A Stately Pleasure Dome

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If the word “Xanadu” happens to come up at our dinner table (and doesn’t it come up from time to time at yours?) we can count on our son’s launching into Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which he memorized at some point due to sheer fascination with the language.

Today is the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and in his honor I post the opening lines of that poem. Along with it I post my daughter’s drawing, from our homeschooling Middle Ages block, of the rooftops of Xanadu, the summer residence of Kublai Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan), who ruled China during the years of Marco Polo’s visit and subsequent years of service to the Khan.

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Cambalu, the winter capital, grew quite hot in summer, so Kublai had a northern marshy river valley drained and transformed into a vast park of gardens, teahouses, terraces, and winding waterways for pleasure boats and wild birds. (Here is Marco surveying the scene from a rooftop.) At its center was the palace of polished bamboo painted with vermilion and gold and elaborate murals.

Xanadu was destroyed in the 14th century, but Marco Polo’s descriptions were familiar and inspirational to later writers, one of whose works (Samuel Purchas’ 1613 Purchas His Pilgrimage) Coleridge had been reading one summer day in 1797 before falling into a deep, some say drug-induced, sleep. While he slept, Coleridge “dreamed” the poem as a series of vivid and haunting images and phrases, which he instantly wrote down upon awakening.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery…

For the rest, please see Poetry Out Loud. You will want to memorize it, too.

For another Coleridge poem, and a painting, please see Thou shalt wander like a breeze.

 

Brotherly Love Part 1

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I post this travel sketch of a London street in honor of the birthday and birthplace of William Penn (1644-1718), who actually seems to have truly been the laudable character recorded in our childhood history books.

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Son of a prosperous knighted admiral and his wife, herself the daughter of a rich Dutch merchant, Penn could have chosen to follow in the footsteps of others of his class, enjoying a life of comfortable privilege on property confiscated by Cromwell from political opponents and dispossessed Irish peasantry. He received the usual rigorous grammar school education accorded boys in his position, studying reading and writing, religion, mathematics, Latin, and Greek from 6am to 6pm, walking the two miles each way between home and the schoolhouse. Be sure to repeat this part to your children when they object to their many burdens.

One Sunday morning, William’s father invited Thomas Loe, a traveling preacher, to lead a service in the family castle. It was an invitation the Admiral had cause to regret, because Mr. Loe, a follower of George Fox, spoke so eloquently of Quakerism that he left a permanent impression upon young William.

At sixteen William went off to Oxford, encountering for the first time extravagantly dressed fellow students who, instead of studying, spent their time, and their parents’ money, playing cards, drinking, and one can only imagine what else. William, however, was drawn to a small handful of progressive, troublesome students who met to discuss surreptitiously such inflammatory subjects as freedom of worship, and who also dared to miss several chapel services. For which they were expelled. Whereas presumably the party-down crowd remained at Oxford as long as they faithfully paid their gambling debts.

Angry and disappointed, Willam’s father gave him a good beating and sent him off on the Grand Tour of Europe to knock some sense into him, an unusual approach to teenage misbehavior not in current use. Perhaps a taste of Parisian society, thought the Admiral, would show William the folly of his queer religious ideas! On the Continent, William acquired fluency in French and a much better wardrobe, but he soon tired of court life and resumed his studies among a group of French Huguenots who (for the moment, anyway) enjoyed an inspiring period of religious freedom.

Back home, although initially cutting an impressive new figure in society, William soon dashed his father’s hopes once again by attending Quaker meetings, sympathizing with the plight of thousands of Quakers imprisoned for their refusal to follow the Church of England, writing to the government in their defense, and eventually serving time in prison himself. On top of this he began to court a Quaker lass. His father was in despair. Beatings, lengthy trips to France, even threats of disinheritance had no effect. What could be done with such recalcitrant offspring?

To Be Continued

Today is also the birthday of Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), known as e e cummings. For a painting and a poem, please see this is the garden.

 

O Roma Nobilis

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According to tradition and Edward Gibbon, September 4th, 476 is the date fixed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (The longevous Eastern Roman Empire had mostly been ruled separately since Diocletian’s reign, 284-305, and would hang on by its fingernails until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453).

In reality the fall of the Empire was more of a gradual deterioration over time, like arthritis, or a growing tendency to misplace the car keys. It took hundreds of years of bad decisions, bad luck, and bad weather for the glories of Roman engineering and culture to crumble into temporary but lengthy obscurity. But September 4th was the day on which the Germanic chieftain Odovacar and his followers bashed their way into Rome and removed the lad Romulus Augustulus from his throne, sending him into early retirement. Officially, and poetically, Rome began and ended with a Romulus.

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On this day of remembrance, I post a verse from my daughter’s Ancient Rome main lesson book, which we included in morning exercises while covering that block. Composed in the 9th or 10th century by an unknown author, it was supposedly sung by pilgrims trudging toward Rome. Perhaps pilgrims of the 25th century will chant a verse in the dead language of English as they make their way to New York or Washington DC.

Eat Your Peas

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Today is the birthday of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), whose study of the humble pea led him to deduce the existence of what he called dominant and recessive traits, thereby perplexing and confusing his fellow scientists with a concept we all take for granted today. For his story, and pictures, please see Peas of Mind.

 

Action Jackson Part 2

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Continued from Action Jackson Part 1

So how did a guy born in Cody, Wyoming who grew up mostly in Arizona and California and studied under Thomas Hart Benton (of all people!) end up as a leading New York figure in Abstract Expressionism, the first major made-in-America artistic movement? Well, that is one of the Mysteries of Art. Perhaps it required a sensitive, moody, depressed, violent, tormented, socially inept alcoholic—someone connected by the thinnest of threads to all that stuff so important to the rest of us—to throw off the last vestiges of representation and rip the painting from the easel (actually, right off the wall altogether) for its completely non-referential expression, to be fully about itself. (At least in its final state. Pollock himself acknowledged that he began a painting with representational imagery, albeit skeletal, which eventually became obscured in the process.)

Also, timing is everything. History is full of sensitive moody depressed people who never launched an art movement, or anything else, and if one of them had started flinging paint around he would have been institutionalized rather than invited to give a one-man exhibit at the Guggenheim.

A Pollock in reproduction is a mere footnote to the actual work. Personal experience of its scale and physicality are critical to appreciation and understanding of its active surface and sense of immense depth. If full understanding is actually possible. Standing before it is an odd experience, at once overwhelming, intimate, and liberating. The powerful presence of the paint, presumably devoid of pictorial illusion, nevertheless sucks the viewer in, at once baldly honest (it’s only paint) and limitlessly suggestive (of raw energy, recklessness, fury, joy, the starry firmament, the birth of the universe!). Its material immediacy combined with its non-objectivity transforms the viewer into a participant who simultaneously sees and re-creates the painting. It’s interactive art.

Pollock was at his most stable and exalted (I can’t say “happiest”) while painting. Between phases of work he was tormented, despairing, self-destructive to the point that his sad end in an automobile accident may actually have been an act of suicide. But his work, which a therapist had once suggested might help relieve his pain, had probably extended his life.

Reflect on the geniuses you know. Aren’t they famously troubled, eccentric, even downright unpleasant? Ah, and yet we forgive them, because they have opened a door to a new way of perceiving, when we hadn’t even realized there was a wall blocking our view.

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Yahrzeit2 Jane


Action Jackson Part 1

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Pollock1

Throughout the 19th century, Europe remained indisputably the center of the Western art world. By the early 20th century, however, a conjunction of circumstances led to a significant non-European artistic development.

A devastating world war, followed only a decade later by widespread economic depression, the rapid decay and displacement of antique regimes, the alarming ascent of megalomaniacs to power, the ominous signs of another imminent war—all resulted in immense disruption and the repudiation of conventions and belief systems in every facet of society, including the arts, on both sides of the Atlantic. Another result of this disturbance was the arrival on U.S. shores of emigrating European intellectuals, scientists, writers, musicians—and artists.

American artists were already actively familiar with what was happening on European easels. Some had spent time studying and working abroad. Others had attempted a departure from Old World movements to pursue more locally relevant directions based on indigenous traditions and subject matter. In the 1930s this was encouraged by WPA funding of new, large-scale public art.

If you like to think of the United States as a giant compost heap (I do), you can see that this blend of rich organic matter and seed varieties would result in some interesting hybrids. Modern American painting experiments reflected diverse influences: the flattening abstraction of Cubism, the fluid intensity of Expressionism, the subconscious/dream imagery of Surrealism, the spontaneity and iconoclasm of Dada, the scale and power of Mexican mural-painting.

But someone came along whose work simultaneously drew upon, melded, and broke the boundaries of all these, with the birth of Abstract Expressionism—a purely materialist expressive form that seems somehow appropriate for the United States, the ultimate “materialist” nation. This was Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), whose birthday it is today. (Please see Action Jackson Part 2.)

For the story of another artist born on this day, please see It’s an Oldenburg.

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March On

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DonkeyJourney

Hmm, you may be saying. Isn’t this a DECEMBER post?

But no, today is a January double anniversary. On this day in 1870, caricaturist Thomas Nast first used the donkey as a symbol for the Democratic party.

A donkey had been used decades earlier in the 1830s during the campaign of Andrew Jackson. When his political opponents labeled him a “jackass” for his stubbornness, Jackson took advantage of the insult and used the animal on his campaign posters to represent instead his unyielding tenacity of purpose.

Nast, however, in his cartoon, “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” intended his depiction to rebuke the Democratic party for its disrespectful treatment of the recently deceased Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s controversial Secretary of War. Nast went on to use the Democratic donkey in later, similarly admonishing cartoons, and the association eventually became permanent. The donkey symbol has the advantage of interpretation by the viewer as representing either 1. (if you are anti-Democratic) foolish obstinacy, or 2. (if you are pro-Democratic) humble determination.

Both the names and the respective goals of American political parties have evolved over the years. It was, after all, Republican Abraham Lincoln who authored the Emancipation Proclamation, after the newly formed Republican party split off from the slavery-supporting Whigs. But, over the last century, the Democratic donkey has become a symbol, both respected and derided, of progressive values. At times it seems the Democratic party is mired in confusion, lacking direction, and anything but resolute. But if we take the veeerry looong view, we can see, beyond party affiliation, the ultimate triumph of progressive goals.

Which brings us to our second anniversary, the birthday on January 15th of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), whose dedication, passion, eloquence and non-violent means effected tremendous change in attitudes and legislation. King is now such a heroic cultural icon that it might even surprise some of today’s schoolchildren to learn of the bitterness and vile tactics of his enemies, the assaults and death threats directed against him and his followers, the fierce opposition to what strikes us today as self-evident fairness and justice.

With his lifelong struggle for desegregation and civil rights, his goal to end poverty and compensate descendants of slaves, his protest against United States support of Latin American dictators, his encouragement to redirect government funds from the Vietnam War toward healing of social ills, he was clearly a man way ahead of many of his small-minded fellow citizens. And in this he seemed, sadly, destined for martyrdom.

Today the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March On Washington, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are the stuff of history textbooks. And, thanks to the Internet and YouTube, we can celebrate Martin Luther King Day by listening to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in recognition of the progress we have made. So far.


AMusement for All

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Muses5

On this day in 1773 a committee of the Charlestown (South Carolina) Library Society established the first public museum in the United States. Except that there wasn’t yet a United States. South Carolina was still a British colony, and the Charlestown Library Society’s inspiration for its project was the British Museum, the world’s first national public museum, founded in 1753. But by the time the doors of the new museum opened to the public in 1824, South Carolina was, and has mostly remained, part of the U.S.A. To this day you can visit and admire its displays of local natural history specimens, which the [now] Charleston Museum has continued to acquire over the centuries, along with South Carolina memorabilia.

Collecting is undoubtedly a natural human impulse, ever since our hairy ancestors stored up grain for the winter. Once basic necessities were taken care of, human beings with leisure time and/or disposable income continued for millennia to assemble various collections, from seashells to sapphires, but they were primarily for private enjoyment, profit, or study. Royalty and the well-to-do collected, and even commissioned, statuary, paintings, and elaborate furnishings for their palaces. Scholars created and collected manuscripts to share with other scholars. Scientists and amateurs alike collected unusual plants, animals, fossils, and other natural specimens, increasingly so from the 18th century onward as human beings questioned assumptions about the origins of life, the earth and the universe.

But what we now call a Museum did not exist until rather recently. The word comes from the Mouseion at Alexandria, Egypt, which was not a collection of objects for perusal by curious passersby but rather a gathering place for scholars to share scientific and mathematical discoveries (option #2 above). If you were an educated Greek male living in the Mediterranean world in the 3rd century BC and possessed both scholarly interests and travel funds, off you went to Alexandria, which had by then replaced Athens as a cultural center. Euclid studied there. So did Archimedes. The Mouseion included the famous Library of Alexandria, which sought to collect works (or copies thereof) from all over the ancient world, and at its height boasted hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls. Eratosthenes served as one of its librarians.

The name Mouseion indicated an institution dedicated to the Muses, who are the nine daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Each daughter embodies a different pursuit—Lyric Poetry, Tragedy, History, etc.—and is responsible for its nurture and inspiration. These are offspring to brag about at any parent gathering. “So, what are your daughters up to these days?” “Oh, they’re the Muses of Choral Poetry… Dance… Astronomy… .” References to the Muses abound in painting and literature, from Raphael to Moreau, Homer to Shakespeare.

We honor them still when we speak of Music, or when we cross the threshold of one of the world’s thousands of Museums, which today often still serve as centers for scholarly study, but in addition are open to ordinary citizens like you and me and contain fabulous collections of every imaginable kind of art, artifact, and animal, in every possible subject—science, history, transportation, sports, toys, bananas (I kid you not)—where we can open our eyes and our minds in wonder. And even get a slice of pizza and a postcard. Thank you, oh Muses.

This is a drawing of five of them, from my daughter’s homeschooling Ancient Greece main lesson block.