Independence Day 2011

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Thanks to an online July 4th promotional event  at ancestry.com and the good offices of my distant cousin Howard Mitchell in Illinois, a far more assiduous genealogist than I shall ever be, I received from him this weekend a document concerning my original American ancestor, Rudolph Hines.

The document below shows that Rudolph emigrated from Prussia in 1733 and ultimately wound up on a frontier settlement in the Ohio Territory, where he died in 1823. He had a daughter named Mary Hines, who married John Mitchell, the son of my patrilinear ancestor from Scotland,  who appeared on these shores in 1782.

Of enduring importance is the fact that Rudolph Hines, born Rudolf Heintz, fought in the Brandywine-Germantown campaigns of 1777,  rendering him not only obnoxious to British forces similarly engaged, but significant also to a number of his own descendants (who by this time number in the hundreds: families were of course huge in those days), and especially to those seeking admission to the exclusive “Sons of the American  Revolution” organization. Thus for example an application from a distant relative named Sherman Strong, who applied for entry on July 12, 1880:

Clicking embiggens.

All of this quite delights me. Even though I share I think only 1/128th of Rudolph’s genetic material, I am convinced that this documentary evidence explains why I majored in German at Boston University, and subsequently spent a total of 13 years living in Germany, preferring Berlin above all other places and Prussia’s Glory above other German military marches.

But despite my demonstrable eligibility, I shall not seek acceptance in the Sons of the American Revolution, which I suppose is as close as we get to hereditary aristocracy in this country. Perhaps such attitudes may have induced Rudolph to leave Germany and fight for American independence in the first place. Anyway, the circumstances of my life require that I view myself as the son of a thoroughly different revolution than the one envisioned and eternally memorialized by the Sons or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

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Mnemosyne

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing  in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:


Mnemosyne
                                   (Third version)


The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.


But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?


My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.



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The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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O father, my father

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This tombstone from a colonial cemetery in Boston has interested me more than all others. The barely legible inscription reads:

W.P. 

O MY FATHER, MY FATHER, 

THE CHARIOTS OF ISRAEL, 

THE HORSEMEN THEREOF. 

1658

I think it unlikely I shall discover the identity of W.P., but since Boston was founded in 1630, he must have been in the first or second generation of English settlers in Massachusetts. (It's difficult for many folks to understand there were things that went on in America between 1492 and 1776, but poking around Boston gives you a certain cognitive edge.)

The inscription puzzled me for years -- obviously a verse from the Old Testament, but from where, and what was the context? Not until Google was invented in the late 90's was I able to find the correct citation in 2 Kings 13:14:

Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof  he died. And Joash the king of Israel came down unto him and wept over his face, and said, O my father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof (KJV).

What was this all about? Several Bible commentaries I looked at are hardly in agreement, but the idea seems to be that when Joash the king of Israel learned that the prophet Elisha was dying, he appeared and had some kind of  future vision, or perhaps past memory, of Israel's military victories.

A bit later the chronicle continues:

20 Elisha died, and they buried him. Now the bands of the Moabites would invade the land in the spring of the year. 21 As they were burying a man, behold, they saw a marauding band; and they cast the man into the grave of Elisha. And when the man touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet (New American Standard Bible).

OK so now maybe we have a Jewish, pre-Christian resurrection parable on our hands? Is this why these words, more than 2000 years old, are inscribed on a colonial gravestone in Boston? Or is it rather that W.P. enjoyed a successful career as a belligerent or a military hero of some sort?

What an appropriate mystery for 17th century Boston, cloaked in patriarchal imagery and advertising itself as the city set upon the hill* to be approved by all, like Gilgamesh looking out from the walls of Ur.

The motto on the seal of the City of Boston is from 1 Kings 8:57 and is no less patriarchal: Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis -- "The LORD our God be with us, as he was with our fathers."

* John Winthrop, 1630, "...for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us." See also my paper Political Themes in the Reformation of John Calvin.


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The history of the unknown

I’m impressed with the idea that as historians we write the history of the unknown rather than of what is known. It seems that facts are helpful in creating parameters for our chosen playing field, but in themselves are boring, even almost contemptible. It’s as if the 19th c. Rankean ideal of “what actually happened” has been replaced with the more compelling depiction of what could have.

The pronouncement that Columbus *discovered* America in 1492—a curious formulation since it was already the world for the millions who lived there, so you might well ask who really discovered whom—is intrinsically inconsequential, since it might have been in 1493 and by Columbus' brother-in-law, and what difference would that have made? More interesting is what isn’t knowable about it, for example which Carribean island did he land upon, the subject of an overly long PBS documentary film a year or two ago.

Writing the history of the unknown proceeds mostly by analogy. In a given social process, we don’t know how A turned into B, but we do have an idea how C turned into D, so we apply that to the former situation. This makes us feel that the know-ability of our undertaking has increased and the aporias correspondingly diminished.

Tenth-century Europe is notoriously difficult for medievalists, who avoid it like the plague, due to a profound lack of documentary evidence. The common practice is to dismiss it as a century of transition. We have the growth of towns and an economy utilizing silver coinage by the year 1000, which wasn’t the case in 900, so it’s like Jack’s beanstalk that grew up overnight when nobody was watching, and we move on quickly to the century following where sources abound.

I’ve been reading Gerd Althoff’s Die Ottonen, a really useful book about the Saxon kings of Germany in the tenth century, but which laments the lack of documentary evidence so often that the reader almost feels guilty for having picked up the book to begin with. One should stop kvetching, accept that the fact that we *know* as much we are intended to, and get on with writing the history of the unknown.

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Alexander in Egypt

I wrote three history papers last semester, including this essay on Alexander the Great's activities in Egypt. If you've ever lain awake at night wondering why Alexander, having beaten the guacamole out of Darius at Issos, left for a long trip to Egypt instead of chasing the Persian king back to Babylon, then the following may be of some assistance.

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Nineteen Kingdoms

So I was searching my hard drive this morning trying to find a map of the known world I made a few years ago when I was last active in SCA, which I wanted to show to a friend of mine. To my surprise I actually succeeded in finding it, and I’ll post it here so I’ll know where to look for it next time.

The Godescalc Gospels

I've been researching illuminated Carolingian manuscripts lately, and I came across these lovely pictures of the Godescalc Gospels, named after the Frankish scribe responsible. There are five illuminations which were created in the scriptorium in or near Charlemagne's palace at Aachen between 781-783 AD.

A youthful Christ is shown with brown long hair, common also for early Anglo-Saxon portraits. For the Franks, the hair style may have recalled ancient royalty, since the first Merovingian kings were known  for wearing their hair long.

The panel to the left which prefaces a coppery page of scripture shows the "Fountain of Life," from which all creation springs forth. Behind the encircling pillars you have to imagine a round fountain of spring water.

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Oh hai, here is Ceiling Cat

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Instead he makinkgz Urf n stuffs.

Later Ceiling Cat joyn teh Crusades.

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Medieval werewolves

Sunt homines quidam Scottorum gentis habentes
Miram naturam maiorum ab origine ductam....


Section XVI, Of Men Who Turns Themselves into Wolves

There are some men of the Scottish race
Who have this wondrous nature from ancestry and birth:
Whensoever they will, they can speedily turn themselves
Into the form of wolves and rend flesh with wicked teeth:
Often are they seen slaying sheep that moan in pain.
But when men raise the hue and cry,
Or scare them with staves and swords, they take flight like true wolves.
But whilst they act thus, they leave their true bodies
And give orders to their women not to move them:
If this happens, they can no longer return to them.
If any man harm them or any wound pierce their flesh,
The wounds can be plainly seen in their own bodies:
Thus their companions can see the raw flesh in the jaws
Of their true body: and we all wonder at the sight.


Aubrey Gwynn, The Writings of Bishop Patrick, 1074-1084, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 1 (Dublin, 1955), pp. 62-63 §xvi.

Complete Latin text and more about medieval lycanthropy at In the Middle.

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Baseball poems

Nice post today about baseball as a poetic subject in the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica.

And see also Guy Halsall's brilliant essay on the stupidity of Francophobic prejudice regarding alleged military inferiority in WW II. Guy's wrath was awakend by a journalist's reaction to a Cameron government proposal to create joint British-French military units.

Messene

Click me.

I was looking up Messene on the Internet yesterday, an ancient Greek city in the Peloponnese known for its remarkably well-preserved ruins of civic buildings and fortifications dating from the fourth century BCE.

The polis was created by the Theban General Epaminondas to check Spartan hegemony after the Battle at Leuctra in 369, where the Spartans got the living snot beat out of them by the Theban army.

What struck my attention was how greatly the flora backgrounding this watchtower along the city walls resembles that of California. You might think that you had landed in the East Bay Hills in late April or early May.

Photo of Messene from Wiki Commons.

Knock before entering

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Those of us with our heads firmly pointed backwards will find delight in this morning's BBC news report of the discovery in Zurich of a 5000-year-old door made of poplar wood. Damn, that's a long time ago.

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A touch of Alexander in the night

Critics all but universally denounced Oliver Stone's 2004 "Alexander" movie. I must admit that the film was pretty strange in places, but it certainly sparked my own imagination and phantasy-life.

One scene I particularly enjoyed was Alexander, on campaign somewhere in Asia, sits down to his daily papyrus review, while the camera hovers over his shoulder.

The employment of Greeklish seems a bit odd, but I find this little touch of ancient literacy very appealing, and not out of keeping with Alexander's obviously formidable intellect, nourished in his youth by Aristotle personally.

Plutarch's Alexander biography has a marvelous scene where Hephaestion and Alexander, alone in their tent at night, are at work going over the daily correspondence. Hephaestion deletes the spam and passes the important mails on for Alexander to deliberate. A. unrolls a papyrus from his Mom, takes off his ring and blows upon it, an indication to H. that her words are to be classified top secret.

Scholars continue to debate about whatever romantic or sexual interests may have existed between the two of them, but for me this little story from Plutarch sums up their whole relationship. After all, how many husbands or wives or partners do you know who would want to examine their mate's emails every day, or who share the same userid or passwords? 

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Incipient capitalism

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Thanks to Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris I have had to revise my understanding of the origins of capitalist oppression. I had tended to think that it originated in Europe after the introduction of wage slavery, replacing serfdom and actual slavery in Late Antiquity.

But Sobin shows that it all started in the late Iron Age, and that overproduction in the food supply is the point of origin. Looking at the south of France around 700BC, when indigenous people were overtaken by Celts coming from the north, Sobin writes:

Out of small, agropastoral, self-sustaining societies, we witness the emergence of larger and larger ‘microstates,’ with highly fortified villages –oppida—on the spurs, ridges, and rock outcrops in the hinterland above. Practicing for the first time an agrarian economy based on surplus, these societies would come to store that surplus in granaries… within the fortified oppida themselves. That surplus would be exchanged against other goods in the first verifiable market economy in Mediterranean Gaul.

Here the archaeological evidence kicks in with a vengeance: some individuals lived in larger houses than others, warranted larger burial plots, had more stuff buried in their graves, had bigger dolmens on top of them.

What happened in earlier Iron and Bronze Age societies? Law of the Jungle, you’d think, but no, the archaeological evidence suggests rather that tribespeople lived cooperatively and free of class struggle.

An interesting feature of the late Neolithic is that there aren’t any signs of warfare. After the last Ice Age, when Europeans lived like the Inuit, hunting reindeer across the icy plains of Central Europe, wandering tribes were numerically so small that they were perhaps happy to run into each over the vast icy plains, and warfare wasn’t advantageous.

This didn’t set in until land ownership and concomitantly the production of seizable assets. So from earliest history you have the two approaches in human affairs: the cooperation inherent in tribal relations, and then the outbreak of individualism and the subsequent struggle to gain control of production.

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I decided that although I read many books, I won't review them on this blog.  After all, who cares what I think about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (It's great.) But I will say without hesitation that the most interesting and useful book I have read so far this year is:

Gustaf Sobin. Luminous Debris. Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc. U.C. Press: 1999.

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