In the series of unlikely summer holiday meditations : the material world at the mercy of human care & destruction

For a supposedly impractical and rather cerebral person, I have an inexplicable passion for the materiality of matter, and for its tactile and visual qualities in particular: the sheer sensual surface fabric of materials, their dullness or gleam, their transparency or reflectivity ....
Think of the differing materiality of stone, copper, wood, iron, steel, tin, glass, cloth, velvet ... or of fruit and leaves – yes, pretty much all of the world’s materials can count on my fond attentiveness (only Plastic is emphatically excluded).

As a species, humans have of course been great manipulators of matter – eternally vacillating between two urges: the careful crafting & conserving of materials throughout the ages versus their wanton destruction in recurring fits of rage.


16th and 17th century stained glass windows making it into the 21st Century

 If it hadn’t been for my guest’s request on that sweltering hot day in July, I wouldn’t have thought of visiting the Saint Michael cathedral in Brussels (which has become invisible as part of my routine urban landscape). But that first visit had definitely piqued my curiosity, and now I even returned there on the first day of my holidays, wanting to elucidate the mystery of its shining stained glass windows. Their iconography seemed to go way back to the Renaissance and Early Baroque, but surely these windows could not be genuine – how could such fragile specimens of human art & craft have survived all the troubles and wars that had since raged in these regions?

In the cathedral shop (1) I found a brochure with precise information on the stained glass windows and was happy to learn from its colophon that there is even a scientific committee taking care of such patrimonial matters (a committee also organizing colloquiums with alluring titles such as ‘Corpus Vitrearum’).  It pleased me, too,  that the old man tending the shop carefully wrapped my little brochure in a paper bag, meticulously folding the bag and then sealing it with tape.

At home I read about the (amazingly limited) destruction these windows had gone through in the past : they had suffered from an explosion of a dynamite factory nearby and obviously from the struggles between Catholics and Calvinists. But mostly, these windows had been lucky enough to find many thoughtful caretakers throughout the ages – from respectful restorers and cleaners to the otherwise unknown “Ladon-company, who at the beginning of World War II took out the stained glass windows and stored them in the vaults of the National Bank” .


The polished gleam of craft and knowledge – Teyler’s museum in Haarlem.

In our disembodied digital age one no longer associates scientific progress with handicraft, let alone with tactile, sensual impressions ...  And for aesthetes there’s surely nothing to savour in scientific research centres. The Teyler museum in Haarlem is therefore unique – open to the public since 1784 it even now still breathes the spirit of the  Enlightenment’s passionate amateurs with their wide ranging interests. As its website rightly boasts : “A visit to Teyler’s Museum is like a voyage through time. A stroll through the museum takes you from fossils and minerals to prints and drawings and paintings, from scientific instruments to coins and medals . [...] It is the only place in the world where such a collection is still on display in its original surroundings!” 

The rooms, the show cases, the instruments themselves - they dazzle by the sheer shine and polish of their marble, wood, glass ,copper..... They impress as witnesses of patient craft and still convey the excitement of insatiable curiosity and first-time discoveries . And it all looks so eminently tangible, so within one’s grasp: why yes, one could oneself do that experiment with the phonautograph : sound makes the tout membrane vibrate and then the stylus ticks into the recording cylinder. Or that giant electrostatic generator linked to the Leyden jars, yes one could oneself make the glass plates rotate, inducing friction and thus ‘discover’ electricity!

Alas, later, any budding hubris about one’s innate grasp of , say, the principles of electricity quickly vanishes when perusing a high school physics book and struggling even with the introductory chapters ...



« Pas de science sans diligence » : the material world represented at the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem

“No science without diligence” ( so goes the motto above the entry of the first room of the Frans Hals museum, dedicated to Dutch 17th century art).
A motto which may sound like a curse for the amateur with wide ranging appetites but limited brainpower: never will the amateur have applied enough diligence to any single subject! Never will he (or she) attain true science and mastery! ( for a further development of this melancholy aside from a vainly fluttering- around flâneur – please see note 2).

In the Holland of the 17th Century, and in Haarlem in particular, extreme specialisation in art genres flourished with artists steadfastly concentrating on a single subject and developing astonishing skill in the “craft of representation”. “With a sincere hand and a faithful eye” they rendered still lifes, seascapes, cloudscapes, architectonic interiors, ...

As Svetlana Alpers persuasively argues (3), Italian high art is mostly a narrative one: its paintings stage humans performing significant actions that are related to prior hallowed texts (from the ancients, from the bible) . The Dutch, however, perfected “the art of describing” , an art in which rendering the impressions of the seeing eye takes precedence on the narrative invention – an art of describing the Flemish had started to develop.(3)

Luckily, for a lover of the visual seductiveness of materials, the collection of the Frans Hals museum is not limited to the jolly portraitist Frans Hals, but also shows some prime specimens of Dutch still life and landscape paintings. In the museum’s quiet rooms one can become enchanted by the play of silvery flecks on leaves as captured by the young Jacob van Ruysdael (“Boslandschap met waterplas”), one can find oneself engrossed in the contemplation of bread crumbs, of the luminous reflections in a glass jar in the still lifes by Pieter Claesz or Willem Claesz Heda.

For all its lack of drama, this ‘descriptive art’ is yet an art that moves deeply - beyond admiration for the advanced praxis of painting, beyond the indisputable virtuosity of skill. And surely, its present impact is not derived either from its emblematic content: simple moral messages (bland reminders of vanity, admonishments against wastefulness) or symbols of bourgeois wealth.
So, could it be that the enduring significance of these paintings lays purely in their celebration of visual attentiveness, in their poetics of careful, disinterested observation of the material world around us?


Destruction and its scattered material fragments

Strange holiday programme, from the preciousness of 17th C Dutch still lifes, testament to human care and attentiveness, to the scattered fragments of past destruction still to be observed around Verdun, on the battlefields of the 1st World War.
But then, war has never been far off in European history – the Dutch 17th C flourishing followed destructive religious wars in the low countries. And many of the artisans and artists who contributed to the Dutch Golden century were in fact Flemish refugees fleeing troubles and persecution at home. As to the peaceful and artistic town of Haarlem, in 1572-1573 it had to endure a gruelling 7-months siege from the Spanish troops, during which no less than 10.402 cannon balls were fired over the city walls (so chronicles tell).
Can military shell statistics measure the depth of horror? The Vaux-fort, near Verdun, was hit by 8.000 shells a day during its siege. And on nothing but the first day of the Verdun offensive, the Germans fired 1.000.000,- shells along the battle lines.

Walking today around the Verdun battlefields, one may get fooled by the apparent peacefulness of the woods. But looking closer you see craters and craters everywhere. And pieces of rubble and rusty, twisted steel. Photos taken during and after the war show a barren moon landscape with craters, a terrain strewn with fragments of dead bodies (humans, horses) and of military materials, also some blackened tree trunks. Entire villages have been simply erased . The land has been re-wooded after the war because the many unexploded shells still laying about made it unfit for culture. 
Even today, shells are still routinely found by forest workers ( and indeed, during a leisurely tourist walk in an innocent wood, we noticed a stray rusty shell laying nonchalantly near tractor wheel tracks where forest workers had been busy).

The local war memorial is morbidly called an “ossuary” – a fitting term for the remaining human fragments, one realises, also when seeing after- war photos of the huge heaps of bones that had been collected from the bombed out battlefields. All in all around 10 million people would have died in WWI, history books say. After which an even more deadly 2nd World War followed. Immer wieder.


 Does history teach thoughtfulness?

 In case you’d ask, I must admit that I in fact don’t know why one would go and take stock of these past horrors when there are already so many contemporary horrors vying for our powerless attention. Syria, for instance, with its mounting toll of destruction & death, its bombed out cities, its poison gas attacks.

Unless knowing the history of past horrors would teach us once and for all the value of peace, the value of care and of thought-fullness? Well, I don’t know – the kids running around those Verdun memorials were mostly excited by the historical guns on display and by the reconstructed trenches where they could play soldiers – “bang bang” they shouted joyously.

Does analysing the causes and the course of the 1st World War help us to avoid the repetition of atrocities , to prevent outbreaks of war? (4) Or does a historical conscience merely leads to an ultimately pessimist conclusion – politics and dialogue can only go so far in reconciling opposite interests and in containing the lust for absolute power.
In the end, might is right, and the violent have their way, not the thoughtful.



But at least the thoughtful have the final notes

(1) what a strange word combination indeed – cathedral and shop. When hearing the cash register ring, one imagines Christ chasing the money lenders out of the temple. In small country-churches, whose architectonic interest attracts more tourists than faithful, one can observe the rather touching habit to put at the disposal of visitors some (unprotected) postcards or leaflets. They are only accompanied by a sign to 'take as needed' and an appeal to deposit a suitable amount of money in the parochial offertory-box.

(2) Ah, the melancholy renunciation of universality because it is specialisation that yields tangible results and drives progress . Our capitalist successes are built on specialisation.. Max Weber brilliantly formulated it in his essay on “protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism” : « se borner à un travail spécialisé, et par suite renoncer à l’universalité faustienne de l’homme, telle est la condition de toute activité fructueuse dans le monde moderne ; ainsi de nos jours, ‘action’ et ‘renoncement’ se conditionnent fatalement l’un et l’autre. »
Even in humanist quarters the renunciation of universalist dilettantism is hailed: the 19th C aesthete Walter Pater, in his essay on the 18the century forerunner of art history, Joachim Winckelmann, judged that it were specialisation and single-mindedness of purpose that were the conditions of Winckelmann’s success – in his typical19th century highfalutin language he writes: “But often the higher life is only possible at all, on condition of the selection of that in which one’s motive is native and strong; and this selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others” .
(for the economists amongst us: this passage echoes the Ricardian notion of comparative advantage Ricardian notion of comparative advantage (a nation should only do that at which it is 'most best' – even relinquishing those activities at which it is better than others, but to a lesser degree. Specialisation and exploitation of comparative advantage between nations, coupled with trade, are supposed to drive global economic prosperity)

(3) Svetlana Alpers, a startlingly imaginative art historian specialised in the Low countries, substantiates brilliant intuitions with painstaking erudition. Her "The Art of Describing" offers illuminating insights in the profound difference between the Dutch and the Italian artistic ways. She convincingly grounds the Dutch “art of describing” in a culture of experiment and observation , a culture of praxis and of craft which contrasts then with the humanist-narrative culture prevailing in Italy.
Italian paintings show us ideal human figures who are performing significant actions as if on a stage, the whole structured and proportioned according to an a priori design (disegno). The Dutch observe the world, they meticulously draw and paint “things after life, as they appear” and their paintings offer images as if directly projected on the retina, as if without a prior viewer who stages and composes a mental image.
 By way of explanatory context for the peculiarity of Dutch art , Svetlana reconstructs a Dutch 17th C culture obsessed with optical experiments, lenses and microscopes, a culture which views pictures as actual worldly descriptions and not as representations of hallowed knowledge (there’s the word in the Bible for that). Alper’s “descriptive mode” need not be in contradiction with the supposed symbolism of 17th century art (sometimes called “schijnrealisme” because it would be full of moral symbols and admonishments ; just as Panofsky called early Netherlandish art “disguised symbolism” because so many painted details had a symbolic, religious meaning). These moral messages may very well be there, but they are not what really distinguishes Dutch art – the moral meanings are but simple, bland messages that are in no proportion to the efforts spent on representing, they are no match for the dazzling skill displayed in rendering and evoking visual effects.

(4) The intricate play of military and economic interests, old resentments & lust for vengeance , the shady alliances between countries : it was a complex whole that led to the first world war, with the main actors starting something of which they could not foresee the horrific consequences.
The 21st C Syria-conflict is of course of a very different nature than that early 20th C war between nations - and yet, reading today’s analyses of the political, military, ideological and economic stakes of the different actors, there’s the uncanny feeling that there’s really not that much new under the sun.
And take that  cover by The Economist (an ashen Assad against a background of poison gas victims in bodybags) – a piece of war-propaganda that morbidly recalls how the gruelling WWI Ypres poison gas attacks were used to sway US public opinion to enter the war.

Contrapunt

  
  
  
  

Grand Tour for Insomniacs

It’s not an obvious place for museum catalogues piling up, the worktop near the kitchen sink. Nor is a kitchen wall the most fetching background for a postcard of a Bellini sunrise at Gethsemane .
But well, my kitchen is where, bleary-eyed after a bad night, I brew the tea needed to face the day. It’s a quiet place too, at the back of the building, where through the open window you can even hear birds singing and leaves rustling (instead of the gathering roar of early morning traffic).

So just the place to be for anyone with her nerves on edge. And you see, the catalogues, the Bellini sunrise - they’re all part of my Grand Tour programme to bear bouts of insomnia. This Grand Tour starts in fact in the bedroom, around 3AM, when I wholly uselessly wake up. Now 3AM is obviously not the time to start pondering one’s life in general (and especially not one’s limitations & failures in particular). Fretting over work problems is also best not done at that dismal darkest hour.

So that’s why, instead, I then go on a Tour, recalling with all my might moments of contemplative bliss, during purposeful flâneries in Europe’s cities, visiting these most sheltering of places: museums and art galleries. Thus, last week I was in Florence again, climbing up the staircase to the upper floor of the Fondazione Horne, where Giotto’s sturdy Santo Stefano  dwells (a prime example of  Berenson’s exhilarating tactile values ). That same night I also wandered through the miraculously empty corridors of the Uffizi, and with a burst of happiness suddenly found myself in front of Bellini’s fascinatingly still Sacred Allegory . The next night I was in Dresden, in an overcrowded Gemäldegalerie, finding peace however in front of a Claude Lorrain landscape bathed in cool morning light.

Now, beware, the demons of insomnia are not always that easily tricked. Sometimes the worn brain gets trapped in a chain of futile memories ill suited for transcending nocturnal restlessness. One night last week, for example, my mind’s eye couldn’t rid itself of the image of a tea bag in a cardboard cup of English breakfast tea, bought in Villiers street, on my way from Waterloo station to the National Gallery – thus, because of an obstinate teabag, memories of the gallery alas kept eluding me that night. And then, of course, self-willed escapism can only go that far – sometimes the elephant of anguish in the room is just too big.

Anyway, onto the final stage of the Grand Tour insomniac programme – this involves briskly getting up at five AM, showering, making breakfast in the kitchen, listen to the world awaking and (above mentioned) birds singing & leaves rustling. And then sit down quietly, intently looking at pictures, in the catalogues of the museums visited that night. A bit after seven one can then venture out into the world and join one’s fellow commuters on their way to work (not everyone looking as fresh as they could -  statistics say that 1  in 3 people have regular sleeping difficulties and that half of those insomniacs eventually have to resort to sleeping pills) . And before eight one arrives whistling at one’s desk and switches on the computer to discover again the day’s calamities.

They say that this century, so uniquely focused on productivity and utilitarianism, is particularly unkind to the nervous & over-sensitive. But then, the struggle for life has been hard on most people most of the time (even much worse than now, one imagines). Unless perhaps one happened to be an over- privileged Renaissance-man? Or what to think of this 19th century blissful vision of the awakening of the young Montaigne – whose caring father sent in a musician in the morning to make sure the sensitive young man could face the new day without stress.

Hamman -  L’éveil de Michel Montaigne (to be seen at the Gaasbeek-castle)

Train catering service (a cup of coffee for b.)

Ode To A Plastic Coffee Cup

turning a page

much more books on ipernity !

more train stuff  (& stations & trams) on ipernity

communing with shadows

Why write when there are so many brilliant quotes to share?

One could for instance quote from W.G. Sebald’s "A place in the country" ('Logis in einem Landhaus') - who weaves fascinating stories around over-sensitive writers, ill- equipped for an age of unfolding rationalism and competitive capitalism (stories spanning a period from late late 18th till early 20th C - somehow announcing the extreme inhospitality of the 21st century for over-sensitive aimless humanists)? .

There’s a world of understanding of the average human lot in this brilliant, pithy phrase of his:
“The gap between our longings and our rational strategy for living”.

 And here’s how his poetic insight deals with the economics of traded goods :
“[...] and sometimes on the perilous lonely peaks of this bric-a-brac mountain, here an ornate rococo clock and there a waxen angel lead a quiet and as it may be posthumous life. In contrast to the continuous circulation of capital, these evanescent objects have been withdrawn from currency, having long since served their time as traded goods, and have, in some sense, entered eternity.”
(I doubt  our electronic devices will not be granted so long an after-life)


Why post photos when one can also link to the extra-ordinary street photos by Vivian Maier ( 1926-2009).   
It’s an intensely satisfying romantic story, too. (Well, if it’s true, whispers the sceptic in me). A nanny roaming the streets on her days off, taking obsessively photos. Keeping hundreds and hundreds of unpublished prints and undeveloped film-rolls in a locker storage, unseen by anyone but herself until they’re discovered at an auction by a local amateur historian. And now, (after her death, alas) her photos are exhibited all over the world.

frivolous perspectives

 frog's perspective

One obviously imagines a Flâneur as a quintessentially bipedal and upright creature. Slightly stooped and with a cane could still be acceptable.
But seated on a little foldable chair!!! And yet, dear blog readers, this is the position in which the (blurred) picture to the right has been shot (clandestinely and thus without flash) – from a frog’s perspective as it were.

At the same level as the two mysterious frogs (toads?) on this engraving of the allegorical dame “Dialectica”.

She sure has attitude, this Dialectical Dame. How self-confidently is she counting off the arguments on her fingers! Not to mention the exquisite nonchalance with which she rests a foot on a pile of venerable books (Aristoteles, Zenon, Gorgias, Lucianus)...


(This is but one of over 200 delightful prints and engravings on show at an exhibit featuring the output of a prolific 16th Century Antwerp print-shop "The Four Winds" , which was exploited with both commercial shrewdness and artistic insight by an endearingly entrepreneurial couple, Hieronymus Cock and Volcxken Diericx.)






street perspective

 
Awaiting dazzling spring-light effects and pending the vibrant pulse of sprouting buds (in woods that are anyway not crutch-friendly), one cannot but courageously chase signs of grace in dull streets.


But it does happen, apparently, dancing in the streets. For instance, when you press the shutter just when a person takes off to cross a doorstep.

Pondering the Fate of Humanity over the Easter Weekend

Easter Music – Passions, Lamentations, Responsories and Lessons of Darkness


Centuries of Easter music have produced many worthy companions to ponder the pathos of our species. No need of course to mention the Bach Passions (on occasion I have felt they may be the closest that western civilisation came to atone for the wretched human condition).

One could choose Charpentier’s ominously called “Leçons des Ténèbres”, but these might be too worldly & pleasing for the ear to produce in the soul the requisite ”holy and salutary sadness” (as a 17th C Parisian priest complained).

One may also have qualms, for very different reasons, about seeking musical redemption in the Holy Week Responsoria / Tenebrae by Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), a ruthless prince and unpunished murderer. Unless it would take a vicious murderer (penitent & guilt-ridden, one hopes) to lament and pray with the  rawness of the blood & nails of an imminent crucifixion?

Anyway, perhaps better entrust one’s musical meditations to the Spanish composer, Tomàs Luis de Victoria (1548-1611),who reaches in his lamentations an exalted pitch of intensity and mysticism, without being devoid of the serenity appropriate for a later resurrection. And isn’t that what the Easter pathos is about - a tragic but ultimately hopeful story of a son of god fully sharing our human misery ; a god betrayed, humiliated, ignominiously dying – all to redeem our sins; and then resurrecting.



Evolutionary Theory - “Genetics of Original Sin“

The evolutionary account of the human lot offers, alas, no such divine redemption for our sins. But it does confirm the religious intuition of an original, fatal flaw in human nature. The culprit is natural selection itself, this most powerful process for maximising short term selfishness.

This is brilliantly argued in the book ““Genetics of Original Sin” (1) by Christian de Duve, a biochimist. With the calm authority and unswerving logic of a Nobel-prize winning scientist (medicine/biology), hallowed to boot by the wisdom of a very advanced age, de Duve first exposes the history and natural mechanisms of ‘life on earth’, to then explain how, if nothing is done, humanity is “headed for disaster”:

• “Natural selection has indiscriminately privileged all the personal qualities that contribute to the immediate success of individuals” [...]“[Apart from] intelligence, inventiveness, skilfulness, resourcefulness, and ability to communicate [...] the selected traits have also included selfishness, greed, cunning, aggressiveness, and any other property that ensured immediate personal gain, regardless of later cost to oneself or others”

• “Natural selection has not privileged the foresight and wisdom needed for sacrificing immediate benefits for the sake of the future”

• “Taking advantage of the powers of their brains, humans have proliferated beyond all measure and exploited a major part of the planet’s resources for their own benefit”

• “If it continues in the same direction, humankind is headed for frightful ordeals, if not its own extinction” (think of climate change, pollution, resource depletion, think of over-population and ferocious competition (i.e. wars) for ever scarcer resources, etc)

In short: if nothing is done, we’ll fall victim, not of an external menace, but of our own adaptive success. De Duve does not mention capitalism explicitly, but that has of course been the system that, by exalting greed, avarice and acquisitiveness as powerful motivations for entrepreneurship , has served us so well in exploiting scientific progress and natural resources to raise material standards of living for increasing numbers of people. And which will also contribute to our ultimate downfall as long as it does not put a limit on greed. (And Economics? Economics is merely a hand-maiden, priding itself on its amoral teaching of efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources. (2))



“The only possibility of redemption from the genetic original sin lies in the unique human ability to act against natural selection”

de Duve coolly points out that humanity’s survival as a species is at risk if we do not manage to “act against natural selection” by controlling or adjusting deeply ingrained traits (such as greed, aggressiveness, acquisitiveness - traits that have served our ancestors so well in their struggle for life but that in the present conditions, amplified by technology and by the sheer number of humans, have become destructive.) As George C. Williams puts it:

“The evolutionary process is immensely powerful and oppressive, but, [...] it is abysmally stupid. It can reliably maximize current selfishness at the level of the gene, but it is blind to future macroscopic consequences of current action.” (3)(4)

Scientific thoroughness obliging, de Duve explores several options to ‘save humanity’ . He comes up with the usual answers such as ‘Protect the Environment’ and ‘Control Population’ (both already requiring quite some self-control over innate selfish urges), there’s the intriguingly formulated option ‘Give Women a Chance’ (because ‘several unfavourable human traits singled out by natural selection are largely associated with maleness ’, e.g. aggressiveness ).

Some other options he proposes are worthy of much speculative pondering: ‘Improve Our Genes’ (highly controversial - who will be the ultimate arbiter, what would be the population to experiment with ?) , ‘Rewire The Brain’ (education & brainwashing to teach us better manners) and ....

‘Call On Religions’ ! : not as an act of faith in divine powers, but rather to use them as a means to an end: i.e. call upon whatever moral authority or capacity for inspiration they have left, to assist in the improving of our manners .

But so, in order to save humanity, there we are back to what religions and ethical systems have tried to do for ages: teaching us charity (within the own group at least) and restraining our boundless greed and avarice.



“Evolution and Ethics”

de Duve’s book is a straightforward, utilitarian discourse, rationally appealing to our medium and long-term interests as a species. And when he mentions “morals” or “ethics”, it is to enlist them as means to ensure humanity’s long term survival. So it’s all about human self-interest, albeit within an extended timeframe and also with an enlarged mentality, trying to minimise pain and suffering.

The 19th century biologist & philosopher T.H. Huxley, too, thought that humanity’s only hope was to “rebel against the cosmic process”, by individual restraint and also by social and technological initiative. But his awareness of the workings of natural selection and of the ensuing “fatal flaw” in human nature found a much more anguished, almost poetic, expression in his lectures about Evolution and Ethics.(5)

His call for rebellion was inspired by sheer moral indignation, “repudiating the gladiatorial theory of existence”: “brought before the tribunal of ethics, the cosmos might well stand condemned. The conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature” .

Cherishing a humanist concept of human dignity, he refused to give any moral authority to the principle of evolution (such as social Darwinism did). Huxley did fully recognize that moral man was a product of nature, and that also the ‘good’ moral ‘instincts’ such as sympathy and altruism had “incidentally” emerged from natural selection mechanisms (e.g. nepotism or self-seeking deals with others). (6)

But he adamantly maintained that “while cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man have come about”, Nature is not the arbiter of what is good and what is evil. And, quite movingly, Huxley associated human notions of the good with an aesthetic faculty, which by intuition distinguishes what is beautiful from what is ugly.

So here we have both a 20th/21st Century biochemist and a 19th century biologist/philosopher inciting us to rebel against our own genes, “a biological absurdity .... no more possible than the natural selection of the unfit.” (7) How can there be such a gap between Ethics and Nature, if humans (including their morality) are a product of nature?

George C. Williams: “I can think of no more fitting response than Huxley’s to this same challenge: “If the conclusion that [the natural and the ethical] are antagonistic is logically absurd, I am sorry for logic, because, as we have seen, the fact is so” (5)





Honing our ethic and aesthetic faculties ( for instance in the Procopius bookshop in Louvain)

So here’s our absurd mission: blithely combating our genes to save humanity. Obviously, we’ll need all the help we can find.

There is indeed religion, that great promoter & instigator of ethic and aesthetic values, but religions have alas a long history of promoting violence against presumed heretics and infidel tribes. Secular humanism then, for all its reverence for our ethic and aesthetic faculties, has not avoided any of the 20th century disasters. And yet, entrusting relentless scientific & technological progress to humans ruled by Palaeolithic emotions seems more than ever a recipe for disaster.

So after all, could not a wizened secular humanism, one disabused of its former grand illusions, fit the bill to offer an “ethics without [fundamentalist] doctrine” ? And while art will not save the world, could not some of its concomitant habits (of reflection, of understanding & imagination, of empathy and not least, of taste) help us to ‘enlarge our mentality’, help us to hone disinterested moral intuitions?

In 1943, Johan Huizinga ( the great historian renowned for his “Autumn of The Middle Ages / Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen”) wrote a book “Mutilated World” ( “Geschonden Wereld” – posthumously published after the war). Despairing of the then prevailing barbarism, he “reflects on the chances of repairing our civilisation”. In these reflections « he continues the defence of disinterested [cultural] exercises, of ennobling forms , without which the world perhaps loses both its meaning and its value”. (8)

I heard of this out-of-print Huizinga book only last week, while reading a collection of essays by the art historian André Chastel, whose own books now seem largely out of favour too. But judging by the few Chastel-books I already managed to find, he may well have been a prime example of that wise and disabused humanism we are looking for. (9)

Now for anyone looking for a fine selection of books to hone his or her ethic and aesthetic faculties, it is warmly recommended to spend some time in the Procopius bookshop in Louvain. It is a very selective kind of second hand bookshop, not at all crammed full with stacks of books. Its collection betrays a wayward kind of selectivity – offering a choice assortment of some of the finest writings (not limited to the usual famous landmark books, but with unexpected finds of unjustly forgotten gems).

It’s the kind of bookshop where you will find for instance this huge, beautifully illustrated, book by André Chastel on the Age of Humanism (the book as such could already serve as a bulwark against barbarism). You’ll find there too a fine selection of books on Evolution (both the de Duve book (this year) and the Huxley book (last year) I found there). And it is only there that, with great astonishment, one can discern, just on the shelf above the one with the Evolution books, the Huizinga-essay “Geschonden Wereld” about whose existence one had learnt only a week earlier...

(Praise also to the handy location of Procopius, less than 1.5 km from the Louvain-station, well within roaming range of even a crutch-assisted, train-travelling flâneur)





Fateful Credits & Notes  


(1) Genetics of Original Sin – The Impact of natural Selection on the Future of Humanity 
Christian de Duve   (with Neil Patterson )

(2) But how about Technology: is it a potential redeemer of the human condition or rather humanity’s Nemesis? Science and technology have obviously immensely eased the harshest aspects of the struggle for life. But they have also greatly increased the impact of humans - some speak of a new epoch with humans able to change the planet: the Anthropocene  . Humanity being a species notorious for its inability to properly discount the long-term consequences of its actions, this is rather worrisome. However, perhaps we have reached a point where it is only further progress in science and technology that can solve the problems we have created. But to use technological progress well, we’d need a more responsible and forward-looking human species.

(3) George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist, in an essay accompanying the re-edition of T.H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics”

(4) A frivolous non-expert speculation: the selfish gene is bent on its perpetuation, requiring not only its current carrier to survive and to procreate but also its current carrier’s offspring to be able to go on reproducing. So the selfish gene might well have a longer term perspective on survival than its individual carrier who is finite anyhow. Hence genetic coding for caring for one’s offspring and perhaps even for a concern to leave a viable world to later generations...

(5) Thomas Henry Huxley  : T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1894)- 1989 edition expanded with New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context, by James Paradis and George C. Williams

(6) Those entertaining the romantic notion of a “noble savage”, a pristine state of nature characterized by love & cooperation , would shudder of present biological explanations of all seemingly altruist or social behaviour in nature - Loving care for off-spring? : ‘determined by coefficient of relationship, so an investment by the donor in its own genes’ ; Altruist behaviour without benefit for donor or its kin? : ‘provoked by deception and exploitation by a manipulator’; Rendering services to one another: ‘a calculation of reciprocity’ ; Gregariousness: ‘hide among companions so that evil will befall a companion instead of oneself’

(7) Gunter S Stent: “ the idea of any organism, including man, transcending its genes is a biological absurdity [..] transcendence of genes is no more possible than natural selection of the unfit.” – as quoted by George C. Williams.

(8) André Chastel, « l’image dans le miroir - chroniques artistiques - historiens et critiques, Johan Huizinga (1946) »: “Son livre posthume, Geschonden Wereld, Le Monde Mutilé (1945), poursuit [...] la défense des exercices désintéressés, des formes ennoblissantes, sans lesquels le monde perd peut-être à la fois son sens et son prix »

(9) André Chastel – an non-classifiable, in-between art historian (which may be why I find him so appealing): he’s neither one of those great humanist art historians still comforted in their idea of a glorious progression of the spirit in western art history, but nor is he amongst the joyless, destructive post-modernists cynically relegating the history of art to the exploitative activities of the rich & the powerful. Chastel fully acknowledged that the post-modern suspicions vàv the « world of art and its smugness” could be justified “by the naïvetés and the hypocrisies of academic discourse, by the imposture of hero-fications and glorifications”, but at the same time he continued to insist on the value of the aesthetic experience, on the dignity of artistic forms.

« On comprend bien que cette suspicion à l’égard du « monde de l’art » et des complaisances qui l’accompagnent se justifie par rapport aux naïvetés – et aux hypocrisies – des discours académiques, aux impostures de l’héroïsation, de la glorification, de la simplification idéaliste. Oui, mais au terme de la dénonciation, on ne fait que renouveler, au nom d’une critique plus ou moins politique, la condamnation platonicienne. Elle reste malencontreuse, puisqu’elle transporte définitivement la conscience à l’extérieur de phénomènes dont l’intérêt n’est que saisissable qu’à travers l’expérience qui en réactive les ressources émotives et sensibles. » « […][aujourd’hui] la démarche artistique […] est mieux représentée par le commentaire que par le résultat provisoire d’un objet »

(10) André Chastel - The Age of Humanism - Europe 1480-1530 (Published under the auspices of the council of cultural co-operation following teh 1st art exhibition of the Council of Europe “Humanist Europe” organized in 1954 in Brussels by the Belgian Government)

How to get rid of a post-op winter depression

A gentle billowing of the yellow curtains .... soft street murmurs floating in ... Yes, they must have opened the windows to catch some of the pre-spring breeze. Such a luminous day too! And how sweet everyone was! One of the nurses had brought freshly baked cookies for her colleagues. But not for me, since I had to remain sober for the small operative intervention I had to undergo. I had already had a little red pill, “ just to make you feel more relaxed”, and more was to flow intra-venously  soon, the anaesthetist had assured me.

So I sighed blissfully, loving life, the world, and this hospital in particular. Like that cute gown they had make me put on, with little green flowers!
Oh, and there was that nice surgeon again! Who benevolently was going to give me the smallest of cuts in my leg, to kindly remove one of the bolts from the iron bar that kept my leg together. Oh yes, what a perfect day! It was Friday, I had the day off thanks to this operation and I was to return home still today.


The next day, I woke exhausted after a night plagued by nightmares (starring a giant spider with a swollen larva-like body and 8 spidery legs, flying through the air, dodging the knives I was throwing at it to eventually land elegantly on the kitchen sink).
The daily health walk was a flop – after 500 meters I miserably hobbled home again. The world was a crummy place. My entire life was a fiasco. I was a pathetic dud. Dear C was soon to leave for Spain, for an indeterminate period. Things sucked, the walls were closing in on me . I had to get out. Something had to be done! Such as going out and lighting a candle in a church? Well no, not really, but speaking of churches .... checking out the Walloon heritage pages on the web..... what was this: the Collegiate Church of Saint Gertrude - I hadn’t ever visited that supposedly marvellous Roman church in Nivelles.
Only 30 kilometres away ... and C was easily persuaded for a little outing by car.

Yes, my heart leapt, seeing the stern, pure lines of a sturdy roman church from afar. Those solid towers, those robust round arches ... But coming nearer, the aesthetic delight slowly subsided and suspicion rose. This was all too regular and too smooth ... this was not a venerable ancient building bearing witness of militant Christianity in dark ages ... Entering the building, one could not fail to spot that many of the heavy pillars were cast in concrete. Aha, a leaflet to enlighten the ignorant church-visitor: consecrated in the 11th century, duly bombed out in 1940, reconstruction finished in 1984...
When we left the building, we were greeted by pelting rain. And where was everybody? The city centre looked neat enough, but the shopping streets were near empty.


One shop drew our attention, second-hand stuff - peering in we saw an anarchistic disorder of piles of books, paintings, DVD’s... A handwritten notice on the door informed us that if the shop was closed, this meant that the owner was working on his Network. But the shop was not closed. While I was gingerly picking my way amongst the heaps of merchandise – putting a crutch here, a foot there – the owner (a young man, still in his twenties I’d say) was eager to explain:
- that the disorder was only temporary (he had just unloaded his truck),
- that he was in fact a “collector & connoisseur” ,
- that he was developing a Network of likeminded collectors,
- that he was building a Database,
- that he had a Business plan and was going to make enough money out of this to fund his leisure activities,
-  that we had to watch out for “caravan collectors” coming on the Web soon (but he may have been bluffing there, he definitely looked hesitating) and.....
-  that next week a load of superb art catalogues from Christies’ (or Sotheby’s – I don’t remember) was to be delivered! (as I write this, it is ‘next week’, and I’m sitting here car-less, unable alas to reach those loads of art books arriving in Nivelles) .

We left the shop with a dozen DVD’s and next proceeded to elucidate the mystery of the missing locals in the city-centre: they had all congregated in the various taverns on the main city square. We followed suit and entered a grand café, oozing the comfortable bourgeois fifties with its mirrors and copper and wood .... A good place to settle with books & papers & a glass of rosé , waiting for the rain to subside.

When the sun finally did peak through, I insisted on a final limping walk to the local park before going home. I was rewarded with an infinitely sombre, wintry park, pathetically dull with its empty benches, its vacuous allegorical statues, its pompous gates . Immensely endearing, really. So much so I could leave all my gloom & doom right there and then.

classical longings, again (see note 5)

While of course the mind can always go after what the feet can’t reach, I do value my feet bringing me again to what I set my mind on (1).
The current 1.5 km (hobbling) roaming range already opens up vast horizons since I have, when venturing out on foot (heading respectively North, North West and South East), three second hand bookshops (2) within reach .

Selective use of the city’s public transports had already been mastered early on after my accident (brandishing a crutch to secure a seat) in order to reach my place of daily diligence. But now also intercity train travel has been added to my expanding mobility range. Which allowed a visit to an exhibition of illuminated manuscripts in the Plantin Moretus museum in Antwerp, one of the world’s oldest printing shops.

The printed book ... now there’s an example of a new medium which quickly caught on, spread everywhere, evolved and kept up with the changing times to remain nearly unchallenged for hundreds of years.
Well, there was the advent of TV, grabbing a lot of people’s attention, but it never proved quite fatal for books.
Books remained in a category of their own, either as beautiful & venerable carriers of wisdom or else as easily transportable & user- friendly stores of knowledge & entertainment. Yes, books continued nearly unchallenged, until today’s handheld devices... Would they herald the end of the printed book?

But even then, a new carrier- technology need not also mean the end of a particular civilisation’s founding texts. Have not all ‘great human documents’ been digitalised by now? So is not in any case the “content” saved for many future generations to come?
Hmm, the “content”, perhaps, but what about the appreciation of these texts, what about their understanding by the general public? Who, outside university experts, is still reading these texts with care and respect? The past 50 years of advances in positive science and technology may have compromised the very notion of ancient texts bringing wisdom. And at the same time our ability and willingness to concentrate and spend time with a complex non-utilitarian text have declined. It’s of course not just because of smartphones and i-pads which invite to surfing & tweeting rather than to deep analysis . Perhaps it’s the sheer complexity of today’s world, with its high demands on our limited brainpower, which has simply used up our spare capacity for disinterested contemplation and thinking?



But back to the early printing days ... The printed book itself was of course a major technological innovation , which crowded out the illuminated manuscript and killed the delicate delightful art of miniatures (3).
Yet what this Plantin-Moretus exhibition endearingly shows, is how much the traditional authors and texts continued to be revered in those early printed book days, how meticulously printers would strive to faithfully reproduce ancient texts. Neither were the old illuminated manuscripts discarded, on the contrary : they were avidly collected as “things of beauty” to be carefully preserved.

The early age of the printed book was a time of bold explorations and discoveries in all domains – geography, anatomy, ....
A time too of religious unrest and ferocious reformations and counter-reformations. And yet in those complex and troubled times a fine humanist culture blossomed (in the wealthy Antwerp classes at least), lavishing loving attention on the authors and the arts of antiquity.


Going back home by tram, train and tram again, I obviously cannot fail to notice how many of my fellow passengers are distractedly caressing the touch-screens of their smart-phones . Conspicuous smart-phone-holders seem to outnumber discreet book-readers by 15 to 1 (hmm, book readers may of course very well be smart phone holders too). There’s no denying the fun those smartphone-holders have with their device, but I still find that, aesthetically speaking, their eye-finger movements, however agile, are no match for the flipping of rustling pages by a traditional reader.
Not to mention the supremely attractive look of concentration of a reader absorbed in a book-passage of particular beauty.

Such a passage perhaps as this one, in defence of classicism:

“[...] The joy to understand, bringing some support to the art of living. All that classicism leading to [mere]intellectual satisfaction? Certainly, but an intelligence then which is much broader than abstract reasoning, one that is capable of clarifying and purifying the life that goes by, capable of giving more courage to the heart. That harmony between formal appeal, human spiritual faculties and the experience of life , furnishes the secret of the aptly called ‘ interior classicism’, which has nothing to do with the formal academism with which it is all too often confounded. “ (4)


Notes & a little booklist
(1) Paraphrasing Walt Whitman “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach”
(2) These hobbling health walks to the bookshop resulted in:
* 3 out-of-print André Chastel volumes, for a ffflâneur irresistibly titled: ‘Fables, Forms, Figures’ 2 volumes Henri Focillon on the Middle Ages,
* a small introduction to the Baroque by Victor-L. Tapié,
* a bundle of essays on the Jew as pariah by Hannah Arendt and the latter’s correspondence with Heinrich Blücher (I long hesitated to acquire that book of personal letters, since Arendt wrote so often about the difference between public and private persona and how the private should remain private),
* a little studious leaflet about ‘Joachim Le Patinier et Henri Blès – Leurs vrais visages’ (published by “ le Centre d’action culturelle de la Communauté d’expression française ayant pour objet d’assurer, dans le respect de la personne humaine, la promotion et le rayonnement culturels de la Communauté d’expression française en Belgique – “ ah, how a sentence can smell of the 70s )
(3) Though Panofsky in fact speculated that the traditional craft of illumination may rather have committed suicide by an overdose of painterly perspective – whose realistic illusionary depth was ill fitted for two dimensional book decorations . “On a dit que la miniature avait été tuée par l’invention de l’imprimerie ; en réalité, elle avait déjà commencé à se suicider en se transformant en peinture. Même sans Gutenberg, elle serait morte d’une “overdose” de perspective. “
(4) Victor L. Tapié, Baroque et Classicisme : ““[...]Le plaisir de comprendre apportant un secours à l’art de vivre. Tout ce classicisme conduisant à une satisfaction de l’intelligence? Assurément, mais il s’agit d‘une intelligence plus vaste que celle que du raisonnement abstrait, capable d’éclairer et de purifier la vie qui passe, de donner au coeur plus de courage. Cette harmonie entre les faculties spirituelles de l’homme, l’expérience de la vie et l’attrait de la forme fournit le secret de ce ‘classicisme intérieur’ [...] qui n’a rien à faire avec l’académisme formel [...] avec [lequel] on le confond trop souvent.”
(5)  again ..... smuggling in an autobiographic note:  an apology for classical longings