Never a shortage of torturers

Tom Pride (a pseudonym) runs a satirical political blog titled "Pride's Purge", headed by this woodcut:

- which presumably indicates what he'd like to do the liars who rule us.

I was morbidly intrigued by the illustration. Was it some sixteenth century atrocity practised on a hapless South American tribesman? Was it one of those dreadful mediaeval European executions using molten lead?

No, not quite so bad as that. Image-matcher Tineye found me the whole picture:

(source: Wikimedia)

It's a waterboarding interrogation. But the eternal basics are there: the ruffian coolly willing to do dreadful things, the "potent, grave and reverend signiors" quietly instructing and recording, indicating by their weighty demeanour that this is a sad but necessary proceeding. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

It comes from a book, Praxis rerum criminalium (1554) by the Dutch lawyer Joos de Damhouder, "which he almost entirely plagiarised from an unpublished text by Filips Wielant and from other works." Joos himself is pictured as sober-solemn:

Joos de Damhouder (Pic source)

But here's the man whose work he plagiarised - Filips Wielant, a fellow Dutchman (and fellow lawyer) born in the previous century, and whose own book was published only posthumously in 1558, four years after de Damhouder's:

Filips Vielant (Pic source)

- a petulant, sadistic face if you ask me. Look at that mouth and those eyes. Perhaps in the century that intervened, eminent personages learned the value of portraits as propaganda, for this one reveals too much.

There is no shortage of such people, or of the villains prepared to serve them. There's always some excuse for torture, and a crowd that can easily be provoked into saying you can wire him up for me, haw-haw, damn towelhead.

“And yet our personal experience and the study of history make it abundantly clear that the means whereby we try to achieve something are at least as important as the end we wish to attain. Indeed they are even more important. For the means employed inevitably determine the nature of the result achieved; whereas, however good the end aimed at may be, its goodness is powerless to counteract the effects of the bad means we use to reach it.”  - Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means" (1937).

William Blake: "A Divine Image" (pic source)

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Drawing profit from circumstances

source

Indifferent and passionate, he gave himself rein and drew back constantly, impelled by conflicting instincts, yielding to all, and then obeying, in the end, his own shrewd man-about-town judgment, whose weather-vane logic consisted in following the wind and drawing profit from circumstances without taking the trouble to originate them.

Guy de Maupassant - Yvette (1884)

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Just perfect

William Blake: Eve tempted by the serpent (1799-1800)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"... of [Blake's poems] ... Wordsworth said after reading a number—they were the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the two opposite sides of the human soul'—'There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott!' "

- Henry Crabb Robinson.

I stood in front of this painting for a long time. 

The perfection of woman, the unreproducible brilliance of the blue (tempera on copper).



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Why Boris Johnson may never be Prime Minister

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A new mode of ignorance

Why is it that when you twist things out of their natural order, when you become a little sophisticated and want more than you ever did before, the risk is relatively greater? So easy to become rotten. A tree never gets that way because it is a tree.

Sherwood Anderson – Dark Laughter (1925)

As age pulls back the social veils it becomes ever more difficult to admire - what? More difficult to admire anything.

I can’t tell if it is the internet or age-induced cynicism but I think much of it is the internet shining its pitiless light on people in the public arena who simply should not be there. People with nothing to offer but their vanity and a grim determination to claw their way up what is now a forest of greasy poles.

Ignorant pundits, political apologists, talentless celebrities, venal politicians, professional liars, grievance mongers, deranged activists, serial exaggerators, insane feminists, male feminists, social justice warriors, eco warriors, gender pundits, race baiters, celebrity celebrities, religious maniacs, atheist maniacs, sports pundits, poverty pundits, fashion gurus, doom mongers, economic fantasists, junk scientists, junk artists, pseuds of every description, bent councillors, sinecure seekers, dodgy charities, fake radicals and all the unlovely crew we would be far, far better off without.

So little to admire, so much to scorn. Was it always like this or has the digital revolution exposed just how bad it is?

Two trends seem to be emerging. Firstly the obvious one – the public arena is far bigger than it was only a few decades ago. More TV channels, more video on demand, more digital voices and many more ways to get a narrative across. As a result the public arena is more diverse with lower barriers to entry. Anyone may hit the right note and propel themselves into the digital arena, especially with professional assistance.

The second trend is paradoxical but it may be real and it is this. In an important sense people are becoming better informed and at the same time more ignorant. The public arena has become so vast and clamorous that many people seem to miss what might once have been called the narrow path of virtue. It may have been narrow but it imposed a kind of sanity we no longer have.

This second trend makes for a peculiar world where people are at the same time both less and more naive than their forebears. They are both less conservative and more conservative as they become less aware of what is worth conserving but more susceptible to wildly exaggerated risks spewed at them from the digital arena.

The digital revolution asks more of us. More time, more effort spent checking sources, a more circumspect and sceptical attitude to information and authorities. Unfortunately many of us do not do the spadework, including many members of the elite. Perhaps most of them.

The net result feels like an explosion of ignorance. Not the ignorance of the past where people were simply uninformed, but a new mode of ignorance where we fail to be adequately sceptical and selective as a brave new world busily wires up our minds.

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Don't be busy

General Slim's day in wartime Burma, fighting the Japanese, "the most formidable fighting insect in history":

6:30            get up
7:00            look at overnight messages
7.30 - 8.00   breakfast with air commanders and principal staff officers
8.30            attend joint air and land intelligence conference
                  other business
Lunch, talking shop with colleagues
                  more office business, then...
3.00            leave office
                  read a novel for an hour
                  tea
                  go for a walk in the cooler air, accompanied by a member of staff
7.30 - 9.30  dinner, then mess bar for a drink and talk
9.30            last visit to ops room
10.00          bed

"I had seen too many of my colleagues crack under the immense strain of command in the field not to realize that, if I were to continue, I must have ample leisure in which to think, and unbroken sleep. Generals would do well to remember that, even in war, 'the wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure.' Generals who are terribly busy all day and half the night, who fuss round, posting platoons and writing march tables, wear out not only their subordinates but themselves. Nor have they, when the real emergency comes, the reserve of vigour that will then enable them, for days if necessary, to do with little rest or sleep."

Field Marshal Viscount Slim, "Defeat Into Victory", Pan Books (1999 edn.), pp.222-223


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The legacy of the Moors in Europe

(Picture source)

By "JD":

Most people will be aware of the Moorish influence on Spain because of the 700 years during which Spain was known as Al Andalus. Their architecture is self-evident and the Moors introduced new methods of large-scale irrigation thus expanding horticultural fertility - in the Spanish language most of the words for irrigation, drainage etc are Arabic.

Under the Umayyad caliphate (929–1031), Córdoba became perhaps the greatest intellectual centre of Europe, with celebrated libraries and schools. Not just in Córdoba but also in Toledo and other centres where arts and sciences flourished. All were part of the so-called Islamic golden age in which Jews, Muslims and Christians lived and worked and studied in relative harmony. When I first visited Toledo nearly 40 years ago what surprised me almost immediately was that the road signs were written in Hebrew as well as Spanish.

There are a number of scholars who contend that the Islamic Golden Age is a myth but that is to miss the point. The golden age was not a direct product of Islam any more than the Italian renaissance was a direct product of Christianity. Just a brief glance at the paintings of Botticelli for example would dispel that notion. Any so-called golden age in any period of history will flourish when the warrior class (the psychopaths) have a respite from the perpetual insanity of their desire for power and control.

The fact remains that in Al Andalus there was a flourishing of arts and sciences. And I have seen for myself in the bibliotecas of Madrid, Toledo and El Escorial astonishing collections of books and manuscripts in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish as well as Syriac and Farsi (Persian) A lot of material came from the middle east via the Moors and these were copied and translated in the aforementioned libraries and schools.

The Moorish influence extended beyond Spain into France and Germany in ways that have been forgotten or overlooked.

We are all familiar with the myths and legends about the quest for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail first appears in a written text in Chrétien de Troyes's Old French verse romance, the Conte del Graal ('Story of the Grail'), or Perceval, of c.1180. Several other writers over the following 50 years wrote their own versions of the Grail (or Graal) These stories are based on old Celtic and Arthurian legends and what they share is that the Grail itself is a cup or chalice. In Celtic myth this drinking vessel or 'cors' is said to satisfy the needs of all those who drank from it. This was Christanised to become the cup used at the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples.

But there is one version of the Grail legend that is different. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal, the Grail is identified as a stone, it is called "lapsit exillis" and this stone had magical powers: "Such powers does the stone confer on mortal men that their flesh and bones are soon made young again. This stone is called The Gral." Wolfram indicates in his writings that the source of his story came from Kyot of Dolet in Aragon. Kyot is a Germanic version of Guy which is the dimiutive form of Guillaume or Guilliem. Dolet is usually interpreted as being Toledo but is more likely to be Tudela which is a city in Navarra in northern Spain. At that time Navarra was part of the Kingdom of Aragon. Living and working in Tudela during this period was a scholar called William of Tudela who was the author of the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise or Song of the Albigensian Crusade, an epic poem in Occitan giving a contemporary account of the crusade against the Cathars. This would indicate that he was a Cathar living in Spain. Working as a scholar in the Bishopric of Tarazona which was a centre for the translation of Arabic lore brought from the Middle East, William of Tudela produced a translation of a work by Thābit ibn Qurra who was a Harranian living in Baghdad. This document is undoubtedly the source of Wolfram's Parzifal because Thābit is named within the story of Parzifal. He is described as a philosopher who "fathomed abstruse arts" and when Wolfram has cause to list the planets he gives them their Arabic names.

Around the same time as these Grail stories there emerged in SW France the phenomenon of the Troubadors. They appeared as if from nowhere but did they really have roots in France or elsewhere? The word does not come from the French 'trouvère' which is what everyone thinks. It comes from the North African tradition of 'Tarab' which was and still is a form of musical story telling. Add the word 'Tarab' to the Spanish language suffix of -ador and you get Tarabador, a person who sings/plays Tarab so the word 'tarabador' is much closer linguistically than 'trouvère'.

The popular image of Troubadors is of the love-struck romantic singing of his unrequited love for an unattanable maiden. But Tarab is sung by both males and females. Here is a song by the Syrian singer Assala Nasri which is a response to a declaration of love by an unwanted suitor:-


The influence of this Moorish music continues into the 20th and 21st cebturies. You may recall that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin) made a journey to the Atlas Mountains in search of further musical inspiration.

Another modern day troubador is the Canadian Loreena McKennit who, like Wolfram, has drawn inspiration from Celtic and Arabic sources. Here she is singing, appropriately enough, in the Alhambra in Granada -


==========
References-
Umayyad caliphate in Spain
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/sumay/hd_sumay.htm

Quest for the Holy the Grail
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/mythical/grail.html

William of Tudela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Tudela

Tudela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudela,_Navarre

Thābit ibn Qurra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C4%81bit_ibn_Qurra

The Hermetic Sources and Structure of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival by David R. Fideler -
http://www.bythewaybooks.com/pages/books/9380/david-fideler-arthur-versluis-kathleen-raine-joscelyn-godwin/alexandria-the-journal-of-western-cosmological-traditions-1

Idries Shah
http://idriesshahfoundation.org/books/the-way-of-the-sufi/

The Troubadors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubadour#Etymology_of_name


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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.