To See A Heaven in a Wild Flower

Impressionism (Pool, Phoebe)

Their inspirations were Constable, the Dutch masters, Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, Millet, Courbet, Boudin and Jongkind; Condorcet and the new scientific spirit; Eugene Chevreul’s theories of colour, above all; the failed revolution of 1848 and the Anglo-Prussian war of 1870; the realism of Balzac; the poetry of Baudelaire; the spirited debates at the Cafe Guerbois.

Their immediate predecessors and sometimes friends: Edouard Manet, Degas, Emile Zola. Their immediate successors: Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin.

Their style: cool, impersonal, pastoral; like Flaubert, they cocked a snook at the flamboyant, fussy, self-indulgent Romanticism of lofty subjects and rich treatment, and insisted on seeing the sublime in the mundane; they represented a democratization – a petite-bourgeouisification, in fact – of taste.

Their credo: Cameras can transcribe nature. Abstraction and representation, not of reality itself, but of an artist’s experience of reality, is art.

Further, that a story or moral are not necessary for a painting. Human forms are optional. Form: not critical. Construction: not important. Lines: trivial. Objects need to be suggested, that is all – suggested by color.

Color is everything. No black, however – there’s no black in nature. Objects only have the colour that light and shadow confer upon them. Only basic colours are to be used, complementing each other, modifying one another. Colors: not mixed on palette, but juxtaposed on canvas, and mixed in our mind.

Every canvas is a careless-looking but precise arrangement of space and colour, a unique solution to a unique puzzle; the puzzle of accurately representing, in two dimensions, a moment experienced by the artist.

The moment passes, time flies and now the light is different. The shadows are elsewhere. Other colours are indicated: it is now a different moment, a different picture. Moments are hard to capture. Speed is essential, and spontaneity. Detail: not so much.

They painted the way William Carlos Williams wrote poems.

Ceci n’est pas une Sunrise. This is the artist’s impressions of a sunrise. Claude Monet’s “Impressions: Sunrise” courtesy Wikimedia.

Portrait of a City as a Protagonist

London – The Novel (Rutherfurd, Edward)

“So how do you define a Londoner, then?” Lady Penny asked, curiously.

“Someone who lives here. It’s like the old definition of a cockney: someone who’s born within hearing distance of Bow Bells. And a foreigner, “he added, with a grin, “is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.”

It was a tiny Celtic hamlet in 54 BC, and its inhabitants watched in awe as Caesar’s legions forded the Thames on their way to battle. Three centuries later, it was a small Roman outpost – two streets, a temple and a wall. Three more centuries and the walls were crumbling, and Christianity came to the now predominantly Saxon town, and with it came a cathedral called St. Paul’s. 1066, and another conqueror arrived, with a continental language and a continental idea of church architecture; Saxons, Danes and Normans alike gawked at the gigantic Tower he erected. Gradually, over the next ten centuries, one after the other, came the Palace and the Abbey of Westminster, St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, then London Bridge, Charing Cross, the Mercer’s Guild, the Grocers’ Guild, the Fleet, Ludgate and Newgate prisons, the Custom House, the Temple and Holburn Bars, the London Charterhouse, the Temple enclosure, Whitehall, Greenwich Palace, The Globe Theatre, Scotland Yard, The Royal Exchange, the Queen’s House, St. James Park, The Royal Observatory, St. Mary-le-Bow (again), St. Paul’s (again), Pall Mall, Jermyn Street, St. James Square, Soho, Lloyds, Hanover Square, Grosvenor Square, Cavendish Square, Berkeley Square, Bond Street, the Old Cheshire Cheese Tavern on Fleet Street, Piccadilly, the Twining’s Tea Shop, Fortnum and Mason, Burlington House, the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall, Hyde Park, Regent Street and Regent’s Park, the Bethlehem Hospital in Southwark, the Mansion House, London Dock and Surrey Dock, the West India and East India docks, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Waterloo Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Vauxhall Bridge, the University of London, the Crystal Palace, the London and Greenwich Railway, Parliament House, Hatchards of Piccadilly, the Thames Embankment, the Tower Bridge, The Royal Albert Hall, the Savoy Hotel on the Strand, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, the Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Natural History, Harrods of Knightsbridge, the London Underground, the Palladium, Victoria Station, Selfridges, the Tate Gallery…

The Celtic village metamorphosed into a bustling city of traders, brewers, merchants, fishermen, whores, carpenters, tailors, watermen, playwrights, clergymen, shopkeepers, mariners, costermongers, politicians, lawyers and financiers. First came the Danes, the Angles, and the Jutes, then the Normans, Italians, Germans and Spaniards, then the Flemish, then the Welsh, then the Huguenots, then the Irish, then the Jews, and now the rest of the world. They came to make a decent living and to live a decent life, to be allowed to go about their own business.

And business, indeed, was (and is) the business of the city: it traded wool from Flanders, furs from the Baltic, peppercorns and silk from Asia, tobacco and wheat from America, tea from China and India, and sugar from the Caribbean; it insured the ships that brought the goods; it lent and borrowed, invested and speculated.

Great social conflicts shook the City from time to time: the rights of the city against the claims of the King, peasant rebellions against taxation, Puritanism against Catholic excess, Church of England against the authority of the Pope, Parliament against an absolutist monarch, Whigs against Tories, Socialists and Suffragettes against the establishment.

London (what else?), courtesy the Daily Mail

Each of the landmarks, professions, and social movements mentioned above has been intricately woven into the fabric of Rutherfurd’s rather wonderful novel, like images on the Bayeux tapestry, as he traces the fortunes of a handful of London families through the last 2,000 years. These families become rich, famous, poor, and rich again, with the ebb and flow of time and events, while historical Londoners make a cameo appearance and contribute to the plot through their actions: Thomas a Becket, William Longchamp, Edward I, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dick Wittington, Wat Tyler, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Pocahontas, William Laud, Charles I, William Prynne, Samuel Pepys and Charles II all have roles to play. Combining the flamboyance of a tour guide with the vast knowledge of a research scientist, Rutherfurd points out hundreds of interesting facts about the city, not just as it looks today but as it must have looked at various points in the past.

I don’t think I’ve read or seen anything as extraordinary as Rutherfurd’s London. It is like a history book, except not textbookish or impersonal. It is as long as War and Peace, except that it takes place over 20 centuries. It is a bit like the BBC serial Blackadder, except it isn’t a rollicking farce. To give a modern example, it is like Downton Abbey, in that it is based in England and uses historical events to advance the story, except that it isn’t merely about a family of aristocrats and their servants, and it goes on for dozens of generations, not just a single lifetime. If novelty is an essential requirement for a successful novel, ‘London’ is a triumph.

Of course, when you paint (or weave) on such a big canvas, there are limits to the detail you can depict on each individual object. The situations are sometimes slightly contrived, as Rutherfurd clearly works backwards from the social, historical and architectural context, in arriving at the plot itself. A few of the characters are no more than caricatures. And frankly, a dozen generations of Duckets, Bulls, Barnikels, Flemings, Carpenters, Silversleeves and Merediths wooing or intriguing against one another does result in some giddiness and fatigue, even though the wooing and intriguing concerned is differently done each time.

But then it is not fair to expect Rutherfurd’s characters to develop or his plot to unfold, when it is the city that he shows to develop and unfold in front of our eyes. The city is the plot and the protagonist. The Bulls, the Duckets, the Flemings and the rest may have all the lines to speak, but they are the real backdrop, insignificant representative samples of the nameless millions who lived and loved, dreamed and died, and who are collectively the city of London, for in addition to the monuments and houses that are constructed on the debris of its past, the city is also the cumulative sum of all the lives of everyone who has ever resided there, and every single one of them has left a trace, on which their successors have built and rebuilt.

If you have more than a passing interest in history, or find in your heart some affection for London (I am proudly guilty of both), you must read Rutherfurd’s London. I believe he has attempted a similar treatment of New York and of Russia, and look forward to reading them at some point. Coincidentally, I saw an advertisement only today, for his latest novel, Paris- The Novel. Grab it now.

Barbarians at the Gate

The Conquest of Peru (Prescott, William H.)

“As for the Pope of whom you speak, he must be crazy to talk of giving away      countries which do not belong to him.”
- Inca ruler Atahuallpa to Fray Vicente de Valverde

The astonished natives made no attempt at resistance. But … they drew nearer the white men and inquired, why did they not stay at home and till their own lands, instead of roaming about to rob others who had never harmed them?

The story is old, and has lost its punch-line through frequent repetition. A group of illiterate, greedy, filthy, disease-ridden, common thieves from Spain show up at the doors of the Inca empire. In an outrageous act of treachery, they kidnap the Inca ruler when he graciously accepts their invitation to dine with them and arrives unarmed. They then slaughter over two thousand of his unarmed servants and nobles in a single evening. As a prisoner, the Inca ruler promises them ransom beyond the bounds of their imagination. Having agreed to these terms and taken his gold, they then try him on trumped-up charges, find him guilty without evidence, and kill him, while their priest waves his cross in the throes of religious ecstasy. They then proceed to butcher the local population, enslave the survivors, violate the women and rob the countryside on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind.

The story is old. It doesn’t shock us any longer. When someone begins to narrate it, we recognize it from our schoolbooks, and we say, ah yes, we know all this – and we move on. Some of us will say, parroting views handed to us by others, “Surely we mustn’t judge the conquistadors by the enlightened morals of our modern age?” But their conduct would have been seen as deeply reprehensible then, as we find it today, in Ming China, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey, Mamluk Egypt, the Mandinka empire of Mali, in every civilized country, in fact – possibly even among a majority of people in that part of Europe from whose gutters the conquistadors crawled out. A couple of generations later, the most famous Spanish knight of all time raged memorably against the dying of the age of chivalry. I’d like to believe that this death began when Francisco Pizarro and his band of savages violated laws of hospitality so ancient, universal and intrinsic to mankind that they were shared implicitly by people of all cultures from China to Peru. Don Quixote would have been shocked senseless by their behaviour. Jesus Christ, in whose name the rape of Peru was performed, would probably have been made physically sick by the sight of these barbaric acts, and he lived 1500 years before Pizarro, so do not tell me morality was different in the 16^th century.

“What have I done, or my children, that I should meet such a fate? And from your hands, too, you who have met with friendship and kindness from my people, with whom I have shared my treasures, who have received nothing but benefits from my hands!”
Atahualpa to Pizarro, on hearing his death sentence (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Mystery, History, Myth and Mush

Possession (Byatt, A. S.)

 “Literary critics make natural detectives,” said Maud. “You know the theory that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery novel – everyone wanted to know who was the Father, what was the origin, what is the secret?”

We are assured of two things on the cover page of this book. Above the name of the book proudly scrolls the line, ‘Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features’. Asserted boldly and firmly below the name are the words, “A Romance”. These two lines, one on either side of the name, remind me of bodyguards who are simultaneously the jailors of the person they protect. The words ‘major motion picture’ and ‘romance’ are constraints on the reader’s imagination, and conjure up the image of a frilly, giggly rom-com romp and they do Byatt a major disservice in the process.

This is what Hollywood has done to romance. They’ve made it one-dimensional, that dimension being sentimental melodrama. Nothing else is even recognizable as a romance any more. But however much I may enjoy ranting about Hollywood, my point is different. It is that the readers who are most likely to enjoy this book are not those who are fans of major motion picture romances. Besides, Possession is somewhat more than a romance – it has many interesting things to say about feminism, for instance, and literary research; about Victorian poetry, about the interpretation of mythology. All the themes coincide in Byatt’s excellent poem based on the mythological story of Melusine. But if you forced me to slot Possession into a single genre, it wouldn’t be any of these: I’d call it a detective novel.

The feminist myth of Melusine (Heinrich Vogeler’s Melusine, courtesy Wikimedia)

Paradigms Lost and Regained

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, Thomas)

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Most books we read have no long-term effect on us. Many don’t even have a short-term effect – we struggle to remember what they were about, the week after we put them down. It isn’t often that we read a book that changes the way we think, or view the world; in whose pages we read things that we are convinced were our own unarticulated thoughts. This is unlikely to happen to us more than a handful of times in our lives; it follows that such books are rare and precious. In my library, Thomas Kuhn’s 1960s classic belongs to that elite club.
I’ve known of Kuhn’s book for a while, largely in conjunction with the coinage of the late 20th century buzz-phrase ‘paradigm shift’. As with all consultese (I’ve written about ‘core competence’ in these pages), it is a much abused phrase, and its pretentious users have only vaguely been aware of its meaning. As a consequence of its loose usage, it has lost its meaning and gone entirely out of favour and fashion. Thus, when I started reading Kuhn, I thought I was resurrecting a historical and esoteric relic, with no relevance to our 21st century world. I was wrong.

Copernicus and Ptolemy, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The Old Man of the Mountains

Landour Days – A Writer’s Memoirs (Bond, Ruskin)

Many years ago, when my fiancee and I were planning our honeymoon, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly we agreed on where to go. I had suggested the sleepy hill resort of Mussoorie because I’d been there once with a bunch of college friends, and because I was utterly devoid of imagination, particularly when it came to destinations for romantic getaways. I suggested it with some trepidation, because the woman I was about to marry had strong opinions, high standards  and not a lot of tolerance for the staid and ordinary. Even back then, and even I, knew that Mussoorie was a boring choice for a honeymoon destination; people of my generation were doing Andaman, Mauritius, Switzerland…and so I was thrilled and surprised, in equal measure, at the alacrity with which the blushful bride-to-be agreed. She’d never been, she gushed, but she’d wanted to go there forever; and so it was decided.

Of course, there was no easy way to get there. We took the local train up to Mumbai, puffed merrily along the countryside on the Frontier Mail to Delhi; took the overnight train up to Dehradun on the foothills of the Himalayas, and finally experienced a vertiginous bus ride up to the little town hanging precariously from the mountain top. I remember that there were little boys selling salted slices of lemon at that bus stop in Dehradun. I wondered why, but not for long. When the drunken maniac at the wheel swung his creaking tin death machine from side to side at top speed, never more than a few inches from the most terrifying drop ever, I saw some of my fellow passengers – the touristy ones - turn a light shade of grey and suck furiously on their lemon slices. This was when I realized the great undocumented value of citrus fruit.

The Road to Paradise…on the way to Mussoorie, picture courtesy yatrii.com

The Argo-Nots

Anabasis / The Persian Expedition (Xenophon)

 “Speak to them and find out first of all who they are.”
He asked them this, and they replied that they were Macrones.
“Now ask them,” said Xenophon, “why they are drawn up to oppose us and why they want to be our enemies.”
Their reply to this was: “Because it is you who are invading our country.”

A group of heroic men is stuck deep in Persian territory. They are nervous, leaderless, unfamiliar with the terrain, and with limited supplies and resources. They have to get back to home and safety through a thousand miles of hostile turf. Several hair-raising adventures later, they achieve this against all odds.

No, this is not the plot of a recent Hollywood blockbuster, but that of Xenophon’s Anabasis, which, by the way, is a far cooler name than ‘The Persian Expedition’, the translated title of the volume I read. It is also cooler, in my opinion, than Hollywood representations of ancient Greek action dramas.

Hollywood: I’ve seen your 300, and I raise you 10,000.

It is 401 BC, eighty years after that minor skirmish at Thermopylae and after the vastly more significant and fascinating naval battle of Salamis. Themistocles was a far more interesting personality than Leonidas anyway, and if I ever got around to scripting the sensational sleeper hit, ’Salamis’, George Clooney would get to play Themistocles, and Al Pacino would play Xerxes. But I digress. Cyrus, second son of Darius II of Persia, decides to displace his brother Artaxerxes as Shahenshah of a massive empire stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Black Sea, the Oxus to the Nile, the Himalayas to the Alps. He raises a secret army from the western fringes of that empire, from among the battle-hardened barbarians who had dealt grandpa Xerxes the biggest embarrassment of his illustrious life. The Greeks are the most fearsome and disciplined warriors in the world, but they have lately fallen to violent internecine squabbles. They are no longer a military threat to the Achmaenids as a nation, but they make wonderful mercenaries. And so, ten thousand of them – Peloponnese, Chersonese, Thessalians, Boeotians, Stymphalians and Achaeans – are recruited by Cyrus with promises of fabulous wealth, added to his Persian force, and marched from Sardis to Tarsus, through the Syrian Gates and across the Euphrates, across the Arabian desert and through Babylonia, where at last they are met by the Shah’s army at Cunaxa. The Greeks hold their own on the right flank, but Cyrus is slain while attacking his brother, and the battle is lost.

Trivia break: the word checkmate derives from Shah-mat, old Persian for ‘The King is Dead’. I’ve known this for decades, but didn’t realize how apt it is until I read this book. In the Persian version of warfare, you could outnumber your enemy, have better technology, better generals, more rested soldiers, and a better formation; and you could use all this to fight your way to a very strong strategic position and the opposing army could be on the brink of collapse; but then your stupid King could get himself killed, and then it is game over.

The route less taken. Xenophon’s men march across the Middle East (Courtesy Wikipedia)