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

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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.

 

 

medieval predilections (臥遊)

In Japan, I knew a gentleman who ran a 200 year old miso shop. K san was also a bon vivant par excellance! Studying Samurai-style (Enshu school) tea ceremony, he wore stylish kimono by day and organized French film festivals for our town on the weekends. He also spent a fortune on tea bowls and art, which he often would show to his friends.

Everyone in town knew him and his miso shop was a gathering place of local luminaries.

Of all the interesting things he was involved in, my favorite was his gramophone club. Once a month like-minded collectors would show up with a favorite record (or not) and sit around listening to old records while drinking sake. Need I say more? The man had endless curiosity and tremendous style. He was my kinda guy!

Speaking of which, I recently finished the most unusual book by Normon Cantor, called Inventing the Middle Ages. The book is about twenty prominent 20th century Medievalists and their impact on the study of the history of the Middle Ages. When I first heard that this book was not just a best seller but was so popular it was even available on Audible, I could hardly believe it! Really? I love anything related to the Middle Ages and so would have read the book no matter what, but I must admit that I was utterly fascinated by the popularity-- as well as the controversy surrounding this book, which after all was on such an obscure topic. 

So, I picked up the book immediately. 

I wasn't disappointed either. 

The book is absolutely wonderful in conjuring up the genius and style of these men. Of the twenty prominent "giants" of Medieval scholarship, Cantor is perhaps best on Johan Huizinga (whose wonderful book on "play" I recently wrote about in these every pages). He is also really engaging on the topic of the inklings--JRR Tokien and CS Lewis, in particular. They all show up as such interesting characters--sharing (dare I say it) something in common with my old friend K san (not to mention with Mi Fu (of whom I wrote about in May). Something all these "characters" share could be summed up in this quote by CS Lewis (discussed at length by Cantor ), describing the way the inklings were engaged in an active resistance to the times:  

 “In talking to me you must beware because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable.” 

That is how Mi Fu was. And so too K san, who believed that the golden age was in the past and it was there that one could find the most exemplary models for how to live. I think the inklings were like that, as described in Cantor's book:

Both men were deeply affected by a nostalgia and a love for a rapidly disappearing England graced by the middle-class, highly literate Christian culture into which they had been born. They saw a continuity of this culture stretching back into the Middle Ages, when, in their perception, it originated. For them, these vibrant, imaginative, complex Middle Ages were in many essentials still activated in the donnish world of mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge and the English countryside, if not so much in London. Lewis and Tolkien wanted not only to preserve but to revitalize through their writing and teaching this Anglo-Edwardian retromedieval culture. 

Theirs was a reaction against the mechanistic, capitalistic, aggressive age inherited by Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher, he would suggest. It really was not all that unlike the last Northern Song dynasty emperor, who turning away from the barbarians at the gate, continued to focus on the ancient bronzes of a thousand years earlier, since that was where virtue was to be found, he believed. (He lost his empire accordingly). Like Mi Fu and Emperor Huizong, this kind of cultural nostalgia (and a love of unicorns) could also be seen in Catholic converts like Graham Greene and Chesterton.... and my favorite Catholic convert of all, Evelyn Waugh. Like Lewis or Tolkien, Roman Catholicism for Waugh becomes a means to escape the relentless utilitarianism of our times. As Jenny Hendrix wrote about Waugh here:

By attaching himself to something ancient, Waugh was able to remain conservative even as Modernism, as he saw it, led the rest of history astray. (Joyce “ends up a lunatic,” he once said; he abhorred Picasso, plastics, and jazz.) A man committed to the defense of a nonexistent world, he loved nothing so much as a unicorn.

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I also love nothing so much as a unicorn.

My astronomer and I are getting ready to head back to Europe to look at more pictures. We became so taken by the donor portraits we saw by van Eyck and Memling in the Louvre, in Ghent and then in Bruges --and, as I wrote here, I was struck over and over again by the way time was conflated in the paintings. Like a wormhole connecting discrete and distant points in time, these late Medieval and early Renaissance pictures were stunningly transportive in terms of time and space so that, for example, Mary and the baby or the Christ were depicted side-by-side with contemporary figures. Contemporary donors appeared in the paintings accompanied by their patron saints, who thereby formed a link between these two worlds.

At that time, I wondered if this was not the ultimate selfie. I was wrong. For what I should have said was that these donor paintings must be the ultimate anti-selfie!  

The tremendous transportive power of these donor portraits reminds me a lot of the Southern Song dynasty landscapes from China. Highly contemplative, both styles of art aim to spiritually elevate by juxtaposing a the realism of physical landscape or interior with that of human imagination...   

Dream Journey over Xiao Xiang 瀟湘臥遊図巻 is one of my favorite paintings in the world (see below) A Song dynasty masterpiece, it is now a National Treasure of Japan. Without a doubt, it is within this landscape that I travel more than anywhere. Maybe many of you will feel the same when I say that very rarely do I meet a person who is so agreeable; who engages me so fully on the level of the heart that I am quite certain that a lifetime with that person would never be enough. That is also how I feel about this painting. And, for 10 years it has been my computer desktop wallpaper. Some of you will, I suppose, be thinking: Wow, 10 years-- that's a long time to look at the same painting. But believe it or not, I never grow tired of looking at it; as it continues to fascinate and draw me in.

Lacking a fixed perspective, the southern Song landscapes are pictures that are not only viewed but are paintings that one can "walk around in." This is the Dream Journey implied by the painting's title. It is the potentially rich empty space in the painting-- the hallmark of Southern Song landscapes-- that in effect carries the viewer far beyond the painted images into a pure and natural realm beyond the "dust of the everyday world.

Obviously, it isn't easy to brush off the dust when one is living down on the flatlands-- where the air is foul and stifling-- so one needs props. "Gayu" is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters 臥遊 "dream journey." Like the ability to imagine mountains even when you are down on the plains, for a literati scholar it was paramount to always be able to access this world of cultivated mind and spirit-- even from within the dusty and oftentimes unbearable confines of ordinary life in the city.

The donor paintings functioned like that. They served as part of the person's spiritual practice. Both pictures also function as a kind of time slip.... in the case of the Chinese landscapes connecting the viewer to the pure and spiritually uplifted world of a golden age natural world and in the case of the Renaissance pictures connecting the imperfect participants to the heavenly world of saints and gods. Both are, in effect, a kind of nostalgia. Like for that of a unicorn. 

Despite is snobbery and classist politics, I have always been a big fan of Evelyn Waugh. Like the other characters in this post, they are fascinating, clinging to fantasies of the past at the expense of their actual real life realities (Mad Ludwig being my own personal favorite). What is it about them that makes for such great story-telling? And what of the similar charisma of works of the kinds of art with which they were so enthralled (not to mention of quests and relics, phonographs and the tea ceremony of the samurai)? Cantor describes his medievalists as being unable to imaginatively and intellectually withdraw and accept defeat in the face of the decline they saw in the world. They resisted the levelling power of global capitalism and resisted in the only way they knew how--through a culturally-rooted pursuit of art, beauty and truth....Emperor Huizong and Mad King Luwig; the inklings and the Catholic converts...yes, Brideshead Revisted!--  For whatever reason you can name, as characters, these lovers of unicorns remain tremendously enigmatic (as is the art they loved!)

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For more: "The Best Picture in the World"

I leave you with Rilke on the Unicorn Tapestries at Cluny: 

 O this is the beast who does not exist.

They didn’t know that, and in any case
– with its stance, its arched neck and easy grace,
the light of its limpid gaze – they could not resist

but loved it though, indeed, it was not. Yet since
they always gave it room, the pure beast persisted.
And in that loving space, clear and unfenced,
reared its head freely and hardly needed

to exist. They fed it not with grain nor chaff
but fortified and nourished it solely with
the notion that it might yet come to pass,

so that, at length, it grew a single shaft
upon its brow and to a virgin came
and dwelled in her and in her silvered glass.