Borges' Library

Out of Cacophony Notes

Notes

Ribeira Palace in its mid-18th century Mannerist and Baroque form, only years before its destruction in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

1. The rowboat was pulling up to the wharf located adjacent to the River Palace along the Terreiro do Paço, the large palace square. And, as the boat approached the landing, Cristóvão was horrified to see crowds of onlookers waiting for the auto-da-fé to begin. A hundred years later, Voltaire would describe a similar scene when poor Candide found himself on the wrong side of the Inquisition just eight days after the destruction the destruction of the city. Cristóvão looked back one last time at the great Nau da Índia, which was anchored in the deeper waters of the Tagus River. This was the ship that had brought him here. Its medieval crusader Order of the Cross banners now flapping madly in the wind. 

 

2. As Cristóvão left the morbid spectacle behind and headed up the hill where Baltazar’s family lived, he was grateful that his friend had warned him to duck whenever someone cried “Agua,vai!” Otherwise he would have had the contents of a chamber pot dumped on his head from a second story window. This had happened to poor Candide as well!

 

3) Duarte Lobo - 450 Years
The second half of the sixteenth century in Portugal was a period of deepening crisis at all levels of life. ... One of the consequences of this change in the cultural life of the country was a growing atmosphere of deep mysticism and disapproval of all kinds of secular entertainment. ... Portuguese sacred polyphony, on the other hand, found its golden age between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. A network of major ecclesiastical institutions not only established large and richly endowed polyphonic chapels, but often also attached to them permanent music schools of high artistic and pedagogic standards. (See this site on Duarte Lobo)

Listen: Duarte Lobo's Audivi Vocem De Caelo

 

4).

I love Voltaire. And, like a favorite landscape, Candide is a book that I seem to return to again and again. Maybe like a lot of people after Japan's deadly earthquake in 2011, I found myself thinking about the book's opening chapters, when the luck-less Candide– along with the syphilitic Pangloss and the sailor from the boat– were shipwrecked; washing up on Lisbon's shores just moments before the city was struck by the infamous mega-quake of 1755.

As if the earthquake wasn't enough, the mega-quake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous.

In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage– but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophisizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: “How could Leibnitz have been wrong?”

How indeed?

5. The Viol

Perhaps contributing more than anything in turning boy into legend, was his supreme skill at the viola da gamba. How his father managed to procure an instrument of that quality still remains a mystery but somehow the boy’s Papa had brought to Macao the finest instrument seen east of Goa. Held upright between the legs and played like a cello, the viola da gamba had taken the Iberian Peninsula by storm and was all the rage back in Renaissance Lisbon. Carved out of the highest quality beech wood, the instrument was lavishly decorated with rosettes and small inlaid mosaics utilizing a richly dark shade of jujube wood and white bone. Most noteworthy of all was the fingerboard which was adorned with a lavish marquetry decoration of several contrasting shades of wood along with white and green-stained bone.

 

"If one were to judge musical instruments according to their ability to imitate the human voice, and if one were to esteem naturalness as the highest accomplishment, so I believe that one cannot deny the viol the first prize, because it can imitate the human voice in all its modulations, even in its most intimate nuances: that of grief and joy"

Thus praised the French theoretician Marin Mersenne in 1636 the viola da gamba*, this most noble of all string instruments, which graced during its flowering - from 1480 to 1780, i.e. from the Renaissance to the Classical Period - court, church and chamber with its presence. Because of its delicate sound, rich in harmonics and in subtle inflections, the viol was considered the most perfect imitator of the human voice, which, in the currents of Humanist Thinking , had been elevated to be the measure of all things musical; it became a paramount medium for sophisticated music.

 

Music

Palestrina | Westminster Cathedral Choir - Sicut cervus

Portuguese polyphony - Duarte Lobo

Tous Les Matins du Monde

MY FAVORITE--bringing back the playfulness and playing around of the Baroque: Ciaccona del Paradiso e del Inferno' P Jaroussky + Arpeggiata - Pluhar, life

++

Books

Dante's Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni

Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (The MIT Press) 
by Peter Pesic

Saramago's Baltazar and Blimunda

Heather Webb: The Medieval Heart

Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris: Baroque Science

Dana Stewart: The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry

My old essay:

Eating God (随 筆)

 

Why Candide is the best book ever written?

It’s like Candide, if he hadn't been kicked out of his homeland, if he hadn't met with a shipwreck and washed unto Lisbon shores only there to be almost killed in a mega-earthquake; if he gone up against the Inquisition, if he hadn't traveled across America on foot, if he hadn't killed a baron, if he hadn't lost all his sheep in Eldorado, well, then he wouldn't have ended up sitting there in Constantinople eating some nice candied citron and pistachios where he would dream of spending his days cultivating his garden…

Palestrina

As the deer longs for streams of water,a

so my soul longs for you, O God.

3
My soul thirsts for God, the living God.

When can I enter and see the face of God?*b

4
My tears have been my bread day and night,c

as they ask me every day, “Where is your God?”d

5
Those times I recall

as I pour out my soul,e

When I would cross over to the shrine of the Mighty One,*

to the house of God,

Amid loud cries of thanksgiving,

with the multitude keeping festival.f

6
Why are you downcast, my soul;

why do you groan within me?

Wait for God, for I shall again praise him,

my savior and my God.

II
7
My soul is downcast within me;

therefore I remember you

From the land of the Jordan* and Hermon,

from Mount Mizar,g

8
*Deep calls to deep

in the roar of your torrents,

and all your waves and breakers

sweep over me.h

9
By day may the LORD send his mercy,

and by night may his righteousness be with me!

I will pray* to the God of my life,

10
I will say to God, my rock:

“Why do you forget me?i

Why must I go about mourning

with the enemy oppressing me?”

11
It shatters my bones, when my adversaries reproach me,

when they say to me every day: “Where is your God?”

12
Why are you downcast, my soul,

why do you groan within me?

Wait for God, for I shall again praise him,

my savior and my God.

 

 

Columbus's Southerly Journey

Despite what we all learned in grammar school, educated people from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages had taken the idea of spherical world quite seriously; with the real question by Columbus’ day being how large the oceans were that separated Europe from Asia. Not unlike the Goldilocks Zone in the search for exoplanets, one of the geographical theories that informed Columbus’ journey saw the world as divided into five regions. The top and bottom were frigid polar areas; and between these two inhabitable zones, stretched a tropical zone, on some maps red hot and inhospitable for all life, but on others imagined as rich in resources.

So people already knew the earth was round when Columbus sailed the oceans blue. But wasn't Columbus sailing west in order to reach the east? Well, that also turns out to be more complicated than we were taught in school-- as I learned in a very large and endlessly fascinating book written by Caltech historian Nicolás Wey-Gόmez about the explorer's southerly journey called, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies.

I came to know of Professor Wey-Gόmez's book after I heard him give a Watson Lecture at Caltech a few years ago. These prestigious public lectures have been put on at Caltech for nearly 80 years and they are always well-attended. And Wey-Gόmez's lecture was no different, as every seat in the house was taken. I should say that I was not predisposed to agree at all with Wey-Gόmez since I had long believed that the Europeans of the Renaissance never expected to find much of anything in those high Atlantic waters where Columbus had set sail. Indeed, the Columbus that Wey-Gόmez spoke about that evening was largely unrecognizable to me. Intrigued, I ordered his book the moment I got home from the lecture. 

3.

Back in Columbus' day, people held more than one map in their minds. 

First, Columbus had an up-to-date version of the medieval T and O map. You've probably seen reproductions of this. With Jerusalem positioned in the center of the world, the three known continents --Europe, Asia and Africa-- are depicted branching outwards from the center. The continents appear encircled by a great ocean that was the "O" of the map's name; while the "T" was formed by the three great rivers that divided the continents from each other: the Mediterranean, the Nile, and the Don (Tanais River).

A tripartite system, each continent was associated with one of Noah's sons, with the sinful one-- surprise-surprise-- being associated with Africa. With East at the top, toward the light of Heaven and Christ, the three continents are shown surrounded by the great sea. Heading West to arrive in the East, then, Columbus would have had reasons to imagine that he had arrived at the easternmost part of Asia. Many of the maps he had studied had indeed showed islands off the coast of Asia, including the coveted spice islands written about by the English knight, Sir John Mandeville, in his book of travels a hundred years before Columbus' voyage.

Wishful thinking must have also played a part in his belief that he had landed in India, since Asia had always been his advertised destination. This was where the riches were thought to lie, and why the islands are still known today as the West Indies.

But why is America not called Columbia --after the man who discovered it?

4.

Wey-Gόmez, in his book, explains that in addition to the T-O maps, there was another tradition of maps that also held great sway throughout the late middle ages and into the Renaissance. These were maps derived from Ptolemy's book Geography, written in the 2nd century. Ptolemy's Geography was so detailed that scholars believe it must have incorporated first-hand accounts of far-flung geographical features. For example, the Bay of Bengal was described with astonishing precision. One of the maps that Columbus consulted just before his voyage was itself based on the Ptolemaic world map. Created by a German working in Florence named Henricus Martellus, it was considered to be cutting edge for all the modern information that had been incorporated into it. Considered to be "America's birth certificate" the famous Waldseemüller map drew heavily on Martellus, but aimed to add even more up-to-date information, by including "the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci and others”. 

By “others” he presumably meant Columbus!

He then suggested naming the new land in the southern Atlantic "America," after Amerigo Vespucci, whom the map-maker credited for having discovered it.

Wait... didn't Columbus discover South America?

Disappointed when few believed he had discovered India, Columbus decided to continue his explorations by traveling further and further south.

South? I thought he was trying to sail west to arrive in the east. 

Then, when finally reaching what was clearly a continental landmass in present day Venezuela, Columbus did something very foolish. Instead of telling the world that he had discovered a new continent, he announced that he had found --you know what I am going to say, right?-- the Garden of Eden. And that is how Columbus got scooped by Amerigo Vespucci. This is where the "bumbler" part of his resume comes in. 

Toby Lester in his book about the antipodes and the Waldseemüller map, called this antipodal continent in the unknown part of the world the "Fourth Part of the World." According to a geographical theory dating back to the ancient Greeks, the world was thought to be a sphere divided into five zones or belts. The top and bottom were frigid polar zones. In the middle stretched the tropical zone, on some maps red hot and inhospitable for all life, but on others imagined as rich with resources. There remained two temperate zones. The first was the inhabited world as the ancients knew it; while the other was a terra incognito.

Alfred Hiatt, in his book Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600, documents the debates that occurred about the existence of an unknown continent starting from ancient times and right up to Columbus' journey. Augustine of Hippo adamantly denied this terra incognito. But Cicero firmly believed there was life on the other side of the world; and stated that such was the great distance separating the known and unknown worlds that Rome's dominion could never reach it. Even Rome had its limits, it seems.

For more, see my post on Cicero, Dreaming in Latin

Scipio's Dream in Harper's

Recommended Reading

James S. A. Corey’s Expanse Series (the show is fantastic!)

Carol Delaney’s Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America

Michel Faber’s novel The Book of Strange New Things

Valerie Irene Jane Flint’s The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus

Donald Goldsmith’s Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

Nicolás Wey-Gόmez’s The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies

Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

Alfred Hiatt’s Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes

Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America

Ilan Stavans’ Imagining Columbus

Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel, The Sparrow

Mary Alexander Watts’ Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination

 

Queen of the Garden of Eden

Writing her letters from the new world, her man in the Indies described the glories and riches that would be hers. He told of blue-green islands of impossibly fertility and beauty; of colorful parrots like rainbows and all kinds of fruit trees; and of people who were docile and, as yet, did not know God. And did he mention there was gold? Endless supplies of gold that would prove to be as much as she needed; like the slaves--it was all endless. And reading these letters from her man in the Indies, Queen Isabella could almost be forgiven, says Giles Tremlett in his wonderful biography of the queen Isabella of Castille, for believing herself to be the queen of Eden.

There has been some criticism of Tremlett's popular biography-- that he engages in too many loose narratives, such as positing motivations in peoples' heads who have been dead 400 years (For example, that Isabella’s daughter had a eating disorder due to the perfectionism of her mother)… and by not taking into account or mentioning recent revisionist history (such as Kazan's book on the Spanish Inquisition) that seeks to address placing full blame on Isabella for the crimes of the time, still I would argue this is a very balanced account of Isabel la Católica. He does address the old Black Legend-- British propaganda that suggests that Spain remains backward like all Catholic countries having been cast into intellectual darkness due to their superstitious religion, which had basically turned the clock back to the “dark ages” (another trope). The black legend is with us today. If you do the Yale Open Course on Cervantes' Don Quixote, the professor will discuss this at some length. And indeed our image of Isabella as a cruel religious fanatic in part is informed by this. (We are always unfair to female rulers).  

And speaking of female rulers, she was the first great female monarch in Europe. In the company of Catherine, Victoria and Elizabeth I....In terms of impact, Tremlett believes her reign to have been most important. Mainly because by sending Columbus off on an "adventure of blind, chivalric daring, she helped reverse the decline of western Christendom and to alter the course of global history in the second half off the millennium."

If you think that is an extraordinary statement for him to make, I did too! 

 Isabel la Católica~~ 

Love her or hate her (she is my own personal arch enemy), her religious fanaticism takes center stage in most books about her--and Tremlett is great on this. My favorite chapters were the ones on Isabella and Columbus. Descriptions of the dashing Genoese explorer, who became a bit of a court hanger-on-er are pretty wonderfully described. Following her from place to place, Columbus even camped out with the queen on the siege of Granada. His portrayal of their relationship was wonderfully reminiscent of a short story that appeared in the New Yorker way back in 1991 by Salman Rushdie, called Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship, Santa Fe, January, 1492. ( Download The-New-Yorker-Jun-17-1991)

 Rushdie is such a genius. In just a few short pages, he somehow evokes an unforgettable picture of the two. 

 ….he bowed over her olive hand and, with his lips a breath away from the great ring of her power, murmured a single, dangerous word. 'Consummation.' — These unspeakable foreigners! The nerve! 'Consummation', indeed! And then following in her footsteps, month after month, as if he stood a chance. His coarse epistles, his tuneless serenades beneath her casement windows, obliging her to have them closed, shutting out the cooling breeze….”

And so she plays with him! At luncheons she promises him everything he wants and cuts him dead later in the afternoon, looking through him as if he were a veil.”

 He wonders if she is tormenting him for fun alone…!

 Tremlett echoes this by telling us: 

“Columbus was a seducer, as tenacious in his pursuit of people as he was with new places. Over the years he would study Isabella and her court, thinking of different ways to impress her. The Italian mariner adopted a mixture of gallantry, boldness and religious conviction, knowing  that she was open to the flirtations, if carefully circumscribed games of courtly love and rivalry. A later letter to Isabella is full of sensual praise for the woman who “holds the key to his desire and to whom he boasts of the scent and taste of his goodwill ..."

Columbus famously appealed to her through a language evoking romance. And the book goes on to detail reasons why Isabella came to give her approval for this voyage since all of her science advisors knew that Columbus was dangerously underestimating the distances involved in such a voyage. Basically, it was a small investment for a chance at what would be an infinite return. To invest in discovering el Dorado and all the gold of the Indies for only the amount of money that a middling aristocrat might have at his disposal in a year. Tremlett goes on brilliantly here:

“He and Isabella were a perfect match.They were equally enamored of bold action, divine justification, and in moments of weakness, of romantic folly. It is hard, indeed, not to see something of Don Quixote in him—a knight errant bent on glory and death, with Isabella as is Dulcinea. And if that was not enough, he added a touch of messianic Spanish glory to the adventure: “All the profits of this enterprise of mine should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem…"  (288) 

The two of them changed history. She was till the end a fanatic (I cannot see her otherwise).  The obsession with blood purity was incredibly politically expedient for Isabella and Ferdinand --and the Spanish Inquisition indeed was far more focused on cultural hegemony than over esoteric religious questions. 1492 was quite a year, from the "discovery" of the New World to the infamous expulsion of the Jews, this was followed by a severe crackdown and expulsion of the Muslim population as well. Isabella set Spain on a path for world domination but wow, at what a price.  Wonderfully written book on a fascinating subject!

[Goodreads version here]

Don Quixote and Japan/ 男はつらいよ (Week 4)

There are so many reasons why Don Quixote resonates so very personally with me. Not least of which is how much the book reminds me of Japan! 

Think of a feudal world, where there is a class of sword-wielding warriors who protect the guy in charge when times are tough-- but mainly (when they aren't at war) have nothing much to do. Too high-born to work for money, they are allowed to boss the peasants around to their heart's delight. Like a hidalgo, a samurai could cut a man down on the road for refusing to step out of the way of his horse. Peasants were at the bottom of the totem pole. Warriors in Japan, like in Spain, were held by their own elaborate array of customs and practices that could easily be called "chivalric"... The way of the sword? Horses and damsels in distress? Well, I don't think there are damsels in the samurai stories, but you get the idea...

And what is a "masterless samurai," or ronin 浪人-- but a knight errant if only by another name. 

Ever since I began reading Don Quixote, my mind keeps recalling stories of ronin wandering the countryside in seek of revenge or a new master to serve; and of their beautiful samurai swords and armor (O-yoroi). There was the bushido ethic. It is, anyway. an interesting overlap for me. And I can see why the novel became so incredibly popular in Japan.

Did you know that one of the better-known Japanese discount chain stores is named Don Quixote? The chain gots its name after the character in the Spanish novel because apparently the company was founded in an attempt to go against common sense and to engage in retail under a different business model. If you try and google, "Don Quixote" in Japanese, you will be inundated with information about the company--from recent store openings and sales and coupons to books about the company's unique style of business. 

If you think about it, like Japan, Spain is a place without a lot of arable land. There isn't oil or gold--but somehow the people rose up at one time and became a global empire. Don Quixote was written about a hundred years after the reconquista was completed and seven hundred years of Muslim-rule over. But a hundred years is a long time and the novel Don Quixote is fundamentally a critique of the society of his times--among other things.

And so, I cannot stop thinking of Tora-san.

I am not afraid to admit that Otoko wa Tsurai yo (男はつらいよ, "It's tough being a man") is my favorite series of movies of all time. Blown along by the wind (フーテンの寅), Tora-san wanders here and there around Japan, getting into scrapes and endlessly failing to get the girl, what is he but the rejection of what was considered common sense at that time in Japan. He is --like Don Quixote-- a parody of the society of the time. Not young or handsome, not born in a particularly elegant locale, Tora-san turns away from the tediousness of the life that was expected of someone like him and instead takes to the road in search of romance, adventure and truth.... There is something so human about a person who simply wants to live big. To do things that matter. To love and set wrongs right. Like Don Quixote, Tora-san causes a lot of trouble--mainly to his family. And it is sad to see beautiful Sakura always ending up in tears... I cannot explain how deeply I love the idea of Don Quixote and Tora-san--such that if I was shipwrecked and could only bring one DVD and one book--it would have to be Tora-san and the Quixote. No question.

It is an issue of hope.

And this brings me to our class today. I think it might have been professor's best class yet. And please keep in mind that Professor Wey Gómez is the best public speaker I have ever met. He is a force of nature--speaking without notes, he has the students so engaged in a way I would not have thought possible in a humanities class at Caltech.

Today a few of the students were confused about Sancho Panza. "Why would he leave his wife and children to follow a madman," asked one student?  It is not realistic that he would believe the words of such an unreliable person as Don Quixote, said another. They were clearly wondering about Sancho's rationality for in the end, was it reasonable to follow Don Quixote?My own thought was that as a peasant, it would have simply been difficult to say no to a social superior. But Professor explained that it was so much more than that. He said, imagine all the people who lived in crushing poverty. This was a feudal society where there were not many chances for escaping one's fate. He told of the people who would leave everything and embark on very dangerous voyages across the sea for the merest promise of a new life. They would travel deep inland for weeks and face untold dangers and most failed... either dying on the journey or becoming as poor in the New World as they were in the Old World. Why would they do it?

Well, he said, think of a gambler. Think of the way a person will keep gambling with a few wins for every hundred fails--but they keep going in hope. I was really thinking of the 2016 movie Gold with Matthew McConaughey and the way he talked everyone into believing in him and investing in him. It was such an incredibly quixotic thing. He has a dream that there was gold in a mountain in Borneo. And before you know it, people are giving them their life savings! His girlfriend lets him sleep live rent-free and stands by him when everything looks lost. Why would they do it? Well, because in the tedium and relentlessly soul destroying rat race of everyday practical life, This guy's dream lit them up. They gambled. 

For the merest possibility of happiness (love or riches; adventure or chivalric principles), a person will leap. More often than not, it ends in destruction and tragedy but human beings will gamble, he said, for the faintest possibility of happiness. Indeed. 

For more:ドン・キホーテと寅さん