Breaking Beauty

Rouen Cathedral, 1820

       How have we changed the world over the past 200 years – both landscapes and townscapes? It’s an impossibly huge question, but a recent exhibition at Dulwich Gallery in London gave me a chance to get a partial but very specific idea by looking at Normandy - a part of the world I know and love well. John Cotman was among a small tidal wave of British artists enabled to visit France when the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy brought an end to 30 years of enmity with England. Cotman focused his attentions on Normandy, principally because he found there a sublime and compelling combination of evocative landscape and grand architecture.

       Normandy had been for many centuries one of the wealthiest and most developed provinces of France, trading with the world through its ports at Dieppe, Harfleur and Rouen. Being relatively near to Paris, its rich fields and pastures provided much of the butter, cheese, eggs and milk consumed in the capital – and the places which Cotman depicted, just before the Industrial Revolution started to transform them, seem to have grown slowly and literally organically into their present condition, whether crumbling ruins or vast busy cathedrals, great sweeping water-meadows or brooding jagged outcrops of grey-brown rock.

Rouen from a distance, 1823

The same, today

       I too love Normandy because much of it still has that quality, but how much of it has been wiped out, smashed, swept away since Cotman’s day! Take these two views of Rouen from a distance, for a particularly grim and telling example.
       Much of the damage to Normandy, of course, came from the Second World War, which reduced many glorious old towns like St-Lô and Lisieux, which so entranced Cotman, to piles of smoking rubble, and their inhabitants to homeless refugees.

Falaise, 1944

Falaise, 1822

              Incidentally, most of the damage to Norman cities during the war had nothing to do with German actions. It was the result of the huge Allied bombing campaigns which preceded the invasion: over 50,000 French non-combatants were killed – far more than Germans – during repeated air raids which destroyed over 75% of all major Norman towns near the coast.  And when they were rebuilt – hastily – during the 1950s, it was in the cheerless and charmless reinforced concrete which today is the first and last impression of most British visitors to Norman cities like Caen, Le Havre or Lisieux.

Rue St Jean, Caen

Rue St Jean today

         No wonder they’re so eager to put as many kilometres behind them as possible on their way to the sun-charmed South. It’s difficult to imagine today how still lovely these places were even in the not so distant days when Jean-Paul Sartre taught in a lycée in Le Havre, or when the future Saint Thérèse became a novitiate in Lisieux.

       So where am I going with this? To point out that most of the picturesquely coiffed peasant women in Cotman’s pictures wouldn’t live past 40, worn out from years of gruelling physical labour and almost annual childbirth in appallingly insanitary conditions? Or that the Second World War became inevitable as soon as Hitler came to power – and that it couldn’t have been won without dislodging the Germans from France? All true, and obvious, and irrelevant:  no one was ever asked how much destruction of their heritage they were prepared to accept in exchange for material progress and the defeat of Nazism.

Mont St Michel

          And what would they have said; how could anyone make such an exchange consciously and deliberately? It’s only the fact that these things have happened in an area which seems to lie beyond anyone’s volition or conscious choice that has made them possible.

       Or here’s another way of looking at it: a Buddhist might say that the only problem lies in our attachment to form. Forms will change, of course, over 200 years, that’s their nature, and we make ourselves unhappy through value judgements about them and preferences for one rather than another.

Mont St Michel, parking lot

       Yes, but. A very big but: the forms which Cotman and his contemporaries show us – the forms we see today in what remains of that heritage – are far more than arbitrary shapes. His was the generation who grew up reading the Romantic poets – and before visiting France he had been attracted to the wilder parts of Britain: to Wales, North Yorkshire, and the Lake District. In such landscapes, as Wordsworth put it:
     “… with an eye made quiet by the power
     Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
     We see into the life of things.”

        So there’s the question for us: how able are we today to feel ‘the power of harmony’, and ‘to see into the life of things’? Cotman and his contemporaries in their travels around Europe were consciously in search of that lifting and ennobling of the spirits which great landscapes bring – with a humility of the heart which can only have been enhanced by the slowness, the dangers and the difficulties of the journey in those days before railways and before metalled roads.
       In our conquest and domination of the physical world around us we’ve laid waste to our internal landscapes, as well as those outside us – and the process is not only continuing but accelerating, as climate change starts to bring about even more dramatic changes. What will be recognisable of these or any other landscapes after a further 200 years to inspire quiet joy in the hearts of our distant descendants?

      

The Abduction of Europe

          It  all started, as many of the best stories do, with sudden, overwhelming, peremptory love. The god Zeus, possibly struck by an arrow from Eros/Cupid, or possibly acting from his own impulses – fell for the most beautiful of the daughters of the King of Tyre (in modern day Lebanon). She, meanwhile had had a dream in which two continents in the form of women disputed her – the one where she was born, and the as yet nameless one over the sea. 

       When Zeus appeared to her in the form of a gentle and graceful white bull as she gathered wild flowers by the seaside, Europa felt no fear for the huge animal and mounted upon its back –whereupon it plunged into the water and took her across the waters to Crete. There she bore him many sons, the first of whom was Minos, legendary founder of the earliest known European civilisation.

          Going further back into its origins, the Greek name (which means ‘broad face’) is generally taken to indicate a link with an ancient Egyptian goddess representing the feminine principle in the form of a lunar cow. This seems to make intuitive sense, given the link with Zeus as a bull, as representing in some way the spirit and force of settled agriculture as the foundation of European culture as we know it now and have done so for thousands of years. By way of a further indication, the name of Europa was often given also to Demeter, goddess of corn and of harvests.
          So, taking the longest view possible, there we have the origin of our continent, and of the idea or ideal which lies behind all the bureaucracy, all the endless speeches in vast half-deserted halls, all the aimless wastage of taxpayers’ money/the impossible yearning to make amends for centuries of bitter conflict (depending on your point of view). Agriculture, fertility, abundance – and abduction, albeit in a consensual form.

          And now it seems that Britannia – who always occupied in any case a very different area of the mythological universe – is drawing away from Europa, and may sever her connection altogether. It isn’t hard to see why these two were never destined to get along together: their gender is essentially all that they share. On the one hand a submissive maiden, ravished by a gentle god and mother to dynasties of powerful men – and on the other a warrior woman, subjugated only through the overwhelming force of the Roman armies. In their later depictions – as if to emphasise the courage which it took to subdue her – she’s typically shown with a trident and a helmet.

          And this is the image which was of course taken up by jingoists and patriots from the 16th century to the present day, on coins and banknotes, innumerable paintings and pub signs. Britannia ruling the waves – fierce, belligerent, domineering; she never seems to have the almost voluptuous femininity of France’s Marianne. (Well, what would one expect of the French?)
          Britain vs. Europe: it’s at its deepest the difference between a nation which still defines itself through war and a yet-to-emerge one which seeks to define itself through overcoming the conflicts which lead to war.

           Perhaps it’s just too soon for this to happen – considering where the myth of Europa originates, the fate of Greece in the hands of the EU is a distinctly bad omen. And the Common Agricultural Policy has much less to do with Demeter-esque  fertility and abundance than with craven servility towards a handful of overweening food multinationals.
          Perhaps in the end we can only echo Mahatma Gandhi, and say that European civilisation would be a good thing – if and when it happens.

DISSOLVING TOWERS

       “At midnight East Germany's rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened. Ecstatic crowds immediately began to hack large chunks out of the 45-kilometre barrier.” (BBC News, 9 Nov 1989.) And of course, within less than a year every single Communist régime in Eastern Europe had fallen, including the most intractably authoritarian such as Romania and Albanian  to be followed soon after by the Soviet Union itself.

       Most people in the West were taken by utter surprise; we’d grown up with this division of the continent and of the world itself into two armed and opposing blocs, and it was unthinkable – far more unthinkable than all-out nuclear war – that one of them should simply crumble. It’s not surprising that the Western reaction for quite a few years afterwards was euphoric: freedom, democracy, the human spirit or entrepreneurial individualism (take your pick) had triumphed, authenticating a narrative of ever-onward-and upward evolution. Not to mention the vindication of Western more or less social-democratic capitalism as the most advanced form of social organisation on the planet, destined to triumph over all in the long run.

       But if what actually happened in 1989 was not the end but the start of a process which is continuing and accelerating today? What if it was the first major sign of the loosening of the structures which underpin all our societies and economies – the harbinger of a coming age of instability? Just under 12 years later another utterly unexpected and unthinkable event took place – this one not at all welcomed in the West at least. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would probably never have happened without 9/11 – and even Dick Cheney would find it hard to assert that they've made the world safer or more stable.

       And since then further towers (metaphorically) have collapsed or are in the process of collapsing. The European Union – guarantor of peace and freedom in Europe, benevolent guardian spirit of a post-nationalist, post-conflictual continent – is degenerating into a protection racket for the richer nations’ bankers, and national mistrust and resentment are at levels not seen since World War 2. Apparently monolithic régimes in the Arab world have crumbled or are crumbling – positive of course in terms of increased individual freedom, but again significantly increasing global instability.

       And the greatest source of instability of all, the one we scarcely dare to think about, is climate change. How many more hurricanes like Sandy or worse, how many more catastrophic droughts; how many more ruined harvests and flooded cities? Will the world as we know it still be habitable with a 4°C rise in global temperature? (it won’t).

       People’s instinctive reaction faced with collapsing structures is to try to shore them up: the purpose of Gorbachev’s reforms was to ensure the survival of Communism, not to destroy it; Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi and fellows are desperate to preserve the EU and the euro. Our need for structure goes back to our earliest years; as children we’re dependent on a stable family not only for our physical maintenance but for our emotional security and even our sense of our own selves – the children of disrupted and turbulent families generally grow into adults with serious behavioural and emotional problems. Even in work most people would rather be employees of stable, even static, predictable organisations than launch out on their own personal journeys.

       Yet unfortunately the one universal generalisation which can be made about human structures is that they don’t last: empires, dynasties and social and economic systems all pass away in the end. As the I Ching puts it: “Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.”

       Order and chaos are twin poles, or attractors in modern scientific terminology, between which all systems oscillate; when they near one extreme rebounding towards the other, like a pendulum.

       We might well prefer to live at the point where the pendulum is swinging towards increasing order, but we don’t; and we’re going to have to live with ever-greater social and geophysical disorder – to what point before the pendulum swings back no one knows. We’d better be prepared to cultivate flexibility of mind, non-attachment, and the long view. Eventually even the pendulum of the earth’s climate will swing back again – perhaps in 100, perhaps in 10,000 years’ time; perhaps with and perhaps without the human race. These times are an invitation to grow beyond the childish attachment to structures, to learn to embrace the formlessness from which all forms are born.

REMEMBRANCE

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 
Only the monstrous anger of the guns ...
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling from sad shires. (Wilfred Owen)

What or who is it that we remember on Remembrance Day – those 95% of us who have no personal experience of being at war; those of us for whom ‘total war’ belongs to the lives of dimly remembered grandparents or great-grandparents, as remote from our own lives as the narrow, black-and-white, stiffly dressed world in which they grew up?

It’s not the wars of my own lifetime that I think about – Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Falklands – nor even the Second World War which shaped my own childhood and created the world I grew up in. The war which haunts my imagination – and of so many other people – is WWI: the war to whose remembrance this day was first consecrated, in 1919.

My only personal link is a tiny photo of a grandfather who died when I was a small child; he's seated on a camel in Egypt, only his uniform dating and locating the event. Those who had fought in the war (my friends’ grandparents) were already elderly by the time I was old enough to ask them about it – and I never wanted to. Yet what they experienced has passed into my imagination, has changed me, has changed us all. We can't forget, even what we never directly knew:

- Passchandaele: July-November 1917. 850,000 men died. It rained for a month without stopping and thousands  drowned in the mud.
- Verdun: February-December 1916. Almost 1,000,000 died. The battle started with a terrifying ten-hour artillery bombardment which could be heard 150 km away.
- The Somme: July-November 1916. Over 1,200,000 died. On the British side alone average losses were 2,930 a day.

In the end, numbers numb – a good reason to call them by that name. It’s above all the words of those who were there that still echo in our hearts and in our minds:

They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud.
O Jesus, make it stop! (Siegfried Sassoon)

No one really ‘won’ the First World War. Among the Allies, supposedly victors, the survivors went home, many of them physically or mentally broken, to a world with not enough jobs for them (even in Britain, unemployment never fell below 10% throughout the 1920s) – despite the war’s scything through the ranks of working-age men.

In other countries the devastation was even worse. Travel around rural France and count the names on the war memorials in every small town and tiny village: a generation of men wiped out, a generation of women left to mourn their lost loves or never to know love at all for the rest of their lives in those rigid and closed communities. Meanwhile in Germany the revenge inflicted by the victors at Versailles was leading to the triumph of Nazism, and less than 15 years after the end of the war Hitler was elected Chancellor.

I believe that some collective experiences are so intensely traumatic that they come to rest in the consciousness of all humanity or at least a whole nation: the Holocaust is just such a case, and for China the Cultural Revolution. So was the First World War; something important remains behind, and it’s right that we should remember – not because they died to save our freedom, but for a much simpler reason.

As Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before he died, in the preface to a planned collection of his poems:
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.

We who were never there and who can scarcely begin to imagine what it was like can still feel the pity he spoke about. When all else has gone, that remains.

Misogyny, sexism, gynophobia

Julia Gillard

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard became a global online sensation when she launched her now-famous attack on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, accusing him of sexism and misogyny. The YouTube video has been viewed over 2 million times, and the speech reproduced on countless numbers of news portals and blogposts. Ms Gillard’s indignation was well justified, and her passionate anger was an inspiration to women all around the world who continue to suffer from being diminished and put down by men.

But why does this still happen, in a world where more than half of university graduates are women (in the West at least), and where most major countries have or have had women political leaders? How often do we find ourselves talking about ‘misandry’ - the equivalent fear or hatred of men on the part of women? (The word isn’t even in my spell-check.) Yet women “hold up half the sky” in the words of the Chinese proverb, and male and female, men and women complement and are indispensible to one another. Doesn’t it seem strange that such a fundamental distortion in the way we perceive and value one another should have arisen – and what does it mean?

On one level the answer lies in the continuing influence of patriarchy and the unequal power relations between men and women – still prevalent even in countries like Australia, the UK and the USA – and most commentators on the incident and its repercussions have focused on men’s unwillingness to accept women as equals in the domains of politics and business. But I want to dig a bit deeper: what are the roots of this condition, and what effect does it have on our consciousness and the way we relate to each other?

The Willendorf Venus

Anthropologists generally assume that most ancient cultures were matriarchal and matrilineal, so far as can be interpreted from the few artefacts that have survived from these far-off and pre-literate societies. Note that matriarchy shouldn’t be taken to be the mirror image of patriarchy: while the latter almost always involves an ideology of possession and domination by a ruling group, many would argue that ancient matriarchal or matrifocal societies were governed by a quintessentially feminine vision of inclusiveness. In any case, none of these societies survived, and we know of no cultures more recent than Minoan Crete which could possibly be called matriarchal. Ideologies and practices of dominance and possession seem everywhere to have accompanied the transition to a settled and agricultural way of life, with the emergence of formal power structures and of cultural transmission across generations.

Despite this, a veneration for the female principle in some form seems to have been a feature of almost all cultures, until very recently.

And this has typically involved several facets at least of the feminine:

Guan Yin

Mary

- the Compassionate, as represented by Guan Yin in Buddhism,
- the Mother, as represented by the Hindu deity Parvati or by Mary in Christianity
- the Sexual, as represented by Aphrodite in the Greek pantheon, or Mary Magdalene in Christianity. (Though it could well be argued that Magdalene stands for male repression of female sexuality.)

In the polytheistic cultures of Asian religions this tradition has continued to this day – though it has to be said that it doesn’t necessarily go with a better deal for women. (The spiritual tradition doesn’t serve to challenge patriarchal power structures, in other words.) However, the great religions of the West are all monotheistic, and, as I pointed out in last week’s post about Brazil, the three facets of the Christian God are all male – like the Prophet Muhammad, all the prophets and indeed the God of the Old Testament. In Catholic Christianity some space is made for the veneration of the female principle (in whatever ‘edited’ form this may be), but Protestantism swept this away as idolatry and superstition, a belief which has persisted into the post-religious and post-spiritual culture which dominates today in the English-speaking world. And this culture, unsurprisingly, remains male-dominated – with a dominance that’s no longer even tempered by any veneration of the female principle, or recognition of complementarity.

Hillary Clinton

Margaret Thatcher

It should go without saying that gender is irrelevant to a person’s suitability for high office, so women like Julia Gillard, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher have taken their rightful places in the political arena purely as a function of their abilities. Yet Margaret Thatcher, as the first female British Prime Minister, brought no feminine ‘inclusiveness’ or nurturing qualities to the post; despite her promise “where there is division, to bring harmony”, she was one of the most divisive figures in recent British history. As for Hillary Clinton, she operates in the service of an American foreign policy which continues to support Israeli aggression in Palestine and which uses drones to kill unarmed non-combatants in countries with which the US isn’t at war. Nothing very healing about that.

Norse Goddess Freya

Ultimately, it diminishes all of us to obliterate fundamental energetic and spiritual differences in the name of gender-blindness. If women politicians are no more than men with ovaries, they’re doing us all a disservice precisely by not bringing all of themselves into their work in the world. Life itself, and all forms of growth and development, come from the fusion of male and female in dynamic balance with one another, and what our wounded planet needs now is a much stronger emphasis on the feminine to balance the out-of-control and survival-threatening left-brain and male dominant culture which has ruled for the past many hundred years. It will take more than a handful of ‘ballsy’ women political leaders to bring that about.

“EVERYBODY IS A MAGUS”

              That’s what Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist, The Pilgrimage, etc.) says. Many of us who have grown up in the English-speaking world would react thinking “Speak for yourself, mate” or “Well, he would say that if it helps to sell his books.”

We’ve been taught to see spirituality as either the property of the church – handed down from the Queen via the Archbishop of Canterbury if you live in the UK – or as a backward-looking fantasy belonging to a pre-scientific age. (By the way, it’s quite amusing to reflect, when you think of the vehemence with which people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens attack the established Church, that these views are actually mirror images – two warring versions of the one true Faith.)

But of course Coelho wasn’t brought up either in Cambridge (Mass.) or Cambridge (UK), and what he says carries a quite different force in the context of Brazil, where a kind of spiritual pluralism reigns without parallel anywhere in the so-called ‘advanced’ world. Like the United States, Brazil is a complex multi-ethnic society with a very large minority descended from former African slaves: over 3 million were sent to work in the sugar cane plantations; far more than went to the United States. However, and even though slavery was only abolished in Brazil in 1888, the culture and spiritual practices that they brought with them have become part of the Brazilian mainstream in a way which absolutely never happened in the USA – and they have merged with 19^th-century European reincarnation-based traditions which have largely died out in their countries of origin. 

To simplify greatly, Brazilian ‘non-orthodox’ spirituality – i.e. apart from the various branches of the Christian Church – falls into three main streams: Spiritism, Umbanda and Candomblé.

Spiritism is practiced mostly by white Brazilians of European origin, and is largely based on the ideas of the French writer Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Léon Rivail) – much better known today in Brazil than in his homeland. It differs from the spiritualism practiced in Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in that it incorporates notions of Karma and of personal development. The quotation in the picture is a fair summary: “To be born, to die, to be reborn and to evolve throughout: that is the law.”

The other two traditions bring us back to the African inheritance, and in the case of Umbanda, also to indigenous (‘Indian’) practices. The picture at the head of this post represents a group of deities or entities from the Yoruba pantheon called orixâ, or Orisha, with whom almost any Brazilian would be thoroughly familiar. You could see them as  representing a number of what Jung called ‘archetypes’: characteristic forces which play a part in mythology and fiction across cultures.

Yemanja

For instance, there’s Ogun the Warrior, similar to Mars or Thor, Exú the Trickster, and perhaps most interesting of all, Yemanja, the Divine Mother.

Another aspect of the left-brain-dominant, one-size-fits-all approach to spirituality which characterizes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture is its extreme male-centeredness. It’s hardly an accident that the attacks on religion which I mentioned earlier all come from men, nor is the characteristically male combativeness with which they’re conducted. Meanwhile, the heads of the various established churches are also – of course – all male.  

While the Catholic Church, for all the appalling crimes against women’s sexuality and their bodies which it’s sanctioned, does at least incorporate a kind of Mother cult along with the worship of many female saints, Protestantism swept this all away as idolatry and superstition, so as to bestow upon us the benefits of modern capitalism. We’re left, if we believe in anything at all, with God as Father and Son only.

Now, you’d hardly expect the Christian Church, in Brazil or anywhere else, to cheerfully accept these African deities as part of the pantheon, and they certainly didn’t. At various times in Brazil’s history Candomblé and Umbanda (the latter is a kind of hybrid of European and African practices) have been persecuted, denigrated, or even proscribed by law. However, Brazil, unlike most other predominately Catholic countries, has been a secular state for well over a century, and the orixâ were able to survive periods of persecution by being ‘disguised’ as Christian saints, in a phenomenon known as syncretism. (This actually only emphasises the extent to which they’re cross-cultural archetypes.)

Yemanja

So that’s why Brazil today, besides having a thriving and rapidly growing economy (the B in BRICS, of course) has also the most diverse spiritual landscape of any major country: a place where a medical doctor might also be a spiritist medium, or where a doctoral thesis on past-life memories would be accepted without qualms by a major university. This is the matrix which formed Paulo Coelho, and where he had the experiences which led him to write the books which have made him world-famous. Meanwhile, we have produced … Harry Potter – CGI sorcery, magic as commodity or spectacle (even if the success of the books reflects a similar yearning for the numinous, the transcendent.)

So is Paulo Coelho right, or J.K.Rowling? – whose first post-H.P. book is an explosion of disgust and despair at a hypocritical and heartless world, by the way.  Is ‘magic’ the privilege of a Hogwarts-attending élite – interesting, isn’t it, how similar Hogwarts is to the public schools which our actual rulers went to? – or is it a property which we all have latent within us?

There’s no doubt how a Brazilian would answer this question.