Bloggin' Historians!

Last night I began reading the of fourth of five Roman histories which Pat had bought me for my birthday: The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner. It promises to be an enjoyable read, despite my disagreeing with his fundamental premiss that ‘Rome was a system of robbery with violence … inherently exploitative and oppressive … and doomed to collapse’. The same cannot be said of the three previous texts which seemed to me to belong to the world of blogging rather than books.
  The first of them, Blood of the Caesars by Stephen Dando Collins, was by far the worst. How the book managed to find a publisher defeats me. Its style seemed to be modelled on those ghastly American programmes infesting Sky’s History Channel which assume that the audience has the attention span and retentive powers of an inebriated gnat: some basic fact is repeated every five minutes - ‘Rome capital of the Roman Empire’, for example - in an over-excited North American equivalent of a Birmingham accent. But at least that fact is true - or was so until the founding of Constantinople. Collins’s ‘fact’ is that Seneca secretly murdered Germanicus, an hypothesis as convincingly substantiated as the Scientologists’ belief that we’re descended from Thetans. Like the blog it’s badly written and batters the reader with the author’s private obsession. Unlike the blogger the writer has been paid to produce this garbage.
  The second and third histories were an enormous improvement on Collins, but were still blogs rather than books if for different reasons. Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain by Edwin Pace argues that Arthur, Vortigern, or the Proud Tyrant, and Riothamus were the same person. The case is argued carefully with a wealth of detailed evidence. And therein lies the problem: ok they’re the same person, now tell me something interesting. For over three hundred pages Pace carries on like the pub bore - ‘and another interesting fact you may not know is …’ - as the reader’s eyes glaze over and he loses the will to live. One of the great joys for the blogger is that he is utterly free of constraints. There is no sub-editor pruning his verbiage, he doesn’t have to attempt to answer objections to the line he’s preaching, he doesn’t have to care whether there is an audience for his ramblings. Pace should have been a blogger.
  Which brings me finally to Britannia the Failed State by Stuart Laycock. The author had spent time in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkans war. This underlay his insight that by basing their units of local government on existing tribal areas the Roman authorities perpetuated existing ethnic tensions. Once the iron hand of Rome - cf. Tito - had been removed ethnic conflict broke out and ripped apart the civilised fabric the Romans has created. I found the idea convincing and, unlike Pace’s Arthurian idea, significant. But, and it’s a very big but, it was a very dull read. The reason? Laycock’s an archaeologist and archaeologists make accountants seem like fun people. Page after page of the distribution of a particular kind of belt buckle is of no interest to anyone but a professional archaeologist. Laycock had an interesting idea: he simply needed to find a way of putting it across which didn’t suck the life out of it. The details about the buckles should have been saved for an academic conference - or a blog!

Parallel Universes?

A few days ago whilst completing a crossword I went into anaphylactic shock. Figuratively so. Or - to adopt current usage which employs the word as an intensifier in contempt or ignorance of its traditional meaning - literally. The answer to the clue was the name of a British bird: sis*i* was as far as I could get, the four letters I’d filled in supplied by the answers to other clues. In despair I showed the puzzle to Pat. ‘Siskin,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. Hence the anaphylactic shock. I’d never ever heard or seen the word before. And it wasn’t the name of some exotic species recently discovered in the depths of the Amazon rain forest, but as British as a skinhead throwing a brick through an asian shopkeeper’s window.
I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of parallel universes, a common plot device in science fiction. A story I read many decades ago involved a time travelling tourist momentarily stepping off a bridge of twentieth century time into the world as it was several million years ago. When he returns to his own time he finds the US slightly, but balefully, changed. A right-wing extremist has just won the presidency - before the time-traveller left the Democrat candidate was heading for a landslide victory - and the English language has changed in many though subtle ways. When the time-traveller takes off his shoes he finds a butterfly stuck to one of the soles.
I think I am that time-traveller. It’s not that I’m unaware that language changes as part of the normal course of events, although when I was young I hardly noticed it: ‘wireless’ being replaced by ‘radio’ is an example which springs to mind. And while the almost universal substitution of ‘train station’ for ‘railway station’ irritates me, and even more so when some ignoramus of a scriptwriter has Geraldine McEwan’s Miss Marple employ the term, I know my irritation stems not from a superior moral or intellectual perspective but merely from the horror of change which affects the elderly. No doubt there were old men in the 17th century deploring the vogue for referring to an ewt as a newt, and young people’s habit of using ‘indifferent’ as though it meant ‘uninterested’ rather than ‘impartial’.
But ‘siskin’ is different. I’ve been reading for over sixty years - much of it fiction I admit - but also thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines. And never once have I encountered the word. Pat thinks my ignorance of ornithology is the explanation. I don’t agree. I am deplorably ignorant of a huge range of subjects but I’ve seen the words they use. I’ve no idea what a quasar is, but the word forms part of my mental landscape.
I’m not entirely sure when I stepped on the butterfly. Back in the late seventies or early eighties over a lunchtime pint, a friend, Graham, drew my attention to the word ‘resile’. Neither of us had ever heard it before, but suddenly it was on every politician’s lips. The recent vogue for ‘redact’ and ‘redaction’ is similar, though subtly different. As an English teacher, I was professionally acquainted with the term in relation to editions of books, but I find the expansion of its use utterly confusing.
So I’m going with the parallel universe explanation. It’s not just No Country for Old Men but no Universe either.

The Divine Blogger

Those readers familiar with Catholic exegesis will undoubtedly have been struck by the parallel between the internal workings of the godhead and the relationship of the blogger to his blog.
To quote the theologian F. J. Sheed, the Trinity works as follows:

‘The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, the perfect Image of Himself is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love - love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness within the Divine Nature … [the] Third Person of the Blessed Trinity … the Holy Ghost …‘

Rather hard going, particularly having to hack through that thicket of capital letters. The idea is put much more vividly by Milton - a covert Unitarian - in describing the relationship between Satan, Sin and Death in a brilliant parody of the doctrine of the Trinity. Satan arrives at the gates of Hell:

… Before the Gates there sat

On either side a formidable shape;

The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fould

Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d

With mortal sting: about her middle round

A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d

With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturb’d thir noyse, into her woomb,

And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d

Within unseen. …
What thing thou art, thus double-form’d, and why

In this infernal Vaile first met thou call’st

Me Father, and that Fantasm call’st my Son?

I know thee not, nor ever saw till now

Sight more detestable then him and thee.
T’whom thus the Portress of Hell Gate reply’d;

Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem

Now in thine eye so foul, once deemd so fair

In Heav’n, when at th’ Assembly, and in sight

Of all the Seraphim with thee combin’d

In bold conspiracy against Heav’ns King,

All on a sudden miserable pain

Surpris’d thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swum

In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast

Threw forth, till on the left side op’ning wide,

Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright,

Then shining heav’nly fair, a Goddess arm’d

Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis’d

All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoild affraid

At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign

Portentous held me; but familiar grown,

I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won

The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft

Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing

Becam’st enamour’d, and such joy thou took’st

With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d

A growing burden. …
Pensive here I sat
Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb

Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown

Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes.

At last this odious offspring whom thou seest

Thine own begotten, breaking violent way

Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain

Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew

Transform’d: but he my inbred enemie

Forth issu’d, brandishing his fatal Dart

Made to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;

Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d

From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.

I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems,

Inflam’d with lust then rage) and swifter far,

Me overtook his mother all dismaid,

And in embraces forcible and foule

Ingendring with me, of that rape begot

These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry

Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv’d

And hourly born, with sorrow infinite

To me, for when they list into the womb

That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw

My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth

Afresh with conscious terrours vex me round,

That rest or intermission none I find.

Before mine eyes in opposition sits

Grim Death my Son and foe, who sets them on,

And me his Parent would full soon devour

For want of other prey, but that he knows

His end with mine involvd; and knows that

Should prove a bitter Morsel, and his bane,

When ever that shall be;

The blogger, like God before the creation, lives in a solipsistic dream contemplating his own thoughts and deeds. And being narcissistic gives birth to his blog, the distillation of his spirit. Unlike the Deity, though, having created no actual world his blog doesn’t go on to dwell within all people of good-will; both those within the visible structure of Christ’s Church and those - protestants, jews, moslems, buddhists, atheists etc - who through invincible ignorance as it used to be called, or good-faith as it’s more tactfully put these days, have failed to sign up to the Catholic Church.
But it’s fun even though, like the concept of God, utterly irrelevant to the world at large.