Areopagus Volume LI

Welcome one and all to the fifty first volume of the Areopagus. We begin not with poetry but a brief announcement. Big Think have recently published an article I wrote for them on why we are so bad at predicting the future and why we should be wary of those who seek to excite or frighten us about what Artifical Intelligence will or will not do. Here is a link to it. If you do read the article then feel free to let me know what you think - and whether you agree or disagree with my conclusions.

Otherwise, and moving on, I suppose the best place to start today's instalment is with a photograph sent to me by a reader called Maurice. He visited Greece this week and walked on the very Areopagus itself, that rocky outcrop in Athens from which this newsletter takes its name:

Suitably located, then, let the great adventure of another volume begin!

I - Classical Music

Morning & Piano Trio No. 2, II: Andante

Justin Hurwitz (2022) & Franz Schubert (1827)

Piano Trio No. 2 performed by the Beaux Arts Trio​
City of Workers by Hans Baluschek (1920)

There are two pieces of music here. The first is called Morning and it comes from the soundtrack to the 2022 film Babylon, directed by Damien Chazelle. This soundtrack was written by the award-winning Justin Hurwitz, who also collaborated with Chazelle on films like La La Land and Whiplash. It is a marvellous little tune. Eccentric, playful, mysterious, and filled with sudden bursts of wholly pathetic (in the old-fashioned sense of evoking pathos, i.e. emotion) splendour. But when I first heard Morning it sounded strangely familiar. And, as it turns out, Hurwitz based it on a piece written by Franz Schubert (1797-1828), mentioned before in this newsletter. Specifically, Morning takes its cue from the second movement of Schubert's Piano Trio No. 2, written in 1827. This is the second piece you hear. It has been used several times in cinema before, perhaps most famously in Stanley Kubrick's cult classic Barry Lyndon, released in 1975.

What do we make of this? First, we should note that a "piano trio" is a piece of music written for a piano in combination with two other instruments, often a violen and cello, and that they usually have three movements. Simple. Second, it touches on a point I have made before: that it is in film scores (and those for television and video games) more than anywhere else that classical music lives on. As Dufay wrote for the church, Monteverdi for the noble Italian courts, and Verdi for opera houses, modern composers write for the silver screen.

Third, one may rightly ask why they didn't simply use Schubert's Piano Trio rather than composing an entirely new but strikingly similar piece. Well, classical music has a long history of appropriation and revision, whereby composers borrowed themes from their predecessors and reworked them into new contexts. This is nothing unusual, then. And, finally, it is common practice in the film industry to use something known as "temp music". Here, before a composer has scored a film, the director will use pre-existing music to give some idea of how they would like a particular scene or moment to be scored. Given that directors regularly turn to the classical for their temp music (where better to look?) we often hear tracks in film which sound remarkably similar to famous pieces of classical music. There are elements from Hans Zimmer's score for Gladiator almost indistuinguishable from Gustav Holst's Mars, for example. What was it T.S. Eliot said?

II - Historical Figure

Arthur Rimbaud

The Original Enfant Terrible

I cannot possibly convey in a few short paragraphs the extraordinary life of Arthur Rimbaud. All I shall do, then, is give you a brief overview, alongside a selection of quotes from his poetry, and hope that it paints for you a worthy portrait of this astonishing and complicated young man.

Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most influential poets in French literary history (to say nothing of his broader influence!) was born in Champagne in France in 1854. His father was a soldier who took no part in the boy's life, and so Rimbaud was left to the care of his mother, a strong-willed farmer's daughter. The young Rimbaud proved a precociously talented child who won the admiration of all his teachers - alongside national prizes for Latin - and became, even as a teenager, astonishingly well-read in French literature. He was, by all accounts, a preternaturally gifted student.

At the age of sixteen, the same year his first poem was published, Rimbaud's adventures began. The outset of the Franco-Prussian War forced the closure of his school and so the teenage Rimbaud ran away to Paris. Various wanderings in Belgium and Northern France, a brief incarceration, a return to Champagne, and a short excursion to join the Paris Commune swiftly followed. This was but the prelude for the enfant terrible of 19th century French poetry to make his real entrance. A letter written in 1871, when Rimbaud was but sixteen, reveals the personal artistic ethos he had been developing:

Powerful words. This was a troubled but inspired young man with more spiritual and creative energy than he could, apparently, bear to handle. Rimbaud sent some of his work to the established poet Paul Verlaine, who was impressed and invited the young man to Paris, even paying his fare. It was then, in a flash of inspiration, that Rimbaud wrote what many regard as his finest poem, The Drunken Boat. Here is an excerpt:

Translated by Wallace Fowlie

So Rimbaud arrived in Paris; all hell broke loose. He was troublesome, insufferable, erratic, and quite frankly dangerous. The romantic image of the artist as troublemaker may have its origins in the likes of Caravaggio and Byron, but few can match Rimbaud for his antics as a volative, deeply unpleasant, even sadistic young man - but one who was, by any and all accounts, a creative genius. Rimbaud and Verlaine engaged in a scandalous affair which lasted for two years and involved several elopements. It was in London, in the winter of 1872, that Rimbaud wrote the Illuminations; here is an excerpt from a part entitled Marine:

Translated by A.S. Kline

This ever-quarrelsome affair ended in 1873, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and was subsequently jailed. Upon returning to Champagne Rimbaud wrote the self-searching A Season in Hell, a prosimetric (i.e. mixing prose and verse) retrospective of his turbulent Parisian years. The final part is called Adieu, and thereafter Rimbaud wrote very little poetry.

Translated by A.S. Kline

After 1875 he wrote nothing at all. What happened in 1875? Arthur Rimbaud, still only twenty years old, set out to see the world.

The rest of Rimbaud's life, if it had not already been, was the definition of peripatetic. He wandered, and wandered, and wandered, apparently always in search of something, unable to rest or lie still, impulsive and unfulfilled and questing until the end. He crossed the Alps on foot, joined the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies, passed through Egypt, worked for a coffee trader in Yemen, and became the first European to see Ogaden in Ethiopia. During his stay in Ethiopia Rimbaud dealt arms, among other mercenary and mercantile exploits, amassing a fair fortune in the process. He also expanded his linguistic repertoire, adding Arabic, Amharic, Harari, Oromo, and Somali to his French, Italian, Spanish, English, and German.

Back in France, thanks to the efforts of Verlaine, Rimbaud had become a well-known and critically acclaimed poet, especially among the nascent Symbolists. But in 1891 Rimbaud became desperately ill. He made the thirteen day return voyage from Aden to France by sea, where he arrived at Marseille in May and was hospitalised. By August he was dead, aged just thirty seven. So ended the life of one of the first truly modern poets, the very definition of a rebel and a young man whose boundless personality and vagabond life have seen him characterised as a genius and delinquent in equal measure.

III - Painting

Madonna and Child

Masaccio (1426)

At first glance this probably looks like a more or less ordinary Early Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child. This is, in some sense, true. After all, it was painted by the great Florentine artist Masaccio. He was the rightful heir to Giotto, who a whole century earlier had taken the first major steps toward restoring the principles of Ancient Greek and Roman art: perspective, depth, modelling, and greater naturalism. Those who are most influential often look, in retrospect, ordinary, precisely because they have been so infuential. We can say this about Masaccio.

But there's more going on here. Look closer. What do you notice about the halo around Mary's head, and about the hem of her robe?

Both are decorated with what looks like Arabic script. But it isn't; it's gibberish. The words say nothing at all. They are a garbled imitation of Arabic rather than the real thing. What's going on here? Well, this wasn't entirely unusual. Masaccio did the same thing in many of his other paintings and in this he was not alone; it was common practice during the Italian Renaissance for artists to decorate the halos and robes of Mary and Jesus with something usually called "pseudo-Arabic" or "pseudo-Kufic", Kufic being a particular calligraphic form of Arabic. Here are some other examples:

But... why? Well, scholars have speculated that painters wanted to evoke the Holy Land, Mary's home and Christ's birthplace, which was under Islamic dominion at the time. So it was, possibly, an atmospheric and narrative decision. This may be true, but we cannot know for sure. A better question, perhaps, is how these artists were familiar with Arabic at all. Well, Medieval and Renaissance Europe had very close links to and a very long border with the Islamic world, stretching from Spain, right across the Medieterranean coastline of North Africa, throughout the Middle East and Turkey, right around to the Balkans. And so, whether because of war (and plunder) or, more commonly, through trade and travel, Christian Europe was flooded over the centuries with wares produced in places ranging from Granada in Al-Andalus (Muslim-ruled Iberia) to Mamluk Egypt, Umayyad Syria, Timurid Samarqand, and Abbasid Iraq.

Islamic textiles, metalwork, glassware, and ceramics were generally of far superior quality to those made in Europe at the time and were therefore much prized. Martin Luther owned one of the famous "Hedwig Glasses" (so-called because they once belonged to a Polish princess called Hedwig), perhaps produced in 11th century Syria, and Thomas à Becket wore a fabulous robe most likely made in Fatimid Egypt. It bears several Arabic inscriptions, one of them reading:

Thomas à Becket did not, presumably, know this. Similarly, the 8th century King Offa of Mercia (an Anglo-Saxon realm in England) minted a number of gold coins which were direct copies of dinars produced by the Abbasid Caliphate. His name was printed in the middle of a poorly copied Arabic inscription reading:

Atop Pisa Cathedral in Italy there stands a 12th century bronze griffin cast in Al-Andalus, and until 1856 members of the French royal family were baptised in a bronze basin inlaid with gold and silver known as the Baptistère de Saint Louis, a masterpiece of 14th century Mamluk metalwork. There were also many objects apparently commissioned from Islamic craftsmen by Christian patrons. One notable example is a brass canteen made in Damascus which mixes Christian symbology (such as a Madonna and Child, the Nativity, and so on) with Arabic inscriptions and typical Islamic decoration.

All of this speaks to close commercial links and an artistic (even cultural!) familiarity between the worlds of Christendom and Islam during the Middle Ages which belies common perception about that era. Islamic architecture also wielded immense influence over the development of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, but that is a story for another day. More importantly, here, it is worth noting that in the art of Islam, more so than in any other artistic tradition in the world, the written word itself became a form of art. There were several distinct forms of Arabic calligraphy, such as Kufic, Thuluth, or Nashki, each with their own aesthetic and technical characteristics, and they were used not only to write books but as decorative ornaments: words were painted onto ceramic bowls, wrought into metal dishes, and woven into silk coverlets. Calligraphy was even a central part of architecture, and you'll find the walls of mosques painted or carved with verses from the Quran, whereby the words themselves, notwithstanding their meaning, have become as much art as any painting or sculpture.

Perhaps, then, Masaccio simply inscribed the halo of his Madonna with "pseudo-Arabic" because of its well-known and much-admired aesthetic and decorative qualities, with which his patrons would almost certainly have been familiar. Masaccio's Arabic may be meaningless gibberish, but it speaks volumes about the interconnected world of the Middle Ages and the many surprises it has in store for us. Art, as ever, is a window into the past.

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Temple Works Flax Mill

Leeds, England

What exactly are we looking at here? I suppose, unless you knew otherwise, your first guess would not be a factory. But that's what this is: the main entrance and counting house of a factory built in the 1830s by the architect Joseph Bonomi, with some help from the Scottish painter and Egyptologist David Roberts, for the immensely wealthy industrialist and mill owner John Marshall. Its architectural style, unsurprisingly, is known as Egyptian Revival. Europe had been in the throes of "Egyptomania" for several decades, spurred on by attention drawn to Egypt during the Napoleonic Wars, and buildings like this were the result. What we see here is, in fact, an almost direct recreation of the Temple of Horus in Edfu, a city in the upper reaches of the Nile. But this is only where the principal offices were based; directly adjacent is the factory itself, which was once crowned with a chimney in the shape of an obelisk and was apparently inspired by another famous Egyptian temple complex at Dendera.

But this was no mere architectural flight of fancy, nor only a vanity project. The Temple Works Flax Mill was, upon completion in 1840, the largest single-floor factory in the world. Nearly 3,000 people were employed here and it was equipped with the most advanced technology available. Industry in the 19th century came no bigger nor any fiercer than this. An unusual but brilliant design feature of the Temple Works is its extensive roof, punctured throughout by several dozen large, conical skylights. As a result what might have been a rather dingy space (given its size) was instead illuminated at all times by natural light. The factory was also installed with a complex system of ducts, vents, and pumps to manage its internal temperature, along with baths for all its workers, not to mention the 240 horsepower steam engine built for Marshall by B. Hick and Sons. In 1840 this factory represented the very heights of high-tech.

Any flax mill must remain humid, for once linen thread dries out it becomes unusable. How did Marshall and Bonomi deal with this? Atop the forest of cast iron pillars supporting the mill's huge ceiling are a series of brick vaults covered in rough plaster. Over these was laid an impermeable layer of coal-tar and lime, upon which was then placed a bed of soil eight inches thick, planted with grass; all of this so no moisture could possibly escape. And - yes - the roof of this mill was once covered with grass. To keep it tidy flocks of sheep were regularly grazed on the roof, transported up there by some of the earliest hydraulic machinery.

The Temple Works Flax Mill was, clearly, a technical triumph, primed for a production line of maximum efficiency. And yet, amidst what was undoubtedly a highly mercantile environment, ostensibly driven by nothing other than profit, John Marshall saw fit to build a factory which was more than a factory. The almost inexplicable facade of monumental papyriform columns, friezes, and cornices speaks to a view of architecture as something more than merely functional. Temple Works is as much a monument of aesthetics as industry. And Marshall's Egyptian Revival project extended well beyond the architecture of the building; the steam-powered machinery custom built for its interior was also decorated with Egyptian motifs, including winged solar disks and scarabs. This was a total project in which every detail was considered: architecture, engineering, technology, aesthetics, and working conditions fully united under one extraordinary roof.

But the Temple Works Flax Mill is, of course, no longer a flax mill. It was decommissioned in the late 19th century when competition from abroad rendered it unprofitable, to be replaced first by a box factory and then, in the 20th century, by a mail order firm. Most recently the Temple Works has lain dormant for over two decades. Thankfully, this situation is set to be reversed; Marshall and Bonomi's masterpiece shall be repaired, restored, and taken over by the British Library. A happy and deserved ending for a truly remarkable bit of 19th century industrial architecture.

V - Rhetoric

Aposiopesis

This is potentially one of the most effective rhetorical devices - and therefore one of the most dangerous. Aposiopesis is, in short, the intentional failure to complete a sentence. This is because of an unwillingness or inability to do so. You trail off slowly, or break off suddenly, followed by a pause, and... the audience is left to complete the sentence for themselves. Aposiopesis is thus usually signified in writing by an ellipsis (...) or hyphen (-). A typical, albeit uninteresting example goes something like, "why you..." We fill in the expletive ourselves.

You can see why it is a double-edged sword, then. Aposiopesis is among the most theatrical of rhetorical devices, perhaps more suited to drama than real-life speaking. But, if we wish to convey that we are gripped by intense emotion then there are few better ways to do so than by appearing so overcome we simply cannot find the words to continue. That might be passion or it might be anger, perhaps excitement or fear. Think of King Lear in Shakespeare's play when he says:

Or, in the emotionally charged words of a politician, unable to fully express their gratitude:

Alternatively, aposiopesis can be wholly intentional. We use it to imply something we do not wish to say, perhaps because it is too vulgar or shocking.

Or simply because, by leaving the thing unsaid, it attains a sort of inexpressible power by the virtue of the fact that we are unwilling to say it:

What's left unsaid is often more powerful than what's said; this, alongside its intensely emotive quality, is what makes aposiopesis work.

(Aposiopesis is slightly different from the related device of anacoluthon, where there is a sudden and unexpected change from one sentence to another midway through the first, resulting in what seems like a grammatical or logical mistake. From John Milton's poem Lysidas: "Had ye been there – for what could that have done?")

VI - Writing

Suffixes & Prefixes: The Amisian Solofix

Overly prescriptive writing advice is pointless, for if we all simply follow the "best" such advice then we'll end up writing the exact same way. Nobody wants that. We are all different and therefore we write differently; ergo there is a great risk if we only write how other people say we ought to. But, from time to time, it's worth considering another writer's advice. We can experiment with their suggested methods and see if they work for us. Then we can cast them off entirely, perhaps learn a little, or even modify those methods and adopt them for ourselves.

The late Martin Amis, one of Britain's most notable modern novelists, once gave a simple but rather elegant explanation of how he put together his sentences. For Amis there had to be "minimum elegance and euphony" in every one of them. Euphony here refers to the quality of (to put it simply) sounding nice. What does this look like in practice? As Amis himself explained:

Barnstormingly simple advice. Don't write more than one word which ends with -ing or -tion or -ness in a single sentence, nor more than one word beginning with con- or pro- or de-. Use any given prefix or suffix only once per sentence. If you do this then your sentences will sound better. Such a method undoubtedly requires close attention to our words, and almost certainly some careful rewriting. But, as far as writing advice goes, this isn't bad stuff. It shouldn't be taken as a hard rule (no doubt Amis broke it himself, and innumerable beautiful sentences have been written which breach it) but if you are looking to make your words a little less cluttered, and a little more elegant and euphonic, then the Amisian Solofix (a term I just invented) might be what you need.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

Is political rule by a single person ever justified?

These were your answers...

Bill C

Isabella M

J.D.

Shovna P

Pilar B

Michael M

Question of the Week

And for this week's challenge of your critical thinking, taking its cue from my article for Big Think, comes a very broad question indeed:

What will the future be like?

Make of that what you will. Email me your answers and I'll share them in next week's newsletter.

And that's all

The 21st June is very nearly upon us: for half the world that means Summer and, for the other half, Winter. So by the time next week's volume of the Areopagus rolls around another season shall have arrived. And yet it is only because things are finite that they seem to have any value at all. What good would be a Spring that never ends? The bare branches must bud, and the buds must eventually blossom, destined soon to wither and fall, until the cycle starts again. Let us enjoy what we have while we have it, then, and covet not what has been nor what is yet to come.

And, with that, I pass over to the 17th century Metaphysical poet George Herbert, who sings us out thusly...

Alack, get thee gone, Gentle Reader, and I bid thee a blessed morrow!

Yours,

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