel. 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Perhaps in cosmic extension entropy rounds on itself. But the fountain we see is a form, the rise and apex of drops always curving to fall. To stop the gravity down would stop the universe. Anti-entropy must weave over that, using particular decay, until the entraining transcendence is itself entrained and used. Where the fountain becomes a drop, curved in the greater rise — to which Pascal's knot will always apply: "seeing too much to doubt and too little to be sure." We of the modern West have felt the whole Earth swerve. 120) Webs of Zilla x-Notata, normal and drugged, Scientific American, 12/54 Music: Bartok, 1919, from The Miraculous Mandarin, near close, side A, Bartok Rec. 301 Spiders on psychedelic drugs weave strange romantic webs. No doubt they will catch fewer flies (carmina non dant panem); but weavers of the creative abstract might prefer this bold, free venture to the standstill of the old symmetry. Has not the Nietzschean West made a drug of the god-self? 121) Schizophrenic drawing, 1922, Heidelberg Clinic, Prinzhorn Which Rimbaud literally applied: "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses." Startling, how close to our center those 1920 drawings by Prinzhorn's schizophrenic patients strike — like the atonal break of Mad Peter, Wozzeck, this Bartok Miraculous Mandarin. We have read it in the nightmare fictions that have seemed most expressive of our age: 122) Chaim Soutine, 1918, Self Portrait, H. Pearlman, New York Kafka's Metamorphosis of man to huge cockroach, the Penal Colony, with its religious torture machine. In art there are the Expressionists, this 1918 self-portrait by Soutine, tenth son of a Jewish tailor, painting in the exile of Paris — precursors of some world disease. (end Bartok) 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 39 �C.G. Bell 123) Symbolic History Firefighter in aluminum and asbestos suit, National Geographic, August 1978 But crisis and disease inseparable from the triumph of technocracy: man mastering the elements to whose wheel he was bound — here in a suit of aluminum and asbestos become the salamander of fire, fighting a jet-fuel inferno at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. 124) Undersea habitat, Oceanographics, Inc., International Wildlife, July-August 1974 Here — beyond what Roger Bacon dreamed of: It is possible that devices can be made whereby … a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river — he sets up his Ondine hydrolab in the ocean depths. 125) Hydrogen bomb explosion over Bikini atoll, 1946, Life: Second World War How to contain the ambivalence of such a Lucifer? Since never have the sunbright scales of armored supremacy more sonorously clanged on the logos of number than in the science where racked-out nature flames the certification of "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" — 126) Botticelli, 1490, Augustine's Dream (predella), Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) That a civilization mediated by God crucified, and preaching the humbled penitence of man — Augustine's dream of the boy dipping the sea into a pool on the shore; and when the saint said, "You can never hold the ocean in that hole," the boy gave the recurrent, pride-abasing answer: "Nor you the eternal in your finite mind" — 127) Model of DNA molecule, with comparative skeletons, fish to man (CGB '78) that a civilization beginning there should come out at the other pole of the incarnate field, where the Jesuit father, Teilhard de Chardin should write of science (while we contemplate what he implies, the double helix of DNA, with the plasticities of the vertebrate skeleton): 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world. 128) Carrier attacked by kamikaze plane, Life: Second World War That assumption of the Light-bearer was put to the test by the Second World War. It was soon clear how far evolution had shifted to organisms reared above man. An aircraft carrier in the electronic navy had a brain-room distinct from the brain of anyone in command; there radar sensings converge, thence guidance goes to the members — guns and planes. But it was not clear how that higher organism related to Teilhard's Omega dream. As he closed The Phenomenon of Man, Apocalypse was still there, from which only a spiritual remnant would be saved. 129) Launch Control Room 2, for Apollo expedition, NASA In the automation since, the individual is more and more superseded, an eye, a brain, a hand, woven in the network of sensors, computers, and adaptive relays. The control chamber for the Apollo moon-launch visibly confronts us with the nerve-net of something hyperzoan. 130) First Moon landing, 1969, Apollo XI module with astronauts on lunar surface, NASA At the other end of which, the messenger molecules of a new genetic and evolutionary leap put the first Earth footprints on the lava-dust of the moon. Where such an organized success is possible, how is it 131) Destruction of forest, near Lacanha, Chiapas (CGB '78) that here, most of humanity creeps like slime mold over the globe — no, lower, like unorganized bacteria on an agar plate, poisoning themselves in their own wastes; whole populations seized by the oldest cancerous self-service, to breed and burn: as in the forests of Chiapas we reel from the foretaste of what is occurring in all the great jungle basins, once the lungs of the Earth. 132) 7/1995 Leaf-cutting ants, McGraw Hill: Life of the Jungle Nature: The Perceptive Field 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History They say leaf-cutting ants are adapted to the balance of nature. One could have said the same, before the hygiene bomb, of the rotational agriculture of jungle-burning man. Those balances are lack of size or power. These leaf-cutters, millions per nest, can rip up a plot of jungle, lugging the pieces on defoliated runways for their underground fungus beds. It is Eden again, God risking Earth-fall, by the freedom of quest. 133) Tornado from thundercloud, Kansas, Reader's Digest: Amazing World of Nature We see nature everywhere hung over violence. Out of the warming of air and convection of clouds, the nourishing descent of water in the discrete drops of rain, we hardly know yet how it comes that those cyclonic 300 mile-an-hour winds form and hold their own over farmland, towns, and all. 134) Planetary nebula, Crab in Taurus, Hale, Random House: Astronomy The nuclear burning of the stars, which lights whatever planets have life, is poised on instabilities. We do not have to explode the world. Nature can make bombs without us. This enormous eruption of gas, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, remains from a flaming supernova, observed by the Chinese in 1054 A.D. Through days of total release they can give out more light than a whole galaxy of a billion stars. Though again birth pairs with dying: the chemistry of life may have required such events. 135) Raphael (with Giulio Romano), 1518-20, Transfiguration, Vatican; + V details In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes Raphael's Transfiguration a symbol of the Dionysian and Apollonian: below, the shadowed Earth-strife of the boy possessed by demons; above, the visionary unity of the radiant and floating divine — an eternal contention. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud opposes Eros and Death, like Empedocles' Love and Strife; though unlike the stern Greek, he finds temporal hope: "that eternal Eros will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary." a136) Una Handbury, c. 1980, The Phoenix, Albuquerque Zoo 136) Rodin, 1905, The Oceanides, derived from the Gates of Hell, Rodin Museum, Paris 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Not surprising if in our century we have auguries of imperative convergence, the sciences (Whitehead, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin) gaping with the philosophic and mythopoetic; while poetry and fiction hunger for a world-epos — an obligation which rests upon us, drawing us on. Yeats: The half-read wisdom of dæmonic images Suffice the aging man as once the growing boy. But what are the images by which art or vision can gather its world? Two works, from 1904, oppositely aimed: Rodin's still voluptuous Oceanides, derived from the romantic synthesis of his Gates of Hell; 137) Cezanne, 1904, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Philadelphia Museum of Art Cezanne's last study of Mont Sainte-Victoire rising over Arles — the sensuous transformed to the abstract triangles, planes, and squares of analysis. If those were poles, the task might lie between; 138) Mondrian, 1921, Composition in yellow, red, blue, and black, Gementemuseum, The Hague as between the most reductive abstraction the thrust of the modern has brought us to — how incommensurate with what we seek — the plain or colored rectangles of so many of the avant garde, here of Mondrian, 1921; 139) Sunset from 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM (CGB '78) and that nature eye and camera record in the amorphous play of its formulable radiances: "Clouds, winds, and waves of light, senselessly beautiful." Curious: we have talked as if the task were of mind, poetry, and art, though surely what should be uppermost is saving the planet left in our care. a140) b140) c140) 140) Enrique Franco Torrijos, photo of a Lacandon girl Carola Bell, at Elbow Branch, Maryland (CGB '60) Earth from space (Mexico, etc.) Y se Formaron Caminos Calla lily with morning dew, Chiapas (CGB '78) Music: 7/1995 Josquin des Prez, 1500-20(?), Agnus Dei, Seraphim SIC-6052 Nature: The Perceptive Field 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nothing more crucial for that, than if the ambivalence of Love-Strife should kindle everywhere the poem of tragic Earth as the sacrament of God — an infolding of consciousness complex as the perceptive field, and as simple as a two-voice Josquin, or the calla's rounding of its synergy of cells: "They toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these." (close of Josquin) 7/1995 Nature: The Perceptive Field 44 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 44 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nature : the perceptive field, Symbolic History, Part 1 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 1 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_01_Nature--The_Perceptive_Field Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/25b777525cae22f837f9073697e1aeb2.pdf 6fa41f0ac81f6495db88f562260abe58 PDF Text Text In Remembrance of Jonathan Hand July 6, 1958 - November 6, 2019 ST JOHN'S College SANTA FE • ANNAPOLIS ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE FEBRUARY 1, 2020 3:00 P.M., GREAT HALL �Lara Fabian ''Mistral Gagnant" lyrics They say that souls wait around before returning to earth That's what they say Sometimes I think of this child of mine which is not yet here And whom I am waitingfor And I am so afraid for it WELCOME Michael Golluber Ah to sit down on a bench for jive minutes with you And watch all the people, Such as there are. Talk to you ofthe good time Which is dead or which'll come back Squeezing within my hand your little fingers Then give something to eat to idiotic pigeons Aim a few kicks at them in pretend . To hear your laughter which splits cracks in the walls Which can cure above all wounds that I've had. To tell you for a while how I once was: "Mino The Fabulous Bombecs", Which we used to pinch from the shop. "Car en Sac" and "Minto caramels"for one franc And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. To walk in the rain for five minutes with you And watch life go past Such as there is. To tell you tales ofthe earth feasting my eyes on you Speak to you ofyour mum a little while Ofjumping in puddles to make her grumbleRuining our shoes and having jun. And to hear your laughter as one hears the sea Stopping then starting offon the way back. To tell ofabove all the "Carambars" of times past And the "Coco- hoers" and the real "Roudoudous" Which used to cut our lips and chipped our teeth enamel And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. Ah to sit on a bench for five minutes with you Watching the sun going down Talk to you ofa good time which is dead and I don't care To tell you those in the wrong that wasn't us. That ifI am crazy it's onlyfor your eyes For they have the advantage of coming in twos And hearing your laughter flying up as high As fly up the cries of the birds To tell you in the end that you need to love life And love it even if time is a great killer And takes off with him the laughter of children And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. And the "Mistrals" that win a prize. Emily Axelberg David Levine Ave verum corpus Performed by the SJC Schola Cantorum (William Byrd) Frank Pagano Allison Levy Benjamin Storey Jenna Silber Storey Mistral Gagnant (Renaud Pierre Manuel Sechan) Performed by Christopher Young (piano) and Natalie Gammill (vocals) Thato Kgalema Walter Sterling Remarks from Jonathan '.s Family Reception in the Junior Common Room Cover image: Athena, Greek Goddess of Wisdom and War �Tutor Michael Golluber Jonathan - or "Mr. Hand" as my wife Tracey always playfully addressed him, easily embarrassing him - he was so easy to tease, and he enjoyed being teased more than most , because he knew we were all flirting with him. So, for example, one could say to him (as I in fact did) "I'm not entirely sure what kind of look you're going for, Jonathan, but you've neglected to shave a noticeable portion of the left side of your face." Jonathan was a great friend and magnificent colleague. Life here at the college for me has not been the same since he left us, and I suffer from losing him each and every day. Jonathan, as everyone knows, was a most enjoyable and joyful interlocuter. I learned so much from him during my many serious, and my many silly conversations with him (there was of course hardly any - if any at all - of a distinction between silliness and seriousness when f spoke with Jonathan - he nailed "that tragedy and comedy of life" thing down). Jonathan had a twinkle or sparkle in his eye {I imagine he would prefer "sparkle" - "twinkle" doesn't quite lend itself to the manliness he pretended to care about, dressing up as he did every day as a lumberjack) . It was that sparkle that I saw, when, at a question period after a lecture, I had just finished asking a question, and he turned around, and with a wink, let me know that he knew that my question was not in fact a real question, but rather was a polite and indirect way of pointing out that the lecturer didn't know what the heck they were talking about. He was much more bold, straightforward and ruthless in communicating such things than I, and to my astonishment he always got away with it somehow. It was that same sparkle that I saw, when , sitting across from me in my Camille Paglia study group (Paglia, by the way, is someone Jonathan was madly in love with, and he wanted to ask to her to marry him, despite (and maybe because) she identifies as an "Amazonian lesbian") it was that sparkle I saw when I asked a question of our dear students that he could not quite believe I could get away with asking, a question he knew he could never get away with as king. And it was the same sparkle when at one of our many lunch conversations, I would say something that he decided was exactly false. Behind the smile and that sparkle, he was thinking: "Michael - there is no way you could have gotten it any more wrong than that! " Or at another lunch, after things got a little heated, he would back down, acknowledging that maybe, just maybe there was something I got a bit right and that he might give it some further consideration. The final setting for such conversation was in the context of my present study group on Simone de Beauvoir' s "The Second Sex" (Beauvoir, by the way, was someone Jonathan had no desire whatsoever to marry). Jonathan came to the first couple of these meetings. But with great selflessness, sincere selflessness, he decided to leave the group because he was sure his crankiness about the book would lead to some misbehavior on his part. After all, Jonathan cared most of all for our students and their education. The strange thing, though, was that �when I walked out of the Private Dining Room and into the dining hall after these meetings, I was always greeted by Jonathan, sitting alone at a table, waiting for me to come out. There was no wave of a hand, there was only that intense sparkle, commanding me to come sit down and join him. You see, he had been keeping up with the Beauvoir readings as our group was reading them. And he demanded from me, after each and every meeting, a minute by minute account of who said what about this astonishing claim or that inexplicable argument, and then demanded an account of why I thought that this student had said that, and then, applying psychology to ontology, demanded that we decipher together what this "why", of the "that" which was said by this particular student, about this book - what that could possibly mean for the present and future of the human as such. And he grew irritated and delighted at the very same time. As deeply irritated as Jonathan may have been with us at one time or another, Jonathan deeply loved us even more. He and his speeches remind one of how Alcibiades described Socrates and his speeches as a sileinos, in all appearances a hubristic satyr, the inside of which is really something altogether divine, having the largest number of images of virtue within, applying to the whole area that is proper to examine for one who is going to be beautiful and good. �Student Emily Axelberg The most difficult part of Mr. Hand's passing, for me, has been accepting the fact that I will never get the chance to adequately thank him for being my teacher, if such a thing is ever really possible. With this brief speech, I would like to try to begin to express my gratitude. I would like, first, to thank Mr. Hand for his seriousness. This one might surprise some of you who knew him well, because Mr. Hand made a lot of jokes. He seemed never to miss an oppo1tunity for biting sarcasm, and often didn't appear to pay much mind to whether or not those around him would deem his humor appropriate to the context. However, I'd like to reference briefly a commencement address that another excellent teacher of mine, Lise van Boxel, gave that touched on this point. Sh~ astutely observed in that speech that, "seriousness does not have to be grave." I think this is one of the most important lessons that I learned from Mr. Hand. He openly rejoiced in the work that we do here, in the books, and in the company of his colleagues and students. This rejoicing often took the form of a particularly effusive and lively approach to teaching and conversation. Mr. Hand's ability to do the work here with impressive diligence and rigor while unapologetically having the most fun possible is the standard by which I continue to evaluate my own work. He taught me that the most serious response to the great books is an ecstatic kind of joy, a lightness. In a document entitled "Mr. Hand's paper advice to freshmen ," which he sent to our freshman language class, he wrote, "these authors are suns: we, at best, mere moons, straining to reflect some of that original brilliance." Mr. Hand's particular sort of seriousness reflected the original brilliance of our authors to me and revealed the undeniable vitality of their dusty old books when I was just starting out at the college. He was my first shining example of what it means to search for humanity in the books we read, and to celebrate when we find it. His last point of advice in that same document simply reads, " have fun. Really." I believe this advice, though it might not seem like much, is one of the deepest and most imp01tant lessons I have learned at St. John's. I would also like to thank Mr. Hand for his continued commitment to my education. Mr. Hand demonstrated a persistent dedication to my growth as a student and as a human being, even at times when I was not so dedicated. A good example of this, which I will relate here mostly because it's funny, is his contribution to my don rag about my performance in language class during the second semester of my freshman year. When it was his turn to speak, he very curtly declared something like: "I think Ms. Axelberg has gotten cocky and lazy." He, of course, followed this remark by saying that my writing was basically satisfactory and there were no major problems with my class participation, etc, but his first statement really stuck with me because it was the truest thing that any one of my tutors said in that don rag. Even though my work in class had been just fine, he knew that I was capable of doing better and called me to account for it so directly that I couldn't disregard him . I remember that Ms. van Boxel even asked him if she should write the first part down in the don rag notes, to which he responded, "I don't see why not." This story is just one of many examples throughout my time at the college of �Mr. Hand noticing me slipping, academically or personally, and encouraging me to do better with the kind of totally unveiled criticism that it seems only he could get away with. The reason he got away with it, though, is because even when he was at his harshest, I never doubted that he was in my corner and wanted me to succeed. I know that the only reason he was so tough on me is because my education mattered to him just as much, if not, at times, more than it mattered to me. Without his constant support, I don't know how I would have persisted through some of my roughest patches over the past four years. I don't think I really have to tell any of you how much it means to have a great teacher believe in you and your work. Obviously, it means a great deal. I will briefly mention my gratitude to Mr. Hand for his lesson on friendship. He once told me that he reads to make friends, and the time I spent reading with him over the past four years proved that to be abundantly true. I enjoyed reading with Mr. Hand not only because I had a lot to learn from him about how to read the great books, but also because it provided an opportunity for me to build the kind of trust and mutual respect with him that I had long been searching for in a mentor. Because of this willingness of his to become a friend to me, I will cherish our time together not only for how it contributed to my academic growth, but how it came to shape me more broadly as a human being in my ability to be a better friend . My last conversation with Mr. Hand was supposed to be on Book II of Rousseau's Emile, but we ended up returning to a discussion that began for us in my freshman language class when we were translating the Meno. We often revisited this conversation, which usually began with one of us asking, "why do we even read these books anyway? What is it we're doing here? What do we really hope to learn or gain?" Both of us struggled to provide an answer sometimes . It seemed to me that Mr. Hand, like me, wasn't always completely sold on the promise of ultimate happiness some people claim you will attain once you manage to figure out all the secrets hidden in the pages of our most revered texts. Still, though, this work was the work of his life, and I know now that it is mine, too. Faced with this version of Meno's paradox the last time we spoke to one another, Mr. Hand and I once again sided with Socrates, agreeing that, " in supposing one ought to seek what one does not know we would be better men, more able to be brave and less idle than if we supposed that which we do not know we are neither capable of discovering nor ought to seek -- on behalf of that I would surely battle, so far as I am able, both in word and deed ." With Mr. Hand as my example, I feel confident I will continue to side with Socrates and attempt always, through my seeking, to be better, braver, and less idle. Thank you. �Tutor Frank Pagano A few words on Jonathan I am Frank Pagano, a tutor at the college and like so many others a friend of Jonathan's. I do not think I am capable of speaking adequately about the personal characteristics that made Jonathan uniq ue like his sunrise smile that glowed with good will, joy and mischief. Instead I shall try to speak of the nobility of his mind. My theme, therefore, is Jonathan's daring intellect and courageous soul, but I must start from afar, for Jonathan was at heart a St. John's tutor. The college promotes and is defined by the conversation between the students and the great books. The tutors are peripheral since it is not their education to which the college is devoted. According to the St. John's Statement of the Program, tutors do not teach directly, they do not profess. The vocation of a tutor is to ask good questions. Recently this humble calling has become harder to follow because good questions presume that there are true questions. In our time the value of the truth itself is problematic. Frequently we ask questions to avoid the truth. Jonathan was one of the few who dared constantly to ask true questions. Let us try for our sakes to understand the truth of his questions. Jonathan wrote primarily about Hegel, the man of many answers. Jonathan told me that he regarded Rousseau as greater than Hegel. Each of the statements in Rousseau's Second Discourse is a hundred questions. Jonathan did not share publicly his questioning of Rousseau. Instead he devoted himself to demonstrating for us the inestimable worth of the truth. Thus his turn to Hegel. In some ways Hegel is the culmination of modernity, but for Jonathan Hegel is not strictly speaking a complete modern, at least from the vantage of the contemporary moment. Jonathan begins his lecture, "Reconciling Subjectivity and Substance: Hegel's Critique of Pure Personhood," with the claim: "Dissatisfaction with or at least ambivalence about modernity is part of modernity1.'' The reconciliation that Hegel attempted is in one way a departure from the spirit of modernity. Hegel thinks that he has achieved, according to Jonathan, an integration of the state, society and family that prevents our person from being empty and our being from descending into nihilism and producing a human nothingness. If Hegel's philosophical enterprise was successful, then there seems to be nothing peculiar to our time for us to ask him. What then is the question? Jonathan's lecture is an act of startling intellectual daring for it reveals how the true question lives. The true question, the question that does not already know the answer, seeks out the right interlocutor. In our education, we must learn to be the right interlocutor for the true question. But we do not know what for us the true question is. Because a true question is a hybrid mixing ignorance and knowledge, our questioner must know and hope and fear. The question must hold out hope for the truth and fear of the error of self-congratulation. Accordingly in Jonathan's lecture Hegel is not the interlocutor, he is the questioner. Hegel puts the question to modernity, including our contemporary pieties. Hegel integrates the human world, family, society, and state. In contrast the way we like to talk is that modernity is revolutionary. Following 1 Hand, Jonathan. Reconciling Subjectivity and Substance: Hegel's Critique of Pure Personhood, Draft of March 10, 2019. �Jonathan's Hegel we see this revolution is really disintegration. The contemporary revolutionary movements in the family, society and state tear apart the Hegelian integration. This has always been the spirit of modernity. In terms more convivial to my cruder mind, since its founding modernity has been in decline. What then does Hegel ask our contemporaries? He asks, What is the worth of your person without the truth? This in its fullness is a terrifying question. Jonathan suggests that Hegel asks this questi on because he has seen us once before. Hobbes claims that each of us awards ourselves infinite value and our neighbors no value in themselves. We are the persistent deceivers of ourselves. Jonathan's Hegel implicitly reveals that value, that social valuation, is an incomplete understanding of ou r fellow human beings. It is merely the coin of the social marketplace. "I have my values and you yours" is the social echo of an empty soul. Jonathan was not a pure Hegelian. He recognized Hegel as the proper interrogator of our times, not the least because he developed many of our approaches to our condition. Jonathan revealed how to suspend the tyrannical spirit of modernity. Without fear he showed how to bring modernity to question its own spirit. True questioning of ourselves, of the dominant spirit of our time, shining a light in our cave, requires the strength of soul and the courage of a giant. �Tutor Allison Levy Jonathan Jonathan was a true friend . To the College, to his students, to me and others. He and I got to be friends back before I was a tutor, when I used to join David for lunch in the cafeteria and observe the fights he and Jonathan had there over the mean ing of pretty much every seminar reading. It wasn't that Jonathan didn't enjoy those fights -- I think he liked them, and I know David loved them - but at some point Jonathan conceived the hope that the wife might prove a less misguided and argumentative Hegel-hater than the husband, so one day he asked me to lunch alone. From this grew our tradition of four- or five-hour margarita lunches at Harry's Roadhouse . From me he got less fighting about philosophy, more drunken gossip, obscene jokes, and petty complaints, which he always treated with great compassion. From him I got what everyone who's been fortunate enough to call Jonathan a friend did: a profound, even visceral concern for my suffering and my good fortune, a fierce loyalty that often defeated the dispassionate judgments of his prodigious intellect, a sensitive and deeply thoughtful conversation partner, and a lively, irreverently funny drinking buddy who delighted in the ridiculous, with which life and the College kept him generously supplied. He had a sharp wit and a particular gift for impressions; if I had his talent and didn't mind getting fired, I'd share some. But one of the many wonderful memories Jonathan has given me sticks with me and seems fitting to mention. Last year, I happened to have all five of my senior essay orals scheduled over only two weeks, which is a bit of a crunch and which occasioned much grumbling from me. Without mentioning it to me, Jonathan noted the date and time of my last oral; when I came out of it, there he was, with a bottle of champagne to congratulate me. We drank it in the coffee shop, where he complained to everyone who walked by about the wrong I had suffered in being subjected to so grueling a schedule; he made sure everyone knew of my heroic virtue in enduring such a trial, and called angrily for the punishment of all responsible . little did he know, my feat was much less impressive than he imagined. It was Jonathan's practice to devote to each senior oral an entire weekend of preparation, which issued in multiple typed, single-spaced pages of careful commentary for every single essay; it didn' t seem to occur to him that most of us give of ourselves less generously than he did, which was certainly the truth in my case. Anyway, after we polished off the bottle I left; Jonathan struck up a two-hour conversation with a student, about books and the meaning of friendship, a conversation which so impressed the student that he told me about it many months later. This was all standard Jonathan, I think. His generosity and intense care for his friends, for his obligations to the College, for students in general, were central to who he was. As has been said, he was gravely concerned about the possibility of deep human attachment in the modern world - in his own words, taken from a speech he gave in honor of his beloved mother on her 801h birthday, "modernity is a world of self-interest, of commerce, of fluid, contractual relationships, of social ties that are made and unmade daily." His favorite image of modern human beings, as slices of "kraft singles" cheese -- that is, of human beings as mass produced, identical " person units," individually sealed off and protected from one another by plastic wrap -- was invoked often. Happily, Jonathan himself provided a very different example of what human connection could be. His intensity of feeling and devotion to what he thought right could make him quick to anger -- but unlike so many bloodless academics, he cared about things worth caring about, and had the nerve to stick up for what was important even when it didn't win him any friends. This combination of intense liveliness and awareness of the most pressing human concerns, �together with an intellect as powerful as his, is extremely rare. Jonathan was a great boon to the College and great delight and comfort to his friends. I miss him very much, and count myself extremely grateful to have known him. �Benjamin Storey Jonathan Bradford Hand, 1958-2019 I met Jonathan some twentyyears ago. Both of us were graduate students at the C.Omrnittee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. It was the spring of 1999; I was finishing my first year, and was still more than a little green-curious and eager, but inexperienced and poorly read. I was a kid who showed up from my state school education in the south to find myself surrounded by people from Yale and other such places, who were infinitely better initiated into the ways of the academic world than I. Jonathan was older and wiser; he had read widely and traveled much. But he was also utterly devoid of academic pretension. He never dropped names; he never jingled his Phi Beta Kappa key. He had an infinite amount to share with me, which he did with great generosity. But he was also unfailingly curious, always asking about what I was reading and thinking about, with his eyes always peeled for new things that might engage his indefatigable attention. We were both there to study philosophy, and philosophy, for Jonathan, was three things: political, personal, and comedic. Political: Jonathan had no taste for metaphysical abstractions-he was interested in the question of how to live, and how the spirit of the laws we live under shape our souls. Personal: Jonathan thought that the thinkers and ideas that interested us were reflections of our character, that you could tell a lot about a person from that person's taste in books and ideas. And finally, comedic. & everyone who knew Jonathan knows, he was a great teacher, and he was honored with a teaching award while we were in Chicago. Interviewed about that award, he remarked that a good teacher was pan priest, pan lawyer, and pan comedian. He could do all three, �but his comic talents were extraordinary. He excelled in imitations of the sages, living and dead, who surrounded us in Hyde Park His Allan Bloom was forever spraying cigarette ashes about and saying, "the-ahh, the-ahh, problem of, ahh, lxdng," his Martha Nussbaum was forever droning on in an absurd falsetto about autonomy and wearing leather pants in solidarity with somebody or other. He gave marvelous nicknames. For example, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, Robert Pippin, was and is a brilliant scholar who commanded the respect of all of us, Jonathan very much included. But Jonathan didn't respect him too much to give him a nickname. Pippin was then writing about Hegel, whose progressive theory of history culminates in the liberal, bourgeois modem life that we all find ourselves living, with all its material trappings, from the white picket fence to the microwave oven. Jonathan cut through all the technical, Hegelian vocabulary in which Pippin was so fluent so as to give him a splendid moniker: "The High Priest of the Minivan." Jonathan's wit always brought life and thought together. In his way of thinking and talking, I found the kind of playful, honest, learned but unpretentious philosophy I had come to Chicago to study. Jonathan was my unofficial but deeply influential teacher, and he shaped my own way of thinking and talking as much as anyone on the actual faculty of the university. The classroom in which I got my lessons from Jonathan was a Hyde Park greasy spoon called Salonica. There, we would meet almost every Sunday for long, leisurely brunches. Jonathan would peruse the menu, for form's sake, and then proceed to order the same thing every time: skirt steak and eggs, the steak medium rare, the eggs over easy-plus whole wheat toast, for health's sake. He would do so in flirtatious engagements with his favorite waitress, a crusty Chicago dame who gave as good as she got and who plainly enjoyed their repartee. We would spend about three hours there, drinking large quantities of thin, American coffee and talking about everything: Plato, Shakespeare, Tocqueville, our teachers, our friends, the young �women in our circle. It was at that table, in Jonathan's company, that I really learned to think my life through. For it was at that table that I learned how life and thought come together. Afterwards, in the summer, we would repair to Promontory Point Park, where would swim off our brunch in Lake Michigan. It was Jonathan who taught me that swimming in Lake Michigan was in fact possible, in spite of the frigid temperatures and the occasional e-coli warnings. For he was an adventurous spirit as much as a learned one. And we never caught either e-coli or frostbite. Before long, I started dating one of the young women in our circle, Jenna Silber. Jenna and Jonathan were friends, as well, and the three of us spent many hours in one another's company. Both of us formed our adult selves in conversation with him, andJenna and I became a couple in the context of those conversations. When we married in 2003, Jonathan gave a mischievous, beautiful toast at our rehearsal dinner that people would remark to me about for many years thereafter. Eventually, we both left Hyde Park for our teaching careers, mine at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina; Jonathan here. You all know Jonathan's work here better than I do, but I always thought that St. John's was made for Jonathan, and Jonathan for St. John's. For the mind of a St. John's tutor must be both powerful and ready for anything-two qualities Jonathan had in spades. My own teaching at Furman was deeply marked by his influence. I agree with Jonathan that a teacher is part priest, part lawyer, part comedian. I'm more priestly than Jonathan was, but I make efforts at wit, as well. And when I listen to myself talk, I sometimes realize that I'm repeating phrases I learned from him. More than that, my own who way of thinking about philosophy, as something intimate and personal, something that we can see in all of our everyday interactions, from the breakfast table to the convenience store, comes from him. One could see this influence in our �shared love of the gauche Swiss-French philosopher Rousseau, who brought life and thought together in a sprawling, unholy, but brilliant mess equal parts intellect, honesty, and absurdity. Jonathan visited my family many times in Greenville, sometimes at Christmas or Thanksgiving, sometimes just to hang out. Once, we all went for a hike in the mountains near there. On the way home, we stopped for lunch at a squirrely-looking South Carolina roadside joint called the F-Man. The proprietor, a guywith a handlebar mustache, a ten-gallon hat, and a brass belt buckle the size and shape of Texas, took one look at us and decided he'd have some fun. When he found out we were college professors, he began quizzing us on all manner of trivia he had picked up in his correspondence school education, which wasn't~ bad. After he'd stumped me, the political science professor, by asking about the running mates of failed presidential candidates of the 1890s, he turned toward science, and Jonathan took over. Mr. F-Man had met his match. Before long, he was sitting slack-jawed at our table, as Jonathan patiently explained the theory of relativity to him, using the salt and pepper shakers to illustrate. When we told my kids of Jonathan's death, and were talking about his brilliance and honesty with them, my middle daughter, Rosalind, reminded us of his bravery. For she remembered the stories he told when visited us after spending a sabbatical sailing across the Atlantic, through a near hurricane in a boat that was no match for such weather. Most professors, after all, spend their sabbaticals in libraries. Not Jonathan. In thinking about what it means to have and to lose a friend such as Jonathan, a remark of one of his favorite authors, Alexis de Tocqueville sprang to my mind. In his memoirs, Tocqueville writes that " Whenever there is nothing in a man's thoughts to or feelings that strikes me," " I, so to speak, do not see him. I have always supposed that mediocrities as well as men of parts had a nose, mouth and eyes, but I have never been able to fix in my memory the forms that those features take in each �particular case. I must constantly ask for the names of such men; yet it is not that I despise them, but I have little truck with them, feeling that they are like so many cliches. I respect them, for they make the world, but they bore me profoundly." Who has ever been less of a cliche than Jonathan Hand? And who has ever been bored by him? Jonathan suffered and he could be difficult; everyone who knew him well knew that. But I knew him in the roles in which he was at his best: as my teacher and my friend. A few years ago, the two of us met up in Roscoe, New York for a weekend. The place was an old haunt of Jonathan's, and boasted of the two things that, in Jonathan's eyes, guaranteed a good weekend: a very good diner and an excellent swimming lake. It was delightful, and Jonathan plainly delighted in introducing me to it. He had discovered many beautiful things in life, and he was always eager to share them. The man I am, the person mywife and children and students know, was formed by and through him. He was a singular and decisive presence in my life, whose like I have no hope of meeting again. I do not know if Jonathan believed in blessings, but he was a blessing, to me and to many others. To his sisters, and his parents in Ithaca, thank you for sharing this extraordinary man with me and with my family for so many years. �Reflection for Memorial Service for Jonathan Hand February l5t, 2020 J. Walter Sterling, Dean St. John' s College, Santa Fe Welcome and Opening Welcome, thank you for joining us. Thanks especially to Michael Golluber, but also to other faculty, staff, students, for planning and working on this event, and thanks to all of our speakers today. I want to recognize Jonathan' s sisters, Sonya, Pattie, and Brooke, and his dear friends Ben and Jenna Storey, and their children, Eleanor, Rosalind, and Charles, all of whom traveled so far to be here. You 've heard some music playing now, by the Beatles, music which Jonathan enjoyed and associated with lifelong memories . We'll hear more music in his honor ... We do well simply to recognize the sadness and loss that many of us are carrying, but we are here today to honor the memory of our friend, colleague, and teacher, and to celebrate together the gift of his life, and in doing so we are strengthened as a community and brought closer together; and we renew our sense of purpose. In that spirit, I invite our first speaker, Michael Golluber, to begin when he is ready. Reflection Words, phrases, memories, images, quotes .. . jokes, so many jokes ... have flooded my imagination, daily, since Jonathan 's passing. But it remains so difficult for me to wrap words around it all. We wish, I wish, to honor and celebrate his life, to express the profound gratitude I feel for the indelible, decisive mark he left on me, for the outrageously delightful and sometimes maddening, often delightful because maddening, times we spent together. But my feelings of sadness, confusion, and, yes, anger at his passing, and the powerful sense that a Jonathan-shaped hole in my world will travel with me for a long time, forever, are all still with me. I have to acknowledge that. It wasn't easy living with him as a friend, and it is much harder still to let him go. His sister Pattie said recently he was larger than life. So true, so beautifully, absurdly, magnificently true. Jonathan contained fascinating multitudes within him and even people who knew him well could be forgiven for not really seeing or believing all of it: his academic accomplishments, most vi sible for us, perhaps, but also: - his incredible, unscripted, and sometimes remarkably dangerous travels all over the world; his teaching sailing over many summers; his crewing a sailboat on a physically exhausting North Atlantic passage on his sabbatical; summers spent traveling in the Greek isles, or Turkey, or Italy; long daily swims in the Mediterranean; taking his bike on the train to Albuquerque and cycling all around; his Jove of smart pop culture, going to see stand-up comedy or Weird Al Yankovic (as he once reported, to my surprise); his serious study, if I might put it that way, of Mad Men, or Downton Abbey, or South Park. His love of jokes and impersonations. (One former student once sent him a mix tape, titled "I see London, I see France .. ." with the rest of that off-color playground taunt left unstated, the tape had British Invasion rock, the Stones, the Beatles, on one side, and some of his favorite French pop music on the other - he loved that; he loved how that student got him , his playfulness, his sense of humor and inuendo, his delight in that pop music, his love of Europe.) - and: his deep connection to C_ �his family, especially his devotion to his parents, his rootedness in his eternal home in Ithaca. All of that lurking behind his jaunty grin, with a cocked hat on his head. ( As dean and as a colleague, I will say now what I would say to some people while he was with us, risking hyperbole: He was the best reader, the best teacher, we had here. He had enormous intellectual gifts (surprisingly voracious for, obsessive with, mathematics and physics, and with politics, and with the philosophy and literature that were his foundation) and he combined his gifts with an intensity, a relentlessness, an incandescence, that was powerful and even more rare - at times, too powerful to be contained in the word "teacher." One philosopher famously wrote, "I am dynamite!" and sometimes, often even, Jonathan could feel like such dynamite. He learned from some of his teachers - Harvey Mansfield, Allan Bloom ... -that it was possible for these books, for philosophy, and for teachers, to make all the difference, if and only if teachers, and students, could go right to the nerves of the books and the arguments, where everything was at stake - to cut through jargon, to risk impoliteness and offense, to (as I long said of Jonathan, to Jonathan) "strip and wrestle naked," to use a Platonic image for the most serious business of conversation and dialectic. He got into the game for all of that- not to play it safe, not to have a career, not to be esteemed or win accolades, but to be ready, like a great poker player, to push out all his chips when it mattered most, to drop everything and follow the argument wherever it led. Book after book, conversation after conversation, he was able to take me, take students, take friends, to the center of things, to the difficult places where our hearts' and souls' demands were all at stake and in play. But what a risk, and sometimes what a cost! I know, I know, that sometimes, when he sensed it could matter, he put more hours, many more hours, sleepless nights, of reading and thinking into, say, preparing for one senior oral where he thought the stakes were high, more than I believe (from my experience) any of my other colleagues do, certainly more than I ever had or would - more than once, I saw a senior on the business end of that preparation, in copious notes Jonathan wrote but especially in an oral bordering on interrogation, and that wasn't always ... easy to watch. Would they learn from that? Would they be grateful for it? Would they realize that it came from respect - from seeing them as worth that effort, that tension? I hope so, but it was a risk, it was teaching without a net, and whatever the outcome, he poured his lifeblood into that kind of effort. In reading hundreds of old emails from him in recent weeks, I came across one where a student who had left the college had written a cringeworthy casual, familiar, and self-deluded, request to Jonathan for a letter of recommendation, after failing Jonathan's class. Serious miscalculation. Jonathan was the only tutor I know who would have responded as he did, and he copied me in (as dean): he wrote a long letter, a brutally honest letter let's say ... and added, is that the letter you want sent? St John's is forgiving, the world less, so, he said, closing with, " buckle up." He put hours into crafting that, trying to do good for that student, to jolt that student into waking up; in fact, hi s sincere plea was that the student really should return to the college. I, like many of us I think, would probably have written a two-sentence note politely declining. One of the things that he and I agreed strongly about is that beyond the job as a job, beyond colleges as institutions, beyond all our rules and practices, beyond syllabuses and curricula, beyond the books, beyond teaching as a vocation even, at the heart of it all was and is an uncontrollable, unmanageable, quest to get to the bottom of everything, to get to what matters, to fight for what matters ... you can' t domesticate that, and for someone like Jonathan who was �always ready to push his chips out, there would always be risks and costs. Prices he'd pay, bruises others would take. If all of us were like Jonathan, we wouldn't have a college, but if none of us are like him, the peak of what we are about ceases to be visible. Without someone like Jonathan, some of us would never hear the one thing needful, we'd never realize both how deep and how immediate the books can be in speaking to us. To borrow from a revered author he respected, Jonathan reminds us of "the sacrifices we must make in order that our minds may be free." Like Falstaff, like Socrates, life is simpler, maybe easier, without him ... but real education will always involve such dynamite. Certainly, some of us carry bruises, he carried bruises, from his not playing it safer - but I know so many students and friends who were given treasures and riches through his teaching, through that incandescence, and for us it was worth all the costs. He was my late friend, my last friend, with whom the conversation could, would, go on forever. Not everyone understands these friendships that are forged through hours and hours of arguing about philosophy, about the good, the true, and the beautiful, with all that entails, but here at St. John's I don't think it sounds too strange. I venture to say that for those of us for whom that is the highest, or one of the highest, forms of friendship, we recognize that you only get a few, a very few, friends with whom you can share almost everything, understand each other, drive each other to the edge of what you understand, bring to articulation the questions that are just beyond that understanding. And if you can do that with shared loves of music, poetry, film, travel, food and drink, well, all the better .. . what a miracle ... - and, it seems to me, those friendships tend to come during, and perhaps fade after, a certain season of life. ( l I met Jonathan our first week as tutors at the college, in August 2003, sitting at the Coyote Cafe. I can say now, I never expected at that point in my life to have another friend, to join maybe the one or two from the previous decades, with whom I could share all of that. I thought that season of life was over. That friend you see on your way somewhere else ... and end up still at the coffee shop, the bar, the park bench, driving in the country, hours and hours later, having forgotten whatever else you meant to do that day. That day, Jonathan and I sat down together over a margarita and talked - and talked. Our first conversation went on for hours (I still remember exact phrases and formulations we used), we disclosed our views on religion, our deepest commitments, our loves and lost loves, the books and authors we had in common, and ... for many years, all the intervening years, that conversation - though interrupted by days, weeks, months, and, much later, even years - never ended. I thought the season for such friendship, for such ecstatic and wonderfully desperate conversation, had ended - but Jonathan at his core was a kind of eternal springtime of the possibility of such friendship. It was what he lived for agonizingly irreconcilable as it might be with what counts as daily life for many of us. Part of Jonathan's vocation was to be (as Plato wrote of the Greeks) "forever young" in this way. I think any of Jonathan's close friends, and his many interlocutors and colleagues with shared interests, know him as the one who would keep that dialogue going - forever, all night, as in Plato' s Symposium, as long as we could go to what matters. - It was hard to keep up, and it was hard to sustain. My memories of Jonathan include so many nights where he would nurse a last drink, or jealously defend a last bite on a plate from waiters and busboys, or he might end up reclined on your couch ... and he would seem content if the conversation never ended. You felt, I felt, like a mortal, who needed sleep and rest, hanging on by a thread, with an Olympian who was prepared to stay at the feast forever. At the end of every semester, we used to plan one escapist day in Albuquerque. For years he loved to make that drive in my Miata convertible, top down, music �playing, driving and talking, walking and talking, eating and drinking and talking ... peripatetics, dreamers, adventurers of the mind. In search of. .. serendipity. Serendipity: he was with me at the dinner in 2005, where I chanced to meet Meghan, in the great good fortune of my life, and he was the first person I talked to the next morning, "see, that is the kind of woman I should be with ... " Jonathan was a great acolyte of serendipity: Among his favorite films, one we discussed many times, for many hours, was Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, together with the rest of that amazingly conceived trilogy, tracking the fate of a romance sparked on a train, with one night of wandering the streets of Vienna, during which two kindred souls passing in the night test their destiny together. Jonathan consciously and well understood that he lived his life as if the magic of that movie might strike ... anywhere, any day, as romance, as friendship, as intellectual insight or epiphany. We all have those hopes in us, but he lived it relentlessly, ever renewed; it animated his European wanderings, it animated his desire never to end the conversation, it animated his interest in what surprising next thing might come from a student's first reading of Plato, from the exigencies of a seminar, from nature, from art. I said of him, to him, that "he loved not wisely, but too well," like Othello, and I said that from a place of deep sympathy and shared, unreasonable hopes; I have thought of that phrase often since his passing. That edge of glistening, romantic hope married to such a rigorous intellect was ... dynamite. As his friend, it was hard to keep the faith, hard not to disappoint, like Prince Hal with Fal staff, hard not to be the first one to blink, to give up on the quest and return to ... life, to the demands of the day. But Jonathan was always ... there ... waiting, ready ... there on the far side of all of everyday life, ready to renew the quest, to forgive all, if we could just go again straight to the heart of things. He was larger than life, he was Falstaff (which I intend and he took as the highest praise) - his ideas and words, his wit, his perpetual youth, his incandescence, will stay with many of us who were blessed to get close to him, to travel with him, in all senses. With a gratefu l heart, I today mourn the passing, but celebrate with abundant gratitude the life, of a great teacher, the rarest of friends, and a bright, restless soul who illuminated the world for me and many others, one with whom I shared so many adventures, adventures that are the stuff of life. - J. Walter Sterling �Williatn Byrd (c.1539-1623) Ave verum corpus ( Published by :-«. Aoede Consort :-«. Troy, New York Copyright© 2012 Dan Foster, Aoede Inc. Edition may be freely distributed, duplicated, performed or recorded. Please give credit. ________________________________________. ( \_, .._ www.AoedeConsort.org Aoede@AoedeConsort.org �Ave verum Corpus 2 Processional Hymn, Corpus Christi Gradualia I, 1605, vol.2 no.5 Pope Innocent VI (d.1342) Superius Medi us ; ~ William Byrd (c.1539- 1623) fl I • t) fl 1IR1z~ c ~~lzlz ... 1-( 2:~& ve ...... -eve A ve rum A ve A ve -- I " Cor ,pus, -6- -0'" rum ...... y "<. Cor pus, ~! 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()_ -{p { lu, v vt {,,,,' ( ( .... , ................................................................................................................................ fV t-z- L c;>f-~ 1J&u~&: fvlc\J2>~lc9 ��D ~--· rz~-- - ._ __ __ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 28 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jonathan Hand Memorial Program Description An account of the resource Program for the Jonathan Hand Memorial that took place on February 1, 2020 in the Great Hall of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Golluber, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Axelberg, Emily Levy, Allison Pagano, Frank N. Sterling, J. Walter Storey, Benjamin Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_Jonathan_Hand_Memorial_Program_2020-02-01 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6759">Recording of Jonathan Hand Memorial</a> Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/61fa706e7dc1257f1905211828b35f6a.mp3 d4882424c10f261139aa4ccc0b3d17b4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Description An account of the resource Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speechespresentationsotherlectures Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:34:09 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jonathan Hand Memorial Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the memorial for tutor Jonathan Hand that took place on February 1, 2020 in the Great Hall of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Golluber, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this recording. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Axelberg, Emily Kgalema, Thato Levine, David Lawrence Levy, Allison Pagano, Frank N. Sterling, J. Walter Storey, Benjamin Storey, Jenna Silber Stover, Sonya Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_Jonathan_Hand_Memorial_2020-02-01 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6760">Jonathan Hand Memorial Program</a> Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c108b2ddcc1c98cf4519d3ca9842abe5.mp3 2b6b68d6aa54b520089b7216e021c9ca Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:59 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beauvoir and the Great Books : reading and living in Old Age Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on February 7, 2020 by Blake Smith as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Smith, Blake Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986. Vieillesse. English Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_SmithB_Beauvoir_and_the_Great_Books_2020-02-07 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/13c0d724bd950b776f4f7cb344538d06.mp3 724ef86fc8938f57def92f2b3bed901a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:03 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Justice in Aristotle’s Ethics Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered by Mitzi Lee, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, on February 7, 2020 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Lee offers this description for her lecture: "What kind of a virtue is justice, and how does it differ from the other virtues, according to Aristotle? I shall argue that, for Aristotle, justice is fundamentally concerned with bringing about just outcomes and states of affairs." Dr. Lee has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 2005. She specializes in ancient Greek philosophy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lee, Mi-Kyoung Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Aristotle. Nicomachean ethics Justice Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Lee_Mitzi_2020-02-07 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a76895bf4bc5a79c425dc3106c5575ec.mp3 4a8cb1b426083b5ed30bc56e7d158879 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:39 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The gate of speculation, is it open or closed? On the possibility of permanent questions Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on January 31, 2020 by Joe Macfarland as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-01-31 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Kritik der reinen Vernunft Maimonides, Moses, 1135-1204. Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_MacfarlandJ_The_Gate_of_Speculation_2020-01-31 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6885709b8bd0a2d1ad51a25ede8648f1.mp3 f51ffb135dacfc861b262e75beeed763 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:37 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tilling, toil, and a lost vineyard Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on January 24, 2020 by Abe Schoener as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Schoener, Abe Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-01-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Wine and wine making Vineyards Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_SchoenerA_Tilling,_Toil,_and_a_Lost_Vineyard_2020-01-24 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fa16d7096db6ebc206f05779755ce843.mp3 d8c94f9ed2229b6d17b6bb4f85f531a0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:13 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Vergil's Aeneid and Augustine's Confessions: Reading, Writing, Being Human (Steiner Lecture) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered by Sarah Ruden, author, poet, and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, on January 17, 2020, as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Ruden describes her lecture topic as: “talking about the great book as a means for both readers and writers to regain some sense of the individual self in a modern society--that is, one in which power has become distant, inexorable, and incomprehensible. Vergil and Augustine were creatures of early modernity, and their struggles for self-expression and communication have interesting and inspiring commonalities.” Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruden, Sarah Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-01-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online." Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Virgil. Aeneis Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Confessiones Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Ruden_Sarah_2020-01-17 Friday night lecture Steiner lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2ebb21d325cadd293cd28ec328d69401.mp3 041a83bd3835f7f7304fc1b6725b0985 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:44:12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ecstatic truth in the cinema of Werner Herzog Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on December 6, 2019 by Ian Moore as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Moore, Ian Alexander Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-12-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Herzog, Werner, 1942- Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_MooreI_Ecstatic_Truth_in_the_Cinema_of_Werner_Herzog_ 2019-12-06 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b3882aad451c37284753d1037fdb47dc.mp3 4046a61b3f65551d77fd0078f87efdf5 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/221b491ec5114fd6b5468b7352be6b49.pdf 7e23480032f607a5ea7605fb9b37796a PDF Text Text The Phenomenology of Blackness Presented by, Michael E. Sawyer, PhD Colorado College St. John’s College Santa Fe, New Mexico Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature 22 November 2019 �“However, the diverse aspects which consciousness takes upon itself are determinate in that each is regarded as existing on its own within the universal medium. White is only in contrast to black, etc., and the thing is a “one” precisely in virtue of its being contrasted with others.” G.W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit §120 �“The master is consciousness existing for itself. However, the master is no longer consciousness existing for itself merely as the concept of such a consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, namely, through another whose essence includes its being synthetically combined with self-sufficient being, that is, with thinghood itself.” Ibid. §190 �“‘Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of the horses is beautiful and good and from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite bloodline. This means that the chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business.’” The Phaedrus (246b) �“ ‘The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are coal black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears – deaf as a post – and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.’ ” Ibid. (253d) �“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk ��““The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs-in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives…And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thig which is there in every photograph; the return of the dead.” Roland Barthes Camera Lucida �������“Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory.” St. Augustine Confessions 28:38 �“…But this opposition between its appearance and its truth has only the truth for its essence, namely, the unity of selfconsciousness with itself. This unity must become essential to selfconsciousness, which is to say self- consciousness is desire itself. As self-consciousness, consciousness henceforth has a doubled object: The first, the immediate object, the object of sense- certainty and perception, which however is marked for it with the character of the negative; the second, namely itself, which is the true essence and which at the outset is on hand merely in opposition to the first. Selfconsciousness exhibits itself therein as the movement within which, in its own eyes, the selfsameness of itself with itself comes to be.” Hegel §167 �“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head…” �“Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” Toni Morrison Beloved �“But we must deny the fact that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both those qualities; being considered by our laws; in some respect, as persons, and in other respects, as property. In being compelled to labor not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master, and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty, and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank and classed with the irrational animals, which under the legal domination of property. The Fœderal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and property.” James Madison Federalist 54 �I AM BELOVED and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are couching too I am always crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked. Morrison Beloved � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:45:26 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The phenomenology of blackness Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on November 22, 2019 by Michael Sawyer as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sawyer, Michael E. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-11-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource The following video is referenced in this lecture: <br /><a href="https://youtu.be/n92zfXkRdnk">https://youtu.be/n92zfXkRdnk</a><br /> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_SawyerM_The_Phenomenology_of_Blackness_2019-11-22_mp3 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4a65bf30753fde968144de5087f5a1a1.pdf 16ab3ce7f64760d83e8ce10568ec5584 PDF Text Text The Phenomenology of Blackness By, Michael E. Sawyer, PhD Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies and The Department of English Colorado College Delivered at St. John’s College Santa Fe, New Mexico Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature 22 November 2019 �1. Introduction: My earliest encounter with the academic discipline we generally label as philosophy, occurred during my sophomore year at the Jesuit prep school I attended in Chicago. My teacher, Brother McCabe, was a Franciscan Monk who was a Kantian. In addition to endlessly referencing the categorical imperative, Brother McCabe’s most memorable trope was “always examine your presuppositions”. I vividly recall him asking me a question and when I began to answer he stopped me and demanded I account for the presuppositions that would attend my attempt at an answer. My first inclination was to propose that the central presupposition happened to be that to the extent I didn’t provide any answer, much less a satisfactory one, I would be in danger of failing his class. That seemed insufficient so I spent what seemed the better part of 10 minutes examining the assertions and systems of thinking, understandings, and misunderstandings that marched before the answer I don’t think I ever managed to provide. Looking back now I realize that the genius of Brother McCabe’s pedagogical strategy was to insure we left his class first and foremost inclined to examine our presuppositions. This to me is the foundation of thinking that can best be described as “critical” to the extent it takes stock of the stuff around the thing you find interesting. Here, I have framed the title of this talk as a statement: The Phenomenology of Blackness that includes several important questions and a foundational presupposition. First the questions: What is Phenomenology? We have an academic answer to that question that we can admit into our archive here as axiomatically the manner in which the term is commonly employed in the discipline of philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides the following definition: Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or �meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. The next term is perhaps more fraught and will be the subject of the talk: What is Blackness? In referencing that question we identify the central presupposition which feels something like Blackness is a Thing (das Ding) in the Hegelian sense of the term and it is possible to experience this thing in the phenomenological sense. There is quite a bit going on here and we do not have the time to properly account for all of the moving parts so I will be direct in framing our employment of the elements that are commonly understood in the field. This primarily revolves around the naming of Blackness as das Ding or the Thing as the point of inquiry. What I mean here is most productively elaborated in §120 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which reads: However, the diverse aspects which consciousness takes upon itself are determinate in that each is regarded as existing on its own within the universal medium. White is only in contrast to black, etc., and the thing is a “one” precisely in virtue of its being contrasted with others. This is not a facile reading of Hegel that extracts this binary opposition of black and white as philosophically significant without context. Here, Hegel is lingering on the implication of “Consciousness” and its marginalization by being negatively implicated by sense certainty and therefore requiring the more robust dialectical process that arrives with his understanding of the relationship between Lord and Bondsman in the well know passages from §190 as an essential element of the torturous journey of mediated self-consciousness to the terminus of Absolute Spirit. Here, Hegel proposes the following: The master is consciousness existing for itself. However, the master is no longer consciousness existing for itself merely as �the concept of such a consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, namely, through an other whose essence includes its being synthetically combined with self-sufficient being, that is, with thinghood itself. The intellectual water, so to speak, has become very choppy very quickly. This, in many ways provides the linchpin or hinge to access the preoccupation of this effort: the notion of Blackness as a discernible way of Being. Here, in the elaboration of consciousness, Hegel proposes that the indicator of the need for the move to self-consciousness is the failed employment of sense certainty, in his parlance the apparent separation between black and white, as spectacular. When he arrives at the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, the existence of the Thing, the master is only able to relate themselves as master by the “thinghood” of the bondsman. What this means for my argument is that the spectacular nature of the color black is the marker of marginal consciousness and with the subjects that will be the preoccupation of this talk that certainty remains by rendering the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, in this instance moribund. The encounter is already over-determined. The dialectic, when operating properly, does not prefigure the status of the subjects who are its participants. In this instance, because of the spectacular nature of the color Black, the dialectic is reifying rather than determinative. The Black subject is locked as the Bondsman because of the overdetermined nature of the color Black and what we are exposing here as Blackness serves as the prison. I posit that this is not an error on the part of Hegel. No lesser authority than the Socratic Dialog The Phaedrus establishes how the color black arrives in the western imaginary as a lack when compared to its opposite, white. The passage is instructive: “Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of the horses is beautiful and good and �from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite bloodline. This means that the chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business. (246b)” It is the detail of the description of the horses that concerns our work here in that it speaks to a robust consideration of black and white as oppositional in quality. Socrates delineates the “goodness of the good horse and the badness of the bad.” (253d) “The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are coal black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty and selfcontrol; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears – deaf as a post – and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined. (253d)” Here we witness, at the earliest moments of the western philosophical tradition, explicit reference to the soul as being divided in two with the worst impulses; those that do violence to reason, represented by physical deformity of which “black skin” is but one manifestation of physical and metaphysical disability. Reason and the ability to properly accede to moral authority, in this formulation, are exemplified by beauty, in conforming to a physical standard, and Whiteness. What that means, walking with Hegel on our left and Socrates on our right, is that the visuality of black (Hegel’s sense-certainty and the Socratic “Bad Horse”) arrives at the point of self-consciousness with an externally imposed system of self-knowledge that we will label here as “Blackness”. This understanding is most ably exposed by the canonical formulation of what I have labelled “Tripartite Subaltern Self-Consciousness” by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. In that text, Du Bois establishes the insufficiency of the Cartesian Cogito for a system of knowing for the subject we will label here as existing under conditions of externally imposed Blackness and the presupposition of insufficiency; the figure Du Bois understands as the Negro writing: �After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, 6) Here, Du Bois understands the fractured nature of the relationship of the self to the self on the part of the figure he understands as the Negro at a discernible remove from being a body that is understood as Black: “two warring ideals in one dark body”, as the fulfillment of the trace that runs from the pronouncement of Black as a lack from Socrates through Hegel’s destabilized dialectic. When I note here that this lack of “true self-consciousness” in the parlance of Du Bois is properly glossed by studying the result of a self that reaches out to touch itself and receives a negative response. Not the “I am” that the Western philosophical tradition situates as the normative response to the self thinking about itself but perhaps an “I am not” in the case of a distorted practice of self-analysis. Where Du Bois describes a subject that is double-conscious, in that it only knows about itself “through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” we find a subject out of synch with Descartes. Further, and here Jean-Paul Sartre’s text, The Transcendence of the Ego, proves useful, he endeavors to explicate what he calls “consciousness in the first degree” or “unreflected consciousness” as distinct from “consciousness in the second degree” or “reflected consciousness”. Du Bois’ formulation is productively read alongside the theorizing of Sartre. What Du Bois seems to mean is that the subject suffering from a lack of true self-consciousness has, in fact, confused consciousness in the second degree for consciousness in the first degree. Further, the secondary system of consciousness has contempt for the subject so situated and causes the self that reflects on itself here to believe that it is, indeed, aberrant when in fact these are externally imposed �conditions of knowing that fracture the possibility of a way to present the self for recognition by other subjects. This question of mutual recognition is the next step along this continuum that, in important ways, returns to the visual nature of what Hegel understands as consciousness encumbered with sense certainty and what Socrates describes as the physical manifestation of marginalization as exemplified by the Black horse. In many ways, and this is, perhaps, an idiosyncratic methodological point, at this stage of this analysis I believe we reach, what I like to call, Technical Exhaustion. That which has been exhausted, in my understanding is first the utility of prose or discourse in the form of philosophy or theory to describe the phenomenon in question. Second, not only does the visual exceed the technical potentiality of words but Western epistemologies fail here as well. I hope we can discuss this assertion in the Q&A, it is a statement that is meant to be positively provocative. But on this point, taking the last assertion first, the manner in which western epistemology finds itself incapable of properly describing the essence of the subject in question is because this system of knowing in fact is dedicated to the destruction of the subject in question. One need only note the manner in which language has already been stacked against the humanity of the subject understood to be Black. Black, the term itself, is fraught. Our time does not facilitate tracing the tortuous path to resolving this tension but it can broadly be understood as a component in the requirement to decolonize the canon and the reason the academy has derived disciplines that range from Africana studies to Feminist and Gender Studies, etc. One brief methodological point here. I do not believe that one decolonizes the canon through a project of contraction or excision of the central pillars of the western system of knowing. On the contrary, in order to exceed the boundaries of that system one must know what the boundaries happen to be. With that in mind we have employed Socrates, Hegel, Descartes, and at the edges of that tradition Du Bois to approach the phenomenon of Blackness. Beyond that boundary we will explore a relationship that I am in the early stages of exploring: that between visual representations of Black �people being coerced by the police, alternative modes of temporal existence and African-American literature in the form of fiction. This is something of an intellectual bank shot so to continue the analogy to a game of billiards, I will just call the shot. I hypothesize that the bridge forward and backward is the visual. I further hypothesize that the visual representation of police violence represents a temporal shift that speaks to what I have called in other spaces the fractured temporality of the subaltern. And finally, I hypothesize that it is only in fiction that we can grapple effectively with this disorientation. Elements of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida speak to this thinking and along with a reference to St. Augustine, will provide the markers of the boundaries we intend to exceed together. Barthes’ writes: The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs-in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives…And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph; the return of the dead. (Barthes, 9) There is an important note here in that I intend to apply Barthes to analyze video even though he proposes that the dynamism of moving pictures is discernably different than the immobility of the photographic image. For our purposes here, we will see that it is the freezing of the subject in space and perhaps consigning them to death in video representations of police violence that the motion of the images is in fact only to memorialize what is the substantively coercively imposed immobility or death. I have a short bit of video that I would like to play at this point that is intended to further buttress my argument. I am interested here in bringing into our conversation the way in which the restriction of mobility memorializes the fractured temporal subjectivity of Blackness. To give some context here, the mechanical process of walking preoccupied the thinking of Ray Bradbury in the �writing of the canonical exposition of the dangers of run-away state power in Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury reveals in the notes preceding his 1951 short story “The Pedestrian” that the arrest of the protagonist for merely walking down the street near his home was informed by the author’s harassment by the Los Angeles Police Department for doing the same. It is this notion of walking down a sidewalk that serves as the opening scene of 451 that is an effect of the causality of police coercive force that restricts the ability to walk that one might note Kant understands as evidence of maturity and I situate here, in its restriction, as a technology for the creation and maintenance of marginalized subjectivity. This is Kant from the essay “What is Enlightenment” for point of reference where he meditates on free movement. Here the progress of the subject is alienated from his humanity and therefore his freedom by the pronouncement of this officer that weaponizes his body and possessions. The shift to spectacle occurs when the officer asserts that the subject is being audio and video taped. The restriction of his mobility occurs through the assertion by the officer that he is not free to leave. There is a way in which that the qualification here, “to leave”. is redundant. The subject is not free. He cannot walk and his immobility is contrasted by the hyper (in comparison) mobility of the humans around him. His possessions are confiscated and inspected. The officer asserts that she will access the videotape to check for evidence of the attack she witnessed. In spite of video evidence that is contrary to the claim that the subject had weaponized his golf club and swung it at the police car he is arrested and charged with a series of crimes. What we have witnessed is the way in which the fractured temporality of the subaltern body, here understood as Blackness places this subject immediately in the clutches of death that has arrived with the presence of the law. Recall the manner in which the officer begins to pronounce his death sentence. One can detect that it is a recitation that is designed to render whatever coercive force she intends to visit upon �this body as necessary. There is much to interrogate with this video but our time together requires us to shift to the next element of my argument, that Western philosophical epistemologies find themselves technically exhausted here and fiction becomes the most efficacious mode of explicating what we are witnessing. Prior to addressing our literary reference, we will briefly linger with St. Augustine as the last stop on the road of the western philosophical canon. Saint Augustine proposes the following, “si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” roughly translated; “if no one asks me what time is I know but if I have to explain it, I don’t know what time is.” In my reading the Augustine establishes the distinction we need in the front of our minds between time and temporality. In this instance, I am reading Augustine as actually commenting on this distinction. The Saint understands time as a force and as a tool for measurement but when asked to explicate that understanding his relationship to time shifts to the experience of it, or what I am labelling as temporality or the self-referential understanding of the experience of time by the subject or subjects in question. So here we are necessarily taking up the challenge posed by St. Augustine to explicate time and to do so not from the perspective of dealing with it as a force or measure but as a way of being. In the Augustine we find his explanation of the manner in which we experience time instructive. Augustine accomplishes this through his careful analysis of reciting a psalm by memory. Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory. (11 28:38) �Paul Ricoeur, in Volume 1 of his Time and Narrative series writes the following in commenting on this move by Augustine: “The solution is elegant-but how laborious, how costly, and how fragile!” The fragility of this proposition is on full display when it is applied to the subject under investigation here. Memory, or the past, serves as the sine qua non of this understanding of time. Following Augustine’s analogy, it becomes immediately apparent that there can be no recitation of a psalm from memory unless there has been a time in which the psalm itself was experienced and remembered in some past. This does not attend in the case of the subjects who have had their relationship to genealogy and history fractured via the Middle Passage and its telos, the condition of enslavement. What I mean is that a set of experiences that serve to destroy, fracture, or confuse a coherent relationship to memory, and here think of memory as operating as “culture”, also renders normative temporal existence as established by Augustine, as impossible. Therefore, there can be no past, present, or future from the perspective of Augustinian Time for the figure harmed by the Middle Passage and its echoes we can label here as bigotry and or racism. In spite of this fracture with memory it is empirically “true,” that the subject so harmed has a time in which it exists, it was created, and has an internal time signature, because it has desire. We do not have the time here to for me to fully expose the manner in which I am calling on desire as the foundation of an interior sense of time but let it suffice to say that it is related to the probative power of Terry Pinkerton’s recent re-translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In that essential document, Prof. Pinkerton revised what had been an error in translating the essential passage, §167 as “self-consciousness is desire itself,” as opposed to the alternative and more traditional “selfconsciousness is desire in general”. This is transformational. §167…But this opposition between its appearance and its truth has only the truth for its essence, namely, the unity of self-consciousness with itself. This unity must become essential to self-consciousness, which is to say self- consciousness is desire itself. As self-consciousness, consciousness henceforth has a doubled object: The first, the �immediate object, the object of sense- certainty and perception, which however is marked for it with the character of the negative; the second, namely itself, which is the true essence and which at the outset is on hand merely in opposition to the first. Self-consciousness exhibits itself therein as the movement within which, in its own eyes, the selfsameness of itself with itself comes to be. It is this movement of the self within the self that I am positing as establishing the internal time signature necessary for being Human. What this means is that the canonical formulation by W.E.B. Du Bois in his Souls of Black Folks must be understood in a manner that asserts that what Du Bois calls a lack of true self-consciousness is a lack of desire which, following this path, amounts to a lack of a coherent internal time signature. What this means here is that we can understand the shattered subject that preoccupies Du Bois as frustrated by an imposed understanding of their lack of historical “situatedness” as an externally imposed subaltern sense of time that we will see Morrison witnesses as the paralysis of “nows” that cannot recede into “thens” which cannot be supersceded by “whens”. It is critically important that we carefully attend to what Du Bois has offered here in that what I am holding up as the nexus of the fracture between the coercive nature of internal time for Blackness and what Jacques Derrida understands as the “self-calling to the self” when he reflects on elements of Kant’s Third Critique. Briefly, I understand the establishment of an internal notion of time, this self-calling or autoaffection, as the foundation of what we understand as being Human, positively and self-referentially aware of the self as a temporal being that then has an individually established time signature that can be presented to other similarly situated beings for purposes of mutual recognition and here we should have Hegel foremost in our minds. Here, operating from an understanding of the Cartesian Cogito, we understand this self-calling as allowing us to witness the self-thinking about the self as a manner to establish the subject in time. What Du Bois describes, the subject with “no true self-consciousness”, is effectively an externally imposed fracturing of the subject forming and reifying power of self-reflection in terms of �Descartes and self-authorizing temporality on the part of thinkers like Derrida through Kant. Hence the paralysis we explore that is exposed by Morrison which, when traced in this way, is what Du Bois understands as the impossibility of the Black Body being able to productively exist as “Negro” in the parlance of the day and “American” at the same time. So here, we should recall the video we observed and witness it as an exemplar of a form of subjective liminality and recursive ways of Being that render him out of time and beyond the explanatory capabilities of tools like Heidegger’s understanding of the relationship of Being to thrownness toward the telos of mortality, death. The subject we observed in the video comes to us as a “rememory” (and we will attend to this shortly) in the way in which Morrison understands that phenomenon. We are witness to his treatment in ways that are at no separation from the treatment of human beings captured and transported against their will through the Middle Passage. His treatment mirrors that of enslaved bodies who found themselves out of place: think here about those who became victims to the empowerment of all white people to arrest any Black person with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. His paralysis at the hands of the state is at no remove from that employed in the aftermath of the Civil War by the Contract Labor System. The same goes for Jim Crow and here this man finds himself unwittingly a participant in the present day’s carceral system that is fruit of the poisonous tree of enslavement. So, let us consider our encounter with the video as a form of memory that must be understood as placing bodies so coerced and formed with the notion of Blackness as the way of being, as operating outside of time. Recall here the manner in which I have summoned St. Augustine here. If we view the video as a “rememory” and insert it into the psyche of a similarly situated being that lacks coherent relationship to the past, Augustine’s system of temporal existence authorized by recall that I have noted as fractured through Du Bois’ formulation of the unstable system of consciousness of Blackness, finds itself exhausted and Morrison takes over. What I mean is that the collective system �of coercive threat to the subject that functions like racism creates an interwoven system of awareness that renders it impossible to separate the fate of one Black body from that of another. Further, the fact that the behavior re-memoried here on video is of the same genus and species as the abuse of Black bodies since roughly 1619 on these shores, the ability to fix one’s system of memory along a coherent temporal continuum fails. Morrison, by summoning the ghost of the child Sethe executed to save her from slavery, allows us to render this experience, this Blackness, legible. The point of literary reference here is from Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved that, in my reading, revolves around the fractured temporality of those who are members of a family tree that touches, even tangentially upon the depravity and howling savagery of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The section in question here opens with the voice of the haunting figure of the murdered child Beloved pronouncing, “I am Beloved and she is mine.” To read the prose in question is to experience Morrison at her most sublime. Here she lays out a temporal continuum from the wars in West Africa that antecede the Middle Passage to the experience of death by a child at the hands of their mother without pause and without referent to the linear progression of time. What Morrison labels in the same text as “Rememory” and relates the state of being as “All of it is now it is always now”1 I have posited that Morrison’s preoccupation with the Middle Passage as a subject disforming catastrophe is a predictable ramification of the destruction of a coherent relationship to history and culture that is a particularly insidious element of the metaphysical harm done by this transit. 2. Beings Out of Time: I find Morrison’s Beloved to be an enchanted text that causes me deep, and oftentimes unresolvable trauma whenever I visit it. But it is necessary and masterful in that capacity. As I proposed a bit ago, Morrison is about the business of demonstrating that the trauma that is slavery is collective and that trauma reverberates across the generations. What she calls “ramifications of ramifications” �in her text Paradise. In Beloved, Morrison’s character Sethe is explaining this temporal confusion to her daughter Denver. The text reads: “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head…” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” (Morrison, 43.) I will make the connection here explicit though I hope it might arrive of its own volition from the narrative we are weaving together. Morrison is resolving the tension we have located between the wages of the color black articulated by Plato and Hegel, the imperative of memory on the part of Augustine, and the notion of fractured or compromised self-consciousness as described by Du Bois. When we, whatever our subjectivity, encounter pictures of the coercion of Black bodies we are encountering rememories and our positionality becomes indistinct from that of others similarly situated across time and space. What I mean is that these pictures, these visual representations of bodies in pain in the process of being rendered un-free, are what Sethe referred to as “thought” pictures for two reasons. One might be obvious. They are the disassociated point of view of the bodies in contact with one another, think Hegel’s Lord and Bondsman here and we as observers occupy a third place in the room as spectator. However, I wish here to push Hegel a bit and propose that the relationship between observer and observed is also involved in a dialectical relationship and the Thing between us, Observer and Observed, in the observation of these videos becomes the time and subject destabilizing wage of Blackness. The second is that the behavior we are observing is a thought picture �in that it renders visible the thinking behind systems of white supremacy like Madison’s pronouncement of fractional humanity in Federalist 54. I’ll quote the text here for clarity and context. Madison writes: But we must deny the fact that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both those qualities; being considered by our laws; in some respect, as persons, and in other respects, as property. In being compelled to labor not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master, and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty, and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank and classed with the irrational animals, which under the legal domination of property. The Fœderal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and property. Morrison continues and here we are in Book II of the text where she abandons the conventions of punctuation to express what I am framing here as the rememory induced phantasm of Blackness. I AM BELOVED and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are couching too I am always crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked. (Morrison. 248) These are complex and fragile passages and worthy of our most diligent efforts at close reading. I have struggled for years with these sections of the text but have found that they yield to my effort when I address them with the understanding we have traced of Blackness. Blackness as an externally imposed system of subjective disorientation that mires the subject in the impossible task of �achieving the form of self-consciousness required to achieve forward progress. Further, I have been aided in understanding Morrison’s notion of rememory as “thought pictures” by the overwhelming presence of videos of Black bodies under conditions of coercion. All of this creates the very system of disorientation that the spectral presence called Beloved experiences that disallows her from being able to separate the experiences of those in her genealogy who have suffered coercive force. There is a great deal going on here in these passages which represent the third in a series of four of this form of narrative where Morrison takes up the challenge that she has embedded in the passage in question, “how can I say things that are pictures”. In fact, the implicit question here is how the subject experiencing these visions, these rememories, might process them and situate herself in time and space and resist the coercion that she is experiencing as a ramification of those ramifications. The passage opens with a decentering of the notion of internal mind/body separation as well as the separation between discreet subjects. “I am Beloved and she is mine.” It is important to note here that this is the only declarative sentence with the employment of a period to eliminate ambiguity. With this understanding we can read the next passages as if the observer is also the actor. “I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass” What is important to note here is that Beloved has bumped into rememories of some other subject in her genealogy. It both is and is not her mother. In this system of perception, it is her mother and hers and everyone in between, starting with a time before the middle passage. The beauty of the images she bumps into are necessary as the counterpoint to the depravity of Atlantic World Slavery. This metaphysical impossibility of separation is experienced by this subject as physical inseparability. “I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing” If one explores this text and these sections in particular one will encounter this refrain “a hot thing”, over and over again. Things indeed become hot and this subjective immersion in the wretched horror of �the Middle Passage freezes time: “All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are couching too I am always crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching”. Beloved, the spirit come to haunt her mother for the act of killing her as a technique to emancipate her from slavery, has never picked flowers in Africa nor directly experienced the Middle Passage but the presentism of these thought pictures is a result of the terrible power of this regime of coercion. For the specter and for the reader it is now, always now. The video we experienced a bit ago in the parlance of Morrison., is a hot thing. 3. Conclusion: The challenge now is to tie this up in a manner that allows us to discuss it and view this thinking as a point of departure that points in many directions at once and sweeps through and across multiple systems of knowing and archives past, present, and to come. There are several points of inflection here that we should mark: the translation of the existence of the visual encounter with the Other yields to the gloss put on that experience by the Socratic dialog that is absorbed by Hegel whose thinking then becomes the target of intellectual challenge by Du Bois. This system must again yield to the somatic or the corporeal encounter with the wages of Blackness as experienced through the employment of video. That experience confuses and disorients us all independent of subject position, yields as well and is gathered together, in the parlance of Morrison, by saying things that are pictures. The real question, the foundational presupposition, is why should we care? I use “we” here advisedly. I don’t mean the “we” of those who are understood to be living under the experience of what we have labelled here as “Blackness”. As a practical matter I also do not mean the life of the mind that privileges this kind of thought experiment as valuable for the sake of the effort. I mean we as a question of humanity and to be succinct we have to care because we are all participants, perpetrators, or observers in what we can frame as the wages of the sin of establishing a societal order that builds its demos on the imperative of exclusion and the notion of freedom as valuable only in the �presence of the possibility or actuality of its opposite. Blackness, as a master signifier here, can be understood to, in its abstraction, speak for the plight of all the aggrieved and the maligned. Speaking for violence against trans bodies in the same way it shouts the despair of children separated from their guardians and caged because they are seeking safety. The same goes for the mosque, synagogue, or bar that is attacked for the presence of what are coercively framed as transgressive bodies or systems of thinking. The same goes for a future that has the potential to erase human existence, in the way we understand it, based upon the poor stewardship of the earth that is the wretched refuse of rabid capitalism. I have gestured, perhaps obliquely at the central problematic of how the figure we have examined here has been called into existence as the unwitting oppositional way of being that allows something like democracy to exist. This is based upon the notion that the value of freedom is only discernible and measurable in its dialectical relationship against its opposite way of being: un-freedom. With that in mind the challenge before us is to imagine and bring into being a type of humanism and in its aggregation, in the form of a societal order that forms itself outside of the logic of seeking the middle point between two extremes. The reason for this effort is not to create something like the debunked and reductive notion of colorblindness. If nothing else remains in our collective minds at the close of this talk it must be this. Blackness is not a race or a color nor an ethnicity. It is an externally imposed system of marginalization that renders its victims and purveyors locked in an unnecessary system of subjective destruction. What this means is that “Blackness” is only related to being a Black person in that this political epoch has assembled that figure and allowed for it to stand as a master signifier for the Muslim, the Queer, the Native, the immigrant, the Jew, the Trans, it is endless, which means that systems of power will always seek a figure to cloak in the subjective disability of Blackness. In his recent text Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe proposes the following and with its recitation I will close our time together. Mbembe writes: The colonial world, as an offspring of democracy, was not the antithesis of the democratic order. It has always been its double or, �again, its nocturnal face. No democracy exists without its double, without its colony – little matter the name and the structure. The colony is not external to democracy and it is not necessarily located outside its walls. Democracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask…In other terms, the cost of the mythological logics required for modern democracies to function and survive is the exteriorization of their originary violence to third places, to nonplaces, of which the plantation, the colony, or today, the camp and the prison, are emblematic figures. (Mbembe) This quotation, perhaps in some measure, explains the way in which the videos we encounter serve to memorialize and resist the erasure that might allow us the luxury of believing that these excesses are either a thing of the past or not meant for us. So long as anyone suffers under the refined technology of Othering, the result of which we have labelled here as Blackness, we all suffer and more to the point, are necessarily at risk. The methodological question for all of us that have, in one way or another, chosen the life of the mind is to focus our attention, across the canon we study and through the scholarship we create, on requiring that the proper attention be paid to the presence of the tail of the dragon of hatred that weaves its way through our consciousness. Thank you. 1 Ibid. 248. � https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4461b8c6adcb75ab9ba142a9fb596772.pdf 7e23480032f607a5ea7605fb9b37796a PDF Text Text The Phenomenology of Blackness Presented by, Michael E. Sawyer, PhD Colorado College St. John’s College Santa Fe, New Mexico Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature 22 November 2019 �“However, the diverse aspects which consciousness takes upon itself are determinate in that each is regarded as existing on its own within the universal medium. White is only in contrast to black, etc., and the thing is a “one” precisely in virtue of its being contrasted with others.” G.W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit §120 �“The master is consciousness existing for itself. However, the master is no longer consciousness existing for itself merely as the concept of such a consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, namely, through another whose essence includes its being synthetically combined with self-sufficient being, that is, with thinghood itself.” Ibid. §190 �“‘Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of the horses is beautiful and good and from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite bloodline. This means that the chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business.’” The Phaedrus (246b) �“ ‘The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; his coat is white, his eyes are coal black, and he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs with a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears – deaf as a post – and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.’ ” Ibid. (253d) �“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk ��““The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs-in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives…And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thig which is there in every photograph; the return of the dead.” Roland Barthes Camera Lucida �������“Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expectation is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory.” St. Augustine Confessions 28:38 �“…But this opposition between its appearance and its truth has only the truth for its essence, namely, the unity of selfconsciousness with itself. This unity must become essential to selfconsciousness, which is to say self- consciousness is desire itself. As self-consciousness, consciousness henceforth has a doubled object: The first, the immediate object, the object of sense- certainty and perception, which however is marked for it with the character of the negative; the second, namely itself, which is the true essence and which at the outset is on hand merely in opposition to the first. Selfconsciousness exhibits itself therein as the movement within which, in its own eyes, the selfsameness of itself with itself comes to be.” Hegel §167 �“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head…” �“Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” Toni Morrison Beloved �“But we must deny the fact that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both those qualities; being considered by our laws; in some respect, as persons, and in other respects, as property. In being compelled to labor not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master, and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty, and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank and classed with the irrational animals, which under the legal domination of property. The Fœderal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and property.” James Madison Federalist 54 �I AM BELOVED and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are couching too I am always crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked. Morrison Beloved � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 20 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The phenomenology of blackness Description An account of the resource Transcript of a lecture given on November 22, 2019 by Michael Sawyer as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sawyer, Michael E. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-11-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource <p>The following video is referenced in this lecture:</p> <p><a href="https://youtu.be/n92zfXkRdnk">https://youtu.be/n92zfXkRdnk</a></p> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_SawyerM_The_Phenomenology_of_Blackness_2019-11-22 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d083229e3fbbefbcb14a38db4bb407aa.mp3 a67903672e15c2e191993e0920b1baba https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ccaef52470d3118e70465607edd0b9f9.pdf 6faa0dbc0748b021c250b993b1b2af52 PDF Text Text “To multiplie in infinitie”.
 The “plultiple” ends of Joyce’s “Book of the Dark” Enrico Terrinoni Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame Chair of English, Università per Stranieri di Perugia Twitter: @EnricoTerrinoni �The Universe in Finnegans Wake • 54.23 “univalse”: “I call our univalse to witness” • 231.2 “juniverse”: “the first rattle of his juniverse” • 410.17: “umniverse”: “where on dearth or in the miraculous meddle of this expending umniverse” • 607.11: “anniverse”: “The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse” �Universe-related ideas in FW • 18.36-19.1 “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos” • 254.26 “cycloannalism, from space to space, rime after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture” �Einstein 1 •149.28 “Winestain” �Einstein 2 •305.6 “Eyeinstye” �James Joyce, Finnegans Wake I.1
 “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” 6 �A book of rivers riverrun, past Eve and Adams… FW 3.1 A river runs out of Eden Genesis 2:6 river > rio (Spanish) rio (Italian) > evil reo (Italian) > guilty �Caos + order (kosmos) •118.21 “chaosmos” �In the beginning was the world (John 1:1) •378.29 “In the buginning was the woid” �ADALINE GLASHEEN, “A SECOND CENSUS OF FINNEGANS WAKE”
 • “Finnegans Wake is wilfully obscure. It was conceived as obscurity, it was executed as obscurity, it is about obscurity”. • Joyce in Ulysses 3: “You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think”. �De Umbris Idearum, Giordano Bruno (the Nolan) Umbra profunda sumus Shadow: the space we inhabit Shadow of darnkess / Shadow of light Shadows of ideas to be connected through the art of memory �Shaun’s dream AND THE NOLAN, FW III.1 404.9--13 And lo, mescemed somewhat came of the noise and somewho might amove allmurk. Now, 'twas as clump, now mayhap. When look, was light and now'twas as flasher, now moren as the glaow. Ah, in unlitness 'twas in very similitude, bless me, 'twas his belted lamp! Whom we dreamt was a shaddo *** Meseem’d (Shem) Amove: to set in motion + to remove (+ not move?) Images of light Shadow: El Shaddai (The Almighty in Hebrew) �“athome” - FW 434.3 / 446.35 and elsewhere in different forms. �“athome” > “Adam” - FW 3.1 / 21.6 and elsewhere �“athome” > “Adam” > a dam, a dame, a madam: (“Damadam” FW 18.30 / “madameen” FW 21.6 and elsewhere �Seventh? Eighth? Adam and Eve > “atoms and ifs” - FW 455.17 �A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man “Then went to college. Other wrangle with little roundhead rogue’s eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned. ” �”The Bruno Philosophy” 
 Daily Express, October 30, 1903.
 “A Dominican monk, a gipsy professor, a commentator of old philosophies and a deviser of new ones, a playwright, a polemist, a counsel for his own defence, and, finally, a martyr burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori” “…he becomes of the number of those who loftily do not fear to die. For us his vindication of the freedom of intuition must seem an enduring monument, and among those who waged so honourable a war, his legend must seem the most honourable, more sanctified…” �Stephen Hero “The Italian lessons often extended beyond the hour and much less grammar and literature was discussed than philosophy. The teacher probably knew the doubtful reputation of his pupil … he was Italian enough to enjoy a game of belief and unbelief. He reproved his pupil once for an admiring allusion to the author of “The Triumphant Beast”. —You know, he said, the writer, Bruno, was a terrible heretic. —Yes, said Stephen, and he was terribly burned.” �John Toland (pantheism) Toland / Nolan �BRUNO IN THE WAKE «Nolan» (50.05) «Father San Browne» (50.18) «Padre Don Bruno» (50.19) «Nolans Brumans» (93.01) «Nayman of Noland» (187.28) «brune in brume» (271.21) «Senior Nowno and Senior Brolano» (567.32),  �John Toland Christianity Not Mysterious 1696 Landed in Dublin in 1697 (to land?) Browne > Bruno > Bishop Browne �JOHN FLORIO Real person, as well as a fictional character in Bruno’s Ash Wednesday’s Dinner Author of: First Fruites Second Frutes A Worlde of Wordes Queen Anne’s New World of Words �FLORIO’S ”QUEEN ANNE’S NEW WORLD OF WORDS” �TO MULTIPLIE IN INFINITIE FINNEGANS WAKE: 404.36-405.1 …and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plultiply! �GIORDANO BRUNO, DE IMMENSO 1591 • In relation to the universe, you cannot state that you are at the center and not in some other place, for it is evident that all around, equally, and everywhere, an infinite space is opened, containing infinite stars and worlds. �wor(L)ds without end • FW 4.19 “immarginable” � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:03:57 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource To multiple in infinite : the "plultiple" endings of Joyce's Book of the Dark Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on November 15, 2019 by Enrico Terrinoni as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Terrinoni, Enrico, 1976- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-11-15 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_TerrinoniE_To_multiple_in_infinite_The_plultiple_endings_of_Joyce's_Book_of_the_Dark_2019-11-15 Friday night lecture