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Today I was riding home on the subway after a loooong day of Monday office work. I was drawing in my little book when a friendly stranger asked me about the drawing I was working on (which was the surreal cartoon about modern dystopia which is pictured above). Uncharacteristically we started talking about dystopean fiction…and then the other people in the train joined in the conversation about favorite works of epic heroic fantasy, and Jungian archetypes, and science fiction as it relates to day-to-day society. It was quite amazing and restored my faith in the world. As ever, I was particularly impressed by Millennial-age people (by which I mean the cohort of younger American adults–not 1000-year-old-humans) who are much-maligned in turgid journals, but who strike me as polite, eager-to-learn, funny, and kind. Anyway, the cartoon is about the unfortunate direction which society is going in at present (and it pokes fun at the inane yet somehow compelling Kevin Costner science-fiction movie), however my unexpected book talk with strangers on a train makes me think the world might be headed in a much better direction!
I wanted to share with you a glimpse back into history to one of the most peculiar and specialized cities of western history. During the middle ages, monasticism was a vast and powerful cultural force. Indeed, in certain times and places, it may have been the principal cultural force in a world which was painfully transforming from the slave society of classical antiquity into the modern kingdom states of Europe.
West of the Alps, the great monastic order was the Benedictine order, founded by Saint Benedict of Nursia, a Roman nobleman who lived during the middle of the 6th century. “The Rule of Saint Benedict” weds classical Roman ideals of reason, order, balance, and moderation, with Judeo-Christian ideals of devotion, piety, and transcendence. The Benedictine Order kept art, literature, philosophy, and science (such as it was) alive during the upheavals of Late Antiquity and the “Dark Ages”–the brothers (and sisters) were the keepers of the knowledge gleaned by Rome and Greece. The monks also amassed enormous, wealth and power in Feudal European society. The greatest abbots were equivalent to feudal lords and princes commanding enormous tracts of land and great estates of serfs.
Nowhere was this more true than in Cluny, in east central France (near the Swiss Alps), where Duke William I of Aquitaine founded a monastic order with such extensive lands and such a generous charter that it grew beyond the scope of all other such communities in France, Germany, northern Europe, and the British Isles. The Duke stipulated that the abbot of the monastery was beholden to no earthly authority save for that of the pope (and there were even rules concerning the extent of papal authority over the abbey), so the monks were free to choose their own leader instead of having crooked 2nd sons of noblemen fobbed off on them.
Additionally, the monastery created a system of “franchise monasteries” called priories which reported to the authority of the main abbot and paid tithes to Cluny. This wealth allowed Cluny to become a veritable city of prayer. The building, farming, and lay work was completed by serfs and retainers, while the brothers devoted themselves to prayer, art, scholarship, and otherworldly pursuits…and also to politics, statecraft, administration, feasting, and very worldly pursuits (since the community became incredibly ric)h. The chandeliers, sacred chalices, and monstrances were made of gold and jewels, and the brothers wore habits of finest cloth (and even silk).
The main tower of the Basilica towered to an amazing 200 meters (656 feet of height) and the abbey was the largest building in Europe until the enlargement of St. Peter’s Basilica in the 17th century. At its zenith in the 11th and 12th century, the monastery was home to 10,000 monks. The abbots of Cluny were as powerful as kings (they kept a great townhouse in Paris), and four abbots later became popes. At the top of the page I have included a magnificent painting by the great urban reconstruction artist, Jean-Claude Golvin, who painstakingly reconstructs vanished and destroyed cities of the past as computer models and then as sumptuous paintings. Just look at the scope of the (3rd and greatest) monastery and the buildings around it.
Such wealth also engendered decadence and corruption. Later abbots were greedy and incompetent. They oppressed the farmers and craftspeople who worked for them and tried to cheat the merchants and bankers they did business with. The monastery fell into a long period of decline which ended (along with the ancien regime, about which similar things could be said) during the French Revolution. Most of the monastery was burnt to the ground and only a secondary bell tower and hall remain. Fortunately the greatest treasures of Cluny, the manuscripts of the ancient and the medieval world, were copied and disseminated. The most precious became the centerpiece of the Bibliothèque nationale de France at Paris, and the British Museum also holds 60 or so ancient charters (because they are good at getting their hands on stuff like that).
We can still imagine what it must have been like to live in the complex during the high middle ages, though, as part of a huge university-like community of prayer, thought, and beauty. it was a world of profound lonely discipline tempered with fine dining, art, and general good living–an vanished yet eternal city of French Monastic life.
It has been a little while since we featured a post about augury. Here is a beautiful etching from the 18th century which shows an augur interpreting a flight of birds to the Latin King Numa Pompilius. The etching was made by Bernhard Rode somewhere around 1768-1769. Notice Numa Pompilius’ crown on the ground beside the king. Additionally you should take note of the augur’s lituus (a mysterious implement of prophecy which was the subject of a previous post). I am told that the oracle found auspicious designs within the flight of the birds and greatly pleased the king. Unfortunately I cannot interpret the future through such a fashion, however if you have questions about the future (or anything else) which require expert divination, you should head over to “The Great Flounder” and ask the magical psychic flatfish your innermost questions.
From afar, Dubai has always struck me as disgusting (indeed the Gulf States as a whole raise my hackles). It is a society where the super-rich who can purchase the good graces of the Sultan (or whatever rinky-dink title their life autocrat styles for himself) can literally do anything to anybody without any consequences. It is a slave state built on the suffering of others–mostly Indian and Pakistani workers who are bamboozled to come over and then worked to death in the oppressive heat or robbed by goons working for the aristocracy. It is a petro-state in which the oceans of wealth come from one and only one industry (a dangerous and supremely problematic industry at that). The flagrant & ostentatious Muslim extremism which is such a feature of life in the Middle East is much on display, but naturally the opprobrious strictures of the faith do not apply to the wealthy, and Mohammed’s lessons of compassion, self-discipline, and striving seem to be lost on his most outspoken followers in the middle and lower tiers of society (who read the divine poetry of the Koran and find only reasons that they are better than everybody else and excuses to abuse outsiders at their will). Also, the whole place is in a sweltering desert. It is what the United States aspires to be in the era of Donald Trump: a fundamentalist kleptocracy with lots of ugly towers where the sordid pleasures of the few eclipse the suffering of the many.
But what pleasures they are! Today’s essay is a work of bemused praise for Dubai (sorry if that purpose got a bit, um, muddled in the first paragraph up there). The crazed rulers of the place have built one of the world’s most lavish pleasure gardens: the Dubai Miracle Garden. The garden is indeed a miracle, since it is built on a reclaimed desert. It is also a miracle of gardening artifice so formal, disciplined, and rigid, that it almost looks synthetic. Indeed it looks very synthetic: as though Mickey Mouse ate a lot of cheap candy and barfed on the set of Blade Runner.
Opened on Valentine’s Day in 2013 the Dubai Miracle Garden is allegedly the world’s largest flower garden (as opposed to larger less densely planted parks, or the flower fields of Holland or Africa). With over 109 million blooming plants covering 72,000 square meters (about 18 acres), it certainly sounds like the most densely planted garden. The flowers are built into pavilions, buildings, and colossal sculptures like some nightmare from Jeff Koontz.
To my eye, the plants of the Dubai pleasure garden mostly look like flashy annuals. That would be highly appropriate since it is a disposable venue. Every year the gardeners tear everything out and build a whole new world out of flowers. The greatest highlight seems to have been the flower version of the Emirates Airbus A380 (pictures of which are heavily featured in this post). However certain features, like the flower clock and the 850,000 sq ft multistory garage seem to be perennial (I could not tell if the garage was made of flowers too, or of some more prosaic material).
Although I have poked fun at it, I really would like to see the Dubai Pleasure Garden. It is an astonishing accomplishment and the sheer excess gives it a Baroque beauty. Indeed my appetite for extremes makes me want to see all of Dubai (which exemplifies the same excessive style), but I feel like I might have burned some bridges in that respect with this selfsame blog post. Fortunately, if I wait around, Brooklyn will probably look the same in 20 years. Since I doubt I am going to become an oligarch, I might even get the opportunity to build the Brooklyn Miracle Garden with my own two hands as Jared Kushner or some such cruel overseer master gardener directs with the whip long flower pointer.
I’m sorry that my posts were a bit exiguous the last couple of weeks. A whole host of summer events showed up all at once on the docket (and summer is the slowest season for blog readership anyway), but I didn’t mean to write so infrequently. To get back to form, let’s present a classic topic which reappears again and again in these pages—snake deities. Ferrebeekeeper has presented some of the great snake deities from throughout world history: Nüwa, the benevolent creator goddess of China; Apep, the awesome universe snake god of darkness from Ancient Egypt; the Rainbow Serpent who is the central figure from the Australian aborigines’ dreamtime; Angitia; Ningishzida; and even Lucifer, the adversary from the Bible, who tempted humankind to eat of the forbidden fruit.
Today we visit Fiji, where the greatest god of the islands is Degei. Degei is the creator of the islands, the father (of sorts) to humankind, and the all-knowing judge of the underworld (he throws most souls into a great lake where they gradually sink into a different realm, but he selects a few choice heroes to live forever in Buroto Paradise. He combines the attributes of a great many of the other snake gods we have visited into a single mighty entity.
Degei’s story is of great interest, not just because of its beauty, power, and mystery, but also because of its substantial similarity to other other world creation myths (just read it and see if you don’t lend new credence to some of the strange things that brother Carl had to say about the universality of mythical narratives).
In the beginning, existence was nothing but endless ocean and gloaming. Two entities dwelled within this dawn world: the female hawk Turukawa who flew continuously above the ocean, and the great serpent Degei who dwelled upon the surface.
But eventually Turukawa needed to nest. Degei pushed up islands so that her two eggs would have a safe place for incubation and he heated the eggs with his body and protected them with a father’s love (I suppose you will have to ask questions about paternity to Degei himself since my sources are strangely mute about this key detail). When the eggs hatched, two tiny humans emerged: the first man and the first woman.
Degei created a beautiful garden for these children, planting fruit trees and flowers all around. He housed the two in a vesi tree, but he kept the boy separate from the girl. As they grew up he taught them the secrets of nature and of the ocean and the sky. They had abundant fruit from the banana trees, but he hid two sacred plants from them: the dalo (taro) and the yam. These fruits of the gods were forbidden to the children, for they cannot be eaten without fire (and fire was a special secret of the gods).
However, eventually the children grew into adulthood and met each other and fell in love. To provide for their livelihood they needed more than fruit and flowers, and so they petitioned Degei for the secrets of fire and agriculture. Since they were now adults, he could not in good conscience keep these secrets from them any longer, and so the great serpent taught the children about the forbidden fruits (yams and taro) and how to safely cook them with the flame he presented to humankind. In some respects, this giant reptile almost seems more enlightened about raising children than certain angry creators we could name, but, um, who is to judge right from wrong?
Legend says that Degei still lives in a cave near the summit of the mountain Uluda. Since his descendants have grown so numerous and prosperous, he does not take the same interest in them which he did in the first days. Mostly he eats and sleeps away the long eons of dotage. Yet his power remains awesome. When he grows agitated the world shakes and tsunamis and deluges sweep Fiji.
Sometimes if you aren’t watching the heavens (or the news) closely enough, you miss a major astronomical discovery. For example last summer, astronomers discovered a galaxy which formed only one or two billion years after the Big Bang (so I guess it is unclear whethter I missed this story by one year or by 12 billion). At any rate, the galaxy hunters used the Hubble space telescope to peer through a powerful gravitational lense far away in space. Gravitational lenses are areas where timespace is warped like a huge lense by high-gravity phenomena, and a viewer can use them like a huge lense to see far-away objects. By using the Hubble telescope together with the gravitational lense they were able to see back a dozen billion years in time to the edge of the universe…as it once was not long after creation. What they saw perplexed them.
There is a fundamental difference between galaxies. Galaxies where stars are being formed tend to be blue and spiral shaped (like our own beloved Milky Way!). Galaxies where stars have largely stopped forming are “red and dead” since the remaining stars tend to be long lived red dwarf stars and the bright young (short-lived) blue stars are mostly gone. These red galaxies are not shaped like spirals, but tend to be elliptical shaped (like an egg or a football, not like one of those evil gym machines).
The ancient galaxy at the edge of the universe was neither of those colors or shapes. It was a dense yellow disk. Stars formed in an (enormous) accretion disk but then, for some reason, new star formation stopped. The blue stars burned out (“the light that shines twice as bright etc, etc..”), but the yellow middle aged stars were still burning. The galaxy had three times the mass of the Milky Way but scrunched into a pancake of much smaller area.
So do galaxies always form as disks and then either become self-renewing blue spirals (maybe by colliding with other galaxies or clouds of dust)or dead red footballs? Or was this early yellow disk galaxy an abberation? Or is our own galaxy truly new (well…newish…being only a few billion years old)? I do not understand astrophysics well enough to answer these questions or even formulate them properly (although I get the sense some of these questions may not yet be answered by anyone in any comprehensive way), but I would love to hear what people can add to this rudimentary yet compelling story of shapes and colors.
Here is the Crown of Kazan. It belonged to Ediger Mahmet, the last ruler of the Tartar state of Kazan. The Khanate of Kazan encompassed parts of modern Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Bashkortostan, Mari El, Chuvashia, and Mordovia—rich forested lands at the extreme eastern edge of Europe which abutted the great Central Asian steppe (indeed Kazan was one of the last pieces of the Mongol Empire which had briefly ruled most of Eurasia). After the death of Genghis Khan, the empire shattered into successor states such as the Khanate of the Golden Horde. Kazan emerged from the turmoil as a powerful state between the early 15th and mid 16th centuries AD.
Although it had a strong beginning, Kazan’s later years were a sad story of Russian meddling, interference, and outright assault. The noble houses of Kazan were more interested in fighting each other for control of the kingdom–which grew more ossified and derelict as the Turkic nobles fought one another and ignored the needs of their oppressed peasantry. Their stupidity, weakness, and ridiculous inability to understand the profound threat from Moscow strikes one as hard to believe. Initially, a Russian puppet, Shahghali, was placed on the throne, but, as civil wars broke out, he proved unable to keep the population subdued under the yoke of Moscow as civil war. In August 1552, forces of Ivan the Terrible invaded and annexed the kingdom outright.
(The Kazans Genuflect Before the Tsar)
After Ivan the Terrible took over Kazan, Russian forces slaughtered more than 110,000 of the nobles, soldiers, and peasants. Pro-Russian traitors who had worked insidiously to ensure the defeat of their country were rewarded by being allowed to keep their lands and towers (and, of course, the gold which Ivan had used to buy them off).
Today the Crown of Kazan is found inside the Kremlin armory with early Russian crowns like the Cap of Monomakh as well as crowns from other kingdoms swallowed whole by the insatiable Russian Empire. Here is a picture of Gerhard Schroeder looking bored/horrified (borified?) as Vladimir Putin explains this history to him and tells how Russia weakened and annexed its competitors during the Middle Ages.
The 2018 World Cup continues. We have come, at last, to the semi-final matches and one burning question is on everybody’s mind: “does this thing even have a mascot?” The answer, as it turns out is a resounding “yes”. Exercising uncommon self-restraint, the Russians managed to find a mascot who is not a bear! They didn’t sugarcoat the formidable nature of their vast cold, forested realm though– the mascot of the 2018 Russian Worldcup is a ravening wolf—a wolf wearing special goggles to keep the blood out of his eyes.
The wolf’s name is Zabivaka which means “He who scores goals” or possible “He who accomplishes goals [by means of cunning social media manipulation].” The wolf was the apparently legitimate winner of an apparently legitimate election, and since we are all busy ascertaining what exactly has gone wrong in real elections around the world, we will accept that as a fact (although this wolf beat out a cat and cosmonaut tiger, which hardly seems like the result one would expect from an internet competition).
Clearly, I am poking some fun at Zabivaka (and, um, also at the fact that our national leaders are so pusillanimous and power-hungry that they are happy to let Russia call the shots here in America for less money than Larry Ellison spends on a single dessert), but he really is a cute little wolf. I especially like his gleeful eyes and the wild disheveled (yet naturalistic) look of the fur near his paws. I hope we have some more wolf-mascots soon: he has the fearsome appearance one would expect from a Siberian wolf, yet he is genuinely likable and cuddly too.
Astute observers will note that this post contains almost nothing about actual World Cup soccer (or “football” as it is known in the rest of the world). This is as it should be, since Americans know almost nothing of the sport other than that it takes place with a spherical ball and a great deal of running about. A friend of mine speculates that soccer is slow hockey, but, when we tried to watch a match our attention wondered off before we found out whether this is true (although it snapped back for the thrilling zero-zero finale). Despite this handicap in understanding the game: my predictions from the last post did quite well. Of the 4 teams in the quarterfinals with red uniforms, 3 made it to the semi-finals. Since one of the 4 matches involved two teams with red uniforms pitted against each other, the “reds” had to lose one (likewise there was a match with no red uniforms, which explains how the French “bleus” got the semi-final). I guess I will go on record as saying the winner will wind up being Belgium, since a Belgian friend helped me program my magical online oracle. If this doesn’t sound right to you, you can go to the magical omniscient fish we made and ask it yourself. One of these days we have to see if anybody else has a flounder mascot.
Primates evolved in a forest habitat of many complex colors and shapes where a failure to properly judge depth perception meant painful injury or death. Vision is therefore a paramount sense for monkeys, apes, tarsiers, lemurs, and lorises. Primates are social animals. After evolving highly acute sight and keen color vision, they then evolved to be the most colorful order of mammals. As with cuttlefish and birds of paradise, primate colors carry all sorts of social cues.
We will talk about all of this more (although, to be frank, we have always been talking about it), but today we are concentrating on the color red, which is of enormous importance to most primates because it is involved in status relations and thus in mating. Red is an important color for primates! For example, among mandrills, red coloration of the face correlates directly with a male’s alpha status: the redder the face the more exalted the mandrill. Primatologists have found this pattern vividly true in many species of monkey (and to other very different creatures like octopuses and cardinals, where red holds similar dominance significance). To quote a particularly eye-opening line from Wikipedia, “Red can also affect the perception of dominance by others, leading to significant differences in mortality, reproductive success and parental investment between individuals displaying red and those not.”
Humans beings are primates. I suspect that it is not news to you that red is heavily involved in our own status and sexual selection preferences (for the sake of chivalric euphemism I will hereafter say “romantic” preferences). Although this is readily evident in the red dresses of supermodels, the flashy Ferraris of celebrities, and the power ties of senators, the subconscious sway it holds over our lives is more pervasive than you might realize.
In studies where men rated the general attractiveness of photographs of women, the women wearing red were rated as more desirable, even when the experimenters stacked the deck with pictures of the same women in different colors. The same sort so f experiments revealed similar preferences among women looking at pictures of men. It might be speculated that this has something to do with blushing, blood flow and suchlike visible markers of fertility/interest (although when asked, men said that women in red were more attractive, and women said that men in red were more “dominant”).
Wearing red uniforms has been linked with increased performance in competitions (particularly physical competitions such as sports). Controlled tests revealed that red conferred no physical advantage during non-competitive exercise, so the effect is purely one of perception among opponents, teammates, and referees. Referees and judges seemed to be a particular focus of the psychological effects we are discussing here, rating red-garbed performers much more highly/favorably than similar peers in other outfits.
One needs to pause and think of how much more frequently the hateful Boston Red Sox and the despicable Atlanta Falcons would be justly drubbed if they wore dun uniforms.
All of this might seem like bad news for people without a great deal of red in their wardrobe or in their clubhouse lockers, but there is a counterposing effect too. In studies which involved paying attention and focusing on achievement-type events like the SATs or IQ tests (or essay questions about the Byzantine empire), red proved to be a nuisance and a hindrance. Exposure to red decreased performance during such events (although my source does not say what this constitutes…maybe the experimenters had a huge red flashing light or a ringing red phone or some such gimmick that would unequivocally mess up one’s GREs).
If all of this sounds wrong or suspicious to you, I guess it is the middle of the 2018 World Cup. According to primatologists, Russia, England, Belgium, and Serbia should all win in the quarterfinals (so as long as they are not wearing their white or yellow “beta” uniforms). If that test seems too nonsensical for you, you could always put on a British naval uniform and walk down to the local bar. I would be very curious to learn how your experiment goes, and I will tally up the results as soon as I finish ordering a few new shirts…
Happy Fourth of July! The United States of America turns 242 years old this year (2018). People always talk about how new our nation is, but 242 is pretty venerable by any reasonable standard. When the founding fathers declared independence, France was under the Ancien Régime, China was ruled by the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, and the Ottoman Sultanate was a great world power. Russia was expanding under the enlightened reign of…Catherine the Great! The nascent United States had the idealistic strength of purpose to break from the forms of monarchy and autocracy which held sway around the world and to revisit the ancient, dangerous ideal of democracy–rule by the people for the people (although, admittedly, it was a pretty limited and flawed democracy in those early days…and maybe in these days too). Democracies have always turned upon themselves and blown apart, so the founders were brave/brash to mint a new one in the era of absolutism, but it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams (except maybe for Alexander Hamilton…that guy was a maniac).
I love my country for its dangerous democracy and vibrant idealism, although weighing everyone’s opinions and forging them into a consensus can sometimes be a slow and painful process. I also love America’s enlightened rule of law, its technological savvy, and, above all, its diverse population of people from all sorts of different backgrounds united by shared ideals. Lately though, we have reached a sort of crossroads where the population is fundamentally at odds over two different divergent views of America’s strength, ideals, and purpose. For the present, we are the Divided States of America: a recherche red nation of obedience, hierarchy, bravery, loyalty, & honor; and a libertine blue nation of shifting identities and ideas, ceaseless change, and unnerving new possibilities. Until one nation gains political ascendancy so overwhelming that the other side acknowledges it, the whole nation stumbles along deadlocked, incapacitated, and unable to adapt to a world where our adversaries and competitors are refining seductive new forms of autocracy (and goodness knows what else).
After World War II, the world lay in shattered ruins. The United States was at an apogee of power, victory and success. Yet America rebuilt our adversaries in the belief that prosperous powerful, happy nations would be better allies and would become amazing friends. We chose to remake the world not only with our vast power (not that we have been altogether reticent about wielding that double-edged sword) but with concepts, contracts, commerce, and compassion. Germany, Japan, and Italy are our dearest friends—esteemed equals in the great work of civilization and progress. The Pax Americana has not been a perfect success, but it has been very good to the world and very good to us. Turning our back on the world we built (and all of the advantages we built into the system for ourselves and our point of view) is rank folly. When we had everything and were the only super power, we failed to reach out to the former Soviet Union with the same big-hearted elan…and look where that got us.
We have made terrible mistakes in the past and we are making a lot of new ones lately (and revisiting some of the golden oldies which have plagued us and destroyed other great nations). Everyone talks about the “shattering of norms” (which makes me think of the drunken everyman from “Cheers” falling from his barstool and exploding into shards like peanut brittle). Reforms are inevitable and necessary if a nation wishes to stay dynamic and powerful. Some norms will have to be shattered so that these much-needed reforms can take place. The dance of reaction versus progress is so much harder in the real world than it looks on the pages of the history books though, and for the first time since the Cold War ended, I am truly afraid for America’s future. If we cannot control ourselves, our bright dreams of space colonies, next generation biotech, super AIs, and enlightened ecological conservation will vanish… so will a lot of other things we esteem and so will some very fundamental things we have always taken for granted.
I live in bluest Brooklyn, and I don’t suppose it is a mystery where my political sympathies lie. But it wasn’t always so. I am a West Virginian too, with a red heart and a (perhaps overweening?) sense of our special place in the world. This is a holiday and it isn’t time for more rancor right now, but I am going to write more about politics as the elections come up. We need to look back 242 years and forwards 242 years too (like the founders did) if we hope to get out of this serious crisis of our democracy.
The greatest Chinese political epic begins with the lines “Nations long divided must unite; nations long united must divide.” We are being tested by that adage and so far, we are failing the test. Have a happy Fourth of July! But stay ever-mindful that we have serious painful work due on our representative government. This time the heavy lifting won’t be done by heroic half-imagined people of long ago with funny clothes, muskets, fifes, paddlewheels, and telegraphs. It is up to us…you and me and all the people we care about with all of our dumb phones, anxieties, loudmouth ideas, and hare-brained schemes. We need to respect one another and strike new compromises, or government by the people for the people will perish here and the world will have to look to South Korea, Switzerland, Belgium, and India to find its paragons of liberty.
What in the hell is this supposed to be?
ferrebeekeeper 