Philobiblon

1. “I shall never believe in ghosts until I hear of one that spends its time turning on the hot water or switching the electric light off and on. A ghost that merely glides past all these fascinating modern improvements is not, to my way of thinking, genuine or convincing.” (p.15)

2. “Indeed, from their willingness to provide tea and sell fudge, it is clear that the old houses of Alfriston fully appreciate the profit to be made from those who are so starved of beauty that they will go miles to look at a thatch.” (p. 102)

These from H.V. Morton’s I Saw Two Englands, 1939 (covering journeys before and after the outbreak of war).

As befits a highly prolific writer he’s uneven, but when he’s good he’s very good.

He’s even got a personal society.

More later, hopefully.

I’m a fan of Lionel Shriver as an author, but as a social commentator she’s way off-beam. Writing in
this weekend’s Guardian, she says:

“After talking myself blue about “maternal ambivalence”, I have come full circle, rounding on the advice to do as I say, not as I did. I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I’ve had it with being the Anti-Mom, and would like to hand the part to someone else.”

While I can sympathise with her being fed-up with a one-line media stereotype, she then goes on at great length to talk about her desire for her own life as her own “evil purposes”, saying of her (relatively) child-free generation: “We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead.”

What tosh. I’m childless myself, entirely and absolutely by choice, and know lots of other people who’ve also chosen not to have children, but this means we have more time and energy to devote to the present and future of our societies and our world. While parents have chosen, as is their right, to put vast amounts of time and energy into helping usually at most a couple of human beings face the future, we’re doing the voluntary community work, conducting the environmental campaigns and generally facing the issues that take entire societies into the future.

To say that this is more “selfish” than putting the same effort into passing on a few of your genes is ridiculous. Indeed there’s a case to be made that if anyone is being selfish it is the parents – certainly those who have more than their replacement allocation of two children.

European societies, as Shriver discusses, are getting very exercised by their ageing social structures, but the world’s population is still growing at a great rate – probably far beyond its sustainable carrying capacity. All that needs to happen is for it to be more evenly distributed.

And if a reminder of the enormous pressures to which we are subjecting this fragile planet were needed, two stories in the Guardian today certainly provide it.

I was struck by a line in a story about China building a railway to Tibet: “The roof of the world is melting.” Then there was the piece about how budget airlines are taking off in India.

The railway is taken as just one symbol of that “those billions are travelling, earning and consuming more than ever before”. But the very foundations of the track, and of the future, are put at risk by that very growth, even though the trouble the engineers are having with the permafrost melting is entirely down to Western over-consumption over the past two centuries.

The human race can’t afford to have them consuming at Western levels, yet if there is to be any hope of convincing them not to do so, we need to dramatically cut back ourselves. The childless are helping with that problem, through that choice, and many others.

So if you’re looking for a new “anti-Mom”, here I am.

An email today reminded me of one of those wonderful “labour-of-love” websites that often don’t get the attention they deserve: Parthia.com.

It is a collection of varied resources about the ancient civilisation, with a particular focus on coins. And if you think that sounds rather dull, well check out this collection of images of horses from Parthian coins. I was reminded anew of just how fine the workmanship on ancient coins can be.

There’s also the inevitable collection of recipes – mainly arriving via the Romans. Pliny reckoned their bread would keep for centuries, if you consider that a recommendation.

The only Parthian (real) site I’ve visited is Dura Europos, on what is now the Syria-Iraq border; then it was the Rome/Parthian border. It is a magical, haunting place, set on a great bluff over the Euphrates. (The atmosphere is only magnified when you know that the actual archaeology of the final battle here was preserved in the bones of the defenders”).

That’s the question Barbara Ehrenreich tries to answer in her brilliant Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War. Or, to put it more precisely, what predisposes the human species to get caught up in war fever?

Her answer, to simplify, is that it comes from the fact that we are the only species to have gone from being mainly prey to almost entirely predator. “Here is what we might call the missing link within the theory of human evolution itself: how a poor, shivering creature grew to unquestioned dominance. Before and well into the age of hunting, there must have been a long, dark era of fear when the careless and stragglers were routinely picked off, when disease or any temporary weakness could turn man into meat.” (P. 45)

The point at which the roles began to turn, Ehrenreich reports, citing William H. McNeil among others, is when humanities and humans started to act as a group, making noise, throwing sticks and stones and otherwise acting together. “As any demagogue knows, a crowd is most likely to bond into a purposeful entity when it has an enemy to face. Millennia of terror seems to have left us with another ‘Darwinian algorithm’: that in the face of danger, we need to cleave together, becoming a new, many-headed creature larger than our individual selves.” (p. 82)

Further,: “The transformation from prey to predator, in which the weak rise up against the strong, is the central ‘story’ in early human narrative. Some residual anxiety seems to draw us back to it again and again. We recount it as myth and reenact it as ritual, as if we could never be sufficiently assured that it has, indeed, occurred.” (p. 82)

And humans continue to promote this anxiety culturally – through stories of beasts “coming to get them” if they’re bad, through horror movies, through Roman ‘games’ plus the human child is for a very long time just as vulnerable as our early ancestors.

The hunting that occurred, as we got to the top of the food chain, was primarily a large group activity – herds that occurred in great numbers were driven off cliffs, into bogs or human-made traps, a task that would require every member of the tribe to participate. It was only perhaps as recently as 15,000-10,000 years ago, with the combined effects of climate change and, probably, human predation, that animal numbers fell to such a point that a few mobile, adult individuals would travel, perhaps long distances, to stalk and spear game.

Not coincidentally, Ehrenreich suggests, that roughly coincides with the first evidence of what looks to us like war, a rock draw in Spain showing bands of stick figures wielding bows and arrows against one another. Graves from the same era in Egypt and East Asia support that conclusion (p. 117)

But this was not a case of competition. Ehrenreich suggests that as gathering and crop growing developed “the majority of adult men would have found themselves in need of some substitute for the hunter-defender role. As encounters with wild animals (both game and predators) became less central to human survival, so, potentially, did adult males become less central to the survival of women and children. In their engaging study of warfare among southwestern American Indians, anthropologists Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana propose that war may indeed have arisen to fill the void. One by one, they eliminate the various materialist theories – involving land and access to water – which have been offered to explain these peoples’ perpetual wars, and propose instead that war exists because it is a prestigious thing for men to do, that it is an exciting and even “religious” undertaking.” (p.124)

And once this direction was taken, it was hard to stop. “As it spreads from place to place, war tends to stamp a certain sameness on human cultures. At the most obvious level, it requires that each human society be as war-ready as the other societies it is likely to encounter … No doubt there are other directions in which human cultures might have evolved – towards greater emphasis on the arts, for example, or philosophy, or more lighthearted games and rituals. But war, once chosen by some, quickly became the ‘unchosen direction’ imposed on all.” (p. 134)

War has traditionally been analysed by reference to social and economic structures of societies, but Ehrenreich says, it has persisted through all of these. It can be thought of she says, as a meme. Ehrenreich says this concept is still rather loose and inadequately theorised, but suggests that in the case of war “it would have to be conceived as a loose assemblage of algorithms or programs (in the computer sense) for action ” (p. 234)

“If war is understood as a self-replicating entity, we should probably abandon the many attempts to explain it as an evolutionary adaptation which has been, in some ecological sense, useful or helpful to humans. … Culture, in other words, cannot be counted to be ‘on our side’.” (p. 235)

“It is … a parasite on human cultures – draining them of the funds and resources, talent and personnel, that could be used to advance the cause of human life and culture. But ‘parasitism’ is too mild a term for a relationship predicated on the periodic killing of large numbers of human beings. If war is a ‘living’ thing, it is a kind of creature that, by its very nature, devours us. To look at war, carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.” (p. 238)

But there are actions that can be taken to combat the meme, for “if the twentieth century brought the steady advance of war and war-related enterprises, it also brought the beginnings of organised human resistance to war. Anti-war movements, arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves products of the logic of modern war, with its requirements of mass participation and assent. When the practice and passions of war were largely confined to a warrior elite, popular opposition to war usually took the form of opposition to that elite.” (p. 239) And within anti-war movements, humans can discover that euphoria of banding together for common survival, Ehrenreich suggests, that they first found when a band of humble hominids drove off a sabre-toothed tiger by working together.

It is a brilliant account, and I’d highly recommend reading the book, which has far more complexities than I have space for here. My edition is Virago, published 1997.

Which makes me think about bringing it up to date. What is changing in the 21st century, it seems to me, is that certainly the dominant Western states are moving away from “mass” wars. Of course this is only a good thing, in the avoidance of bloodshed, but if wars are to be conducted by robots and drones, as the Americans seem to be aiming for, the impetus for anti-war movements that Ehrenreich identifies will have disappeared. (Unless of course the robots decide to rebel!) And if the humans involved are those from lower socio-economic groups (also the case in America and other Western societies), they’re the ones with the least voice to speak out against the wars in which their sons and daughters are dying.

Perhaps we all need to do something about that.

How can you sum up 325 minutes of theatre – that’s nearly five and a half hours (albeit with three intervals) – that whirls with imagery, pulses with energy and buzzes with ideas?

At the level of narrative, The Dragons’ Trilogy, now at the Barbican, could be summarised as a too-neat, too-circular family saga: two young French-Canadian girls living in Quebec City in the 1930s, close friends, begin the play just on the cusp of adolescence. One gets pregnant and is gambled away to become the wife of a first-generation Chinese-Canadian by the drunken barber father. The other joins the army, marries “appropriately” and has two sons. Meanwhile in Japan, a geisha is made pregnant by an abusive Englishman, who abandons her. The daughter of that baby will eventually get together with the French-Canadian’s son, while the illegitimate daughter will, well not to give too much away, will suffer a nasty fate.

Yet the director, Robert Lepage, is not, you can’t but feel, terribly interested in narrative, or indeed dialogue. He knows audiences expect it, crave it, and gives them the bare bones, in a sometimes naturalistic, sometimes stylised mixture of English, French, Chinese and Japanese. (There are surtitles when necessary.)

What really matters to him, however, is the stunning image, the shock of movement, the flash of light. Sometimes it is surreal. At one point a nun standing in the basket of a speeding bicycle (being ridden by the father of that illegitimate girl, still a delivery man in his home town) is shouting out the humiliation of her public trial in China after the revolution, underneath a screen image of Mao, while the married French-Canadian woman sits on the roof of a shed learning to type to a disembodies voice of an instruction manual that is actually commenting on the action, while her old friend sits and mourns the departure of her daughter.

Yet it all makes sense. Really!

The triology is staged in a pit of gravel, a brilliant touch for often what is important here is the swish of movement through it, or the stamp of (metaphor) jackboots, even the slice of ice-skates. An often underused sense often strains for full fitness. It is also a Japanese garden, a grave, our earth mother, and a parking lot that contains the history of all that came before.

So what does it all mean? I heard more than one member of the audience asking. That’s where the reviewer’s task gets really difficult. It would be possible to use phrases made vacuous by overuse like “choice and free will”, “the flow of life”, “the human condition”, “the modern condition”, “the female condition”. Really, this is a show about life in all of its messy, and metaphorical, reality.

And it is an optimistic reality. The new generation, coming to life as the old fades away with the “white dragon” of autumn, seems to be making a better fist of it, in its glorious multicultural, multi-ethnic reality, than did their parents and grandparents.

Last time the Trilogy was produced in London, one reviewer said “See Robert Lepage and die”. It is hard to disagree.

***
A Guardian biography of Lepage is here, an academic article on his work here, and a review of a book about him here.

My knowledge of priest-holes – hiding places used from the 16th century onward to hide Catholic priests in Protestant England, as well as Cavaliers, Roundheads and the odd Jacobite and, one suspects, plenty of clandestine lovers – comes chiefly from Jean Plaidy, which means it dates back a way.

But now I can update it: from the 18th-century email list, Secret Chambers and Hiding Places, by Allan Fea, on the net. He notes:

From Horace Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Scott, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Lytton, Ainsworth, Le Fanu, and Mrs. Henry Wood, down to the latest up-to-date novelists of to-day, the secret chamber (an ingenious necessity of the “good old times”) has afforded invaluable “property”—indeed, in many instances the whole vitality of a plot is, like its ingenious opening, hinged upon the masked wall, behind which lay concealed what hidden mysteries, what undreamed-of revelations! The thread of the story, like Fair Rosamond’s silken clue, leads up to and at length reveals the buried secret, and (unlike the above comparison in this instance) all ends happily!

Thank you Gutenberg Project!