Some ways of thinking about conventional values

1

You are such a mystery, Circe said to me.

I am. We are a mystery to each other.

To me, her way of thinking about life is a mystery. She appears wholly conventional, prepared to accept all the usual values -- family + social status -- as they are, without questioning, without doubt. In this, she is just like most women I have known: it never seemed to occur to any of them to doubt whether there really was any value in having children or acquiring a club membership.

Yet, compared to those women, Circe is an intellectual giant. That her view of life is no different from that of the others mystifies me since I automatically associate exceptional intelligence and broad reading with daring non-conforming, with non-conventionalism. Clearly mistakenly.

2

In accepting the conventional view of life, Circe remains in touch with the world: she understands others well, while I do not. It is me who looks at the conduct of others and shakes his head in amazement. Why, I ask myself, do they bother? To me, people appear to work so very hard for pseudo rewards: a better car, the front row pews, an invitation to a exclusive but boring vernisage. Sometimes I suspect that the difference between their motivation and mine lies in the difference of our heads; a difference akin to that between different species -- since I seem to understand peacocks -- and tigers -- better than men.

3

The reverse of the coin is that Circe does not understand me. How can you just pick up and leave? How can you not care to be famous? How can anyone not care to attain an exalted social position? How can you live a life which does not amount to anything (socially)? How can you not want to make a contribution? And your mother, your mother...

Then, when I try to explain to her how I feel about these things, something strange happens: she disagrees with me in an abrupt and final sort of way, peremptorily closing the discussion; though she says otherwise, she does not actually wish to understand my point of view. The finality of her disagreement makes me wonder if it is a sign of anxiety -- of a kind of hidden, sneaky uncertainty about her principles. Perhaps deep down she intuits that they are a sham, a house without foundation?

4

My mother did the same thing to me, when I shared with her my doubts about certain established values. Sometimes it is better not to think like that, she said to me with the same finality which I now see in Circe. And I know that my mother did it out of fear -- out of fear that such conversation might undermine her house of cards; cause it to collapse about her ears; and that she would then find out that all her life's successes have been -- empty.

5

The trouble is, it seems to me, that the reverse is the real danger: that it is far worse not to think like that. That by not thinking like that -- not challenging the usual values -- we sentence ourselves to living dull, stupid, unhappy lives and one day finding ourselves with achievements which mean nothing. We find ourselves successful and -- miserable.

6

Nahedeh was case in point: committed to the social values of her class -- family, work, money, social position, reputation, titles, skills -- and successful at practicing them, she was utterly miserable with them. She had the urges of an adventurer, a highwayman-poet, an artist in a Montmartre garret, a wayward woman; but they seethed under a heavy, unbreakable crust of middle class values. She stifled; she was miserable; she knew it, yet she could do nothing about it. She realized her values were not suitable for her and that they made her miserable, but her values were stronger than her, she could not rise above them: she could doubt them but she could never reject them.

As a result, she lived in a city she hated, in a country she hated, a life she hated -- giving social functions which bored her to tears, shuttling her children from private school to piano lessons; in a sexless marriage with a man prone to wining. All of this for the satisfaction of being somebody. Somebody in other people's eyes, of course; those which did not see the misery of her inner life. A misery she saw all too clearly every day of her life.

7

There is a Bacon essay to the effect that such people live by other people's opinions: they direct their lives towards other people's appreciation despite personal discomfort and displeasure. (They in fact turn to others, saying "Say, I am happy, aren't I?")

This is significant coming from Bacon because he was an avid social climber himself. In his essay he wrote, basically, that it sucks to be a highly placed official and that only those who aren't one can think it is a great thing. Yet, like Nahedeh, he persisted with the life about which he said openly that it was not satisfying!

What was the man thinking? Was he lying, perhaps? Was he in fact only pretending not to enjoy the pleasures of being a highly placed official? Was it a kind of philosophical pretense? Perhaps no more than a pretty disguise for his burning ambition?

8

Unlike Nahedeh, my friend Circe does not seem unhappy. Thus, perhaps Bacon was not, either, then.

But unlike Bacon, Circe is unable -- or unwilling -- to understand my thoughts. I wonder whether this is a meaningful difference. Does she not think Bacon's thoughts because, once having thought them, she could not, unlike Bacon, live the conventional life despite them?

After all, does she perhaps read my reports of my life with such interest precisely because she would rather live my kind of life than the successful life she had built for herself according to the conventional values? If so, does she know it? No, she can't. If she knew it, she would not read this stuff because she would realize how dangerous it is. Dangerous to her life: it could seduce her. She could fall from success into adventure.

So she manages an interesting trick: she reads about my life with interest, but chooses not to understand the motivation behind it.

Mr Zelenka's fame

Jan Dismas Zelenka's Missa votiva (E-minor), ZWV 18 is quite good. A competent performance by Collegium 1704 and Colegium Vocale 1704, under Vaclav Luks (available on Amazon) has been on the Czech and Polish radio lately. Mr Zelenka is another rediscovered composer, rediscovery being a bit of an industry with the ancient music lot nowadays. This Czech -- a little older than Bach -- lived and composed most of his life in Dresden and was thus Bach's neighbor. In a letter to Forkel CPE states that Zelenka was one of the composers J. S. Bach admired most; some think JS may have studied Zelenka's masses when working on his B-minor. Most of Zelenka's compositions have not yet been recorded, but one hopes the excellent Mr Luks and his ensemble will see to that.

The PR2 commentator asks why such good music could have been so totally forgotten and suggests the usual explanation -- offered also to explain the great forgetting of JS himself -- that it was composed in the old style (baroque) just when style was undergoing change (classicism). There is something to that, I suppose -- a change of style can be accompanied by vicious hounding, such as baroque architecture underwent in late 1700's, which destroys all, the good with the bad, but another explanation is probably closer to the truth: that neither Zelenka, nor JS, were particularly famous in their day. Neither had major royal sponsors, for example (unlike Dufay, or Mozart); neither was a famous child progeny (unlike Dufay, or Mozart), neither was a great commercial success in his day (unlike Dufay, or Mozart); in short, neither was famous for the sort of reason for which one becomes famous. One suspects that both were well known only in the narrow society of professional musicians.

The truth is that fame grows out of fame. Those who become famous in their lifetime tend to remain famous -- whether justly (Bellini, Mozart) or unjustly (Delacroix, Munch). Discoveries of unjustly forgotten are rare, as are forgettings of unjustly famous. For all we know, Madonna and Hirst are here to stay. There is no justice in fame and future generations are no more just than the contemporaries.

Fearing death (2)

My oldest memory is of drowning. People tell me that I can't possibly remember it since I was only two and a half at the time: I fell in some shallow water by the river's edge where I had been playing. I remember air bubbles flying up in the bright yellow water before me. I seem to remember thinking -- "so this is it, this is how it feels". This last can't possibly be a memory, it must be a kind of soundtrack added later, perhaps taken from a rather serious car accident in which I was later, as an adult.

My second memory is of waking up crying at night. I was perhaps four or five and had been put to sleep in my god-mother's room. The room had thick curtains and I was not used to sleeping in darkness that deep. My mother came to ask what troubled me. "Is it true that I am going to have to die?" I asked through tears. She answered wisely, not giving me the usual crap about immortal soul and heaven, but saying simply: yes, but it is a very long time before you have to worry about it." That calmed me; but though I have never feared death since then as a result, I have not stopped thinking about it; I have taken the awareness of my death as a kind of reminder that I am not allowed to waste my time. A kind of goad: that I must get done what I mean to do; that I must do it now.

The thing is: unlike most people, I have decided that the thing I must do before I die is not write a great American novel; or start a great political movement; or win the Nobel peace prize; or make any other important contribution to the lives of others; but make an important contribution to mine, the sort of contribution no one else would care to, or be able to make: be happy.

Fearing Death (1)

The frequency with which one experiences anxiety about his mortality seems to be -- at least in my case -- counter-proportional to the frequency with which one experiences happiness.

When I was younger I was frequently unhappy: in part because my economic condition obliged me to waste untold swathes of time on things which made me miserable -- such as gainful employment or living in substandard housing, in ugly cities, in bad climate; but also in part, because as an European, I suffered from the European disease of unhappiness: this consists in either not realizing that great and noble ideas do not lead to happiness; or realizing it and yet willfully preferring great ideas over one's own happiness; or both. So I lived in ugly cities, wore indifferent clothes, ate tasteless food, and worried about the Bolsheviks or high culture or moral principles instead of pleasure; a better recipe for misery would be difficult to concoct.

Throughout this period I frequently thought about my death. I did not exactly fear death itself having intuited, even before I read it, Epicure's argument that where we are, there is no death, and where there is death we are no more. But I was loath to let go of this miserable life; I told myself that I needed to make something of it before it ran out. That overwhelming sense that life was running out is your clue: an unhappy person worries about dying because he is afraid that life will end before he or she has had the opportunity to be happy.

As I neared my retirement I became obsessed with the thought that I might be accidentally killed by a bus when crossing the street and what a waste that would be if I were to die before I reached the goal and managed to retire (and finally live the life I had always wanted). Of course that was nonsense: my life then consisted of nothing but hateful, stupid, endless work, under very heavy stress; it was a life not worth living; a well aimed blow of a bus would have been an act of mercy.

Paradoxically, now that I am retired and live an interesting life in pretty places in a state of more or less constant contentment, I never think of death, and I certainly do not fear it. Even though I should, since now I actually do stand something to lose. Yet, I appear to think that I have had my happiness; whether this happy state continues simply does not seem to matter. I am ready to go anytime. Perhaps because having been so intensely happy for so long, I do not have the sense that I have wasted my life.

Or perhaps because so few things seem matter at all now. Is it going to rain? Well, I'll go to a museum. Has Miss so-and-so decided to stand me up? Well, no one will prevent me from reading a book this afternoon then. The world stock markets are collapsing? Let them. Early retirement insulates you from the world so effectively that the world simply stops to matter.

This is most curious: why should the unhappy fear death and the happy not? Perhaps fear of death really is no such thing at all; no more than a name we put on the cumulative frustrations of an unhappy life. Perhaps the fear of death is really not the fear that our life will end, but fear that our life will never get better.

The case of the hunchback's issue (with the owner of a straight back)

Honest conversations about important things are not possible. Take beauty: those who are disadvantaged in that area will deny that it has objective value and argue till they're blue in the face that it is socially constructed; why, they will even claim that it is somehow immoral (all those beautiful selfish people in TV dramas). And one can't very well tell them that it is important (and that therefore they are crucially handicapped) or that moral condemnation of beauty is vicious (and that therefore they are mean): one can't say these things and expect the acquaintance -- or even the conversation -- to last. It is like joking about domestic violence: such jokes are funny to me because I do not know domestic violence first hand; but I have lost friends for having most innocently told such jokes. It isn't so much that I was being indelicate (how on earth was I supposed to know about their papa and mama), but that they hold my health against me in the same way in which the ugly hold our beauty against us. In Polish one calls it the case of the hunchback's issue with the straight back.

A Chinese porcelain chalice and paten for Japan

The quality of Fundação Medeiros e Almeida's collection in Lisbon is on par with the Gulbenkian's: there is not a single item here which is not a masterpiece. Though the website advises helpfully that it takes an hour to see the whole place; and some people apparently manage it in less (by the draft of their passage, I was made aware of some figures gliding past me without apparently slowing down at all); I was barely done after four. Closing time brought me up short rudely, but no doubt also saved my life: I went straight home and packed myself off to bed with that kind of emotional exhaustion one might feel after an 18-hour love making marathon: I was bushed.

Of the many wonderful pieces there, one has been with me day and night since: a Chinese blue and white cup and saucer, extremely finely and beautifully potted, of unusual size and shape. The shape is undeniably oriental but the size larger than any category of either Japanese or Chinese drinking vessel: it does not seem to fit into any occasion of oriental life. The decoration reveals why: both the cup and the saucer feature Christ crucified and beneath The Virgin and St John ("mother, this is your son; son, this is your mother"). The figures on the vessels are striking: the Virgin wears a Japanese court dress and both Jesus and John have the shaved pates and loose long hair of ochimusha, or "former samurai". This is enough to identify the set as a Portuguese Jesuit chalice and paten ordered in China for use in Japan.

It is porcelain because Japanese Christians would have found gold or silver too vulgar by half to receive the Lord's Blood. (The most precious implements of the time were porcelain used in tea-ceremony, which is, if you think about it, a lot like the Holy Mass: take this and drink of it, this is my tea). And the men are ochimusha -- their shaved pates indicate their samurai origin while the loose long hair indicates that they have left the military life, or -- "left the world"; in other words, while they are religious, they are also of aristocratic birth. In Japan the Portuguese presented themselves as an aristocratic warrior society, which the Japanese found easy to understand, relate to, and respect. (Harping on Jesus' woodcutter origins was just not cutting any ice).

The history of Jesuits in Asia is a history of cultural cross-dressing. Mateo Ricci in China originally tried to copy the dress and shaved heads of Chinese Buddhist monks, thereby hoping to steal automatically into the respected position of priesthood by the mere dint of donning a dress; but they soon discovered that while this did earn them some automatic respect with the lower orders, it also earned them disrespect of the religiously skeptic and overtly anti-Buddhist mandarin class. So, Ricci soon adopted the Confucian dress and called his teaching Xiyangxue, or western studies -- to avoid calling it something disagreeable -- like, god forbid, religion.

Likewise in Japan, the Jesuits found, there was nothing to be gained by adopting the Buddhist style; but, au contraire, a lot to be gained by adopting the aristocratic and military manner. This of course came easily to the Jesuits who were by and large of aristocratic background and who had been founded by a former soldier and along military lines.

One does wonder, however, who tricked whom, the Portuguese the Japanese or the other way around? Portuguese Jesuits did not seem to need any encouragement to adopt Japanese cultural practices, tea ceremony included. The chalice and paten at the Almeida may as much be a sign of Jesuits exploiting Japanese cultural conventions to press their message as Japanese civilization subverting the Portuguese Jesuit mind: perhaps the Portuguese Jesuit who had ordered it really did come to the conclusion that gold was too vulgar a vessel to receive the Holy Blood.

When I think of all the complex ways in which this piece fits into European, Chinese and Japanese cultural realities of the time, how they mix and clash in it, I am rendered speechless. I am surprised and delighted by the richness of its associations.

And delighted by my own scholarship.

*

PS. See this for some interesting examples of Jesuit Asian art. I find the Mughal Virgin especially touching: appropriately to the requirements of Persian painting genres, she holds in her hand a book of Persian poetry. In the absence of the photo of the Almeida chalice and paten (not to be photographed, God forbid that anyone should see our collection), I reproduce her here.

Also, see Yoshitomo Okamoto, The Namban Art of Japan, Tokyo 1972, p. 14o, for a grainy black and white photo of a makie-e chalice now in the Fujitsugu Azuma collection.

PPS. Some Japanese TV executives in town; when told about the Namban art here, they said Asoka? Amazing: they didn't care.

World class bad performers

The Unholy Trinity of ancient music is: Koopman (dull), Herreweghe (dull and weird), and Hantaï (bad). The last played lately the Brandenburg fifth on Mezzo -- and played it very badly indeed. The keyboard solo was telling: the fast bits were passable, but the slow bits were terrible.

Paradoxically, it is actually easier to play fast than slowly: most ears are not as good at catching details at speed, and, at any rate, the fastness of the technique (especially when one can barely see the fingers flashing in the air) impresses; a so-so player playing fast can get away with a lot of garbage; it is when the keyboard plays slowly that we notice that the performers tempi are odd, he attacks the notes falsely, etc. -- all the tiny little nuances which take a lot longer to master than speed alone.

The same is the case with composition: it is far easier to compose an impressive fast piece. Like Ciaja's 6th sonata: lots of running passages plus frequent hand crossings amaze, thereby effectively hiding from the ear that the music is actually wholly uninspired.

PS Mondonville's violin sonatas, recorded by Leonhardt, are quite good.

PPS. How do fellows like Hantai manage to make such brilliant careers? Don't people hear that they are lousy?

Also safe to listen to

Krzysztof Meyer's Mass for Mixed Choir and Organ (1987-92, somewhat more radical Oedipus Rex); Piotr Perkowski's Sinfonietta (1927, to the far right of Prokoffiev); Florent Schmitt (his oddball La tragédie de Salomé, 1907, clearly inspired the Rite of Spring, even if Stravinsky later denied it; his Antoine and Cleopatra is pure Stravinsky, whatever the Russian says); and Bruno Maderna Liriche su Verlaine (1946-47), songs accompanied by piano, are all very good.

I saw the last last year at the conservatory in Venice, played by two women: a boy-like, thin, tall short-haired Russian blonde was the pianist; she was manly and businesslike, a little brusque; while a big-haired, full-bodied Romanian sang the soprano; she was tender and feminine and sweet, fleshy-lipped, pure softness and eros. The two were well matched musically, too. It was one of those rare moments when simply everything goes right and general rapture results. The conservatory did not allow the performance to be recorded: the conservatory is not interested in either helping their students or promoting the repertoire. Damned fools.

But never mind that: what I wanted to say is that there is so much music to discover; it seems endless; every week I discover something new and excellent; why we all keep playing the same old, limited repertoire is not clear; that anyone could say X is the best based on such a small sampling as most of us, even the most erudite, know seems silly; that anyone would dare compose anything -- propose to add to this unnumbered, bottomless pit -- seems ludicrous. For all we know, it has already been done: all one needs to do is look around.

As in literature and philosophy, it has probably all been said already.

A day in the library

Edmund de Unger, the owner of this miniature (which is a leaf of Shah Thamasp’s Shah Nama, read about it here, read it here, see pages from various manuscripts here), was born into a Hungarian aristocratic family. His father was an Oriental carpet collector and his first drawings as a child were – carpet designs. His father’s collection died a dramatic death: during the 1945 fighting for Budapest, Russians buried their dead in them. One couldn’t very well object: they were, after all, war heroes. (And a carpet makes a fitting shroud for heroes, for sure).

After the communist take-over, Unger fled to the UK where for a time he served as a gentleman’s gentleman (literally) while studying for a barrister’s degree. He then joined British imperial foreign service and it is there that he caught the lustre-ware bug. It all went from there. Though it was probably inevitable: a collector is born a collector, Unger says, what he collects is a matter of accident – stamps, bottle caps, Old Masters.

(Certainly, this not the case with me: my collections are not collections at all. They are just assemblies of beautiful object of every category and description, since they do not follow any scheme at all -- no category, nor period, nor genre. Clearly, I am not a collector in the same sense as Unger. Nor in another: I do not care if my possessions are authentic; only if they are beautiful).

Still, I do understand something of de Unger’s pleasure: he recalls fondly falling asleep deliciously while counting his friend’s Qing pieces. It has happened to me.

Asked his favourite oriental carpet design he says without hesitation "Mamluk", because, no matter how many times one stares at one, he says, one always discovers something new. I understand this, too: I, too, am slave to complexity. Says who complexity is not a source of pleasure?

*

I found the interview in the most recent issue of Hali ("carpets, textiles and Islamic arts" -- where has this beauty been all my life?). There I also find other treasures; like the advertisement, by Azer Ilme, a carpet weaving and marketing company of Azerbaijan (see some of their offerings here), that they have managed to reproduce a Shehi Safi carpet (last examples of this wonder were made in the 16th century, back when Azris still spoke an Iranian dialect); and an article on the paracas carpets of Peru.

These last date to sometime between the 1st Century BC and 4th century AD. They were used to wrap the dead who were then buried in elaborate necropolises in the Paracas peninsula, Peru. Julio Tello discovered the necropolises in the early 1900´s when he noticed very strange -- and beautiful -- carpets for sale in the markets of Lima and followed the grave robbers to their source. The colors of the surviving carpets have been beautifully preserved in the dry darkness of the graves; we know nothing about the civilization that made them, or why they made them, or what the designs mean, but they look as if they had been died and woven only yesterday.

The Russians, wrapping their war dead in Persian carpets, were simply rediscovering what the people of Paracas had discovered long before them: that a carpet makes a fitting shroud for the dead. I should make a note of it: I too want to be buried in a richly woven carpet.

(All this for a mere afternoon at the library. Can you imagine? And they say reading does not have a future).

Post scriptum

On a later day at the library I discover that burying the dead wrapped in carpets was an ancient Scythian custom. (This touches me deeply: I am supposedly of Scythian descent). The oldest extant European carpet comes from a Siberian Scythian burial.

The real estate lesson of the Palacio de Queluz

The Palacio de Queluz, the last royal palace of Potugal, is really quite pretty, marrying the quaint oddness of Portugal with the international French neocolonialism in delightful ways. Especially nice is the ceiling art, in some places couched in unorthodox-shaped domes vaguely reminiscent of bathroom fixtures. And the management is good: the cerberi leave you alone and you can photograph to your heart's content. The garden, however, is disappointing: not because the statuary is lousy (garden statuary almost always is), but because of the immense roar of traffic from the freeway which loops right around it; and to, a lesser degree, because of the occasional disconcerting sights of the boxy bedroom community which has sprawled over the surrounding hills. Let this be a lesson to you: when the kings chose this place, it was a remote hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere. It was cool to say "I'm off to Queluz" because it meant something like "I'm off to chop wood". Now, two hundred years later, the erstwhile lodge finds itself in the middle of the peripherique. You would not want to go on record actually saying that you live in Queluz, even if it were to say that you live at the royal palace. Where is your country place? your friends might ask. Oh, never mind, you might answer, trying to make it sound mysterious rather than embarrassed. The lesson? Be careful when you open new territory. The ensuing development doesn't always raise real estate values.

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.