by Liam Heneghan

In Memoriam Tim Robinson (1935 – 2020) and Máiréad Robinson (1934 – 2020)

In Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006), the first volume of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson’s trilogy of books about that rugged part of Co. Galway, Robinson records an illuminating and slightly fraught exchange that he had with landscape artist Richard Long about the fate of the artist’s work left exposed to the battering Irish coastal elements.

Work of Long’s include pieces sculpted from rocks and other materials found as he traversed natural landscapes on foot. The sculptures are gradually re-arranged by forces in the landscape, though the images have greater durability and are often displayed in galleries and preserved in archives.

In his excursus about Connemara to complete his trilogy, Robinson located one of Long’s sculpture on a small headland near the town of Roundstone The piece, entitled Connemara Sculpture (1971), is comprised of beach pebbles arranged in a distinctive pattern. This was not the first of Long’s pieces that Robinson had located and mapped. As a gift for Long, Robinson’s wife Máiréad had sent Long a copy of a map on which Robinson had marked a couple of pieces on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands.

Long took umbrage to the gift, writing to Robinson that he was “very surprised and aghast when someone told me years ago that my work was marked on a map.” It had not been his intention, he went on to write, for the sculptures “to be marked sites.” Long concludes his letter to Robinson noting that fortunately the “map that you kindly sent… didn’t have my sculpture on it.”

Robinson—that consummate map-maker—replied to Long, pointing out explicitly where these sculptures were marked on the map. Of course they were mapped!

Along with Robinson’s spirited defense of the fidelity of his mapmaking, he makes the following point: “…once the artist has made an intervention in the landscape and left it there, it contributes to other peoples experience of place, which may well be expressed in someone’s else work of art.” He goes on to write, “…your marks on the landscape will have a career of their own; they are no longer defined by their origin in your creativity.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Charlie Huenemann

I routinely remind my students that human minds have always been as complicated as they are now, from when we dropped out of the trees to when we step upon the escalator. When we are reading in the history of ideas there is always the temptation to turn intellectual landscapes into cartoons where options are limited, painted in bright primary colors, and uncomplicated, like a toddler maze in Legoland. What’s going on, I suppose, is some hidden supposition that people who lived in earlier times must have been like us when we were children; or to put it more accurately, we suppose that people of earlier times must have been like we now conceive ourselves to have been when we were children. For we are wrong on both counts. Our lives when we were children were more complicated than we now remember, and every life that has ever been lived has been more complicated than we are now likely to suppose, because that’s just what it is to be human: we are complication engines.

But it is also true that we know more than we have in the past. (That of course doesn’t make the minds of the past any less complicated: minds are not complicated by what they know, but by what they think they know). This is clearly true at the species level: humans know more now than they ever have before – Moon shots, penicillin, Higgs boson, and all that. But I am guessing that it is also true that we as individuals, on average, have more knowledge in our heads than our historical counterparts, on average. I have to guess this because how on earth could anyone know for sure that this is so? What would they measure? Whom would they measure? When would they measure it?

For what it’s worth, IQ scores have been going up since their inception (see the Flynn effect; though note that IQ scores seem to be hitting a plateau in recent times). But it stands to reason that if more people are getting more education, and if what people are being taught to some degree tracks what we, as a species, have come to know about the world, then more individuals should be gaining more knowledge than previously. Of course, this general truth – if it is a truth – falls apart as soon as we start complicating the discussion by asking what we are measuring as “knowledge”. So long as we stay at the unfocused level of “you know, truths about the world”, we can maybe get away with the general claim that individuals know more now than they have in the past.

But our advance in knowledge has come with an advance in the complexity of our problems. Read more »

She Drives as I Scribble on London

I wear my French bodice and you don’t even notice
I dread turning into a submissive housewife
Will you still hug me after we are married?
I understand the off-side rule in football better than many men I know
When I’m premenstrual, I want to smash glass
I can’t bear the thought of dead meat in my stomach
London is a city of roundabouts
This is not New York
We give way to other drivers
The best view is from the Waterloo bridge
I don’t want a dowry—that’s so South Asian
I never ever indulge in malicious gossip
We have our demons
When I was a child in Mombasa, I jumped rope with the cook’s daughter

By Rafiq Kathwari — his new collection of poems, “My Mother’s Scribe” (Yoda Press 2020), is available here. Please do read. Thank you.

by Mary Hrovat

Escape. When I was a child, I read at every opportunity. If I could, I’d read on the playground; at one point, I was allowed to spend recess in the library and read there. Overall, teachers seemed unenthusiastic about the idea of a kid reading during recess. My mother, a great reader herself, used to tell me that reading was a treat, to be saved for the end of the day when all the work was done. When I was reading, I wasn’t playing with the other kids or helping out with the housework, as I should have been. But I was one of those people described by Penelope Lively, people who are “built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”

My family went to the public library every two weeks, and there were books in the house, so I was given at best a mixed message about reading. I seized the opportunities offered by the books around me while evading the imposed limits. I read in the closet in the evening after my sister was asleep, or in the living room late at night when everyone was asleep. When I could, I read while I ate. Perhaps I was fortunate to have a boundary to transgress, ever so gently and passively, so as to avoid being entirely subsumed in the role of good girl.

I was reading to learn, but also to escape. Reading for escape is sometimes seen as an inappropriate use of time or a failure to accept reality. Look what happened to Emma Bovary and Catherine Morland (characters created by Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen, respectively), who came to grief (in very different ways) by taking novels far too seriously. But escape from boredom, emotional distress, or anxiety is no bad thing. I tend to agree with W. Somerset Maugham, who said that reading provides “a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” I was lucky this refuge was available to me. The power to escape into a book was a rare means of control over my circumstances, and I can’t imagine what life would have been like without it.  Read more »

by Peter Wells

Christmas is traditionally a time for stories – happy ones, about peace, love and birth. In this essay I’m looking at three Christmas stories, exploring what they tell us about Christmas: the First World War Christmas Truce, The Gift of the Magi (O. Henry), and the Nativity story.

Peace: The Christmas Truce

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is, as the Imperial War Museum admits (link), one of the most mythologised events of the First World War. Here is one version, which is probably as near the truth as we are going to get:

Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man’s land dwindled out [Imperial War Museum website, my emphasis].

Love: The Gift of the Magi

O. Henry’s 1905 story, The Gift of the Magi, is a Christmas story about “two foolish children” – an impecunious American couple, aptly surnamed “Young.” We are introduced first to Della, who has only $1.87 to buy her husband, Jim, a Christmas present. She sells her exceptionally long and beautiful hair to a wigmaker, so that she can buy Jim a present that reflects her love for him. This earns her enough money to buy a gold chain for his beloved fob watch, and she is blissfully happy. Then he arrives, sees her with her shorn head, and the chain, and reacts in a terrifying manner:

His [Jim’s] eyes looked strangely at Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not understand. It filled her with fear. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor anything she had been ready for. He simply looked at her with that strange expression on his face [my emphasis].

This wild look comes about because Jim has bought, for Della’s Christmas present, a set of combs for her vanished hair. As a further irony, in order to buy the combs, he has sold the watch. So there are a number of emotions going through Jim’s mind, none of them happy, and none of them anti-Della, though they are very much anti-something. Read more »

I visited this old friend who lives in a park in Brixen, South Tyrol, last week.

by Mindy Clegg

Actor Ryan Reynolds recently directed two commercials for the dating website Match.com that summed up this year for many. A bored Satan in Hell gets an alert on his phone. His eyes widen and soon he’s meeting a young woman under a park bridge—who insists he calls her twenty-twenty. It’s a love at first sight, full of references to the year of hell.

A second commercial parodies the classic rom-com When Harry Met Sally.

A good bit of comedy to be sure. This year continues to dole out a serious amount of misery. Although it feels like this year is “happening to us,” in reality the things going on are a product of complex interactions between all of us on a global scale. If nothing else good emerged, this year magnified some of the core problems in our modern political, economic, and global social systems. In this month’s essay, I argue that 2020 has become a summation of failures not only of the current administration, but of the larger failures in our systems that we’ve left to rot for far too long now. The Trump administration did not find a pristine political and economic landscape on which to impose their will, but merely continued the already existing process of strangling the government in the bathtub, advocated by Grover Norquist. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Christmas gets me thinking about magic. Remembering the way I enjoyed Christmas as a child brings me back to a time when I believed in the power of supernatural phenomena. The most exciting piece of magic I performed was writing a message on a piece of paper, addressing it to Santa Claus in the North Pole, and setting it alight so that the smoke would be carried away on the winter breeze and read by him (I thought flying reindeer seemed pretty neat as well). The joy was of taking some of my innermost desires, embodying them materially and sending them into the world through a very practical activity, so that the universe could respond.

The sadness I felt at my loss of belief in Santa came from the realisation that I was living in a solely ‘material’ universe. As a scientifically curious child with no religious beliefs, the last bastion of magic had fallen. This death of magic was deeply disappointing, but this loss is not just at an individual one. In society as in biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is to say, I was merely following in the steps of a journey of disenchantment that many secular societies had already been on. 

Max Webber was the first to comment on the way the triumph of science and bureaucracy was melting away traditional beliefs about the power of religion and the supernatural. He christened this process, which is distinctive of modernity, ‘disenchantment’. Science, by reducing the functioning of the universe to physical cause and effect gets rid of the need for explanations in terms of magic and gods and spirits. Likewise, modern bureaucratic systems reduce social life to rationalised processes which become ever more difficult to escape from, and dilute social activities of their traditional meaning in the name of efficiency and process. Read more »