Category: Columns

Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself from the marble cornice and flapped in a leisurely way across to the gallery where once Byzantine empresses worshipped, encased in pearls and purple. Instinctively, one of the tweeds lifted his umbrella to his right shoulder and sighted along its shaft. He nearly dropped it in surprise: “Good God,” he said, “bloody thing’s out of shot.” After that, the party had a healthier respect for the grandeur of this great fane.

Other museum-goers are moved by a hunger for information rather than an atavistic instinct for field sports. See how some people spend substantially more time reading the didactic label on the wall than they do confronting the complexity of the work it interprets. Such folk should find joy if they go to see the St. John’s Bible, numerous sheets of which are on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (until July 3), together with plenty of explanatory props: quill pens, penknives, even photographs of the sheep-surrounded scriptorium in Wales where the scribes commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, penned this, the first handwritten Bible in half a millennium.

For at this exhibition, the urge to read rather than to look leads the eye not to the (excellent) supporting information but to the texts of the Bible pages themselves, written in real time to be read in real time. The pleasure of contemplating these great creamy white sheets (about two feet high and two and a half feet wide when spread out) is like the pleasure of watching an artist sketching in the open air; you are drawn to take part in his art, though in this case you fall into the rhythm of his work not by actually seeing him marking the regular black text with his goose quill, but by following with the eye the dance of the text across the page. Such watching induces a passion of patience.

Of course, too, there is looking in addition to reading, for it is the illuminations that catch the eye. They light up the text with multiple colors and associations. Alongside the Parable of the Sower is a figure who might have walked straight out of a Byzantine Gospel-book with his round halo and imperial purple tunic, except that this nether man is clad in something that looks mighty like the blue jeans of a Stearns County bachelor farmer. The butterflies are delightful (as butterflies always are), and gold leaf makes Christ at the Transfiguration appear to be entirely made of light.

But for all their glory, it is to the text that the pictures bring you back. One visitor was overheard to say she had found the exhibition so interesting that when she got home she was going to find a Bible and read it. If the manuscript has this effect on many people, the monks of St. John’s will surely feel they were right to commission it.

Scripture, said Gregory the Great, is a stream where lambs may wade and elephants may swim. A friend was telling me the other day about the meetings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars whose assumptions I do not entirely share (why assume that miracles do not happen?), but who had the admirable aim of analyzing the Gospels to work out what Jesus actually said and did. They also had the good sense to set up their headquarters in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, so that after a hard day’s analyzing they could visit the venerable vineyard of Gundlach-Bundschau, in existence since 1857 (though it grew pears during Prohibition).

You can enjoy a vicarious visit by drinking their Bearitage, Lot no. 11, a red wine available locally for about $12. They call this “California claret,” because like the great reds of Bordeaux it is a blend of several grapes. The analytical palate will detect the round sweetness of Zinfandel, the blandness of Merlot, the long slow tannins of Cabernet Sauvignon (which will give this wine the capacity to keep, though it is also nice now). Analysis is enlightening but not necessary. This wine is more than the sum of its parts; with a steak it told a coherent and convincing story, one which I think would please anyone who has red wine running in his veins.

I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever perpetrated on a military parade ground.

Besides, I cannot see students at a degree ceremony without thinking of the swink and toil that brought them there: the freezing evenings bicycling home to Uptown after three hours of night class; the utter frustration some encounter in trying to satisfy mathematical language requirements; and above all, the hours spent doing dull jobs like parking cars and turning hamburgers, hours that impress on students the repetitive and broadly approved message that it is more important to be on time for banausic employments than it is to live the life of the mind. There is an inscape to graduation that merits a certain amount of outward pomp and circumstance.

Elgar, too, had an inscape. There are those who write him off as simply an English Sousa: “Delius is for the superselius, who think Elgar is velgar.” I disagree. The tuneful confidence of “Pomp and Circumstance” is only the surface of a composer who is altogether more enigmatic. You have only to listen to his Cello Concerto to find grand musical language being employed to express a distinctly abstract passion.

No less complex, yet also more accessible, is his big choral piece The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar shared with Purcell a capacity for giving remarkable resonance to words that might otherwise not attract admiration. (Verdi, too—his best opera is the Requiem, because it is the one with the best book.) The Dream of Gerontius is a long poem by John Henry, Cardinal Newman describing the death of an early Christian, not a particular hero or a martyr, just geron tis—Greek for “a certain old man.” The first half happens at the deathbed; the second describes the old man’s onward progress after his passing. No doubt gentle readers will put me right (as several kindly did in the matter of World War II poets), but the only other piece of literature I can think of that has the hero die so early in the action is Charles Williams’s All Hallows Eve, a novel in which the protagonist perishes on the first page. Neither work, however, is in the least bit gloomy. Gerontius’s hopes and fears and acts of faith can indeed induce a certain vertigo. They show, if nothing else, that Elgar was no pompous extrovert; like the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, he knew the “mind has mountains … hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.”

The idea of inscape was actually invented by Hopkins, an older contemporary of Elgar. Hopkins used it to indicate quintessence, what you see of something from the inside once you have made an act of commitment to it. One somehow doubts he applied the idea much to appreciation of the winemaker’s art—he was an ascetic soul who even, as an undergraduate, denied himself the use of the armchair during Lent—but there are few sensual experiences to which it is more applicable; once one has surveyed, sniffed, sipped, and swallowed one’s wine, commitment to it is complete!

A claret came by me the other day that illustrates the point perfectly. The label on the characteristic Bordeaux bottle (with shoulders) said “Chateau des Agates 2003” and the fluid within, a clever blend of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, was a good deep red (and only about ten dollars a go). Drinking it made one aware not only of the inscape of the wine, but also of the architecture of one’s own senses. The smell and taste not only have structure in themselves, but they also raise awareness in the consumer of his own capacity to taste.

Think of your mouth as some great pagan temple, say, the Pantheon at Rome, where they pour libations to the Gods. Take a sip of this claret and a good dry flavor swirls through the hall, followed by pleasant tannins against the teeth. Finally, an aromatic whiff rises into the vault of the palate, up and out through the nose, like smoke through the hole in the middle of the dome. The Gods breathe in and smile.

This is very heartening wine. It would go well with roasted chestnuts or simple barbecue (not one which has been slathered with sweet sauces), the sort of celebration that should await any fresh graduate emerging from commencement. Prosit!

Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For me it is the English countryside before the Great War, the Old England of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

For most middle-aged Americans I suppose it is, for better or worse, the Eisenhower era: the wonders of modern science, Detroit dragons, and America as Top Nation forever more. No one now (apart, apparently, from Mr. Rumsfeld) thinks the world is, or ought to be, as simple as it seemed then in the black-and-white pages of Time magazine. Many of us never thought it was.

Ask your pets what their world looks like. Your cat knows your neighborhood quite as well as you do, but what he has marked on his mental map is entirely different. Poor Kit Smart wondered at the wisdom of cats and they put him in Bedlam. You see a crack in the neighbor’s siding. Your cat sees the Gate of Mouse and watches with the full-bore attention of Ernest Hemingway gazing at the gate through which the bull will enter the arena to meet its matador.

Your dog, too, he has a consciousness that makes intelligent distinctions mostly on the basis of smell—a sense most humans (except, of course, connoisseurs of wine) are well on the way to losing. I have seen a pack of beagles follow the trail of a hare through a mink farm without faltering. This is a serious feat of discrimination, since aroma algebra teaches us that mink equals skunk squared. How much we must be missing. One wonders what gave the animals in that Sinhalese nature reserve early warning of last December’s tsunami, so that they made their way inland and escaped the deadly waves.
In the ancient world, it was the Stoic philosophers who were the great exponents of the notion that there is a hidden sympathy that links all physical phenomena. If the Stoics had known about Tokyo and Texas, they would certainly have asserted that a butterfly clapping its wings in the air over the Japanese capital could cause a tornado over Austin. Even spiritual things were exquisitely refined matter, and so were subtly and physically linked. The soul was like gold to airy thinness beat; the whole round earth was every way bound with golden chains too fine for human sight.

It was these connections that made things beautiful. If each person and thing lived in accordance with its own nature, it would become perfectly adapted to its environment, indeed, to the entire universe of which it was a part. Beauty could be discerned wherever things were well-proportioned to one another, above all when they displayed a mathematical symmetry, like the colonnaded frontage of a Greek temple.

Just such a Stoic combination came my way the other evening. It involved a crumbly English cheese called Blue Shropshire (like Stilton, but golden instead of white) and a 2002 Vouvray (costing little more than $12) called Masbon, which is French for “good estate,” though I guess it is simply the name of the shipper. (The experience would probably have been as good, just different, with many another cheese, perhaps best with Wensleydale, that crumbly white poetry from the Yorkshire Dales, home of James Herriot, the horsedoctor and raconteur.) For a vehicle there was good crusty bread; ideal would have been Bath Oliver Biscuits, as eaten with hard-boiled eggs by Dan and Una in Kipling’s Puck.

Vouvray is a white wine from the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. It is made from the Chenin Blanc grape, which means that it is somewhat sweet; (“off-dry” is the pundit’s word). 2002 was a fine hot year but this wine is not oversweet; it has the characteristic Vouvray edge. One bottle had an aftertaste I was personally not keen on (a little like a McIntosh apple), but this was well-masked by the Blue Shropshire cheese.

Looking for the link that made this wine and cheese such a successful combination required serious research—that is to say, repeated, careful consumption. In the end I decided the connection consisted in a concatenation of creaminess. Nothing excessive, you understand—nothing in excess was a common Stoic motto—but a gentle connection catalyzed by the consumer. As Charles Williams wrote—it is National Poetry Month—“How good the universe can be, what now?”