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Happy New Year! Welcome back to Ferrebeekeeper. We’ll talk about the perils and sweet promises of 2018 later this week. It is a year which offers much…assuming we can prevent complete political meltdown, war, and pestilential horror (and can manage our empty & overheating economy into something more useful). There is another election coming (thank goodness). Innovation,experimentation, and exploration, though woefully underfunded, still continue.Here at the old blogstead, I am adding some new topics and leaving behind some older themes which are played out. Also, for my professional life, I am planning a big new art project and some exciting shows. So keep watching for details on all of these things!
But first I want to start the year with a homily from my grandmother. Grandma Ferrebee is (locally) famous for her kindness and generosity, but also for her earthy wit and her grasp of the barnyard fundamentals which underlay the (thin) veneer of society. Additionally, she ran a beer hall in rural West Virginia for decades so beneath the affable exterior is the cold steel required to run a small business of any sort, much less one with a lot of drunken hillfolk running amok. I didn’t always appreciate her bucolic wisdom when I was younger (the scatological nature often struck me as unseemly) yet lately this fable seems uniquely apt. Here it is (paraphrased):
Once upon a time the organs of the body became embroiled in a noisy contest concerning which organ was preeminent and controlled the body.
The brain said “I am the seat of intellect and I direct all of the conscious and unconscious nervous impulses. The limbs do what I say and the body responds to my commands. I alone can apprehend the future and create lofty abstruse thoughts of things beyond rude physicality. I properly and truly rule the body.”
The heart then replied “I am the seat of emotions. Your fears and joys…your hatred and yearning comes from me. I am synonymous with love–eternal and sublime! Plus, on a more literal level, I pump the blood which make all of the organs function. The heart is the center of a person and I am the most important organ.”
Then, before any of the other organs could say their piece, the ass stopped working: the system filled up with shit and the whole body died.
It’s…uh..pithier when Grandma tells it with her West Virginia twang and her knowing looks, but I think I have conveyed the fundamental message. It is a message we need to think about in our “United” States. This red/blue rubbish is useful for pundits, but poisonous for a functioning nation. Our political parties of increasing furious ideological purity are becoming like some autoimmune illness. Ayn Rand Republicans who believe that a healthy and robust society can exist without a thriving middle class and contented workers (to say nothing of scientists, creative professionals, and technocrats) are deadly con-artists misleading us into disaster
Likewise democrats who split hairs over esoteric social manners, and carp forevermore on status conveyed by hereditary victimization left over from bygone eras have lost sight of the future as well. We have a motto about how things are supposed to work.
It is a dangerous time for our nation. I am writing here about The United States, which I know best, but all of the great democracies are afflicted by a wave of strife and malaise…indeed the whole world is convulsed by change so rapid that only authoritarian nations are dealing with it at all (mostly by pilfering the till and building Potemkin cities). We can talk about the larger ramifications of this in the coming year, but first we need to talk and listen instead of shouting slogans like we are in the cultural revolution or something. Democracy is not inferior to whatever China calls its brand of oppressive authoritarianism, but we need some reforms to make it work right. And we need to be patient and compassionate with each other while this process happens.
Above all, we must remember that, just like in the story, society needs people of all sorts in order to function. The nation needs both the sharp-eyed riflemen from Kentucky and the shrewd-minded accountants from Montclair. The states are deeply heterogeneous but stand beside each other through any crisis–structural, cyclical, or natural. We are not the “Fiscally Independent and Selfishly Aloof States of America”. Our name is much finer than that. We need the brain and the heart (and everything else) to work together if we are going to move forward…or even survive (for with a vastly greater population, our margins for error have shrunk). Also we need to go back and think symbolically when we look at this story and not just put the ass in control.
An unknown artist’s copy of an original portrait of Richard III (1520, Royal Collection)
Richard III is indelibly remembered as the dark antihero of Shakespeare’s great play, but his real life seems to have been even more complicated and ambiguous. The last king of the House of York of the Plantagenet dynasty was killed during the Battle of Bosworth Field by means of a halberd blow which shaved off the back of his skull. We suddenly know a great deal about Richard III because his remains were discovered a few years ago under a car park (which had once been the churchyard of the Church of Grey Friars) in suburban England!
A photographic portrait of Richard III ca. present
The discovery of Richard III’s body in 2012 makes for fascinating reading and we learned all sorts of amazing things, but the researchers and archaeologists were left holding a surplus dead medieval king (and a rather sinister one at that). What to do?
A modern funeral crown in medieval style for the (second?) funeral of Richard III
For reasons of pomp and tradition, it was decided to reinter Richard’s remains in a fashion befitting an English King—and this required a crown (since such prop is an essential ingredient for royal funerals). The original medieval crowns of England were lost during the age of the Protectorate (except for the little wedding crown of Richard III’s sister). The modern crowns of the sovereigns of England are inappropriately anachronistic (not to mention super-valuable)…plus the queen hardly wants some long-dead evil king handling her cool stuff. Yet there could hardly be a kingly reburial without some sort of crown, so history enthusiasts built their own funeral crown out of copper with gold plating. The crown featured white enamel roses and cabochon rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and turquoise. They based the crown on that of Margaret of York, and on descriptions of the open crown which Richard III wore during his last days.
Funeral crowns purpose-built for the exequies of kings were not unknown during the Middle Ages. Often these crowns were kept at churches or sacred sites near the burial place of the monarch. Presumably this will be the future for this strange yet beautiful piece of modern medieval jewelry for the strange and disturbing king.
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