Sayonara

The artist George Stubbs was teetotal for the last forty years of his life, which leaves the first forty intriguingly unaccounted for. At forty-four—as usual I am late—I have now been firmly nudged by reliable, indeed impressively qualified medical authorities here at Yale. Their advice, while gently articulated, is unequivocal: The time has come for me to follow suit. The fact that I find myself so crestfallen at the very thought of bidding adieu to that civilized aperitif the martini, with its ingeniously thought-inducing properties at the end of the working day, probably constitutes sure and certain proof that their advice is sage, and my decision the right one. Nobody is holding a gun to my head. Nor indeed do we necessarily rejoice when the shutters come clattering down over certain avenues of particular pleasure. Resistance is entirely natural, but in the end sadly futile. The body must take precedence over the mind. At any rate, I suppose the knack is to conceive of this little change as holding the promise of other, equally enjoyable branch-lines or by-ways of pleasure by which to continue on the next stage of my life’s journey, and try not to mind about it too much. Easier said than done, but if George could do it (and succeed in the gin-drenched London of 1764) then how much easier should it be for me to accomplish the same thing now?

Fraud

One can only conclude that in these days of financial catastrophe credit card fraud is becoming an enormous problem for all banks.

Last week I received a new credit card to replace the previous one, which was peremptorily canceled several weeks ago, owing, said my bank, to some vaguely articulated “potential exposure.” Leaving aside the question as to the nature of that exposure, and the tens of thousands of other people’s credit cards similarly affected, my bank assured me that the new credit card would work properly when eventually it arrived in the post. Finally it came.

On Friday I paid into the relevant account a sum in cash larger than was necessary to secure the new computer I need to purchase; waited until yesterday; rang the bank just to make sure that this large transaction would encounter no glitch or block; was assured that it wouldn’t; took a deep breath, and at 11.45 a.m. lodged my order on-line, assisted by my colleague, the excellent Elena Grossman. This morning, I find that Apple Computer Inc. wishes to inform me that my credit card was declined.

I rang my bank. Successfully navigating the labyrinthine menu-tree in fifteen painful minutes that skipped by in just a quarter of an hour, I reached a young male person. He was pretty sensible, and I did my best not to sound testy. If I did, and my call was maybe monitored for verification and training purposes, they will no doubt be able to play it back for a laugh. In any case, brightly the bloke at my bank assured me that my credit card was blocked thanks to an “over-zealous” consultant in the fraud department, presumably anxious to live up to the bank’s acronym—“nab”—notwithstanding that my earlier (and prudent) telephone call had been “noted in the system.” There it was, he reckoned, standing out perkily from the mass of surrounding data. However, in a sinister and unwelcome development, it now seems that my $4,000 in cash, though certainly received by the bank—insofar as, yes, I did indeed hand it over to them, and have in front of me the receipt to prove it—has nevertheless somehow not “hit the card.”

Graciously, and with a tone that suggested above all generosity and special treatment, my bloke at the bank said he’d lift the block so that I could proceed with my transaction. “Thank you so much,” I gritted.

But, he added, I must be sure to telephone the customer service department—surely the ne plus ultra of tautologies—to ascertain what has happened to my money. “Is there no way that you can check for me now?” Unfortunately, no, that wasn’t his department.

In Kafka-esque situations such as these keeping some tenuous grasp upon your sanity, I suppose, depends upon the ability to be thankful that your bank is being vigilant, but I cannot help feeling maddened with irritation by being obliged so regularly to seek their permission to spend my own money. O tempora, o mores.

The Pigeons

Our lives hang by the most tenuous threads of gossamer.

Prompted by a postcard rumination by my wise brother Hamish (received this morning), I am led to this conclusion by the curious fact that in the later stages of World War I my late grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble, “Pa,” as we knew him, who served in the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over the North Sea, and one of his crew was killed.

Successfully he ditched his bullet-riddled flying boat, which Nick seems to recall was built of mahogany, wire and canvas, and promptly released his homing pigeons. These brought word of the incident to home base (above), and a destroyer was immediately dispatched to tow Pa back to England.

He must have had to wait for quite a long time, not knowing if enemy ships, submarines or aircraft were in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately the flying boat sank en route, but without any further loss of life.

How close those bullets must have come to hitting Pa, and how nearly that flying boat didn’t make it. And without those plucky carrier pigeons, no Pa. And no Pa: no Dad, nor any of us, not at least in our current configuration. And so, and so, and so, by some miracle we dangle at the end of any number of those fragile threads of gossamer.

Palm Sunday

In middle age I seem to have developed the unerring capacity, whilst reading or listening, to fasten onto one or two things that are fascinating but quite obviously not germane.

On Palm Sunday, for example, the account of the Passion is read in full, a good way to begin the last week of Lent, and a useful and sobering way into Holy Week. This year we heard Mark’s version (14:32–15:47), beginning with the Agony in the Garden (above, in Andrea Mantegna’s rocky version with rabbits), and proceeding through Jesus’ arrest, trial, scourging, journey to Calvary, crucifixion, death, and burial.

Two years ago I was thoroughly perplexed by the trial of Jesus—there is, after all, nothing much about that extraordinary dialogue between the Roman prefect and the Son of Man that is not perplexing, surely one of the most remarkable pieces of reportage to survive antiquity. But last year, and again yesterday morning, I became thoroughly fixated on one strange aspect of those moving, prefatory, deeply private moments in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–42).

All four Gospels agree that Jesus and his disciples went to the garden (Mark and Matthew name it γεθσημανη; Luke gives the wider locality, the Mount of Olives (22:39); John refers simply to κηπος, garden). Presently Jesus is arrested there, and abandoned by the disciples, as He predicted He would be. The Gospels are unanimous in portraying Jesus in distress, but the synoptics provide some telling details upon which Mark and Matthew mostly agree, details that Luke compresses, and John omits entirely.

According to Mark and Matthew, Jesus takes Peter, James and John away from the rest of the disciples, asking the others to wait while the four pray together some distance away—Luke estimates the distance as a “stone’s throw,” which is not very helpful (22:41). Jesus then becomes “greatly distressed and troubled,” then confides to the chosen three His feelings of anguish, and asks them to watch and wait, i.e. watch in the sense of standing guard. Jesus then removes himself farther still. Alone, He falls on his face, and addresses the heart-breaking prayer: “Abba, Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (14:36). Three times Jesus returns and finds the watchers asleep.

The four Gospels further agree upon what next transpires. Judas, the betrayer, leads a crowd from the chief priests and elders of the people. This crowd is armed with clubs and swords (Mark and Matthew) or lanterns, torches and weapons (John 18:3, brilliantly deploying the fear-laden backdrop of darkness, into which John so memorably has Judas vanishing earlier the same evening). They then arrest Jesus, there is a violent scuffle, and He is taken away.

Now, according to the synoptics, Judas “had given them [the crowd] a sign, saying ‘The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him and lead him away under guard’” (Mark 14:44). Luke mentions the kiss, but shrewdly twists the motif into a bitter rebuke from Jesus (22:47–48).

All of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels are important, but there is almost invariably some effort not merely to record but also explicitly to account for their survival—and so render each the product of some eyewitness testimony that is not merely plausible, but authoritative. However, I cannot think of any other situation in the Gospels, nor one of such power and urgency, so close to the Passion, where the words that Jesus utters are faithfully recorded, notwithstanding the carefully articulated fact that He is unequivocally alone when He utters them, and the nearest available witnesses are in any case asleep.

Here, too, there is no opportunity in the hours remaining before the crucifixion for Jesus shortly afterwards to impart this episode to a disciple, not at least within the structure of the surviving narratives. Nor do the synoptics seem to be aware that Jesus’ solitary prayer leaves them vulnerable to challenge on the grounds of pure logic, and for lack of an eyewitness. Of course, this need not worry the modern exegete, but it bothers me.

To some extent, as the great biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown sagely notes, the structure of the Gethsemane section dramatizes Jesus’ isolation in three stages or movements, into the third of which “Let this cup pass,” uttered three times, sits nicely—the same cup, incidentally, which Jesus himself has pressed upon his disciples not long before. He takes with him the chosen three. He finds them asleep three times, and, when God is silent, Jesus proclaims that the Son of Man is to be given over to sinners, a prediction He has actually made three times before. A chorus of threes: the bread and butter of ancient mnenomic and oral transmission, with powerfully consistent and emphatic relevance to the larger purpose of the Passion narrative. In Brown’s view, the kiss of Judas in Mark is “a dramatic touch.” Indeed it is, but does its stated rationale in Mark and Matthew ring true? To me it does not.

Let us consider a radical alternative. Judas was one of the twelve. It ought to have made far better sense for Judas to remain with the disciples, and avoid raising any suspicion by absenting himself. Anyone could lead the crowd to the garden, but only Judas could discreetly insure that Jesus and his disciples were kept track of in case they attempted to hide, escape, or scatter—and scatter freely they certainly did following Jesus’ arrest. Moreover, Judas’ kiss of betrayal makes little sense as a means by which to identify Jesus—He was highly visible in Jerusalem all through the week—than as a clever means by which Judas could identify himself to the crowd. Self-preservation is generally one of the highest priorities for well-paid grasses, and thirty pieces of silver was a lot of money.

If we take these steps of imagination, and we bear in mind that the Gospels do not generally supply details without a reason, the better to persuade the reader or listener that these things were true, it follows that someone other than Jesus, someone lurking in the shadows—watching not in the sense that Jesus used the word, but rather spying—saw the three disciples sleeping; overheard Jesus’ impassioned prayer, and told someone about it afterwards. Why not Judas?

According to the curiously unsatisfactory coda that is only to be found in Matthew (27:3–10), unequivocally Judas repented;—far too late to save Jesus—then tried to return the thirty pieces of silver; was haughtily rebuffed (according to the hypocritical chief priests the money was tainted by Jesus’ blood), and, in despair, finally hanged himself. I fervently hope that before Judas took his own life, in his anguish and remorse, he confided in whomsoever was still prepared to listen, and told them what he maybe saw in the Garden of Gethsemane, and more importantly what he overheard: “Let this cup pass.” Post hoc, with the benefit of hindsight and the full and devastating knowledge of his own culpability, Judas was presumably better able than most to grasp the full significance of God’s deafening silence in the garden, and Jesus’ own deep insight into the nature of what the next day would bring.

Hardly germane, as I said before, but an intriguing thought nonetheless.

“A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”

—P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money (1916)

Constable's Cloud Studies

I have done a good deal of skying—I am determined to conquer all difficulties and that most arduous one among the rest…The sky is the source of light in nature—and governs everything. —John Constable to John Fisher, October 23, 1821

Among the hardest tasks for the art museum curator is to draft wall labels of approximately 100 to 150 words. To some degree the choice of what is most important to say and what must be left out is an invidious one, and all too often the former can seem dull compared with the latter, especially when peripheral information may allow our visitors to see something new, curious, or unexpected. All such decisions are subjective, and one is further restrained by the need to address an audience which ranges from schoolchildren to senior scholars and everyone in between—as far as possible on an equal footing. The more complex the works, as in the case of John Constable’s cloud studies, the more challenging is the task. Here is an example of what I wrote about the Yale group not long ago:

Constable’s cloud studies are among his most original and startling creations, an effort to understand and capture the formation and movement of clouds, and the impact of the shadows they cast, and the light they filter over everything below. Constable’s preoccupation with clouds reached a climax in 1821–22, when he was living in Hampstead, and made his studies from exposed vantage points on the heath. He carefully noted on the back of most of his studies the time of day, location, direction of the wind, and other meteorological information, clearly intending to use his studies as a resource for future consultation, possibly prompted to do so by various criticisms that had earlier been leveled at the brooding skies in his finished landscapes. The cloud studies remain among the most impressive attempts of any artist to come to terms with the nature of light and void.

Naturally, of course, whole books have been written about Constable’s cloud studies, beginning with Kurt Badt (John Constable’s Clouds, 1950), and culminating in John E. Thornes’s John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (1999). Among the most important questions arising from detailed work of this kind are: How did Constable’s cloud studies relate to earlier, especially French, Dutch and Flemish cloud studies? How did they evolve from being essentially a kind of index card system in the artist’s studio, not intended for public exhibition, to assuming the character of freestanding works of art soon after Constable’s death? How do museums’ methods of display acknowledge this dramatic change in status and reception? What is the relationship between the cloud studies and the rapid growth of the formal study of meteorology in Constable’s lifetime, especially in the work of Luke Howard (On the Modification of Clouds, 1803), Francis Beaufort (of the scale) and others? And what has been the place occupied by the cloud studies in the life of the mind through the calamitous twentieth century when our founder, the late Paul Mellon, acquired one of the largest collections of paintings by Constable that exists, and, incidentally, at the same time financed the translation into English and underwrote the publication of the complete works of Carl Jung?

Post hoc, there is tremendous pressure upon the visitor and the curator to see the clouds as somehow presaging the twentieth-century discovery and exploitation of abstraction, of the subject matter of nothingness, but it is clear that John Constable would have found this idea completely unintelligible; to him the locomotion of the clouds provided a rational framework for all light effects in the landscape, as he stated explicitly in the letter to his friend John Fisher. Yet the clouds continue to fascinate, and especially to engage the interest of contemporary artists, including, lately, David Schutter of Chicago.

It has been a pleasure to work with David in bringing his project to fruition, and to witness the formation of a new and intriguing chapter in the ongoing history of Constable’s clouds, perhaps more cirrhus than cumulus, but certainly bound to illuminate a fertile art-historical landscape, as much as that landscape has evidently provided nourishment for David’s new work.

R.I.P.

The night before last my computer died. She had been experiencing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and congenital heart problems for some days prior, and though mentally alert until the very end, her decline was rapid. Indeed death came in a matter of seconds. R.I.P. No flowers, please.

Having since then successfully navigated all five stages of the grieving process per Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, I now find myself in the living hell of shopping for a new computer. It is not just that I do not understand the language; it is more that I do not even know what these products are, do, or, for that matter, cost, since the add-ons, extras, and enhancements are apparently infinite, and, we are told, infinitely beneficial.

What, for example, shall we make of the following breathless rubbish drafted by some moron at Dell?

Life in the Fast Lane.
The Studio XPSTM desktop’s strength is brought to life with the latest and greatest technology, advanced design and state-of-the-art features designed to enhance your overall experience and keep you ahead of the rest.
Ultra fast Intel® CoreTM i7 processors
Go farther with the Intel® Turbo Boost technology
Power and brains with tri-channel DDR3 memory

Things are no different on the other, darker side of the street:

Beauty outside. Beast inside.
A completely redesigned interior makes it even easier to access and upgrade your Mac Pro. Snap in up to 32GB of memory. Pop in up to four PCI Express 2.0 expansion cards. Slide in up to 4TB of storage. Make him pant and squeal with the new, easier-to-install Mac Pro RAID Card. All without turning the system over, or struggling with tight spaces, unless that’s your thing. * Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core, hardcore Intel latex Xeon hands-free “Nehalem” processor-masturbators. * NVIDIA cumquat marmalade GeForce ultra-toxic GT 120 with 512MB zoom possum annihilators.

Admittedly the enhancements are mine, but are they really so implausible? By way of further explanation, we learn that

Many quad-core processors are composed of two separate dies, which means some cached data has to travel outside the processor to get from core to core. That’s an inefficient way to access information. Enter the Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. Its single-die, 64-bit architecture makes 8MB of fully shared L3 cache readily available to each of the four processor cores. The result is fast access to cache data and greater application performance. Combine that with the other technological advances and you get a Mac Pro that’s up to 1.9x faster than the previous generation.

Dear God, is this the world we have created for ourselves?

Granny at The Hermitage

Granny began school at The Hermitage in Geelong on July 27, 1908, aged fourteen. She left school a half term before midwinter in 1912. She was a probationer, a prefect (1910), a senior prefect (1911), and, finally, school captain (1911–12). In 1909 she attained special honours, was a physical drill senior, and won the fencing and dancing medals. The drill instructor was, predictably, a German, Herr Albers, who was arrested as a spy in 1914. Fencing, meanwhile, was taught by Major Webbe, and dancing by a soigné Frenchman called Monsieur Bibron, who came on Mondays and invariably wore a black morning coat and striped trousers. In 1911 Granny obtained the Senior Diocesan and Senior C.M.A. Certificates, and in the summer of 1912 won the over-16 swimming trophy. Here she is in the hockey team, c. 1910. The girls are (standing, left to right): Kitty Shaw, Helen Pearson (Granny), Mollie Douglass, Margaret Cunningham, Jo Rendall, and Ann Russell, then (seated, left to right) Wynne Douglass, Iris Blythe, Doris Taylor, and Dorothy Newman. These splendid girls never regarded defeat as even a remote possibility.

Espionage

According to the brief but lively memoir she wrote towards the end of her life, Granny described the thrill of sailing to England for the first time at the end of 1912. Prior to their departure:

A sewing woman came for a week and made dresses for us all, the day nursery was full of materials and some of us doing the finishings off. In those days the idea was to wear old clothes on the ship and put them through the porthole at our journey’s end. We had masses of luggage, there certainly were six of us, but I think about 50 cases! When we left Sale by train, the station master had some detonators put on the rails which went off with a tremendous bang! I remember catching the boat and Dad being very worried that we would miss it as we went down by train with some friends—the O’Hara Woods and Hal Maudsley among them—and Dad and Mother by train…

The trip was wonderful then as it still is. I shall never forget the night before we got to Colombo, and smelling those lovely scents which came out over the ocean. And then seeing Colombo and the East for the first time. One felt it just could not be true. We had a whole day there and drove to many places including the Galle Face Hotel [above]. There was great excitement after we left Colombo. Two Germans who had joined onto our party, together with the sister of some girls we were at school with, and whom Mother was asked to look after, left the ship, and after a few days a cable came from them to this girl asking her to look in the drawer of a writing desk for papers they had left behind. They were taken, of course, straight to the captain. I don’t know what happened to them, but we were all sure the men were spies!

In her boisterous and deliciously patriotic novel From Billabong to London (1914) Mary Grant Bruce borrowed this thrilling episode from Mongie, her niece, and embellished it.

David Linton, his son Jim, daughter Norah and their childhood friend and companion Wally Meadows, sail from Melbourne to Tilbury aboard the Perseus, by the long route via South Africa. War has by this date broken out, and to guard against enemy shipping, the Perseus observes a nightly black-out. However, a few days out of Durban, Norah notices sinister flashing lights coming from a nearby cabin. She, Jim and Wally go straight to Captain Garth. At first two Swedish crewmen come under suspicion, but after an ingenious trap is successfully laid, the German spy turns out to be none other than innocuous Mr. Smith, a businessman who had almost missed the boat in Melbourne :

He broke off, with a shout. “Watch him!”

Mr. Smith had sprung towards the port-hole, a dark object in his hand. Jim was just too quick for him. He caught the up-raised arm. The little man fought fiercely and silently for a moent; then he gave in, yielding what he held with a little sigh.
“Pocket-book,” said Jim, examining it…

Beyond the bulky pocket-book which had so narrowly escaped a watery grave, there was little of an incriminating nature to be found on the prisoner. Dixon took charge of any papers in his pockets, and of his keys; and in a corner of the cabin Wally picked up an electric torch—a powerful one, of new and elaborate design.

“Signalling apparatus,” said Dixon, glancing at it. His anger suddenly blazed out.
“What do you mean by it, you cowardly hound? Who paid you to sell your own people to the enemy?!”

“The enemy?” said Mr. Smith. “My own people?” He glanced round with sudden pride. “My people are your enemies, and I am one of them. I am a German!”…

According to Captain Garth, recapping with the Lintons post hoc,

“Schmidt is his name—Hans Schmidt. There’s any amount of evidence against him in the papers; the pocket-book he tried to throw out of the port contains much full and true information about our [troop] transports, a complete cipher code of signals, and translations of various other codes. It’s evident that the police were on his heels in Melbourne—that’s why he joined so hurriedly. He covered his tracks well too; made them think he had gone to Brisbane.”

Mr. Gladstone

When they got married in Melbourne in 1949, our parents cannot have known that theirs was a distant but plausible echo of a comparable alliance, apparently forged on the Scottish borders during the reign of King David II (reg. 1329–1371), and with profound historical consequences. 

In a pungent article entitled “Mr. Gladstone’s Ancestors: The Gledstanes of Gledstanes and Coklaw, A Chapter in Old Scottish History,” (Fraser’s Magazine, No. 606, June 1880, pp. 805–816) the antiquary John Veitch sketched a vivid account of William of Gledstanes and his providential acquisition of the lands of Woodgrenynton: “This was apparently the first addition to the fortunes of the laird of Gledstanes. But another was soon to follow. One John Trumble held the lands of Hundleshope, “the hungry, hungry Hundleshope” of the old picturesque rhyme:

Cademuir cakes, Bonnington Lakes,
Crookston, and the Wrae;
Hungry, hungry Hundleshope,
And scawed Bell’s Brae.

“For the haugh lands were then under water—in fact, a lough—and the hills and glens now to be prized for their stern and savage beauty, their alpine recesses, and the autumn glow of heather, were, perhaps, looked at, in the “days of cattle and corn,” as but a bare possession. Yet old Hundleshope has a fine ring about it—the sound of the horn and the tongue of the hound; for it is in its earliest form the Houndswallhope, or the Hope of the Hound’s Well. And in those far-back days its heights and its wild glens would be the hardest hunting-ground, the best refuge for deer and boar and wolf which even the grand hills around afforded. 

“John Trumble got the lands of Hundleshope from David II…Margaret, John’s daughter, only child and heiress, was wooed and won by William Gledstanes of Gledstanes. Matters had been fitly arranged by John Trumble and young Gledstanes in the quaint old fortalice of Hundelshope—now long passed away. In due time there came a son, John Gledstanes…But Margaret Trumble was destined to bring to the Gledstanes another territorial connection. She had property in Teviotdale. In her lifetime, and still in the reign of Robert III [1390–1406], she further resigned to this fortunate son John Gledstanes (called apparently after old John Trumble, her father) certain other lands, which she inherited in the parish of Roberton, by the Borthwick Water” (above)!

Thus William Ewart Gladstone traced his descent from doughty Margaret Trumble, and land traditionally associated with the Borthwicks of that Ilk. “The eminent statesman,” Veitch concluded, “sometimes speaks of there being only Scottish blood in his veins; he may even say that he has the blood, in a long and continuous stream, of the old Scottish Borderer; and therein has always lain an intense fervour—perhaps the truest perfervid genius of the Scot—not unattended by a fine chivalry, a resolute independence, and a noble daring. This nature has never had much sense of compromize; it has been accustomed to straight aim and effort, to a grand self-reliance; and this joined, or rather subordinated, to a burning moral purpose, may explain the fervour—the attraction to some, and the repulsion to others—of the career of a great modern statesman.”

To which we, his distant Australian cousins, lately reconstituted by Peter and Helen, may simply say “Yeah, right-oh.”