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.

Black Legend

A string of esteemed British writers came to Mexico in the last century and, with the exception of Sybille Bedford, could barely conceal their sniffiness to the verge of contempt for the place: Greene, Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, and Somerset Maugham, the last of these quipping, when asked what he thought of the country by Frieda Lawrence, “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

Leonora Carrington, the English writer and surrealist painter who settled in CDMX's Colonia Roma, observed that she "felt at home in Mexico, but as one does in a familiar swimming pool that has sharks in it."

I was however surprised by how willing American travel writer Paul Theroux was to add himself to this rather long list when I read the account of his relatively recent Mexican excursion, On The Plain of Snakes...

"The Mexican border is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures—hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies—a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me."

 

To a certain extent he is knowingly exploiting the obvious caricature there in order to reach a specific no-passporty, north of the border audience, but in other ways, one becomes aware, he is also THAT gringo...

"It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm."

Maybe it makes an important difference if you enter from the south. Theroux notes how just 50 yards across the northern frontier things have turned 'improvisational'.

There's a certain abruptness to the other borders too, because Mexico is after all, Mexico, but of a rather different order. The south of course has more indigenous Mexicans and it is these people who have seemed to most unsettle the anglophone authors. Huxley: “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

It's as if this land is also the edge of known humanity. Paul Bowles served up similarly garish depictions of the wily natives, but largely in a Muslim country, and they have name for this 'delito', Orientalism, and so today he has been at least semi-cancelled, but Mexico remains fair game for these apprehensions of lurking, wicked otherness, in the mainstream foreign press as well as literature. 

Theroux again: "From the mutters and guarded warnings, I became aware—as anyone would in the sinister rustling of these whispers—that there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico’s prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms."

Now, I have been shaken down in the past by Mexican cops, and in my own experience of travel there I have concluded that it is near impossible to visit the country without experiencing at least one really negative interaction with one of the locals, and so it was this time too.

But I'd say the same thing about France, frankly, and so I am wary of this tendency to stoke the 'Black Legend'.

Pax Romana

I suppose I had long assumed that the Roman legions departed Britain in the fifth century in much the same way that western armies have now abandoned Afghanistan — packing up quietly in the night and making for the exits with barely a 'seeya, wouldn't wanna be ya', in effect leaving the locals to get on with the Dark Ages.

Truth is, it was a more complex and drawn-out process. 

It all began with what we now tend to refer to as a humanitarian crisis. Various Germanic tribal types had been living fairly peacefully at the edges of empire yet suddenly found themselves ruthlessly attacked in the rear by rampaging horse-borne Huns. The Romans kindly allowed the Goths safe passage over the border into full citizenship-land, and were very soon rueing that decision. 

The endemic insecurity provided by all these poorly-assimilated barbarians in the west led to some chopping and changing of the executive arm and its associated administrative hub, which shifted from Trier to Milan and back, with the imperial mint eventually settling in Ravenna, notably distant from our island. 

Britania had benefitted from close ties to the elite in Trier, then part of Gaul. As political and economic power was shunted further away, the province suffered. When London stopped minting coins in the late fourth century, the quantity of currency in circulation dropped off and one can assume the legionaries were not getting paid quite so formally or with the same regularity. 

The coins that do turn up in the archaeological record from after the start of the fifth century tend to have been clipped, presumably in order to recycle the edges into additional currency, such that the money ancient Brits had for their housekeeping was steadily shrinking in size. 

Industry was simultaneously collapsing with basic manufactured items like decent pottery and iron nails starting to vanish. 

This week, various high-minded Tory types with direct personal experience of the war in Afghanistan have been remonstrating about our apparently sudden withdrawal over there, making comparisons with the relative patience involved in other 'missions', such as Korea*. 

But on the Korean peninsula the Americans have been providing the same service that the Roman legions had in ancient Britain — peacekeeping — pretty much the opposite of what they have been up to much of the time in Afghanistan. And one must not forget that in the case of imperial subjects like us Brits, it was the local not the Italian taxpayers paying for all this pax, and as part of the deal they could not carry their own weapons.

The Roman armies began to depart Britain in chunks, not so much because they were ordered to, but because they kept rebelling against the big boss and marching off with their own alternative candidate, never to properly return. 

And that brought an all too obvious end to the Roman end of the bargain; peace. 

So then the civilians in turn revolted, declaring their distaste for central government in ways we are currently very familiar with, expelling Roman magistrates and setting up a plethora of their own alternative, rather localised systems — 'self-governing administrative units' familiar from shows like The Walking Dead, many fronted by despots. 'The King of the North' back then was one Coelius, 'Old King Cole' of the rhyme. 

Eventually, a final belated appeal was made to the emperor Honorius, who told the Brits to ede faecam, and thus ended the Roman era in Britain. 

I realise now that I am probably drawn to the parts of history where nobody can really say definitively what was going on. We can only really surmise how total the failure of civil society ultimately became at that time. It seems fairly certain that the clippety-clop of three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse could be heard around the land, with a fourth, Conquest, very much on his way in the form of pagan Saxons. 

The idea of hiring a splinter group of these, famously led by a pair known to the legend as Henghist and Horsa, in order to help repel the raiders from overseas and up north, turned out not to be a particularly good one — though the Brits had some military success at the close of the century (i.e. Mons Badonica, 490), which eventually coagulated into the myth of King Arthur and Camelot. Some more on that another day, when I review The Green Knight. 

The Saxons took longer than the Taliban to complete their political ascendancy, roughly one hundred years, and tended at first to adhere to the old British tribal boundaries. At London they set up shop outside the city walls in the area now known as Aldwych, content to leave the native administrative and mercantile structures intact inside. 

These were epochs of quite startling changes of climate. The lucky Italians had timed their arrival to coincide with a period where the weather was warmer than at any time in subsequent history. At the moment of their departure conditions were markedly colder and wetter, and by the late sixth century sunlight was said to be at a premium, so the 'Dark Ages’ may have deserved their name in this respect at least. Alfred the Great is said to have invented a kind of clock that permitted him to predict when the sun would be veiled by fog. **

Unpredictable harvests were indeed bad, but it may have been a pandemic that finally settled matters in favour of the newcomers, as they appear to have been less susceptible than the natives to the great outbreak of Bubonic plague that reached Britain from the eastern Mediterranean in the mid-sixth century: the so-called Plague of Justinian. 

*In the 80s, given the number of US bases we then had, there was a tendency to refer to the UK as a 'floating aircraft carrier', yet surely all aircraft carriers float, and maybe islands don't?

** The climate improved markedly during the boom years of the eleventh and twelfth centuries only to tank again in time for the omni-shit fourteenth. 

Chechén and Chacá

Behind the cyathea here, you can just glimpse the trunks of our Chechén and Chacá saplings. 

There’s a ancient Mayan legend about these trees, always found together, one with a toxic black sap, the other with a brown bark that serves as the antidote. 

Kinic and Tizic were brave, warrior brothers, both of whom had a thing for the beautiful Nicté-Ha. Kind hearted Kinic’s motives were honourable. Tizic, let’s say, was a bit of a wrong’un. Their duel ended in a deadly draw. The Gods subsequently decided that they should be reborn as this forever affiliated dyad of the Mayan forest. 

I am not sure how they arrived in our garden, but I went through a phase a few years ago of collecting seeds during trips around the Yucatán. Poor Nicté-Ha came back as a species of white lily, which we have yet to acquire. The bamboo is irrepressible. 

The Strain

As you might expect from a novel co-written by a highly imaginative film director in his spare time, The Strain is very cinematic.

This is both good and bad news. On the one hand the grammar of the scene-cuts and dialogue is reassuringly familiar and the story is packed with highly 'visual' set pieces.

On the other hand, I'm a slow reader, so taking on a novel which sounds a bit like someone describing the movie they are watching in their head, represents a time commitment of around ten times that of actually sitting in a darkened cinema for a couple of hours.

Philip Pullman famously observed that the thing that gets left out when Hollywood adapts a decent novel is literature. Here, it's what neither author has tried very hard to inject in the first place. Having said that, the core idea — and I suspect that one would have to credit Guillermo del Toro with this — has a certain thrill about it, and Chuck Hogan has executed it competently.

A 777 lands at JFK and then comes to a standstill on the taxiway, having apparently suffered a complete systems shutdown. On board everyone appears to be dead, though once the bodies have been collected and deposited at various morgues in the city, they reanimate as the virus-incarnate of vampirism.

Del Toro wanted to get back to the nasty vampires of old, consciously rejecting the fey romantic male leads of Twilight (and to a lesser extent True Blood). This lot have fast-zombie personality traits with long chameleon-like stingers under their tongues — rather like Ridley Scott's Alien — instead of sharp incisors. Their swarm leader is the freakishly tall Jusef Sardu aka 'the master', one of a group of ancient vampires who have in the past tended not to allow their victims to proliferate.

Yet now, a plutocrat whose wealth is a match for Buffett and Gates, but whose health is failing fast, has assisted the giant bloodsucker in his quest for a transatlantic break....one which will most significantly break the age-old truce amongst the 'old ones'.

As the undeadly plague spreads throughout Manhattan, a small grass-roots team forms to prevent the 'turning' of all humanity: an infectious disease specialist, a rat catcher and a frail old Romanian professor who's had some previous with Sardu in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

This is the first part of a trilogy and Del Toro was a little ambiguous about future plans to film the story when interviewed by Simon Mayo on R5. On the one hand he said he was happy to try his hand at the authorial medium, but then later admitted that he'd earlier run the concept by some studio execs who'd been taken by the bizarre notion that it should be done as a TV comedy.

The Mexican director has introduced humour in the Hellboy series, but he is generally quite earnest about the struggle between good and evil, and here, as almost everywhere a thematic link with fascism is developed. The location also allows him to make repeated references to 9-11, with the vampires setting up their own ground zero HQ beneath the WTC site, and to generally stoke up the mood of apocalyptic gloom that makes the story feel rather like a prequel to Matheson's I Am Legend.

It seemed like an appropriate enough read in the lead up to Halloween and, if there's a vogue for vampires right now, there's also a whole load of books about future dystopias and apocalyptic scenarios appearing on bookshelves right now (Such as Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and Fay Wheldon's Chalcot Crescent.) which are no doubt telling us something interesting about the inverted-escapism of the economically depressed.

Henry, Virtuous Prince

A book that could handle the strapline A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man..when he was perhaps a bit more of an artist.

In a radio interview earlier in the year, I heard its author observe that: "Had Henry died in 1529 he would have been forgotten, just another tedious late medieval king who tried to be Henry V."

And perhaps the worst thing that could be said about part one of Starkey's biography of the man he sees as the plus-sized axis of English history, is that it is very much the story of that king; appropriately unremarkable in places to the point of being a tad humdrum. Not the Henry VIII Part I that a less circumspect Shakespeare might have penned.

But Starkey makes no apology for refusing to read Henry backwards from what he was to become, and thus clearing himself of the unforgiveable academic sin of "whiggishness". (To be honest, you might not find this link especially illuminating). And so we have to content ourselves with this patchily intriguing account of a future tyrant's tutelage...

The second son of Henry VII, remote heir of Lancaster and king by virtue of his unlikely victory on Bosworth field, Henry junior was an auxilliary element of the solution his father had fashioned to a fifty-year-old problem: the cousins' war, known to us today as the war of the roses.

He was born in Greenwich — then known by its latin name placentia (pleasure) — and brought up at nearby Eltham palace, favourite home of his Yorkist grandfather Edward IV, whom he is said to have much resembled. His mother was Elizabeth of York, Edward's daughter with the beauteous Elizabeth Woodville and thus sister to the princes in the tower. It was she, Starkey suggests, who taught Henry how to read and write. Unlike his elder brother Arthur Henry was to pass his boyhood — García Márquez-style — in a household made up almost exclusively of strong-willed women, something which may account for his later tendency to marry for love...on several occasions.

In the early days Henry's piety was of the conventional late-medieval kind, but his formative association with the likes of Moore, Erasmus and Mountjoy would produce an unusually latinate monarch and one uniquely in touch with the new compositional style. The Reformation in England could not have developed in the way it did if this had not been the case, Starkey insists.

This poetical, musical and undoubtedly learned young prince was destined, once elevated to the throne, to become the greatest disappointment of his mentors' lives. As Starkey puts it, perhaps anticipating that contemporary history will quickly supply the necessary irony, "It was not the first time that the advent of a young, able, good looking and charismatic leader had provoked an outbreak of messianic joy. Nor would it be the last."

Henry VII survived numerous attempts to reverse out the Tudor takeover. One Yorkist pretender, defeated at the battle of Stoke in 1486 was, in what Starkey describes as an act of "ironic mercy"condemned to spend the rest of his life working in the royal kitchens. Something of a "fiscal terrorist" the young Henry's father was never to achieve genuine mass popularity and indeed was never 'one of us' as far as the English nobility were concerned.

He had invested his second son at a very young age as a knight and Duke of York in order to counter the pretensions of Perkin Warbeck (then posing at a distance as the missing Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York) and seemed inclined to tolerate Henry's laddish counterside which found a natural outlet in the tournament.

Jousting was then the almost exclusive preserve of disruptive, ne'er-do-well knights with distinctively Yorkist sympathies. Henry inserted himself into this potentially insurgent subculture of high-status hoodlums with relish. While his father yet lived he would be prevented from taking part in full-on jousts, but soon after replacing him on the throne was, along with his then wing man William Compton, competing incognito as a 'stranger knight' in manner familiar to readers of medieval romance.

Around this time in his life there occurred a couple of stand-out incidents. Firstly the adroit counter-coup effected at the time of his father's death.

Such was the unprecedented level of privacy that Henry VII had established at court that the fact of his expiry could be covered-up for several days, allowing Henry and his closest advisors to dispense with the dead king's least likeable cronies and to shore up their position before anyone else got a whiff of dynastic weakness. Starkey also provides a vivid commentary of Henry VII's funeral at Westminster Abbey, outlining how there were in effect two kings in England up until the moment that the coffin was ritually divested of all its royal and knightly insignia and lowered into the tomb.

The other notable circumstance was a misadventure presaging future upheavals. Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Reyes Catolicos Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish infanta who had apparently shagged Henry's older brother Arthur to death, would eventually be passed on to him after being declared technically unblemished for the purposes of international and well as marital relations.

Catherine's first pregnancy with her second husband was to conclude prematurely with a miscarriage, but her physician misinterpreted her persistently swollen belly as another child in the uterus and the Queen was to retire into a ritual confinement, a PR mis-step which would ultimately cause considerable embarrassment to all concerned, and put her husband into a sustained filth.

Part 2 will no doubt feature all the juicy stuff of legend. I am still of the suspicion though that Henry VIII, unlike say the Henry V of Juliet Barker's Agincourt, is somehow a lesser figure than his myth would have us believe.

Starkey however has no doubt of his enduring importance: "He is my Cleopatra," he confessed in that same radio interview. The king who Charles Dickens famously described as "a spot of blood and grease on the history of England" was, he avers, the real driving force behind the burst of creativity which would follow in his daughter's reign (Shalespeare et al.) and the first to visualise the British Isles as a single political unit.

A bit of an old-school Tory himself, Starkey tends to liken Henry VIII's momentous rejection of the Roman Catholic church as an early expression of euro-scepticism, where the issue of the king's divorce is recast as a debate about whether the Vatican has the authority to decide on matters of significant national importance such as the Tudor succession.

Anyway, with the sequel yet to be published Starkey took on the complete story with his Channel 4 series earlier in the summer and it is to this that I shall now turn...

Blindness

In as much that one's first thought on going blind rather unexpectedly would no doubt be 'WTF?', Fernando Meirelles's film is an authentic representation of this experience.

Saramago's novel was certainly heavy going in places, but never as chillingly dull as parts of this adaptation. I think even I could have done a better job of adapting the novel for the screen, especially in terms of the dialogue.

In its creative greed the international movie business has appropriated landmark novel after landmark novel without any regard for the fact that the best modern authors remain ardently uncinematic in their storytelling tenor. And if you take away the narrative voice from a Saramago allegory, you take away its humanity.

I'm convinced there's a dingbat out there somewhere who's going to try to bring Cien Años de Soledad to the silver screen in my lifetime. (Or is anyone yet up for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?)

In Saramago's stories something tends to occur in a small country (which may or may not be Portugal) which temporarily changes the fundamental rules of the game: people stop seeing, people stop voting, people stop dying. In As Intermitências da Morte the way to carry on dying is to head for the border. These are not global apocalypses; yet this is exactly what the 'white plague' has become in Blindness, which Meirelles shot in Canada and Brazil with a quaintly international cast. (Alice Braga is in the mix, last seen in the equally post-cataclysmic I am Legend...BSing Will Smith about God as he in turn BS'd her about Bob Marley.)

And when someone says 'We're starving to death here' they need to look a bit more like Christian Bale in El Maquinista. A few turds in the corridor do not an authentic concentration camp make.

There are certainly parts of this film which are striking, beautiful even. I caught blurred glimpses of what had moved me in the book. But you can also sense the director flailing around for arresting visual metaphors, as if to compensate for the poetic truncations implicit in Don McKellar's screenplay.

It's odd how talented film-makers such as Meirelles get themselves roped into these projects. The whole thing smacks of a Hollywood remake which has bypassed the unnecessary intermediate stage of the subtitled foreign flick.

Grade: B -

Yuca Shuca

We're both getting a bit sick of eating yuca after V bought 15 sticks of the stuff last week in Alotenango: "Me fui de boca."

Due to a bad back I haven't been into town much since the Champions League Final on Wednesday. Not only did John Terry miss the penalty and lose the cup for Chelsea, he blew a golden opportunity to make Cristiano Ronaldo the laughing stock of European football. Shame.

The rains have come, but so far Antigua has avoided the worst of the downpours. The other night lightning was flashing away behind the volcano like a faulty lamp and in the morning we learned of serious flood damage in Palín. Still, it amuses me how this kind of weather is reported on the local news stations as if it didn't turn up around this time every year.

Wandering around Antigua today I've noticed a couple of interesting 'hooks' from local establishments such as the "as much wine as you can drink" offer advertised on Fridays at the Cine Lounge. The trick there would seem to be to pick the right movie to accompany a vino tinto bender. Then there's the Martini Night at Nokiate sushi bar: Q100 (approx six pounds fifty) for as many martinis as you can gulp down. Of course it only really becomes value for money after the fourth!

There's also a newish Korean restaurant called Casa Veronica which shows fairly current movies every Tuedsay night which should be worth trying out.

The other night we watched I am Legend, at best half of a good movie. It's great until the dog develops fangs and then the arrival of random Brazilian woman provokes a discomfiting outburst of bollocks about God and Bob Marley.

My blogging will remain intermittent until we get a land line and an Internet connection at home: at least a month away I'd say.