Areopagus Volume XXXII

Welcome one and all to the thirty second volume of the Areopagus. No poetry to kick things off this week. Rather, I'd like to say thank you for all the incredibly kind emails I receive. I try to respond to them all but, if ever you have emailed me and not received a response, please accept this as a mark of my gratitude. To know that you find value in my work means more to me than you perhaps realise.

And now... vamos!

I - Classical Music

Lento

Howard Skempton (1990)

Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra

A Study at Millbank by J.M.W. Turner (1797)

The story of classical music since the Second World War is one of increasingly extreme experimentation followed by a return to what, ostensibly, is more traditional - but with all the lessons from that experimental phase duly learned and applied. Howard Skempton's majestic Lento epitomises that process. He had been involved, in the 1960s, with some incredibly experimental music. He helped found the Scratch Orchestra, whose music is full of randomness and improvisation, chaos and dissonance. You'll hear everything from table tennis to unintelligible shouting in their music.

We saw one of the watershed moments of this experimental era, John Cage's 4'33", a few weeks ago. If Cage's most famous work represents the pinnacle of the mountain of experimentation, Howard Skempton's Lento is what lies on the far side.

Lento is much more familiar, using at it does traditional instrumentation and recognisably consonant melody. But notice the purity of Lento. It is by all accounts a simple piece, working with a single musical idea which is repeated without the ornamentation or development that would have been deployed by a composer of the 18th or 19th centuries. This is a feature inherited from the Minimalism of the 1960s. We hear only what is essential, with just two melodies ever really appearing, as though in some profound and eternal struggle.

And, all this musical history aside, Lento shines forth as something self-evidently special. Hypnotic in its steadiness and transcendental in its monumentality, flowing with almost excruciating emotional force but calmed by its regularity, this is a masterpiece of contemporary music which feels, even when you first hear it, like something truly timeless.

II - Historical Figure

Enheduanna

The First Writer

Enheduanna, who lived sometime in the 24th and 23rd centuries B.C., was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad. He had come down from Akkad in northern Mesoptamia and conquered the Sumerian city-states gathered around what were at that time the shores of the Persian Gulf. And, ruling over so many foreign cities as he did, Sargon's kingdom has been tentatively labelled the first empire in history.

Ur was one of the foremost Sumerian city states, and perhaps to establish authority both spiritual and temporal Sargon installed his daughter as high priestess in the temple of Nanna - the Sumerian moon god and the patron god of Ur. Synthesising the differing religious traditions of his native Akkad and those of Sumer was a vital part of his imperial programme, and so his daughter, Enheduanna, had an important role to play. Of Ur - its Ziggurat, houses, shrines, walls, and graveyards - many remains have been excavated, and so it is possible to imagine what it might have looked like three thousand years ago when she was in charge of the temple there.

Enheduanna is also the first named writer in all of human history. What survives of her work was not written by Enheduanna herself. Rather, they were copied down by scribes several centuries after her death. Whether this was out of concern for preservation, a part of the formal training required of scribes in the subsequent Old Babylonian Empire, or something else, we do not know. It has even been speculated that later scribes attributed their own work to Enheduanna as part of some formal religious or devotional convention. We cannot know for certain, but it is clear that her religious poetry played a role in the establishment of an Ancient Mesopotamian rhetorical, liturgical, and poetic corpus which lasted for centuries and, in no small way, laid the foundations for both Ancient Greek poetry and the Hebrew Bible.

Her most famous piece, the Hymn to Inanna, is devoted to the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, and war, known as Ishtar in Assyrian and a predecessor of the Greek Aphrodite. Here's an excerpt from it:

She also wrote the Temple Hymns, comprising about forty short religious poems. It seems that later additions were made to this collection, though some of them are clearly Enheduanna's work. The hymns conclude with these lines:

A sign, perhaps, that Enheduanna's poetic output at the Temple of Nanna in Ur were among the first real literary attempts in her civilisation's history. No wonder, then, that she was held in such high regard by generations of subsequent writers.

Another of her works, the Exaltation of Inanna, tells the story of a rebel king called Lugal-ane who established himself in Ur and demanded religious recognition from Enheduanna, her being the high priestess and representative of the gods in Ur. She refused and was exiled. This piece, written during her exile, sees her invoke the aid of Inanna against this impostor king:

Enheduanna is so removed in time from us, and her era of history so shrouded in uncertainty, that it verges on what Ancient Greek historians would have considered myth. That doesn't mean it didn't happen; it just means speculation and imagination are necessary to construct a coherent picture of what her life must have been like. And yet, through her verses - some of them startlingly personal - Enheduanna speaks across the gulf of the millennia.

III - Painting

The Gleaners

Jean-François Millet (1857)

What do you notice about this painting? It isn't especially beautiful. There's nothing immediately eye-catching about it, no great drama or complex psychological insight. The colours are mellow and earthy but far from warm, and though a rural scene we have nothing like a countryside idyll here.

And that's the point. Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) wanted to capture something profoundly normal and to display it without sentimentality. He was associated with the Barbizon School, a group of landscape painters who gathered in the village of Barbizon, France, around the middle of the 19th century. It was their work which paved the way for painters like Gustave Courbet, later regarded as the first Realist painter. This Realism was a reaction both to Romanticism - with its emphasis on natural beauty and human emotion - and to Neoclassicism - with its idealised style and noble themes.

The Realists were also, it must be said, deeply political. This was about depicting the real world, unadorned by artistic idealism and not veiled by the ignorance of polite society. Millet, Courbet, and the other Realists wanted to show the real lives of real people in all their mundanity and, often, misery. It was part of a broader post-Napoleonic movement in France, channelled best in the literature of Victor Hugo, which looked to the extraordinary inequality of French society and the crushing poverty which defined the lives of so many of its citizens.

Ordinary life had been a common theme in art for centuries, especially in the Protestant parts of Northern Europe. But, even then, Brueghel's peasants were yokels and Constable's fields were arcadian. Even the plain-clothed commoners of the Dutch Golden Age had a certain subtle beauty about them, charmed by their artist's spell. There's none of that here. Millet's peasant gleaners - people who collect the leftovers from a harvest - are presented exactly as he found them. And that was the most sympathetic thing he could do, neither gracing their back-breaking work with the saintliness of religious poverty common to Biblical art nor softening it with the charm of a rustic idyll.

The Gleaners caused a scandal when it was exhibited in Paris; critics lambasted its plainness and ugliness. Still more members of the middle and upper classes (the usual guests as the Parisian art salons) saw in The Gleaners a memory of the 1792 revolution all the terrors it entailed, a rallying cry for nascent socialism and a sign of social upheaval.

The Gleaners might look quaint to us, distanced as we are from the agrarian lifestyle of old. But in an artistic environment dominated by sublime landscapes, allegories for the human spirit, stories from Classical or Biblical history, scenes full of drama and delight and mystique and beauty, The Gleaners must have been astonishing. Mundanity, Millet realised, could be revolutionary.

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Lincoln Cathedral

Medieval Megastructure

The first cathedral on this site was built by the Normans in the 11th century. They had only recently conquered England and maintaining their authority, especially in the north of the country, was proving a challenge. Like Durham Cathedral, built around the same time, Lincoln's was situated on a hill with a commanding view of the surrounding area. And, like many other Norman religious buildings, this was as much a castle as a cathedral.

Most of that Norman structure was destroyed first by a fire in 1141 and then an earthquake in 1185, but parts of it still survive in the western end. You'll notice some rounded arches - typical Norman architectural features - beneath the superimposed Decorative facade.

Reconstruction of the cathedral started under the new bishop, Hugh of Avalon, in 1192. This work was completed in 1235, but the central tower he built collapsed just two years later. In 1255 King Henry II ordered it to be rebuilt and in the early 1300s this tower was itself enlarged and redesigned. The cathedral as it exists today, with its so-called "crazy nave" - because of the unusual and inexplicably asymmetrical vaulting used to construct its roof - had finally taken shape.

It should also be noted that a huge spire was added to the central tower in 1311, which was already over two hundred and forty feet (eighty metres) tall. Newly five hundred and twenty five feet (160 metres) in height, this made Lincoln Cathedral the tallest building in the world, taking that title from the Great Pyramid, which had held it for over three thousand years. The spire blew down in a storm two hundred years later and was never repaired, while the spires on the two smaller towers were taken down in the early 19th century because of structural concerns.

The cathedral as we see it today is something of a palimpsest then, with Norman fragments and plenty of so-called Early English (1150-1250) Gothic architecture. Following the Early English style, which had introduced the pointed arch but remained relatively robust and unadorned in appearance, came the Decorative Style (1250-1350). This was much more flamboyant and ornamented, with improved engineering methods permitting larger windows and arches and a greater focus on aesthetic rather than purely structural concerns. Decorative cathedrals abound in flowing, sculptured forms, minutely carved details, lofty chambers, and great arcades filled with light.

The two rose windows of Lincoln Cathedral, known respectively as the Dean's Eye (early 1200s) and the Bishop's Eye (early 1300s), capture this transformation from the rudimentary charm of the Early English to the exuberant spirit of the Decorative. Notice how much more complex and refined tracery on the Bishop's Eye (right) compared to the simpler forms of the Dean's Eye (left).

While we tend to think of great architecture as being designed by a single, visionary individual - Brunelleschi's dome for Florence Cathedral, Christopher Wren's St. Paul's, or Mimar Sinan's Selimiye Mosque - the names of the stonemasons who built the great Medieval cathedrals of Europe have been lost to time, if ever they were known at all. These were itinerant but skilled labourers who went from city to city, country to country, going wherever they could find work and dedicating the fruits of their craft to the pinnacles, tympanums, buttresses, and clerestories of these limestone monuments rising all over the continent.

The length of time required to build this cathedral is, itself, revealing. After the crippling of the Norman cathedral in late 12th century it would take a further two and half centuries for Lincoln Cathedral to take on its present shape. This was, like most Medieval buildings, a constant work in progress. Whether because of natural disaster, practical concerns, or simple taste, each subsequent generation reworked, remodelled, expanded, and reconstructed the cathedral. Many of those who worked on the cathedral knew they wouldn't live to see it finished. And so this is less the work of one person than the culmination of the work of thousands, a generational testament centuries in the making which has stood for seven hundred years and will no doubt stand for many more to come.

One can scarcely imagine what an impression Lincoln Cathedral must have made on pilgrims and worshippers, commoners and lords alike, when it was first completed. Nothing of this size had ever been witnessed before and its central tower is still visible from over fifty miles away. It was, and remains, a miracle of Medieval engineering, architecture, and passion.

If any of you ever visit Lincoln Cathedral, look out for the famous imp. Legend says it was caught doing mischief in the cathedral by an angel, who turned the imp into stone; it has since become the symbol of the city.

V - Rhetoric

Enthymemes

Aristotle, whose On Rhetoric is a startlingly technical manual on linguistic communication, often speaks about enthymemes. An enthymeme is a syllogism with the first or last part omitted. What is a syllogism? It’s an A + B = C of reasoning, where two propositions are used to draw a related conclusion. For example:

An enthymeme, by cutting out the first or last element of this logical equation, relies either on the reader’s prior knowledge or on the reader’s ability to add the missing part. This may sound like philosophical bilge, and I share sympathies with anyone who, like Polybius, dismisses the discussions of Plato and his ilk as ‘too complex and long-winded’, but Aristotle’s identification of enthymemes is sound. Such as when Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said in Predator:

He was employing an enthymeme. The full syllogism might look something like this:

Far less quotable. Now, observe yourself speaking. Read back your writing. See how often you have employed enthymemes. The answer is almost certainly: far more than you ever realised. My point here is that rhetorical devices infiltrate our language whether we like it or not. We naturally tend toward neat and effective verbal constructions, such as those of Arnold and Aristotle, and rhetoric is but the science of them. A study of it, then, will not be fruitless - it's the refinement of what we already do, all the time.

VI - Writing

Learning from the Worst

There's a famous remark apocryphally attributed both to Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami, and probably to Oscar Wilde as well. It goes something like this:

That doesn’t necessarily preclude reading the “greats”, because the truth is that vanishingly few people actually read the greats. The lion’s share of the books we read have been published in the last two years and will have been totally forgotten in a dozen. It stands to reason, then, that we perhaps ought to read books which have faced the ultimate test - time, over two thousand years of it or more! - and survived. For that fact alone we may be fairly sure they contain something of real worth.

But, putting aside the great and the obscure, we must also learn from the worst. Brilliance can be overwhelming, and the problem with learning from the greats is that… they’re too good. If all a music student listens to is Beethoven’s Ninth - which is a work of such quality that it becomes less a symphony and more an inscrutable act of genius - the student might not learn as much as they could.

A badly written paragraph, a badly explored idea; these will set your teeth on edge. It will make you realise I could write that better, and then you’ll suddenly start thinking about how you could write it better. And when you notice what’s wrong with other people’s work your error-detection muscles will strengthen, and you’ll see the mistakes in your own writing. Reading the greats grants us the ability to appreciate greatness. Reading what's not so good strips away those rose-tinted glasses and allows us to see good writing from the other side. So seek out some poorly written novels, essays, or articles, and let your critical faculties get to work.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Why study history?

To those who already love history this question might seem trivial. But it's never without value to reassess our foremost assumptions. Why is history worth reading?

It has often been said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Thucydides certainly agreed. Horrified by the devastation unleashed during the Peloponnesian War, he wrote a history of it with the express purpose of providing for future generations a forensic analysis of what political and social machinations caused such a catastrophe.

But here is another view from the historian Diodorus Siculus (100-30 BC), who wrote a so-called "universal history" of the known-world from ancient times to his own. Diodorus, like many other ancient writers, also placed a great deal of emphasis on history's power to inspire:

Question of the Week

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

Do humans have an inherent identity or are they shaped by their upbringing? In other words: nature versus nurture.

Eva V argued that they cannot be separated:

While Laura W pointed out an underlying assumption in the original question and argued that belief in our identity is a critical part of the answer:

And Ciaran K discussed how nature and nurture, while playing different roles, coincide:

For this week's question to test your critical thinking:

Why study history?

And that's all

Writing the Areopagus is a delight and sharing it with you a privilege. Wherever you are in the world I hope you have a splendid weekend. Goodbye for now. May the Force be with you and all that...

Yours,

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