The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 2)

In Monday’s post I suggested that our mediæval ancestors’ reaction to a natural disaster would be different from ours. Yes, they would be horrified and grief-stricken but they wouldn’t have seen it as calling into question the benevolence of God. Amongst the dead the baptised infant below the age of reason would, ipso facto, be in Paradise; the decent adult in Purgatory; and the evil-doer in Hell, so saving potential victims from his attentions.

But this does not mean the more thoughtful would not have wondered why such events occurred. There were two answers - one of which, though it has its attractions, no longer holds water; the other might. The first stems from the concept of the Great Chain of Being made familiar by Tillyard to English undergrads in the sixties. Rattle any bit of the chain which links the angels and saints, humankind arranged hierarchically, animals, plants and inanimate objects, and the consequences are felt along its length. We are all too aware today how human greed and stupidity impinge on the animal kingdom and the material make-up of the planet. Unfortunately we are also aware of Darwin, so can’t really buy in to the idea that imperfections in the natural order - earthquakes and volcanoes - are a consequence of the Fall. We know that the tectonic plates began moving millions of years before the human race came into existence.

The second concept is memorably expressed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde:

… O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,

O influences of thise hevenes hye!

Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,

Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.

In other words, things only seem to happen arbitrarily because we don’t have the whole picture. In reality every event is a jigsaw piece and God’s got the box with the illustration! The idea is given flesh in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, and most poignantly of all in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

In Chaucer’s story, Dorigen, awaiting her husband’s return to Brittany from England, upbraids God for having created the dangerous rocks which could sink her husband’s ship.

'Eterne god, that thurgh thy purveyaunce

Ledest the world by certein governaunce,

In ydel, as men seyn, ye no-​thing make;

But, lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

That semen rather a foul confusioun

Of werk than any fair creacioun

Of swich a parfit wys god and a stable,

Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?

For by this werk, south, north, ne west, ne eest,

Ther nis y-​fostred man, ne brid, ne beest;

Pestered by an amorous squire, Aurelius, Dorigen jokingly promises to sleep with him if he can get rid of the rocks. At vast expense, he hires a magician to create the optical illusion that the rocks have gone. Her husband, Arveragus, having returned, Dorigen reveals her rash promise. He tells her she must keep her word, otherwise she loses all integrity. When she arrives in tears to keep her promise Aurelius is moved by her distress to release her from her vow. He, in turn, begs the magician to let him pay him in instalments, or he will face financial ruin. Hearing what’s transpired, the magician waives his fee. God has answered Dorigen’s question: the rocks are the necessary cause of a chain of noble deeds.

Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is not an aristotelean work: events are not the consequence of a tragic flaw. On the contrary, the protagonists’ innocence is stressed. Instead it embodies the mediæval concept of tragedy as an integral part of the human condition: once we step on the wheel of fortune it will for a time carry us aloft until inevitably its revolution plunges us into the depths. But although the lovers’ deaths are tragic they are necessary to bring redemption. Their:

… misadventur’d piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife

… And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

Today, only the lunatic fringe of the American evangelical right sees natural disasters forming part of any over-arching divine plan. According to Pat Robertson the Haitian earthquake was a punishment for a pact with the devil. One would have thought France, which until 1947 extorted ‘reparations’ from its former colony for the losses incurred by the expelled slave owners, might have been a more suitable target.

So, whatever he said, John Sentamu was stuffed. If he’d replied, ‘Stuff happens. But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, And their going from us to be utter destruction : but they are in peace,’ he’d be accused of insensitive escapism. If he dodged the issue, as he did, he’d be equally unconvincing. In an age of disbelief perhaps the only effective answer is to address the issue we can all agree on: the yahoo lurking beneath the surface in all human beings, though pretty close to it in the likes of Pat Robertson. To ask why the disaster in Port-au-Prince was so much worse than the one in L’Acquila nine months earlier. Perhaps the French being allowed to bleed dry a desperately impoverished country might supply part of the answer.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 1)

Exactly two weeks ago, whilst sitting enthroned in my bathroom I heard and felt, what I thought was a bang on the door. It wasn’t: it was an earthquake centred on Loro Piceno around 20 kilometres away. Fortunately it only measured 4.5 on the Richter scale and was about 20 km deep. There was no damage.

Today, our parish priest announced that the collection would be sent to aid the victims of the earthquake in Haiti - they hadn’t been so lucky: 7 points and near the surface.

In the interval between these two events I heard the Anglican Archbishop of York being grilled on the Today programme. The poor man was having to attempt to reconcile the Christian belief in an omnipotent and all-loving God with the devastation wreaked by his creation on the unlucky sods living in Port-au-Prince. Ever since Voltaire’s demolition of Leibniz after the Lisbon earthquake, that’s been a tough call. Inevitably John Sentamu made an embarrassingly poor fist of it, muttering platitudes about God being there suffering alongside the victims. Try telling that to mother’s whose baby’s just been crushed to death.

However, I suspect his pre-reformation Catholic predecessors would have had an easier job. These days we wander down a pick-and-mix counter of beliefs either selecting astrology, Buddhism, Islam or Christianity in any of its multifarious guises or, alternatively, deciding not to buy at all but to go down the road to Dawkins & Co who have a much more up-to-date selection. In the middle ages you had Catholicism and that was it. Everybody you’d ever met or even heard of was a Catholic, belief wasn’t an option, it was as much part of life as the sun coming up in the morning or going down at night. And the Church taught that this life was just a small and finite part of an eternal existence, solely important as a determinant of where you spent that eternity. The Archbishop of York may well believe this today, though, his being an Anglican, it’s difficult to be sure. Even some of the Today programme’s audience may share the belief. But what none of them will share is our mediæval ancestors’ experience of it not as a belief but an undisputed fact, a given. To have that you need the intellectual hegemony which the Church exercised 500 years ago. The nearest modern equivalent is the West’s belief in democracy. Apart from the odd BNP nutter, we instinctively share Churchill’s belief that despite its weaknesses parliamentary democracy is the best political system on offer. A mother whose son gave his life defending Britain against Nazi Germany would have felt the same anguish felt by the Haitian survivors today. But behind the pain would be the knowledge that his death was part of a larger pattern which gave it a positive meaning. And maybe that gave some comfort. Similarly, whilst the pain of bereavement was no less acute in the Middle Ages, behind the grief was the knowledge that the loss was not final. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli destroyed that world for ever. We may well feel the change was for the good. But in losing that world we’ve lost the only thing which could comfort us in the face of a natural disaster.

Jimminy Clarkson

I must confess to rather liking Jeremy Clarkson. Or more accurately, as I’ve never met the man, to finding his television persona engaging. And all this despite my being a bearded, Guardian-reading socialist: the embodiment of all that Clarkson despises. Like Ken Clarke, Boris Johnson and the late Alan Clark he seems authentic - the opinions may be outrageous, but they’re his, and delivered with a bonhomie and self-irony which charms the listener. Although much of Top Gear is tediously repetitive, and filled with nerdish details which make train-spotting or cricket seem like fun, the interaction between Clarkson and the Hamster and Captain Slow is usually entertaining. But until yesterday I’d always been puzzled by the team’s ability to experience an orgasm whilst sitting in the front seat of a car, alone, and with both hands on the steering-wheel.

To explain. Yesterday I took the car for its 100,005 km service. Our garage is on the coast, a good hour’s drive away and this being Italy, even minor services take hours. In the summer that’s not a problem: after a coffee and croissant in the nearest bar I buy a paper and wander down to the front to read it. This is followed by a leisurely lunch in a fish restaurant by which time Arnaldo rings my mobile to tell me the car is ready. Winter is different: there is nothing to do in Porto Sant’Elpidio apart from walking for miles along the Adriatica to the shopping centre, and even that’s out of the question when it’s raining. Accordingly my heart sank when Arnaldo explained that our Forester wouldn’t be ready until the evening. I therefore tentatively asked if it would be possible to borrow a car. Unlike England, courtesy cars are a rarity in Italy. In Norfolk our Subaru dealer delighted in lending Pat the latest model, in the hope no doubt of tempting her to buy it. Sometimes he was successful. To my surprise and delight Arnaldo rummaged through a pile of keys, took me outside and said, ‘The white one.’ The car was old and the radio didn’t work - but it was an Imprezza! And what a world of difference from a Forester. Taut handling, acceleration which pinned you to the back of the seat, and oh that throaty roar. And as I creamed my jeans, not having been so exhilarated since I traded in my Kawasaki half a lifetime ago, I suddenly saw the light. For a second I too became a believer in the four-wheeled gods of Jeremy Clarkson.

Jazzer, Fosca and Meg

Last night I finished reading Fosca by the scapigliato [member of the 19th century bohemian group of writers centred on Milan], Igino Ugo Tarchetti, loaned to me by a friend’s wife. It’s a first-person psychological novel about the self-destructive relationship of the handsome Giorgio with the extremely ugly, highly neurotic, and sickly Fosca. She throws herself at Giorgio despite his having no feelings for her, other than intermittent pity. Fosca accurately sums up herself in a letter to Giorgio:

Io nacqui malata: uno dei sintomi più gravi e più profondi della mia infermità era il bisogno che sentiva di affezionarmi a tutto ciò che mi circondava, ma in modo

violento, subito, estremo. [I’ve been ill from birth. One of the deepest and most serious effects of the sickness has been my violent, impetuous and abject need to

feel loved by everyone around me.]

She, at least, has self-awareness; Giorgio despite his penchant for introspection, has little. In this respect he resembles Emily Brontë’s Nelly Dean and Ishiguro’s Stevens: a narrator who is blind to the significance of what’s he’s narrating. In a masterly fashion Tarchetti conveys to the reader what the narrator is unaware of: his moral illiteracy - revealed by his reaction to the letter from his beautiful mistress, Clara, breaking off their relationship. She’s done so because her husband’s finances have taken a sudden and catastrophic turn for the worse. She rightly feels that she needs to stand by him and their child, despite her love for Giorgio. Rather than sympathy and understanding for her plight there is only fury;

Tal cosa non poteva immaginata che da un essere mostruosamente ingrato, mostruosamente crudele. Io aveva amato questo essere. [One can’t conceive of

any creature that isn’t monstrously ungrateful and cruel behaving like this. And I had loved such a one.]

He consequently decides that Fosca is the woman for him because:

Quella donna mi ha amato, ella sola mi ha amato veracemente. [That woman has loved me. Only she has really loved me.]

And he goes off to consummate their relationship, demonstrating that for Giorgio love is not about giving oneself but satisfying his ego, even in the arms of a woman he finds repulsive. Fosca dies three days later. Unlike Dobbin, in Vanity Fair, she wasn’t disillusioned when she finally won the long sought object of her affections, because for her, as for Giorgio love is about self-gratification, not mutual affection.

Meanwhile The Archers is running a comic variant on the theme of unreciprocated love. Jazzer, who up till now thought love was a four-letter word beginning with s and ending with g, has decided that Fallon, the daughter of the local pub’s landlady, is the girl he wants to settle down with. They get on well, but as far as Fallon is concerned they are friends, not potential lovers, and she tries to tell him. He hears the words but doesn’t get the message and thinks if he takes things slowly Fallon will come round. Fat chance I’d say.

And finally to Meg. She’s on heat, so our walks are accompanied by a bevy of assorted swains, including two we normally like - Lupo’s dog, Rasta, and Valentino’s, Libero. Like Giorgio and Fosca they’re only interested in self-gratification - in their case carnal rather than psychological. The problem is that unlike Fallon and Jazzer both parties are up for it - the expression a bitch on heat has become disturbingly concrete. Trying to prevent access to her rear-end has made walks a nightmare. But once her season’s ended things will be back to normal - she and Libero will be good friends again with no psychological hang-ups or smouldering resentments. And a dog’s life is meant to be a deprecatory term!

The Good and the Bad Pedant

There are two sorts of pedants: those who are aware that they are are pedants, and those that aren’t. The former - the conscious pedant - is a harmless beast. He’s taken on board the essential triviality of his concerns: the world at large is either unaware of the whole issue of ‘correct usage ’ which so exercises him, or knows that there are more important things to worry about. (Or, as emended by the pedant, ‘about which to worry’.) Knowing himself, the conscious pedant uses his foible as a source of mirth. The unconscious pedant, however, is a humourless individual, who uses his knowledge to bolster his feeling of superiority and sense of self-importance, oblivious of the fact that in so doing he only succeeds in making himself look a pretentious tosser.

Today’s Observer contained examples of both sorts of pedantry: a witty article by Euan Ferguson (Man your apostrophes, my friends, and support the pedants' revolt) and a reader’s pompous letter reproduced below:

The big issue: The Kercher murder. The persecution of Amanda Knox goes on

While I share Barbara Ellen's concerns that the murder victim Meredith Kercher seems to have been forgotten by the press reporting of the trial in Perugia ("Meredith, not Knox, deserves our thoughts", Opinion, last week), it is a pity she accuses Amanda Knox of "flowery oratory" in her final statement to the court using a sloppy translation.

"Ho paura di avere una maschera di assassina forzata sulla mia pelle" means she doesn't want to be branded a murderer, not to be "given the mask of the assassin". Having watched the whole speech in which she not only thanked her friends and family for their support but even acknowledged the job her accusers had to do, it certainly did not "sound like some ham mangling Shakespeare".

My impression was of watching an innocent young woman, who'd already spent two long years in a foreign jail, feeling vulnerable but hoping she would receive a fair verdict – and judging from the more balanced reporting elsewhere in your paper, we may yet see the guilty verdict overturned on appeal.

Sue Newte

London SE7

The opening sentence’s subordinate adverbial clause of concession, as we pedants put it, makes one’s hackles rise. Just as one knows ‘While I’m not anti-semitic/homophobic/racist, some of my best friends are Jews/gay/black, but …’ is always the prelude to some disgusting piece of prejudice, what follows the Newte’s opening remark demonstrates that she does not share Barbara Ellen’s concerns at all. Her ‘impression’ that Amanda Knox is innocent outweighs the verdict of the court.

But the real reason for the letter is her desire to demonstrate that her command of Italian is better than Barbara Ellen’s. It is not. ‘Given the mask of the assassin’, one slight quibble aside, is a literal not a ‘sloppy’ translation. Whilst it’s usual to translate assassina as ‘murderess’, a pedant should know that the English word ‘assassin’ simply means ‘murderer’. It’s only contemporary usage - and when has that carried any weight with the stickler for ‘correctness’ - which has conflated its meaning with ‘hired assassin’ - i.e. someone who carries out a killing on behalf of a political or religious idea, or another individual or organisation. As Barbara Ellen says, the translation has preserved the floweriness of the original. A straightforward wish not to be branded might be expressed as: ‘Ho paura d’essere bollata’ or ‘d’essere stigmatizzata’. The same wish expressed figuratively might be ‘Non mi piace aver la parte d’assassina imporre a me’. Only a ‘ham mangling Shakespeare’ would complain of having a murderess’s mask forced upon herself. The Newte is confusing translating the idiom of one language into its equivalent in another (e.g. ‘poppet’ not ‘cauliflower’ when choufleur is used as an endearment) with preserving the original’s register. To translate Knox’s statement as ‘branded as a murderer’ is as inadequate as flatly translating la Serenissima as ‘Venice’, The Smoke as ‘Londra’, or some twerpette writing to the Observer as ‘la signora Newte’.

That’s better: now I’m feeling superior and a lot more self-important - or would be if anyone read this blog!

Darwin and sanctity

I was expelled from the first school I attended. The nuns told my mother that ‘James is a very naughty boy. We’d like you to remove him.’

‘Why don’t you smack him?’

Unusually for the nineteen-forties, and remarkably so in the light of recent revelations about some orders’ behaviour in Ireland, they replied primly: ‘We don’t believe in corporal punishment.’

Being expelled from kindergarten may explain why at my next school, when each child in the class was asked what he or she wanted to be when grown up I replied, ‘A saint.’ An answer greeted by general hilarity. But if one forgets canonisation and thinks instead of managing to grab a priest for the last-rites, followed by an extended stay in purgatory, not an entirely implausible ambition.

I was reminded of my Somerset infant school by an article about Darwin’s legacy I read a couple of days ago. Click here to read it. Although I knew about the Nazis' obsession with the pseudo-science of eugenics, and was vaguely aware that it had had a following in the western democracies, I hadn’t realised how widespread that following was, or how horrific its consequences. The activities of the British Eugenics Society led to ‘to the imprisonment without trial of more than 40,000 people. Many were detained for "moral imbecility" - having children out of wedlock, committing petty crimes, or displaying homosexual inclinations. Some would remain incarcerated for 20 years.’

The real shock, though, came from reading:

‘Darwin's ideas have also fathered some of the most grotesque instances of man's inhumanity to man.
Darwin's decision to represent as a scientific fact that the several races of mankind had travelled different distances down the evolutionary path - that white Europeans were, in short, more highly evolved than Africans or Australian Aborigines - has had appalling consequences. Today, Darwin's supporters frequently make light of his racial views, claiming that he was no more racist than the average upper-middle-class gentlemen of his day, and warning that we should not try to impose the politically correct attitudes of our own times on to the past. But Darwin's racism was very different from that of his contemporaries.

Though any Victorian Englishman might have regarded himself as socially superior to the lawless, savage tribes he encountered throughout the Empire, only Darwin - as the man who discovered evolution by natural selection - could provide an underpinning for racial superiority in biology and evolutionary science. Only Darwin could establish the notion of a hierarchy of races as a scientific orthodoxy that would prevail through much of the following century.

… Darwin's second catastrophic error was to promote the view that the poorest sections of society were genetically inferior to the educated middle class and that most, if not all, the traits that led to pauperism were hereditary. Darwin's analysis generated a fear that if the working class continued to breed faster than the middle class, then the society would continue down a spiral of genetic degeneration.’

Although I knew about Social Darwinism I’d always believed that it was a completely unwarranted distortion of the great man’s teachings rather than an integral part of them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that the seamy side of Darwin’s theories should have been brushed under the carpet. We all like our saints made of plaster rather than flesh and blood. Think of the Whisky Priest, Graham Greene’s anonymous protagonist in The Power and the Glory. As well as being dependent on alcohol, the priest has an illegitimate daughter. The apostate priest, José, at his wife’s instigation, refuses to administer the last rites to the whisky priest before his execution. So he dies believing he is damned, though the theologically literate reader will know that his final emotion- ‘He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all’ - is an act of pure contrition which will save him. And the common reader, of any belief or none, will know him to be a good man who, despite his many frailties, did his best to do what he believed to be right. But as soon as he is dead the pious turn him into a plaster saint:

'And that one,' the boy said, 'they shot today. Was he a hero too?'

'Yes.'

'The one who stayed with us that time?'

'Yes. He was one of the martyrs of the Church.'

'He had a funny smell,' one of the little girls said.

'You must never say that again,' the mother said. 'He may be one of the saints.'

'Shall we pray to him then?'

The mother hesitated. 'It would do no harm. Of course, before we know he is a saint, there will have to be miracles ... '

'Did he call "Viva el Cristo Rey"?' the boy asked .. '.

'Yes. He was one of the heroes of the faith.'

'And a handkerchief soaked in blood?' the boy went on, 'Did anyone do that?'

The mother said ponderously, 'I have reason to believe … Señora Jiminez told me … I think if your father will give me a little money, I shall be able to get a relic.'

'Does it cost money?'

'How else could it be managed? Everybody can't have a piece.’

One would have thought that it would be more inspiring to know that greatness or sanctity can be found in someone whose ideas or behaviour are in many respects deplorable. Darwin was wrong to propagate the belief that some groups of people are inherently inferior to others; the Whisky Priest was wrong to break his vow of celibacy. But they are both heroic figures, because of, rather than despite, their frailties.

Substance and Accidents

Read an excellent article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian (click here to read it). Jenkins suggests that what makes a place attractive to us is the network of friends and associations it has for us rather than its objective beauty. I have the good fortune to live in a breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I’m rarely any longer consciously aware of its beauty: it’s simply my home. Something similar can be said of people themselves. It's often struck me that it’s much easier to describe the appearance of those we don’t know very well than that of our close friends and family. Their physical appearance changes over the years but unless we look at an old photograph we’re not conscious of the fact. And although when we have lost contact for years with someone who used to be a close friend we’re immediately struck by their changed appearance when we meet them again the shock soon wears off. Last week I met an old schoolfriend again for the first time for over forty-five years. He now bears a striking resemblance to George Bush senior . However, after a few hours the sexagenarian had melded seamlessly with the bluecoat boy I’d shared a dormitory with for seven years of my life. Not only do the changed accidents seem unimportant one soon ceases to be aware of them - only the substance remains.

  A critic - I think it was Walter Allen - remarked that it was untrue that Dickens created caricatures. What he did was to embody his creations with the vividness of perception which we have as children. Think of those larger than life eccentric masters who dominated your schooldays. If you meet them in later life they seem to be disappointingly normal. Allen suggests that as adults we subconsciously reduce everyone to the norm: we flatten their eccentricities and heighten their ‘normal’ features. We no longer see them as they are but what convention tells us they should be. But Dickens uses accidents to manifest his characters’ substance. However, in our close friends and family substance has no need of accidents: we apprehend their substance in the same way a mystic knows his God.