A drama to miss all drama

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s story is a fascinating one: a 10 year old Brahmin boy from a poor family in a small town in Tamil Nadu becomes interested in mathematics circa 1900 by way of a book on higher math which someone gifted him almost as an afterthought. Tinkering in his free time, alone, he develops a considerable mastery of the subject and begins to make what he thinks are significant new breakthroughs. Uncertain of the value of his work, he send his theorems to several math professors of whom most ignore him. But one actually does read the theorems – a miracle since the cover letter starts with the words describing their author as an Indian clerk at the Madras Port Trust – and is sufficiently impressed to invite the boy to study in Cambridge. After some struggle, the boy – now a young man – makes the heroic decision to travel over the polluting sea to a foreign, cold, dark land where he will find it difficult to maintain strict observance of the dietary rules of his caste. But before he leaves, his mother, to bind him to India, arranges for a suitable wife for him. The wife is suitable in all ways except one – the bride is six. He leaves, he studies in Cambridge, he makes important contributions to mathematics, he is granted advanced degrees and inducted into the Royal Society, he becomes ill, returns to India and dies at the age of 32.

This story teams with dramatic possibilities: a new world grows out of a book and swallows up a small boy’s life; a small town conservative Brahmin boy from Tamil Nadu travels to cold, modern, western England all by himself, worried about his identity, his religion, his caste; he leaves behind a 6 year old bride: both he and she will live the next decade in expectation of their union’s eventual consummation (which perhaps never happens since he returns gravely ill); aged 22, in Cambridge, the boy enters formal schooling for the first time in his life and discovers that, like all minds of the self-taught, his is also a hodgepodge of the brilliantly innovative and the utterly wrong; he is a genius colonial in colonial England: black, but brilliant, the left loves him, the right says he is a charlatan, a fake; everyone seems to lay a claim on him: Indians want him for India, Brits for Britain, Brahmins for the caste system, mathematicians for mathematics; as a mathematician he breaks new, revolutionary ground, while in his private life he remains a stodgily conservative slave to an ancient, irrational religion; finally, there is his work, unique and strange, in many ways paradoxical, in itself fascinating if only explained well. There are a legion of dramas here -- too many for a short radio play, in fact; each could be riveting in its own right.

Yet, the BBC play A Disappearing Number, based on the stage play by the theatre company Complicite, fails to find any of them. Like all stories about genius written by people who don’t quite understand the subject, its presentation of mathematics is trivial; there is none of the personal drama of Ramanujan’s life showing that the authors have not understood it; instead of Ramanujan's otherworldly love story, there is a hackneyed love story of modern Euro-Indians, too emotionally overcharged and too full of screaming to be interesting, interspersed by bizarre encounters with Indian BT telephone operators whose significance lies in their being based in Bangalore. (Perhaps outsourcing is the only thing the authors of the play know about India). What any of it has to do with either Ramanujan or mathematics is not clear. That it is lousy and a waste of time is clear within the first five minutes; actually, three, when the narrator who opens the play says “actually I am an actor playing a mathematician”. You don’t say.

The BBC website says the play won an award. Really? I can't imagine why.

The BBC website's blurb for the play says: "An award-winning production exploring our relentless compulsion to understand, and which is a provocative meditation on the beauty of mathematics and the nature of creativity." The empty pretentiousness of it should be sufficient clue for anyone to stay away.

Post scriptum

Perhaps India is like China and Japan: that those who know them well don´t usually speak or write English well -- English or any Western language; and those who do speak it, usually do not know the country well. The result is that books about these countries are usually crap. India's situation may be worse than either China's or Japan's: there is less money in Indology to afford real talent but a greater number of would be specialists -- people with distant relatives there, or who have been once and maybe spent a week in an ashram, or a month in Goa. This is true about the English speaking Indians in India, too: upper class Punjabis don´t go to Tanjavur, they go to London. I once tried to tell one about the marvelus cholas of Tanjavur: she grimaced.

Post srciptum 2

The following week there was a play on Spinoza. It was quite adequate in presenting the issues of Portuguese conversos rejudaising in Amsterdam. Somehow, the BBC seems better on 16th century Jewish Amsterdam than it is on early 20th century Anglo-Indian matters. Somehow, this strikes me as odd.

The philosophical bits in the Spinoza play, on the other hand, were just as bad as the mathematical bits had been in the Ramanujan play. The BBC should either stop this line of pursuit altogether or hire writers with the necessary background/intellectual wherewithal. The series is an intellectual embarrassment: being half-stupid (i.e. trying to say something intelligent and failing at it) is worse than being stupid (not even knowing that one could try).

That modern aesthetics is an act of violence

FMR, a Rivista bimestrale d'arte e cultura visiva, as its byline calls it, is an extraordinarily expensive (490 euros for 6 issues) bimonthly of extraordinary visual beauty published in Italy since 1982. It has until recently attempted to cover contemporary art as well as the art of the former times. The jarring effect of the juxtaposition which this created was not missed by anyone flipping through its pages. The possibility of jabbing my eye on contemporary content has always kept me on edge and prevented me from subscribing.

But now I can: as of 2008, FMR no longer mixes chalk and cheese, having shipped out the contemporary stuff to its own, separate publication. This in belated recognition of the fact that Picasso and Hirst do not belong on the same side of the brain with Mabuse and Kakiemon. In this, FMR is no different form the majority of art museums of the world which, if they can only afford it, carefully isolate the two types of art in from each other in separate buildings.

Actually, the question in my mind is whether the two types of art belong in the same brains at all. As to this there are good reasons for doubt and no evidence at all to the contrary. And if contemporary and traditional arts indeed belong to different kinds of brains; then perhaps aesthetics is no more than a means by which one kind of brains overthrows another.

That would explain all the violence in contemporary art. It is an act of war.

Parandowski, classicism, health

Jan Parandowski, in an archival interview on PR2:

“A book can make a great change in a person’s life, especially young, impressionable person’s life; it can cause a wonderful flowering; but it can also break and destroy him. This places a great responsibility on the author: he must not betray his readers’ trust. They expect from him things beautiful and wise; he must not instead give them stupidity or ugliness.”

Parandowski was a classicist. A note he had once written to himself listed his "companions". It started with Homer and Horace and ended with Plato and Żeromski. Tellingly, several very famous names were missing from the list: Joyce, Kafka, Dostoevsky.

“The characters of a novel are people in whose presence the author, for some reason, chooses to spend time”, he went on. He couldn’t imagine wanting to be in the company of any of the characters of Brothers Karamazov; or Ulisses; or Amerika. He didn´t understand why any authors did.

That´s classicism for you: Classicism as mental health which does not bother to refute, but simply rejects disease.

The 11 gentlemen of Abukir

Here are the eleven so-called Abukir medals now at the Gulbenkian Museum in Libson. They have many claims to extra-ordinarity: the story of their finding is a bit of an orientalist mystery (a la Conan-Doyle, dubious and colorful oriental gentlemen arrive in Paris with a crazy tale of treasures dug up in the desert sand), we have no clue as to their purpose, they are the only such set surviving (though others have once existed and we do have their fragments), they are technically incredibly attained, as any cursory comparison with the Renaissance medals in the same museum shows, despite the relatively low technological level of metallurgy in Roman times, their iconography is mysterious (it is not clear how all the images hang together), and some of the medals represent novel treatment (such as the fellow seen enface from somewhat below). Above all, they are very beautiful and (like everything else in this museum) very beautifully displayed.

Snuff bottles at Museu Oriente

Snuff (a mixture of finely chopped tobacco with salt, spices, etc., inhaled and thunderously sneezed out) became fashionable in the 18th century not only in Poland ('tabaka') but also in China. It was thought to possess important medicinal properties in curing headaches and the upper respiratory system. When the emperor acquired the habit, it became de rigeur to take snuff. The habit gave rise to a new art form: the snuff bottle. They are some of the most wonderful art works of Chinese 18th and 19th centuries, but for some reason they remain undervalued. (That westerners, trained on a) large objects of art b) infused with moral or political messages, do not appreciate them is understandable; why the Chinese should underestimate them is not clear).

Here are some of the items in the collection. They are all between 2 and 4 inches tall.

(My own collection, I am happy to say, is smaller but no worse in quality).

Category 1. Painting on glass. This is done with a curved brush on the inside surface of the bottle. (Calligraphic inscriptions must therefore be executed in mirror image).







Category 2. Camoes. These are pietre dure (i.e. semi-precious stones) carved in cameo technique. (Cameo technique consists in carving a two-layered stone in such a manner that one, upper layer is reduced to mere pattern upon the flat surface of the other, lower layer).




Category 3. Porcelain.







Category 4. My favorite: pietre dure.

Category 5. This is a very special piece (first time I see this technique): a bottle carved in a semi-precious stone then decorated in fen-cai, (that is decoration painted in overglaze paint and fired as if it the piece were porcelain):


Category 6. Painted enamel on copper.




Category 7. Ivory

That beauty is not relative in the sense in which you mean it

An acquaintance, who reads more than he looks (and too much reading is not a good thing: it takes up time one might instead spend looking, or licking), jumped on me when I explained something about a 16th century textile technique – that a certain apparently odd effect was in fact produced intentionally. These are culturally determined preferences, he said, and they are not stable overtime! (Thinking, obviously, that tastes have changed, etc).

He was of course wrong, as wrong as are all aesthetic theoreticians who do not know about technique.

What is desirable in a technique – such as a textile technique – is not determined by place or age or religon or fashion, but by the limitations of the technique itself. Perfectly round circles are the most desirable shapes in double-ikat because they are the hardest thing to do; washes are repeatedly explored in mordant dying because in it precision is not possible at all; precision in fencai is highly valued because it is so hard to achieve (and possible); as is uniform color in sang-de-boef; transparency is valued in porcelain, as is thin shape, because it is the only pottery in the world which can achieve both – one needn’t kaolin clay to make thick, heavy, and opaque pots; therefore working in kaolin, one doesn't.

All these examples show that beauty -- and the aesthetic judgment of goodness or badness in general -- is automatically built into the technique, it emerges out of it. Mary Mothersill once said that but no one believed her because her examples were lousy.

Beauty is relative only to the technique, or, better said, genre, that is to say, what is beautiful in double-ikat is not what is beautiful in qalamkari. Just as what is beautiful in a tall, buxom blonde is not what is beautiful in a petite brunette. They are different, incomparable things.

(On drawing quickly, part 2)

(I have this image in my mind: a dull average fellow, perhaps a little overweight, frustrated with the boredom of his life, decides to set out on what is sometimes referred to as the inner voyage. He buys some ink and rice paper ($29.99 for the Zen Painting Set) and, locking himself up in his room, connects with his inner self and dashes out quickly a few works. What he produces looks awful, and he does notice, as he studies it, that it is none too pretty; but since (the theory tells him) his fast work represents a revelation of the inner self, he meditates on the ugly stuff, trying to interpret it. So this is how I am inside, he says to himself, puzzled).

On drawing quickly

A woman once refused to sleep with me because we quarreled about drawing. Drawing quickly, she said with conviction, produces one’s best work. To me it was obvious nonsense, as it must be to anyone who has seen an Indian miniaturist pain-stakingly at work. I said so, but my argument gained no traction and I – no bodily comfort.

Another woman, who had, for a change, not refused, said her drawing instructor kept telling her, and the class, to draw quickly.

One must say in the instructor´s favor, that speed is no doubt good in these days of globalization. Faster work leads to higher productivity. (Which is, no doubt, why they play Mozart’s Number 17 so damn fast in Trondheim). If, as a sketch-artists, you charge per sheet, then the faster you turn the sheets, the more money you make.

But while economics may be the real motivation of the drawing instructor, the theory with which she disguises it is the popular (American) version of Zen (for which see here): one paints as one strikes with the sword: draws the weapon and lops off the head all in a single stroke; the speed, shorn of calculation and reflection, liberates us from social constraint (bad); this allows us to draw on our unalloyed inner resources, our psyche; which is always right, or at any rate, true (whatever that means).

But this idea rests on a confusion: when one has learned something really well, and done it millions of times, one can do it quickly and gracefully; without either reflection or getting in touch with anything at all. The act becomes automatic, like riding a bicycle. Yet, that one does something fast does not mean that what he does will be better than what he does slowly. (Even if what X does quickly may be better than what I do very slowly indeed).

The woman who did sleep with me drew exceedingly slowly and exceptionally well. Her instructor was impressed but did not notice that my lover’s style of work contradicted her own theory of art. The instructor thus never revised her theory. She continues to tell her students to draw quickly. Like a Zen swordsman, she imagines, by painting quickly they will accesses their souls and produce superior works.

An attractive theory, of course (everyone wants to believe that what he is deep down is valuable and creative) except that we haven’t anything resembling a soul which we might access.

In fact, if you do paint something quickly, and it is good, it is because you have painted it countless times already; this or something very much like it. If you attempt something new or never done before, speed may actually be a problem.

East West

Having spent the better part of the morning in the Asian part of the Gulbenkian (Persian lustres, Turkish tiles, Chinese famille rose and verte) and taken delicious lunch (lentil soup, a pastry stuffed with mushrooms in cream sauce, an Alentejan red) I considered what to do with the one hour remaining before my movie date. I realized that it could not be the Western section – even though the paintings and the applied arts are, like everything else here, superb. To go from Asian art to European art is simply too much of an aesthetic violence, it is too much of a turn. The western bits are simply too damn crude; too large; too violent; too loud; too full of contrasts; too small on detail; too big on meaning; too confrontational; too in your face. It is like stepping from cool shadows into violent sunlight; from a peaceful garden into a raucously busy street. I couldn’t do it. It would have hurt. So instead I went back East and looked at some Islamic book covers. The experience was cool, calm, and shadowy; like sitting by a brook in a forest

How to calculate how much you need to retire

What you need to do is:

1) First estimate your expected annual expenditure in retirement.

2) Then you you must double this amount to make up for inflation. (You will have to put half your net after tax income back into investments to beat the inflation which erodes them). This is the minimum amount of after tax income your investments must generate.

3) Then you must divide this figure by (1 - your tax rate). For example, if your tax rate is 35%, you will divide by 1 - 0.35 = 0.65. This is the amount of annual pretax income you must generate.

4) Now you must divide this figure by your expected investment return. For example, if you expect your investment return to be 10%, you will divide by 0.1. If you expect your annual invesment return to be 8%, you will divide 0.08. This is the amount of capital you need to retire on.

The whole formula looks like this:

d = (a x 2) / (1 - b) ) / c

where

a -- amount of annual expenditure you expect in retirement
b -- your tax rate
c -- annual return on investment you expect to generate
d -- amount of capital required

Solve for d.

As you can see, all three of the four crucial variables in this calculation are controlled by the government: investment returns (through economic and fiscal policies, such as the setting of interest rates), inflation rate (through monetary policies), and tax rate (through fiscal policies). Since governments live off our income, they are vitally interested in making us work as hard and as long as possible. They are not interested in making early retirement easy for us and you must expect such unfriendly policies to continue.

Good luck.

Don´t need the plot

Visconti´s L’Innocente is beautiful. So beautiful that it fails to irritate. As well it should: here is a story of the 19th century Italian rich aristocrats, who live in houses full of breathtaking art: bronze statuary, polychrome marbles, brocades, stone inlays, kakiemon, Japanese lacquerware, Chinese screens, alabasters, Napolitan urns; beautiful villas with spacious rooms and high ceilings, with airy verandas and well groomed gardens which seem to go on forever. They spend their days hunting, fencing, and going to auctions and the opera. They live the superior life of aesthetic and athletic attainment rarely given to ordinary mortals. Yet, Visconti tells us, they are stupid, petty, and maladroit in managing their personal lives: despite all those artistic wonders in their lives, they manage to feel anxious and empty, and like any working class girl look for fulfillment in love, experience jealousy, and are easily manipulated. Is Visconti lying? How can such aesthetically attained men be so life-stupid? Does Visconti know what he is talking about? Does D’Annunzio, the author of the tale? Do they in fact know such men?

I managed to enjoy the film all the same. In the foreground the heroine betrays her husband, he murders her illegitimate child then blows his brains out, but I take it all in in passing, as it were, not paying it much attention somehow. My eyes are firmly on the background: a magnificent alabaster fireplace covered in brilliant grotesques, a marquetry jewelery box by the bedside, black obsidian krateri on the living room table. To me the story is no more than an excuse to show these things. I wonder whether the story is even necessary. How would the film be if we had the same sets -- without the story?

I feel similarly about Luz Silenciosa (Stelle Licht) by Carlos Reigadas. The story of a love triangle among the Germanoid-speaking Russian Menonites of Chihuahua has the usual: love, jealousy, suffering, loyalty, death, guilt; even resurrection. The reviewer on Internet Movie Database feels there was not enough plot. I think there was too much: the beautiful 6 minute shots of sunrise and sunset, and of the amazing ados happening in the big sky, the brief flashes of red and yellow dirt roads running down among green fields – they were the best part of the film, just as the magnificent interiors of Luccan villas were the best part of L’Innocente.

Now, really, I am tired of men's love stories. They are nothing but the same damn thing over and over and over again; and they are not just tiresome; they are dumb, too. Anyone with half a brain would be able to avoid their troubles or work a simple way out. Why anyone should feel the urge to make them into 2 hour movies beats me blue and black.

Really, the world is so much more interesting without men in it to dumb it down. Can we please just have the background from now on?

(Sheherezade’s view of the same two films is the same but opposite. While I found it implausible that rich, educated, cultured men of leisure (L’Innocente) would live such stupid lives, fraught with such silly concerns, her take was a disbelief that spiritual, religious people (Luz Silenciosa) who refuse worldly goods, “do not believe in façades” – as she puts it, or – another good turn of phrase – “choose overalls for the love of Jesus”, would live the same problems as their materialistic, irreligious betters. Her conclusion is not just her usual atheist observation that the religious are just as bad as the rest of us and that therefore there is no net gain in religiosity, but that all men in general are dumb. That there is therefore no salvation; no hope of one. Everyone lives as stupidly as everyone else).

Massive migraine-like headaches due to poor breathing

I have had these headaches most of my adult life. I would wake up with a headache and suffer debilitating headache all day until I went to sleep and slept the full night and woke again the next day. I suffered these headaches several times a month.

Accidentally, while staying at a family’s house in a pine forest in springtime, I discovered the cause of the headaches. I suffered from terrible allergy in the forest and used nose drops to keep my breathing passages open. The pollen season lasted a month and during its entire duration I did not suffer a headache once. But it returned as soon as the pollen season finished and I stopped using the drops. This was my clue: as long as I took the drops, I was headache free.

Apparently there is design flaw in my nasal passages (a common problem) which obstructs my breathing when I lie down: not noticeably – I don’t suffocate – but sufficiently to cause an occasional oxygen deficiency which in turn caused day-long headaches.

Nose drops (0.05% oxymetazoline hydrochloride) used once a day (before sleep) prove an effective treatment. Since I have been using them daily (last 5 years) I have cut down the frequency of my headaches to about twice a year. (Unless I booze, but that's a different story altogether, and easily diagnosed).

Warning: one has to be careful with the nose drops: if used too frequently they tend to lead to what is called “rebound effect” (a constriction of the nasal passages which requires ever-greater doses of nose drops to keep open). It is important therefore to use smallest effective dose. One may be able to use the 0.025% formula (marketed as “for children”); further, one may be able to only spray once per time (i.e. one puff) and only into one nostril. I use this method; I suffer from a minor rebound effect: my nasal passages are now somewhat obstructed during the day (when I do not use the drops) but not enough to case me any serious hardship. I am glad to suffer this minor discomfort in return for not suffering my terrible headaches anymore.

The infantile ethics of Heinrich Böll

Shocked, just shocked to hear that Heinrich Böll received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Group Portrait With A Lady. It is a damn sentimental tale of a love affair between a German girl and a Russian “prisoner” (slave, in fact) during WW2. Consider some of the moral points of the tale (which no doubt occasioned the Nobel Prize).

1. In the book much is made of the fact that the girl did not sleep around. This is a round-about way of saying that her carnal relations with the Russian must have been caused by true love. That is to say, “true love justifies everything”. (At least sin, anyway). OK?

2. The girl’s fundamental goodness is underscored by the fact that she never remarried. (Which is a backhand way of condemning all widows who remarry as somehow less perfect).

3. Much is also made of the woman’s ostracism by the post-war society on the “wrong but understandable” grounds of her having had an affair with the enemy (“slept with a Russian while out boys at the front…, etc.” (Could it be remotely possible that our boys at the front slept with the local girls there?)

4. And of the said postwar society’s essential goodness since in the end a group comes to the widow’s financial aid. (They’re not a bad lot, really, the Germans).

What the novel tells me abut Böll’s (and Germany’s) moral discourse -- conventionally trite -- is depressing. What it tells me about the Nobel committee is damned shameful. They should have given him the prize for his Irish Journey, a fine wrought piece of travel writing free of hackneyed (and questionable) moral points.

Yakshini Anadyomene or Indians in ancient Egypt

The legend next to this wonderful Gulbenkian piece (about 6 inches in height) calls this small faiance fragment in Egyptian blue, perhaps the most moving work in the Egyptian room, Venus Anadyomene ("Venus Rising From the Sea"), which, the wikipedia says, "was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in Pliny's Natural History, with the anecdote that the great Apelles employed Campaspe, a mistress of Alexander the Great, for his model." Here is one:

(Venus Anadyomene, Museo alle Terme, Rome)

I believe the authors are mistaken and the piece is really an Indian Yakshini. My evidence is three fold: first, the fat fold on the belly, this kind of loving rendition of body fat being a feature of Indian but not usually Greek female statuary; the busy Indian necklace (Greek Venuses did not bathe with jewelry on); and her typical Mathura pose called the tribangha or 'pose of the three bends', bent at the hips, waist, and breasts (sometimes with the head cocked), to provide an S like shape; and one not at all typical of any known bathing Venuses. (In fact, the position of her shoulders suggests that her one hand once held a branch of a tree while the other rested on her hip; thus she is possibly shalabhabjika, or, as a website describes the genre, 'a woman so devastatingly beautiful that she makes trees blossom merely by touching them with her foot'). (See an article here).

(Yakshi, Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill)

That there should be Indian art in Roman Egypt ought not to surprise since India and Egypt enjoyed during Roman times brisk trade by way of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. An Indian Yakshini, in ivory, was found in Pompeii and is today in the Archeological Museum in Naples:

(Pompeii Yakshi, Museo Archeologico, Naples)

The uniqueness of the Gulbenkian piece appears to lie in it having been made in Egypt (the evidence for which is the blue glaze) but to an Indian model.

That Nietzsche was a Martian

Nietzsche was a Martian: he lived in the desert. (His desert happened to be a pension up in Swiss Alps, yes; still it was a desert).

Yet, he persisted in writing books. Good ones, too. That he derived pleasure from writing them there seems to be no doubt: they are so pleasant to read (stylistically, if nothing else) that they must have been pleasant to write (and polish). But it is remarkable that he cared to write them. After all, there was no one around who would read them; and probably no one around whom Nietzsche could have hoped to read them. (Perhaps even no one he could have wanted to read them). Why write then and not -- work on one's put?

Matywiecki writes -- in his book on Tuwim -- that a poem is a cry for readers, for empathy. Is not all writing that way? Was Nietzsche -- the Ubermensch -- secretly crying to be understood?

More about Lucius the Martian

Lucius, like St Anthony of the Desert, has spent a lifetime cutting himself off from real life. (Perhaps 'common life' is the better word: life as it is lived by most men, the life known to him as koyaanisquatsi, that is, the life not worth living). At this task he has succeeded. He is totally and completely alone.

But then every now and then he attempts to connect with other men and when he does, they always fail him: they don't have time for him; they don't have a strong interest in him (as a Martian, he isn't of much use to them); they don't understand him; perhaps they fear him; they don't have much to say that he cares to hear. When that happens, he feels disappointed, though he shouldn't. What else can he expect?

In the final chapter of The Journey to Ixtlan, a wizard tells a story in which he attempts to return to his home village to see Mom and Dad. Everyone along the way turns out to be a ghost and he seems unable to find his way. The narrator fails to understand the story. Don Juan, his preceptor, explains: it takes a passionate man to choose the life of a wizard (Mexican wizards, like St Anthony, and like Lucius, live in the desert); but such a life puts us beyond the pale of social life, beyond the pale of normalcy; it interferes with our human contacts which thrive on normalcy: henceforth, everyone who is not a wizard is to us merely a ghost (and we to them, merely weirdos); passionate men find this separation from mankind very painful. It is the high price one has to pay for freedom from ordinary life.

Source of artists´status anxiety

At the Anastacio Gonçalves museum I realize the source of 19th century artists´status anxiety (see here). This is because their work is... well, crap (pardon my French). Of course they were worried about their status, I would be, too, if what they made was the best I could do and I had to make a living by it.

Anastacio Gonçalves must have been worried, too. He came to collecting too late. By the time he began to collect, the best stuff has been bought and stored away -- by national museums, chiefly; but also by other great collectors who had come before him. Some of them just. Gulbenkian cleaned up the market, like a great Electrolux vacuuming up all the good stuff. Gonçalves was left with nothing but left overs to assemble.

He did find one good piece, though: a 16th century ivory crucified Christ, astounding, despite its less than perfect condition. Sri Lankan, says the caption.

*

Really, modern day collectors' only hope lies in identifying as yet undiscovered art genres; like Ceylon ivories (in the case of Gonçalves); or architectural models (see my future post on San Roque).

Meissen at Arte Antiga

Museu de Arte Antiga has a show ('Museografia') intended to suggest the vast amount of stuff they have locked away in storage. It shows photos of the old days, when everything here was on display. It was a little crowded, it's true, but to my mind it does not seem to follow, as two recent Museu Antiga directors claim in quotes at the entrance to the show, that one must prune and display only a few pieces with a lot of dead space to spare. (And throw the rest in the dungeon). Neither Pitti in Florence, nor Pamphilhj in Rome, where paintings hang cheek to jowl -- and jaw to forehead -- in three, sometimes four rows one above the other, are bad museums.

(Maybe it is my baroque nature, but I like to be crowded in by beautiful objects. Come, embrace me, my soul says, come, hug me tight).

One of the items in the show is a cabinet, 1 x 2 meters, of French, Spanish, and German (principally Meissen) porcelain cups. These items, formerly in the Portuguese royal collection at Necessidades, are all incredibly beautiful, there is not one less than perfect thing, testifying to Their Majesties superb taste, and, surprise, the high quality of production Meissen was capable of. I am incredibly moved here: until I saw this collection I had no idea that they ever made good stuff in Meissen. But they did: and the Portuguese bought it all and locked it away.

I try to take photos, but photography is not allowed. There are no reproductions of these pieces for sale and there is no catalogue of the museum's porcelain collection. During the era of exploration, the Portuguese kept their discoveries secret. (It has even been suggested that the main reason why they didn't fund Colombus's proposal to sail West is that they already knew that there was land there and that it was not India). It is perhaps the Portuguese nature to discover things and -- hide them.

*

Among the more memorable pieces: a Meissen plate painted in rose leaf, with globular cup painted in rose petals outside and solid gold inside and a handle in the shape of a thorned branch; a Meissen cup with landscape with landscape on the plate wrapped wreath-like around the central flat circle (which receives the cup's foot); a Spanish piece with cup and plate painted with red marble columns and cypresses between them; a French set, with the cup in the shape of krateros, dark blue with gold patterns, white inside with a wreath of roses around the lip, and the same wreath of roses around the edge of the plate; a French piece in spring green, with roundels with symbols of the republic -- fascii, Frysian cap, tree of liberty; a Meissen service set with gold-tipped, dark blue lip and individually hand painted nature morte.

Tinker, tailor, Martian, sailor

Lucius lives an extraordinary life. He travels 3 months; then returns home, where he reads, thinks, writes, goes to theater, cinema, opera, museums, listens to the radio, and organizes his thoughts about his travels; then he travels for 3 months again.

A great life, people say. And then add: Don't you get bored?

He used to think they were simply mean; that they meant the question as a kind of attack, out of envy. After all, what is interesting about their lives (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep)?

But today he has realized something important: that work is what makes people interesting in the minds of other people: it makes us what we are in other's estimation. (Why else would the second question posed by new acquaintances always be 'What do you do?') After all, when we meet someone who is, say, a fish monger -- or a used car dealer -- we know what we can do with him, how we can fit him into our life, how he can be useful to us. But when we meet someone who is retired; a connoisseur of art and literature; a traveler; what are we supposed to do with a man like that? We have nothing to do with him, nothing at all. He can't sell us anything at a discount, he can't write us a useful letter of recommendation, he can't advise us on where and how to submit a job application. He might as well be a Martian: 'Hi, I am from Mars.' 'How do you do?'

The interlocutors of Lucius know and understand it. They would never opt for the life he lives, even if it is interesting. They want to be useful.

Americans' aristocratic fantasies

PR2 reports that the New Yorker reviews that someone in America writes a book about the change in attitude to concert conduct in Europe (once audiences behaved badly; then the concert hall became like the church); and that he attributes it to the rise of the middle class. It is yet another one of those fanciful American interpretations of Europe -- one more instance of how illusory is the cultural unity of the West: by and large we really do not understand each other.

The book's argument, apparently, goes that aristocrats behave badly because they can, their status being assured by birth, while the middle class is not certain of the day or the hour and must earn/prove their middle classness constantly and do so through decent behaviour. (For instance, presumably, sitting mum in concerts). (As if sitting mum in concerts were a universal given of polite behavior).

The way to parse this argument is of course this: ‘middle class’ means ‘America’ (‘us’); 'we' (Americans) live in constant anxiety about our status and worth; and since 'we' have created the world we live in, and it is unlike anything that was before, the past must have been very different and there certainly must have been an age in which some people at least didn’t feel anxious about their status. The aristocrats, of course.

PR2, being a European radio station does not know how to parse American self doubt. And, as all Europeans, it accepts American analysis of European realities come scritto. (Like everything American, it must be good). But PR2, being European, ought to know better. All that renaissance drama, baroque opera, medieval chivalric tales: Europeans fed this stuff in school ought to know something about aristocracy. Such as that noblesse oblige; that is, that aristocrats lived under constant pressure to live up to a complex and demanding code of conduct; a fact emphasized by all literary and dramatic production right up to the age of enlightenment. In truth, dear PR2, the true difference between aristocrats and the middle class was that aristocrats were required to be a certain kind of person (to justify their preferential access to worldly goods), while the middle class only needed to acquire and hold the goods to be middle.

As for the concert hall conduct, the reason why people began to behave religiously there has nothing to do with the middle class, and everything to do with the romantic vision of art as the new religion: valuable by definition, elevated, life giving, true, etc. Liszt improvising is like the Transfiguration: one falls upon his knees and beats his chest.

(One could argue, I suppose, that this elevation of art grew out of artists' typically middle-class status anxiety which drove them to demand heretofore unheard of respect for their productions. Liszt said (in effect): I am a priest. And in time he actually became one).

It was not always so. There was a time when what we call art today was just pleasure, when opera was no different from the hunt or the corrida or a hand of whist. Then the nineteenth century came and breathed the excruciating, stultifying, mind-numbing religious seriousness into art. Suddenly, it meant something.

Art with capital A.

Oh.

Also safe to listen to

Jean-Marie Leclair would have been a famous composer if he had not taken it into his thick head to fight Guidon (no wikipedia entry) over the control of Musique du Roy. (The history of music is full of Guidons, untalented bastards who have left us nothing worth listening to, but who nevertheless are good at social climbing and holding onto posts against challenges from their betters; Locatelli comes to mind; and Tchaikovsky; but not Salieri, who had in fact been generally supportive to the younger generation of composers, Mozart especially).

Now, because Leclair was a fool (picked a fight he could not win) he lost a promising career, and we lost a lot of good music, as this recording of fragments of Leclair's only opera, Scylla and Glaucus shows. (About which see an interesting article here -- it´s point is that the French centralizing obsession was responsible for a much lower output of the French opera, as opposed to the free market Italian competition; long live the free market!)

The recording is by the very good Raymond Leppard, leading English Chamber Orchestra. Enjoy.

Spoiled

Last June it rained two days; the rain was not heavy and it was not cold. It was a pleasant relief after the stifling heat of Venice. But my Portuguese friends, who do not know Venice, complained bitterly. What terrible weather! I smiled. How is the winter? I asked. Awful! they said. It rains cats and dogs. Look outside, it’s just like this. Yuck!

There is only one conclusion: the Portuguese have been spoiled by their divine weather.

That niceness is an American virtue

A young man performs at the Institut Franco-Portugues on accoustic guitar. He plays Domenico Scarlatti (K. 1 and K. 491) whom he has the temerity to call, before a Portuguese audience, an Italian composer. Bad idea.

He then plays a piece ('Koyunbaba') by a modern Italian composer, a fellow named Carlo Domeniconi. The piece is titled after a Turkish air on which it is based (read about it here). The last movement of it (Presto) has a rich texture which suggests that in better hands this could be an exciting piece.

(As it turns out, it is. Hear it played presto here, very presto here, unbelievably presto here, and what seems like prestissimo -- and beautifully too, though too bad about the technical quality of the recording -- here).

Or on a better instrument. For though it is possible to play Scarlatti (not too well, apparently) on an accoustic guitar, it is also possible, I am sure, to play him on a beer bottle, bottle caps, or the Turkish grill. There is a reason, however, why the composer had meant his sonatas for the harpsichord.

(Sonority, of course: compare the first two koyunbaba recordings linked to above: the second is technically better, and has all the magical effortlessness of a perfected skill, yet, at this speed the instrument loses all it's resonance and sounds like... a plucked toothpick).

At the end, the audience stands up. I feel like I am in Kalisz (my grandfather sponsored an opera house there between the wars). No one stands up in Berlin, or Paris, or Milan.

(They do stand up in New York, but that's because they are nice. Niceness is an American virtue).

A medieval mystery

Gallus Anonymus is the name by which one has come to refer to the author of Cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum. The book is the first written history of Poland, dated to sometime around 1113 AD, and considered of great literary value on account of its Latin style. The author, who calls himself a pilgrim – that is, foreigner – in Poland, has been traditionally referred to as ‘Gallus’ because of a popular theory (on account of some aspects of his literary style) that he might have been French. Professor Jasinski of Poznan University now proposes at length what has been suggested before but without much evidence: that Gallus Anonymus was in fact not French, but Venetian. His argument is based on computer-based textual analysis of Cronicae and another, Venetian text on the translation of the relics of St Nicolo from the Near East to Lido, between which two the professor finds several dozen striking analogies. They include a particular mix of two styles, cursus volux and cursus trispondaicus (on which see a discussion here), use of certain unique literary devices and phrases, use of same prayers, references to same saints, and to same historical and geographical places (in particular, of Via Egnatia) in the same order (traveling south to north).

If taken as proof of common authorship, they would suggest that Gallus Anonym was at one point a monk at the monastery in Lido, that he spoke Greek, and that he was educated in Tours. They may also be taken to suggest that he had participated in the 1st crusade and was present at the taking of Antioch.

For me, one part of the special flavor of this argument lies in the fact that the Venetian origin of Gallus appears to account for many surprising little things, such as his familiarity – and pride at his familiarity – with matters Slavic (which, as a Venetian, he would be); or his reference to the dearth of fresh salt water fish in Poland (a common complaint among Italians residing in Poland today). And another, in the fact that Gallus Anonymus was one of the more global men of his century: we already know from the Cronicae that he was quite familiar with Hungarian realities, and therefore may have lived there for some time; now we know that he had lived in Lido and Tours and been to the Near East. Perhaps more: Professor Jasinski suggests a possible candidate for the Gallus identity: a Venetian scholar named Cerbanus Cerbani, of whom we know that he served as a Greek-Latin translator in Constantinople, and later in Hungary, that he wrote in a style very similar, not to say, plagiaristic of the author of the Translation of San Nicolo, and that he disappeared from view just about the time when Gallus Anonymus may have arrived in Poland.

Other clues have been found to the story. Gallus’ Cronicae become more personal when they reach about the year 1106 (he suddenly writes things like ‘we have seen’ etc.) In that year, a Hungarian refugee prince, Almos, arrived in Poland. Did Gallus arrive in Poland with him? Then the chronicle appears to break off, unfinished, about the year 1113. In that year, Almos was lured back to Hungary, where he was treacherously blinded and some of his retinue put to death by his brother, Coloman I The Book Lover. Was Gallus among those killed? If so, this would be doubly ironic: in Cronicae Gallus praises Coloman as ‘more educated in literary sciences than any of the kings who lived in his age’; and the prince for whom he had written his most famous work, Boleslaw Krzywousty (Wrymouth), had dethroned and blinded his own brother, Zbigniew; and pilgrimaged to holy sites in Hungary to expiate the sin.

Ealier this year I have visited the church and monastery of San Nicolo in Lido, where I have seen documentation of the opening of the San Nicolo casket. Beside the bones of the saint, it contained various items – coins, jewelry, and so forth, and a beautiful bowl in Chinese white and blue, with the Arabic inscription: ‘at first, the science is bitter, but with time it becomes sweeter than honey’. The scholarly commentary for the piece said that it had been executed by someone who was apparently illiterate in Arabic. No word, alas, on whether the painter could have been Chinese. Now here is a real mystery.

Safe to listen to

Azzolino Bernardino della Ciaja, Siena 1671 - Pisa 1725, was a harpsichordist, organist, organ builder, and a talented composer. As a composer he seems unjustly forgotten. His six sonatas for the keyboard have recently been recorded by Attilio Cremonesi. Cremonesi was once assistant conductor and accompanyist to Rene Jacobs and is today a conductor in his own right; see his recent engagements, including Incoronazzione, here. (I can't believe any artist today may not have his own website). The recording is intelligent and passionate and the instrument has wonderfully rich sonority. The sonatas have a delightfully complex texture. Though some have suggested derivation of Domenico Scarlatti, the style seems to me quite unmistakably Ciaja's own. A delightful, if miserly, 30 second sample can be heard here. Enjoy.

The oddness of Portugal

The word that comes to mind most readily when trying to describe the production of the great Portuguese film director Oliveira is “odd”. Take his film Cannibals, an opera about a man from distant Brazil who wins a singing contest by virtue of singing the strangest song; and thereby he wins the hand of a beautiful maiden; during the nuptial night he reveals his heart-breaking secret: that his arms and legs are artificial. His new wife flees in horror, he sings another strange song and – throws himself in the fireplace, where he roasts to death. In the morning, his brothers in law arrive, and finding no one in the house, in puzzlement take some of the strangely delicious roast on the fireplace.

Odd, but beautiful.

Portuguese architecture is like that, too. Everywhere one sees strange features – shallow arches crossed by columns, rope-like stone decoration of windows, greeting servants in white and blue tile on staircase landings, rounded corner balconies, steep, pointy, Hindu-like domes in red tile, unusual color combinations (e.g. dull pink with pale grey) – which appear unique to Portugal. Somehow, these brilliant Portuguese inventions never emigrated outside of Portugal. Like a population isolated on an island, Portuguese architecture evolved in its own, strange directions. Oddness seems prized. Per plaques which decorate them, the oddest buildings seem to have received highest architectural prizes.

The food is like that, too. At Quinta da Regaleira, the restaurant serves deer chops in purple cream-cranberry sauce. It tastes alright, but looks surprisingly beautiful. How was it, asks the waiter, named (oddly) Nelson. “Strange”, I said, “but good.” “Ah, yes,” said Nelson. “Try this: roast a rabbit in vegetables with cinnamon and saffron. Then add three leaves of fresh mint”. “My God!”, I said, “that sounds odd!” “Yes!” he said with a victorious smile. “I was glad to invent it.”

More about the nun

Mme Cyr says further – a propos the fact that for centuries a debate ranged among scholars as to whether the Portuguese Nun’s Letters had been written by her or rather by a man – that women have been denied the right to speak. In this she picks up the favorite argument of the femlib movement. There is something to it: some (male) scholars’ insistence that the author could not possibly be a woman does seem to betray a strong wish that she should not have been. But the general remark makes no sense: whoever had written the letters, man or woman, they were published – and made a stir – precisely as the production of a woman. Apparently, there was no social barrier to a woman’s literary success in 1666.

(Besides, the relationship between gender rights and gender publication is completely made up: in male chauvinist Victorian England more women published than men).

But to the point.

Mme Cyr then adds, a propos the Brooklyn Seamstress who had found her feelings helpfully expressed by the letters, that such exclusion from literature has meant a kind of crippling of the whole sex, leaving, as it were, women uncertain how to feel. But then, given that the feelings of the letters may not really be those of the seamstress, but only put on, one wonders whether such publications are in fact a good thing.

For centuries now young privileged people have read Marx and been worked up by him into white fury about social injustice which they themselves did not actually experience. Their feelings of personal frustration – perhaps with parental authority or lack of sexual fulfillment – were channeled by a craftily crafted book into feelings of revolutionary fervor. But the so-called revolutionary class consciousness, which they thereby acquired, being proletarian consciousness, is false – cannot be anything but false – in upper middle class youth: it is not their consciousness at all.

Just so the Portuguese nun’s love may not be the Brooklyn Seamstress’ love, either; by putting it on, the seamstress may not be adopting the correct diagnosis of her ills, and therefore not getting at all closer to a cure; and the book, by offering wrong diagnosis of her ills, may in fact be reducing any prospect of improvement.

Books are dangerous things. If we are to read like this – impose their creations upon us – perhaps we better not read at all?

The Portuguese Nun

Myriam Cyr, who performed the letters of the Portuguese Nun in New York, writes in the introduction to her book on the same, about a seamstress from Brooklyn who came to her after one of her performances in tears. "She was going through a painful break up and Mariana's letters had given her the words to describe everything she felt but had not been able to express until now." Two thoughts suggest themselves:

The seamstress is like many, perhaps most, humans: she does not know how she actually feels. It's hard to manage one's life as a result; and practically impossible to be happy (unless the happiness come by accident).

So, to put some shape on her feelings, she borrows the words of others. She feels that these words express her own feelings well, but, since she's not in great touch with her feelings, who knows whether this is actually the case? Who knows whether the words, by expressing pain, and sounding nice, do not bamboozle her into thinking that she feels what the words express, while in fact what she feels would be better expressed by, say, the Lisbon-Sintra line timetable?

The Sleepiness of Lisbon

The state of soporific exhaustion which overcomes one here is perhaps the result of the goodness of the environment. There are no unpleasant stimuli which force the system to respond or defend: the temperature, lovely at 9, never seems to rise beyond what is wonderfully comfortable; nor fall at night; there is no traffic noise during the day, and no karaoke noise at night; there are no mosquitoes; in the street there are no crowds; in shops no one seems to care to sell a thing. All systems slip into idle. One yawns. It is time for siesta.

At first glance all Portuguese seem to live in this lazy, slow-motion state, like flies in ointment. Asked whether they feel soporific, they would probably ask to be explained what that means; explained, they would probably nod and say that in Portuguese it is called Saudade.

In Morocco, the climate explains religion; in Portugal, poetry.

The Loneliness of Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai, one of the multimillion cohort of Indians whose first language is English, feels alienated and sees her alienation a result of being a foreign language speaker in her own country. By this measure, of course, most Indians are foreign language speaker in that they do not speak Hindi as their first language. Yet, though no doubt some of them feel alienated also, many do not, just as many Indian English speakers do not.

Kiran Desai, I submit, feels alienated because it is her nature to feel alienated.

Kiran’s argument is more sophisticated than that of the Moroccan lady I discussed here earlier. Kiran ascribes her alienation not to the (presumed) demeaning function of agreeing (being compelled?) to speak to the Bwanas in the Bwanas' language, but to the fact that while, growing up in the Himalayan foothills, she experienced a kind of forking of consciousness: she found her body in the Indian hills ("reality") while her mind dwelt in the English flatlands ("novels"). Those English flatlands were of course not accessible to those around her without the literature bug. This -- she feels -- made her “odd”: it made it impossible for her to share her inner world with the physical persons around her.

But her condition is not different in this regard from that of others with oddball interests: that of a Pole in Poland who loves the opera, or an American in America who plays role playing games. However that a tragically felt sense of alienation must result from this condition is not immediately apparent. It could, of course, if one has the proclivity to feel alienated to begin with. But then a person with the proclivity will manage to feel alienated in all and any circumstances; and if he or she is intelligent, won't lack for presumed external reasons to blame for the condition.

This proclivity to feel alienation is no more than the obverse of the so called desire to belong.

This appears to be a strong desire with some people. I am not sure, however, what the term “to belong” might mean. The concept seems to me a muddle. The fact that we instinctively assume that we know what it means, and react to it emotionally, only hides from us the obvious truth that the phrase, simply put, means nothing. Consider this quote from Illakowiczowna, returning to Poland after 6 years of exile during WW2:

"This (experience) cannot be compared to anything else on earth, believe me: that every encountered man is familiar, that he greets us, smiles, gets angry in our way. That one wants nothing from these people: no profit, no popularity, not even decent treatment; that one desires nothing except that they exist, and that they be familiar."

The term familiar appears to mean here a certain state of Illakowiczowna's mind; it is hard to see how the ability to reach it can be anything other than a property of her own mind.