Stupor Mundi

 

Sudden and very shocking.

He supervised me one on one for a single week in 1987 during the temporary absence of my regular supervisor that term.

Earlier, during my senior year at SPS, where he had himself been a pupil two decades previously, he had been something of a legend, his precocious levels of scholarship spoken of with awe.

He was then possibly most famous for his work on Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), HRE and King of Sicily, one of those medieval figures that even people with minimal interest in the Middle Ages ought to know a bit about, I had long surmised.

So I chose to write about said unconventional German monarch that week, though unfortunately Professor Abulafia and I were not to see eye to eye once my essay was complete.

I believe this was largely down to the fact that he saw me as a rather irritating intrusion from the northern wastelands — not a Caius man — and perhaps, if I am to be honest, because he'd spotted my own lack of hellbent scholarship, let alone genius.

And also because I found the whole experience rather unsettling.

He was something of a Stupor Mundi himself. His rooms were possibly the most apparently disordered personal space I have ever visited, a labyrith of piled papers, journals and hardback books. Though I have no doubt he correctly recalled the precise location of every single line of text contained therein.

And I think if you'd told me then that he was still only 38 I would have been gobsmacked.

Just this morning I was pondering whether there were any serious public intellectuals in Britain who might be inclined to weigh in on the Beckham row, and it then occurred to me that there aren't that many left. Definitely a dying breed.

Following his 2017 retirement as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, Abulafia had certainly been cropping up with increasing frequency in the UK's right-of-centre media, often as a champion of free speech, but also occasionally leaning into pro-Brexit and anti-Woke narratives.

He believed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece, but wrote in the Spectator last November that the Rosetta Stone 'does not belong in Egypt'.

His lasting legacy will be his tomes on the human histories of what Ishmael refers to as the 'watery part of the world', most notably The Great Sea, his grand account of the importance of the Mediterranean within human history.

Dumped

 The delightfully named Belizean village of Dump...

It kind of marks the spot where we Brits were supposed to carry the Southern Highway onwards, straight, past Blue Creek and into Guatemala, where it would have joined up with the CA-13 in Petén after it clips the bottom left corner of Belize.

Instead, as you can see, it makes a hard left and heads to the coast at Punta Gorda.

Just to the west of Dump there is a Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan community in a township called San Antonio who possess a colourful cosmological myth relating to the origins of the larger celestial bodies in the sky, in the form of a soap opera.

The Sun and the Moon were just starting to enjoy their first home together as a married couple when the Sun invited his bachelor older brother to come and stay and generally play third wheel. (Albatross, we used to say at Cambridge, or 'Albert Ross'.)

But the Sun had to go out to hunt leaving wife and brother behind, and eventually 'er indoors ended up in bed with 'im indoors.

The Sun figured out what was going on and hatched a cunning plan, collecting bile from the bladders of various birds, such as a turkey and then a chicken* he had bumped into, and used these noxious liquids to prepare a particularly vile tamal for his housemates.

As their eyes watered and throats burned after this dinner, and all the water indoors was used up in an attempt to assuage the discomfort, the Sun gave a big speech covering how he felt about the whole situation.

He sent the Moon out to fetch some more water, but feeling sick and miffed about the very awkward scene, she sat down beside the river and began to cry.

Soon after she was joined on the bank by a vulture who told her about his boss, who lived in the sky in a huge gaff made of guano and she quickly decided she'd rather be up there with him than go back to face her husband and his brother.

Meanwhile, the latter was sobbing relentlessly and the Sun decided that it was time for him to go.

So he tricked him into jumping on a plank which, after three tries, broke and sent him tumbling into a deep ravine. (The people of San Antonio now identify this adulterer as Venus, and in their version of the tale this 'superstar' eventually scrambled out of this hole and found a place in the firmament.)

The Sun’s next ruse was to get himself carried up to the vultures' lair by pulling the skin of a dead deer over his body and waiting for the carrion alert to sound amongst the birds.

Once up there he was denied a room in the guano mansion, but found a nearby hut where he started to play musical instruments and fiddle with a pile of red maize kernels, which induced a severe toothache in the Moon's new feathered lover.

Over the course of several days the pain steadily worsened and the Sun, having drawn an audience with his tunes, claimed to be an accomplished healer — yet the vulture lord still refused him permission to enter his abode. He finally relented, but the face to face cure would send him into a slumber and the Sun was able to retrieve the Moon.

Just how keen she was to go back to her old conjugal existence varies across versions, but in the San Antonio take she's already quite bored with the carcass removal lifestyle and the pair duly commandeer a pair of vultures in order to first return to their home, before later taking up their more familiar roles above Central America.

* Chickens are often mentioned in the context of the so-called Columbian Exchange, yet there is evidence to suggest that they had already taken up station in the trees of the Americas, most likely owing their introduction to Polynesians perhaps a century or so before the Admiral showed up.

Peering beneath the hysteria...

The very persona of Trump generates a cloud of hysteria. Yet it is also true that he seems to understand this on some level and feed it, whether this can be described as strategic or not is debatable. 

One is obliged to try to tune out of this hysteria, even if like paranoia, it is sometimes justified. 

One also needs to tune out of all the yabbering ‘historians’ and other experts who are trying to impose precedents as templates to the present moment. Whatever use these could have as gateways to understanding is always limited. America has such as short-sighted view on history that it systematically re-treads the same old hackneyed material, over and over. 

I might cite examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or even earlier) which could even be more relevant — or insight-pregnant — right now, but it would still be irresponsible. Historical narratives can function like dogmas, a semi-transparent cutaneous layer over reality. 

Trump has said and perhaps also done many outrageous things on the way towards finding an end to the war in Ukraine, yet behind all the unsettling noise, concrete positive steps continue to be made and the major European powers are accepting a heavy future load, which may have been the underlying goal all along from a US perspective. 

I always saw Venezuela as Little Marco’s pet project. And we need no reminding that early 50s Guatemala was also the pet project of a sitting Secretary of State. The way Vance is so far distancing himself from the seizure of Maduro does seem to reinforce this impression. 

Yet even if recent events go against the core MAGA belief system, there should be no doubt about the lures which have proved difficult to resist here: Caracas sits at the centre of a nexus of major US policy itches — narcos, migration, almost insanely blatant corruption driven by a criminal mafia which co-opts the organs of state (as here in Guatemala), support for Islamism, and a wormhole through which both Russians, Chinese and even Iranians have been able to blithely pursue strategic inroads right under Uncle Sam’s nose. 

And for Marco it has been holding up late stage ‘Castro’. Remove the imports and other assistance from Venezuela while Putin simultaneously self-destructs and Cuba would thereafter depend largely on goodwill gestures from Mexico and Canada, neither of whom are major participants in the new ‘Great Game’ nor represent a significant extra-hemispherical threat to anything like the same extent. 

Ramsés

Part of this new game, as being played by both the US and China is to make Putin think he is himself a key player, while slowly undermining him. 

The seizure of those Russian-flagged tankers today was a step in this. Before making their move on Taiwan, China is much more likely to snatch a swathe of territory in the east that it disputes with Russia. If and when it does, Russia will exit rather like one of those unfortunate third-placed reality show contestants. (No doubt with a good deal of sour grapes that could turn into very toxic grapes indeed.)

The ‘international law’ system was born out of hope and resignation in the last century. It was always going to require nations to start acting like Japanese citizens, reflexively sticking to rules with only a minimal need for policing. And when that policing did take place it was occurring at the end of a Cold War where the world appeared unipolar (a fully-aligned NATO or the US) and the cop could be seen as in some ways benign, but even before the neocon over-reaches of the 'War on Terror’, the first big customers for the Hague were brought there by a bombing campaign over Serbia which had the effect of turning Putin against the West. 

Right now the ‘other’ powers and mini-blocks around the three playing the top level game need to adapt to the evolving new situation fairly rapidly. NATO can still have some influence, because Trump wants benefits more than he wants costs and to some extent so does Xi. Only Putin still has this logic utterly back to front. 

In simple terms the big picture world may have just four ways to go forward right now:  1) the late twentieth century platitudes of the ‘international law’ order, perhaps precisely just the same old platitudes, but some would strive for a world so multipolar and inherently peaceful and harmonious that everyone just buries all their weapons along with their greed and resentment 2) open, unabashed direct conflict between the blocks, probably leading to apocalypse  3) ‘globalise the intifada’, overthrow everything, destroy all wealth, imprison and kill everyone who disagrees,  and go back to some sort of totalist medievalism across the globe (possibly seguing back into option three in the end) or 4) find a way to live within a world that has three or perhaps 2.5 great powers acting selfishly and sometimes amorally, clashing either through proxies or at a regionalised level, yet never walking away from the table where a deal of some sort awaits.

These are never going to be absolute forks in the road. Though option two in its most exclusive form tends to become one in the end. There’s some wriggle room for both head and heart, thought and action. 

Other courses continue to be possible at every other level other than the top level, given the current social, political and financial constitution of humanity. 

Maduro’s error, far more than his predecessor, was that he flaunted his position as a provocation in this situation where option four has been developing. He was, as they say, taking the piss.