Saturday, March 23, 2024

Circe,















https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe


 












https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RB8















https://www.rct.uk/collection/publications/castiglione/circe















https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_W-6-37



there are some books, not many ...















https://archive.org/details/castiglione-lost-genius.-royal-collection-trust./mode/2up?view=theater



and there are poems, even in our lifetimes ...


















and as for music ... jun miyake's LILLIES OF THE VALLEY ... isn't about Circe ... but it's fluent rhythms and counterpoints suggest that feeling of being irresistably drawn towards a mystery ...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je0lFe0MHjU


of course, as the culture of humanity evolves, so the old myths may lose their relevance ... there are always new minds ready and willing to pillage the old myths for shoddy new variants ...














Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Ganymede ...
















In England, and wherever people speak that same language, the myth about Ganymede tends to be glossed over ... he is abducted by Jove in the form of an Eagle to live amongst the immortals as Jove's cup-bearer ... the bit that gets left out is the messy bit about forced sex between a male adult and a male child, or youth.  This kind of sex was acceptable to the Greeks in ancient times, and remains a "fact of life" universally, although it is quite properly unacceptable to most people.



















The THEOI website states ...

"GANYMEDES (Ganymede) was a handsome Trojan prince who was carried off to heaven by Zeus in the shape of an eagle where he was appointed as cup-bearer of the gods. Ganymedes was also placed amongst the stars as the constellation Aquarius, his ambrosial mixing cup as Crater, and the eagle as Aquila. Ganymedes was often portrayed as the god of homosexual love and as such appears as a playmate of the love-gods Eros (Love) and Hymenaios (Hymenaeus) (Marital Love).












 


Ganymedes was depicted in Greek vase painting as a handsome youth. In scenes of his abduction he holds a rooster (a lover's gift), hoop (a boy's toy), or lyre. When portrayed as the cup-bearer of the gods he pours nectar from a jug. In sculpture and mosaic art Ganymedes usually appears with shepherd's crock and a Phrygian cap.

The boy's name was derived from the Greek words ganumai "gladdening" and mêdon or medeôn, "prince" or "genitals." The name may have been formed to contain a deliberate double-meaning."


In comparitively recent times the mythical stereotypes have morphed, so that  Ganymede is no longer snatched from innocence to debauchery by an Eagle ... in 20th Century Spain, on the roof of several insurance offices, he became a triumphant and heroic figure perched on the shoulder of ... wait for it ... the PHOENIX.


What were the Spaniards thinking ?  And should we see it as symptomatic of the decadence of people whose notion of heroism was tainted with Imperialism and with deeply embedded cultural beliefs of racial superiority ?  I would guess that the people who commissioned this sculpture lived in hope of the revival of Spain as a global power.







 











The story of Ganymede was told many times in Ancient literature.  Details vary.  The classics website THEOI lists and quotes them all ...


https://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Ganymedes.html



Monday, March 11, 2024

the unicorn tapestries ... a lovely book from the met, published originally back in 1998, is available to read on the internet archive















internet archive accounts are free of charge


https://archive.org/details/unicorntapestrie0000cava/mode/1up?view=theater


and the pages can be read at a high magnification








 





so feast your eyes


and soak up some scholarship













Thomas Hobbes ... a short summary of his life that should have been written when I was a schoolboy in Malmesbury ... we learned nothing of his ideas in our so called GRAMMAR school

 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 – Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

This article is more than 6 years old

Thomas Hobbes’s essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagination

According to the 17th-century historian and gossip John Aubrey, Thomas Hobbes “was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.” As a great thinker, Hobbes epitomises English common sense and the amateur spirit, and is all the more appealing for deriving his philosophy from his experience as a scholar and man of letters, a contemporary and occasional associate of Galileo, Descartes and the young Charles Stuart, prince of Wales, before the Restoration.

Hobbes himself was born an Elizabethan, and liked to say that his premature birth in 1588 was caused by his mother’s anxiety at the threat of the Spanish Armada:

… it was my mother dear
Did bring forth twins at once, both me, and fear.

Throughout his long life, Hobbes was never far either from the jeopardy of the times (notably the thirty years’ war and the English civil war) or the jeopardy sponsored by the brooding realism and pragmatic clarity of his philosophy. What, asked Hobbes, was the form of politics that would provide the security that he and his contemporaries longed for, but were always denied?


frontispeice of leviathan by thomas hobbes
The famous frontispiece to Leviathan. Photograph: Alamy

Subtitled The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and CivilLeviathan first appeared in 1651, during the Cromwell years, with perhaps the most famous title page in the English canon, an engraving of an omnipotent giant, composed of myriad tiny human figures, looming above a pastoral landscape with sword and crosier erect.

Thus “the Leviathan” (sovereign power) entered the English lexicon, and Hobbes’s vision of man as not naturally a social being, animated by a respect for community, but a purely selfish creature, motivated by personal advantage, became condensed into his celebrated summary of mankind’s existence as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.

It was Hobbes’s argument that, to ameliorate these conditions, man should adopt certain “Laws of Nature” by which human society would be forbidden to do “that which is destructive” of life, whereby virtue would be the means of “peaceful, sociable and comfortable living.”

The first law of nature is: “every man ought to endeavour peace”. This, he argues, will be a hard goal: the general inclination of all mankind is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”. The second law of nature is: “a man [must] be willing when others are so too … to lay down his right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.” The third law of nature is: “men performe their Covenants made.”

This, in essence, adds up to Hobbes’s social contract, enforced by an external power. Accordingly, members of civil society should enter into a contract to confer their power and strength “upon one Man, or upon an Assembly of men … This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-wealth.” For Hobbes, the contracting of such power is the only guarantee of peace and prosperity: “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is every man against every man.”

Having witnessed the English revolution at first hand, it is war above all that Hobbes most fears. Social warfare empowers mankind’s darkest side: “Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.”

Hobbes is never less than ironical in his attitude to humanity’s appetite for “government”. He had seen too much debate, before and after the execution of Charles I, about the relationship between, citizen, church and state to be anything but pragmatic: “they that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy; so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.”

For Hobbes, the “political community” is paramount, and individuals must surrender themselves for their own further and better protection: “he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself; no nor himself of injury; because to do injury to one’s self, is impossible.”

As numerous commentators have observed, Leviathan is the founding document of the “social contract theory” that would eventually flourish in the western intellectual tradition. It is also a majestic monument of 17th-century English prose, at once sinewy and vivid:

Riches, knowledge and honour are but several sorts of power.

Hobbes also illuminates his argument with many delicious asides:

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

This comparison of the papacy with the kingdom of fairies (“that is, to the old wives’ fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits”) is a reminder of the philosopher’s pre-eminent wit and imagination. Combined with the economy, candour and irony of Leviathan as a whole, it marks Hobbes out as one of the truly great writers in the English literary canon. But he is also a giant of western philosophy whose influence can be found in the work of Rousseau and Kant.

Not that his contemporaries understood this. “Hobbism” became a term of opprobrium, Leviathan was publicly burnt as a seditious document, and Hobbes himself spent many of his later years in fear for his life. He died in 1679, suffering from Parkinson’s disease. According to Vanbrugh, on his deathbed he said he was “91 years finding out a hole to go out of this world, and at length found it.” His apocryphal last words were: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”


A signature sentence


In such condition [of Warre], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.


Three to compare

John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1690)
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
Paul Auster: Leviathan (1992)


Sunday, March 10, 2024

franz stuck ... is best known as an expressive painter of latently erotic images ... but he was also a mighty fine designer ... here he made some impressive heraldic designs














although i can't make much sense of the mottos










in either of them ...












 













frank thompson ( late, great ) ...

Some years back I published this picture on The MALMESBURY NOW AND THEN FACEBOOK PAGE


Some years after that, a lady named Kat Thompson contacted me, saying Frank was her father but she hardly knew him.  She asked if I could write down a recollection for her.  


That was in April 2017, and I didn't see her message until the following October, by which time I was severely exhausted by my work and we were desperately home-seeking.


At that time my hours were consumed with an exhausting driving job, and we were about to retire ( I was 68 years old ) and move from London to Tenby, so there was a delay of a whole year before I could settle down and respond.  Inexcusable !


So I only wrote it and sent it to Kat a whole year later in October 2018.  Kat had contacted me via Facebook Messenger, so I replied via that platform and attached my text as a Word File.  


There was a very long silence.  Three and a half years later, in May 2022, I encountered a Sherston man, Pete Evans, at Sheila Evans funeral, and asked if he knew Kat, explaining how I had heard from her.  He seemed to know nothing and his face showed no sympathetic expression.  I wrote to him later but got no reply.


Then, in February 2024, Kat contacted me.


She hadn't known how to open the file I'd sent until then.


I'd love to meet her sometime, to see how much of Frank is in her DNA, so to speak.







 











The photograph shows Bert Clifford, Henry Wheeler, and a pensive and unusually dishevelled Frank Thompson, scrumpy in fist, probably fortified with gin. ... at the Carpenters Arms in Sherston ... 1980ish ... and at lunchtime by the angle of the sun.

 

There follows what little I remember of Frank Thompson ... because I only knew him a little.

 

He was never hard to like but you’d have to see someone regularly and have regular conversations to say you knew and understood them. 

 

I’m trying to remember the first time I looked at him closely.  I was a stranger in the Carpenters Arms.  I was perhaps twenty-two or three, so maybe it was in 1972.  


I’d entered what I’d imagined to be a quaint old country pub on a sunny autumn afternoon, expecting to find quaint old agricultural labourers and instead being almost dazzled by three men in their maybe mid-thirties, very smart in shiny new but slightly old-fashioned suits and deep film-star suntans, who were full of laughter and song and were as comfortably relaxed as if they’d owned the place.  They were like young gods, but drank as if they had no intention of getting old.

 

To my art-schooled-eyes, Frank looked like an heroic Michelangelo figure, thinly disguised as a teddy boy.  Just now I thought of describing Frank in that moment as a kind of cross between Hercules and Apollo, when they were young and untroubled.   


The fashion trends and hair-styles of the nineteen sixties, which had taken various spectacular forms in popular culture, had somehow passed un-noticed in the Carpenters Arms.  In those days it was an isolated refuge from modernity.  These men had a nineteen-fifties look.  That afternoon I was with some friends who were all younger than these three, and so we didn’t join them but sat close-by in the very small backroom with its thick ancient walls, tiny windows, utilitarian bare floors, and puritanically scrubbed and bleached little tables.  


We’d stepped back in time, quite a long way back, it seemed.  Frank, and his companions Phil Pegler and John Evans filled the room with raucous jollity, singing tiny snatches of old Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra songs, so old it suggested an arrested development had held them lightly somehow for fifteen or twenty years. 

 

The first time Frank and I properly spoke was five or six years later, maybe 1977 when I went to live at Foxley and began to visit the Carpenters on Saturday nights and Sunday lunchtimes.  In those five years Frank had become a quieter man, no less handsome.  I came to admire the gentle courteous nature of him, and to envy his Herculean stature and open gaze.


Yes, a solitary man, happy to be at his own little table, whose distinguishing character was that unfailing courtesy and sweetness of voice, and a raw startling beauty.  Now and again we’d take a hand in a game of crib, though I think it wasn’t a game that interested him much, he was just making up the numbers for the company perhaps.  In those times I never knew him to show an interest in any thing new.  


It might have been Frank who showed me how to fortify The Carpenters’ notoriously unpalatable scrumpy with a measure of gin.  I tried it a few times, was beguiled, but then quickly realized it wasn’t part of a sustainable lifestyle.  


His one small passion was a nostalgia for the Sherston of his younger years.  Oddly, he carried a small sheath of very old cinema programmes in his jacket pocket and he once handed them to me to see if I shared his enthusiasm for the films that had captivated his boyish imagination. 

 

I was working in Malmesbury at the end of the 1970s when a friend asked me to collect a plumber from a pub in town and drive him out to a cottage in Minety to fit some new taps.  When I got to the pub to collect the plumber, there was Frank in a crisp white shirt, open-necked, and with a few tools neatly wrapped in a hessian sack that lay at his elbow on the table where he drank.  


He’d aged a little, was heavier, but was as placid and confident and courteous as I’d come to take for granted.  He had a quiet and gentle way of conversation that made you feel like old friends from the start.  As we drove out towards Minety I quietly marvelled at the huge plumber’s hands and wondered how this big man might fit himself in to the intricate corners of modern kitchens.

 

Not long after that, I saw a rare demonstration of Frank’s old-fashioned code of honour, which he’d probably learned at the cinema from Hollywood actors like Alan Ladd or John Wayne.  John Evans, unlike Frank, had become a difficult kind of drunk.  Whist John was often the life and soul of the party, he had few inhibitions and he was always likely to upset the evening with little or no regard for anyone’s feelings, or for his own safety.  


One evening John said something toxically unkind to Pat, the lady behind the bar in The Carpenters, and it was not for the first time.  Everyone there overheard it and all were deeply embarrassed.  


There was a very short and awkward silence before Frank got up and he quietly but insistently accompanied John from the premises through the back door, and sent him home via the unlit back yard with a thick lip.  He then resumed his seat just as quietly, asked no praise, made no comment, and the incident was never mentioned again. 

 

Not long after that, to the surprise of the regulars, Frank began to show up at The Carpenters with a woman who seemed to match him in fine looks and sweet temper.  She’d have made an excellent artist’s model for Rubens or Rembrandt or Renoir.  She was both picturesque and ornamental, and how I envied him.  Everyone liked her, and in no time, just as I was leaving Foxley and abandoning The Carpenters, I heard that they might marry. 

 

Years passed.  I’d left Malmesbury altogether and gone to work in Brighton, but had often drifted back to visit old friends and family, and would sometimes stay for a day or two to wander.  One morning, just before catching a bus that began the homeward journey, I discovered Frank sitting in the back room of the little shop in the Cross Hayes that sold antiques and second-hand furniture . 


He was jaundiced and bony and a very sad sight.  He made a space for me beside him and I sat there for a while, knowing from first glance that I might never see him again, and we talked a little about our changed worlds.  John Evans and Phil Pegler had not long left the planet, and Frank knew his days were few.  


He told me that he was staying in Malmesbury with Ray and Grace, whose shop it was, and that they were caring for him.  Apart from his fatigue, Frank was his old sweet self, never a trace of complaint or self-pity, nor any bitterness or regret.  All I can remember from the conversation is my surprise and delight when, in a moment of sweet pathos, Frank pulled out from his jacket pocket those same old cinema programmes and offered them for me to show an interest.  I did, and then we parted, myself with as heavy a heart then as now.

 

Tristan Forward, 24th October 2018, in Tenby.