28.7.04
Barbellion’s Journal
One of the fascinating things about Barbellion’s Journal is that it is contemporary with two works with which it has affinities, but which Barbellion is unlikely to have known: Rilke’s Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge and Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Rilke’s book was published in 1907, when Barbellion had already begun his Journal; Pessoa’s began during the 1914-18 war but was then laid aside and not revived until the late 1920s. However, both of these other books are more displaced towards fiction and, perhaps for this reason, less urgent that Barbellion’s.
The book Barbellion related most closely to his own was I Am the Most Interesting Book of All by Ukrainian writer and artist Maria Bashkirtseff, about whom he wrote: Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! How we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate — ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heartrending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1884. I was born in 1889.
Another fascination with Barbellion is the way in which his Journal resembles a weblog, nearly a hundred years before the form was invented. It is this aspect of his book which makes it seem so contemporary because, unlike many diarists, he is writing for a contemporary audience, for now, since he knew there was no sense in addressing himself to posterity.
I had to break off my reading of his Journal the other night, first because of the weirdness of his entry on the Three Johns (see below) but secondly, and more particularly, because of what he has to say about himself in the next entry but one ... In these moments of ecstasy my happiness is torrential. I have the soul of the poppy flaming in me then. I am rather like the poppy in many ways ... It is peculiarly appropriate. It must be my flower! I am the poppy!!
This was written in May, 1911, before the Great War, before Flanders, long before the poppy became the symbol of the dead in that war. It is – not only in this entry, but throughout the book – as if the war is taking place in Barbellion’s own body, not his body considered as metaphor, but in his actual flesh and blood; while his mind and soul rage against it.
from: The Journal of a Disappointed Man
There are three Johns, and I am much mistaken if in these pages there will not be found something of the John known to himself, and an inkling, perhaps, of the man as he is known to his Creator. As a timid showman afraid that unless he emphasises the feature of his exhibit, they will be overlooked, let me, hat in hand, point out that I know I am an ass, that I am still hoping (in spite of ill health) that I am an enthusiast.
W. N. P. Barbellion, 30th April, 1911
W. N. P. Barbellion, 30th April, 1911
27.7.04
Blind Willie McTell
This morning I woke from what seemed like a very long dream in which I was trying to prove to two friends that Blind Willie McTell is the greatest song Bob Dylan has written. I told them that, as I couldn’t sing well enough, I would have to show them by reciting the words aloud. Then I found that I could not remember them all – even though I memorised the lyrics some years ago, I could only get verses one, two, and five, with none of three and only fragments of four. I went over and over and over it, tediously, in the dream, until I was so bored and frustrated I woke up. Only to find that, waking, I could remember no more than I had in my dream. It wasn’t until I got in here and could log on to the relevant web site that I could get the rest. So. All day, in and out of the other things I do, I’ve been singing:
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem ... "
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem ... "
W. N. P. Barbellion
The name—the pseudonym—comes, in the case of the surname, from that of the proprietor of a chain of sweetshops with branches in South Kensington, Bond Street and elsewhere; the initials stand for the world’s three greatest failures—Wilhelm, Nero and Pilate. The announcement of the author's death at the close of The Journal of a Disappointed Man is premature, a joke. The fact is, he said later, no man dare remain alive after writing such a book. The Journal went through three impressions in six months. It was both praised and maligned. Some people thought it a ficcione written by H. G. Wells. During the middle part of 1919 Barbellion corrected the proofs of his second book, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, which he did not live to see published. W. N. P. Barbellion died properly on the 22nd October 1919.
26.7.04
An Unintended Consequence
I have been getting phone calls from a man called Peter Williams, an Anglo-Indian, as he calls himself, possibly of South African origin. His mission is to eradicate drug use in New Zealand and, to this end, he wishes me to write a book which will help accomplish this and, incidentally, make me a great deal of money. I told him that my already-published books do not make any secret of my own past and present drug use, but this seemed to make him, if possible, more enthusiastic—I could save myself while at the same time saving the country.
He has worked out an elaborate plan to organise the entire populace into hundreds which would then elect representatives to a larger council, which would then elect representatives ... and so on, a vast hierarchy based around threes, thirty-threes, ninety-nines. His last call, which I received as voice mail, really scared me. He said he had dobbed in a number of drug-users who are now sitting in gaol on remand and perhaps I could begin my research by interviewing these unfortunates. I did not reply, and have not heard from him since.
One interesting thing he said is that serious drug-importing into New Zealand was begun by a man called Frederick E Cumming-Bruce, an Englishman who was at Cambridge in the 1930s with Philby, Burgess, McLean and Blunt. Cumming-Bruce is said to have been posted to Wellington as a diplomat. When he was subsequently sent to India, he is alleged to have set up the networks for importing into New Zealand. Importing what? Williams does not say.
I googled the name and came up with a few hits: there was a Cumming-Bruce advising Harold Wilson on Britain’s Gibraltar policy at the time in the mid 1960s when Wilson and Ian Smith of Rhodesia were about to meet on board HMS Tiger at the Rock; the same, or another, is cited in a footnote regarding Botswana in an academic paper written by an Australia historian; another is quoted in a long judgment by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority granting refugee status to two Malaysians in Auckland in the mid 1990s.
But none of these is Frederick E. There is however—or was—a man called Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English naturalist who wrote under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion. His The Journal of a Disappointed Man was published posthumously in London in 1919, with an introduction by H. G. Wells. Barbellion died on the last day of 1917, the victim of a creeping paralysis whose inexorable progress he documents through the years of the Great War. He was 28 years old.
It is a beautiful book. A sample, his entry for February 7th, 1917:
The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further round the horizon was another moon—the full moon itself—yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all round the horizon.
In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides—pat-pat-pat—wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns the people of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?
He has worked out an elaborate plan to organise the entire populace into hundreds which would then elect representatives to a larger council, which would then elect representatives ... and so on, a vast hierarchy based around threes, thirty-threes, ninety-nines. His last call, which I received as voice mail, really scared me. He said he had dobbed in a number of drug-users who are now sitting in gaol on remand and perhaps I could begin my research by interviewing these unfortunates. I did not reply, and have not heard from him since.
One interesting thing he said is that serious drug-importing into New Zealand was begun by a man called Frederick E Cumming-Bruce, an Englishman who was at Cambridge in the 1930s with Philby, Burgess, McLean and Blunt. Cumming-Bruce is said to have been posted to Wellington as a diplomat. When he was subsequently sent to India, he is alleged to have set up the networks for importing into New Zealand. Importing what? Williams does not say.
I googled the name and came up with a few hits: there was a Cumming-Bruce advising Harold Wilson on Britain’s Gibraltar policy at the time in the mid 1960s when Wilson and Ian Smith of Rhodesia were about to meet on board HMS Tiger at the Rock; the same, or another, is cited in a footnote regarding Botswana in an academic paper written by an Australia historian; another is quoted in a long judgment by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority granting refugee status to two Malaysians in Auckland in the mid 1990s.
But none of these is Frederick E. There is however—or was—a man called Bruce Frederick Cummings, an English naturalist who wrote under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion. His The Journal of a Disappointed Man was published posthumously in London in 1919, with an introduction by H. G. Wells. Barbellion died on the last day of 1917, the victim of a creeping paralysis whose inexorable progress he documents through the years of the Great War. He was 28 years old.
It is a beautiful book. A sample, his entry for February 7th, 1917:
Chinese Lanterns
The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further round the horizon was another moon—the full moon itself—yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all round the horizon.
In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides—pat-pat-pat—wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns the people of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?
25.7.04
Another Darlinghurst Memory
I was walking that road which runs along the long west wall of the old Darlinghurst gaol, going towards Oxford Street. It was a fine afternoon, blue sky and the sandstone of the prison walls drinking the sun, when I entered one of those still and empty moments you get sometimes even in big cities. Nobody around, a hush in the traffic noise, even my footsteps faded. I looked ahead and saw two people coming toward me, a man and a girl. At first I thought it was a hippie guy with one of those fantastical kids hippies used to have, but as they came closer they looked stranger and stranger, he with his leather waistcoat, Ned Kelly hat and nineteenth century boots, she in her dress of motley and her bare feet. She was a child-woman, a sprite, and he was some kind of desperado, probably with a knife in his boot. By the time we drew abreast of each other my heart was hammering and I couldn’t look at them, though I could feel their eyes glinting at me. I let them get at least ten paces past before turning around to look after them, but – and I knew this would be as I turned – there was nobody there. Nobody in the whole wide street, nobody on the footpath, nobody crossing to the other side. They had been there but now they were gone. And there was nowhere they could have gone except into thin air. I kept on walking, no longer afraid, past the gates of that gaol, now an art school, and on into the 1990s.
22.7.04
The Last Time I Saw Adam
The last time I saw Adam, years ago today, was in Hyde Park; at least I think it was him coming slowly toward me down one of the long diagonals, pushing a shopping trolley full of junk. His head was down, his hair was completely grey, and he seemed many years older. I paused. He did not look up. I passed on, not wanting to disturb him on the long shamble graveward. I have since heard it said that once those men and women of the street begin to carry things, it is rare for them to speak to anyone much any more.
21.7.04
The Last Time I Saw Jimmy
Jimmy’s eyes bulged like Marty Feldman’s; perhaps he had some kind of thyroid condition. The skin of his face was pitted and worn, and there were enormous blackheads in his nose. He usually wore an old checked jacket, a grey shirt, and nondescript trousers held up with string; a spotted handkerchief knotted round his neck; and socks and roman sandals on his feet.
I don’t know if Jimmy was his real name. I called him that because Iris did. Iris was the Cypriot woman who ran the corner store in Womerah Street, a blonde with enormous dark eyes which filled with tears at the least provocation. That’s where I first met him - he used to hang around the steps of the shop, chatting to Iris. She liked his company I think, and maybe used to dispense a little charity in his direction as well, although there were other times when she would lose patience and chase him away.
Jimmy never offered any information about himself, and if you asked him a personal question was liable to change abruptly out of his engaging, companionable self into someone both reticent and deeply ashamed; he might even, head down, wounded and sorrowing, turn and walk away. He was not an alcoholic or even a drinker; he would sometimes ask for cigarettes, but never money; and he remains the only street person who ever gave money back to me, as he did one lucky day by the El Alamein fountain, taking a two dollar coin from one of his pockets and pressing it upon me.
I remember him talking about Ford motorcars that day, and this was also the occasion when he delivered a particularly inspired rave, most of which I have unfortunately forgotten, apart from one blazing image, which was that he could see the iridescence of his thoughts turning in the hubs of the wheels of cars passing in the street.
The last time I saw Jimmy was beneath the Coca Cola sign that stands at the top of William Street at the very place where Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road intersect to make Kings Cross. He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase such as children used to take with them to school, painted all over with cloudy yellow dots. We had not met for a while, and greeted each other with pleasure: Gidday Dutchie! Hi Jimmy!
At that his face clouded in the familiar sorrowful way; but instead of turning and walking away, he held up one finger to me, like a mime, then ceremoniously took the case and placed it carefully upright against the wall of the building before which we stood. Next, drawing himself up to his full height, with his feet in second position, standing beside his suitcase and indicating it with a graceful theatrical gesture of his hands, he said: My name is Adam.
I don’t know if Jimmy was his real name. I called him that because Iris did. Iris was the Cypriot woman who ran the corner store in Womerah Street, a blonde with enormous dark eyes which filled with tears at the least provocation. That’s where I first met him - he used to hang around the steps of the shop, chatting to Iris. She liked his company I think, and maybe used to dispense a little charity in his direction as well, although there were other times when she would lose patience and chase him away.
Jimmy never offered any information about himself, and if you asked him a personal question was liable to change abruptly out of his engaging, companionable self into someone both reticent and deeply ashamed; he might even, head down, wounded and sorrowing, turn and walk away. He was not an alcoholic or even a drinker; he would sometimes ask for cigarettes, but never money; and he remains the only street person who ever gave money back to me, as he did one lucky day by the El Alamein fountain, taking a two dollar coin from one of his pockets and pressing it upon me.
I remember him talking about Ford motorcars that day, and this was also the occasion when he delivered a particularly inspired rave, most of which I have unfortunately forgotten, apart from one blazing image, which was that he could see the iridescence of his thoughts turning in the hubs of the wheels of cars passing in the street.
The last time I saw Jimmy was beneath the Coca Cola sign that stands at the top of William Street at the very place where Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road intersect to make Kings Cross. He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase such as children used to take with them to school, painted all over with cloudy yellow dots. We had not met for a while, and greeted each other with pleasure: Gidday Dutchie! Hi Jimmy!
At that his face clouded in the familiar sorrowful way; but instead of turning and walking away, he held up one finger to me, like a mime, then ceremoniously took the case and placed it carefully upright against the wall of the building before which we stood. Next, drawing himself up to his full height, with his feet in second position, standing beside his suitcase and indicating it with a graceful theatrical gesture of his hands, he said: My name is Adam.
19.7.04
Jimmy: a memory
Jimmy was a man of indeterminate age and culture, with long flowing grey hair, dark, dirty brown skin, brown eyes, broken teeth, a skinny body which gave off the rank odour of one who sleeps under bridges, on park benches or in doorways, and spends his days trawling the streets of the city. A clochard, the French would say and like one of Beckett's immortal pair, he had a line in existential talk which brought the brevity of time and the darkness of space into annihilating collision with the quotidian. Often, too, he bore marks of a recent beating on his face or body, but if I attempted to find out who was responsible, he would only ever identify his tormentors as those big people.
One day when I was in town I saw him on Liverpool Street and stopped to ask him how he was. He looked away into the distance and in his soft voice said: Legally dead, mate. Yeah, they've just about abolished me. Jimmy's particular obsession was with the chemistry of the body, which he investigated exhaustively for clues to his errant state of mind. I used to see him sometimes in the Kings Cross library reading medical texts, or flicking through periodicals, scanning the mysterious symbols of the psycho-biologists. This day he was inquiring into the scientific status of the resurrection of Christ. How did he get himself to rise up? Jimmy wanted to know. Something magnetic in the blood? What do you think? Or is it just a story they made up to keep us guessing?
What could I say? I felt my own mind tipping as I entertained the possible mechanism of a 2000 year old confidence trick. Yeah, I said, probably. Jimmy nodded, looking away down the street into the warp of Einsteinian space-time. Probably the iron in the blood was magnetised, he said, and that's how they did it. Where you going, Dutchie? (Jimmy, for no reason I know, always called me by this name. The closest he ever came to an explanation was the day he told me: You know, Dutchie, you're half Holland, half New Guinea, and half New Zealand; that's why you're more than a hundred percent!)
I wasn’t going anywhere except to the Green Park, so we walked a couple of blocks down the road together, making desultory conversation. Outside the fashionable Robin Gibson Art Gallery he stopped suddenly and began rooting around at the base of an iron fence bordering the palm garden until he came up with an audio cassette, battered, unlabelled, unplayable, and spent some time turning it over in his hands, wondering what was on it, before explaining he didn't have a cassette player anyway and hiding it again in a chink in the sandstone wall outside the Church of Christ, Scientist.
At the corner where we parted, I felt in my pocket for a coin and came up with a dollar. Jimmy was scrupulous where money was concerned. He always refused the first time I offered, and paid me back whenever he could. I urged the gold piece onto him a second time and he took it. Thanks, Dutchie, he said. I can buy four smokes with this. See you ...
He went on and I turned in to the pub, to that anonymous corner table where I sat and drank until I had no more money left to spend. It seemed incredible that the glittering Darlinghurst life I had once led, in and out of beautifully lit rooms, serenely appointed and full of the latest music, the latest clothes, the latest talk, had disappeared like some childlike vision creeping out of view, leaving me companionable only with myself and dossers like Jimmy. I could not understand how it was I had lost the key to that party world, nor could I quite believe that it continued, presumably, to exist in ghostly parallel to the derelict streets of the uninvited.
Driving north on the freeway later, drunk and more or less anaesthetised against the cold, I watched my breath steam inside the car as if the freezing element without had colonised the interior. The engine wheezed like an emphysemic because the water pump was going and it was a toss up, as always, whether the part or the journey lasted longer. I was so hungry I could feel the sides of my stomach flap sourly together. Outside, the eucalypt and sandstone rolled away glimmering under a boneyard moon, seeming the domain of a people who have become, like Jimmy, shadows, legally dead yet still existent, living their spectral lives in a wilderness of speaking rocks, under sighing trees, beneath the incessant silver of the stars.
One day when I was in town I saw him on Liverpool Street and stopped to ask him how he was. He looked away into the distance and in his soft voice said: Legally dead, mate. Yeah, they've just about abolished me. Jimmy's particular obsession was with the chemistry of the body, which he investigated exhaustively for clues to his errant state of mind. I used to see him sometimes in the Kings Cross library reading medical texts, or flicking through periodicals, scanning the mysterious symbols of the psycho-biologists. This day he was inquiring into the scientific status of the resurrection of Christ. How did he get himself to rise up? Jimmy wanted to know. Something magnetic in the blood? What do you think? Or is it just a story they made up to keep us guessing?
What could I say? I felt my own mind tipping as I entertained the possible mechanism of a 2000 year old confidence trick. Yeah, I said, probably. Jimmy nodded, looking away down the street into the warp of Einsteinian space-time. Probably the iron in the blood was magnetised, he said, and that's how they did it. Where you going, Dutchie? (Jimmy, for no reason I know, always called me by this name. The closest he ever came to an explanation was the day he told me: You know, Dutchie, you're half Holland, half New Guinea, and half New Zealand; that's why you're more than a hundred percent!)
I wasn’t going anywhere except to the Green Park, so we walked a couple of blocks down the road together, making desultory conversation. Outside the fashionable Robin Gibson Art Gallery he stopped suddenly and began rooting around at the base of an iron fence bordering the palm garden until he came up with an audio cassette, battered, unlabelled, unplayable, and spent some time turning it over in his hands, wondering what was on it, before explaining he didn't have a cassette player anyway and hiding it again in a chink in the sandstone wall outside the Church of Christ, Scientist.
At the corner where we parted, I felt in my pocket for a coin and came up with a dollar. Jimmy was scrupulous where money was concerned. He always refused the first time I offered, and paid me back whenever he could. I urged the gold piece onto him a second time and he took it. Thanks, Dutchie, he said. I can buy four smokes with this. See you ...
He went on and I turned in to the pub, to that anonymous corner table where I sat and drank until I had no more money left to spend. It seemed incredible that the glittering Darlinghurst life I had once led, in and out of beautifully lit rooms, serenely appointed and full of the latest music, the latest clothes, the latest talk, had disappeared like some childlike vision creeping out of view, leaving me companionable only with myself and dossers like Jimmy. I could not understand how it was I had lost the key to that party world, nor could I quite believe that it continued, presumably, to exist in ghostly parallel to the derelict streets of the uninvited.
Driving north on the freeway later, drunk and more or less anaesthetised against the cold, I watched my breath steam inside the car as if the freezing element without had colonised the interior. The engine wheezed like an emphysemic because the water pump was going and it was a toss up, as always, whether the part or the journey lasted longer. I was so hungry I could feel the sides of my stomach flap sourly together. Outside, the eucalypt and sandstone rolled away glimmering under a boneyard moon, seeming the domain of a people who have become, like Jimmy, shadows, legally dead yet still existent, living their spectral lives in a wilderness of speaking rocks, under sighing trees, beneath the incessant silver of the stars.
18.7.04
The Fortunate River
There is an infinity of other islands. There is no reason to say more, only that all have gold and slaves and trade with one another, and the small ones do this in the larger ones that have been mentioned, and the larger ones trade with Malacca, and Malacca with them, spending and bartering the merchandise. Most of these islands have gold, and they also have corsairs and robbers who live by that alone. The corsairs only sail in light paraos and therefore they do not attack junks. And the corsairs who are nearest to Pahang make in Pahang their trading ports, and those near the Moluccas and Banda trade in Bima and Sumbawa and Sapeh, and those near us hold a fair and trade in Aru and in Arcat, Rupat. They bring countless slaves, and therefore a large number of slaves are used in Malacca, because they all go there on account of the great trade it has, more than all the kingdoms and ports over here; and so it is called the fortunate river. There are certainly great sailings from here; no trading port as large as Malacca is known, nor any where they deal in such fine and highly-prized merchandise. Goods from all over the east are found here; goods from all over the west are sold here. There is no doubt that the affairs of Malacca are of great importance, and of much profit and great honour. It is a land [that] cannot depreciate, on account of its position, but must always grow. It is at the end of the monsoons, where you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Vol. 1, p. 228
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, Vol. 1, p. 228
29.6.04
Tomé Pires: not a ficcione
Tomé Pires, author of Suma Oriental, the earliest extensive account of the East written by a Portuguese, was born around 1468. The son of an apothecary to King John II (1455-95) of Portugal, he himself became apothecary to Prince Afonso (1475-1491). In September 1511, Tomé Pires was appointed feitor das drogarias (factor of drugs) at Cochin in India. He was also in charge of a botica (supply of medicines) worth a considerable amount of money. Tomé Pires' next appointment was as Writer and Accountant of the trading fleet in the newly acquired Portuguese possessions of Malacca and Java. During these various appointments in Estado da India, Pires gathered the vast amount of information on trade, geography, commodities and pharmacology contained in the Suma Oriental.
It is not known if the book was compiled in Malacca or Goa; probably, by stages, in both ports and on board ship as well. On his way home to Portugal, having made his fortune, Pires was delayed at Goa and then sent back to Malacca, and thence, in 1517, as the first Portuguese Ambassador to China. He was unfortunate in that, not long after his arrival, a Portuguese ship’s captain named Simão Peres de Andrade caused some trouble in Canton; the Chinese decided Pires was not an ambassador after all but a spy, and seized him and the twelve men with him. They were tried, sentenced, flogged and tortured; five of them died, eaten by lice, in prison; and the rest were banished separately into internal exile. Nothing was heard of Tomé Pires for many years.
Then, in 1543, the great Portuguese traveller Fernão Mendes Pinto, arrived by river boat, a prisoner himself, in the Chinese city of Sampitay. Here the wife of the chifu – mandarin – who had bound and flogged Mendes Pinto and his companions, fell ill, delaying the party in the town. The Portuguese, still in their chains, were allowed ashore to beg alms from the people. While they were thus begging in the streets a young woman, seemingly Chinese, came forward and, unbuttoning the sleeve of the purple satin coat she wore, showed a cross tattooed on her arm – like the brand of a Moorish slave. Mendes Pinto and his men all fell to their knees, whereupon the woman uttered a cry, raised her arms heavenward and began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese.
Mendes Pinto spent five days at the house of Inez de Leiria, as she called herself, who was a wealthy woman and had her own chapel with a wooden crucifix finished in gold leaf, silver candlesticks and lamp; she was, she said, the daughter of Tomé Pires, who had met her mother during the period when the Chinese first entertained him as ambassador and later, when they decided he was a spy, contrived to be exiled near her. The two had married and lived a very Catholic life together for twenty-seven years, converting over three hundred local people and meeting every Sunday to worship in the chapel. Their marriage was only ended by Tomé Pires’ death at the age of about seventy years.
When Inez de Leiria heard Mendes Pinto’s own story of shipwreck and loss, she remarked, sounding very Chinese: Men who seek their livelihood at sea find their graves at sea. That is why the best and surest thing is to value the earth highly, and labour on the earth, since it pleased God to create us out of earth. Afterwards, Mendes Pinto passed on to the many other adventures related in his Peregrination, also known as The Travels of Mendes Pinto. He himself died, an old man surrounded by family, at Pragal near Almada on the opposite bank of the Tagus from Lisbon, in July, 1583 at the age of seventy-four years.
It is not known if the book was compiled in Malacca or Goa; probably, by stages, in both ports and on board ship as well. On his way home to Portugal, having made his fortune, Pires was delayed at Goa and then sent back to Malacca, and thence, in 1517, as the first Portuguese Ambassador to China. He was unfortunate in that, not long after his arrival, a Portuguese ship’s captain named Simão Peres de Andrade caused some trouble in Canton; the Chinese decided Pires was not an ambassador after all but a spy, and seized him and the twelve men with him. They were tried, sentenced, flogged and tortured; five of them died, eaten by lice, in prison; and the rest were banished separately into internal exile. Nothing was heard of Tomé Pires for many years.
Then, in 1543, the great Portuguese traveller Fernão Mendes Pinto, arrived by river boat, a prisoner himself, in the Chinese city of Sampitay. Here the wife of the chifu – mandarin – who had bound and flogged Mendes Pinto and his companions, fell ill, delaying the party in the town. The Portuguese, still in their chains, were allowed ashore to beg alms from the people. While they were thus begging in the streets a young woman, seemingly Chinese, came forward and, unbuttoning the sleeve of the purple satin coat she wore, showed a cross tattooed on her arm – like the brand of a Moorish slave. Mendes Pinto and his men all fell to their knees, whereupon the woman uttered a cry, raised her arms heavenward and began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese.
Mendes Pinto spent five days at the house of Inez de Leiria, as she called herself, who was a wealthy woman and had her own chapel with a wooden crucifix finished in gold leaf, silver candlesticks and lamp; she was, she said, the daughter of Tomé Pires, who had met her mother during the period when the Chinese first entertained him as ambassador and later, when they decided he was a spy, contrived to be exiled near her. The two had married and lived a very Catholic life together for twenty-seven years, converting over three hundred local people and meeting every Sunday to worship in the chapel. Their marriage was only ended by Tomé Pires’ death at the age of about seventy years.
When Inez de Leiria heard Mendes Pinto’s own story of shipwreck and loss, she remarked, sounding very Chinese: Men who seek their livelihood at sea find their graves at sea. That is why the best and surest thing is to value the earth highly, and labour on the earth, since it pleased God to create us out of earth. Afterwards, Mendes Pinto passed on to the many other adventures related in his Peregrination, also known as The Travels of Mendes Pinto. He himself died, an old man surrounded by family, at Pragal near Almada on the opposite bank of the Tagus from Lisbon, in July, 1583 at the age of seventy-four years.
Who the people are who traded in Malacca and from what parts
Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Lucoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arqua (Arcat?), Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives.
Besides a great number of islands there are other regions from which come many slaves and much rice. They are not places of much trade and therefore no mention is made of them, only of the above-mentioned people who come to Malacca with junks, pangajavas and ships; and in cases where they do not come to Malacca, people go there from here, as will be said in detail under the title for each region. Finally in the port of Malacca very often eighty-four languages have been found spoken, each one distinct, as the inhabitants of Malacca affirm; and this in Malacca alone, because in the archipelago which begins at Singapore and Karimun up to the Moluccas, there are forty known languages, for the islands are countless.
Because those from Cairo and Mecca and Aden cannot reach Malacca in a single monsoon, as well as the Parsees and those from Ormuz and Rumes, Turks and similar peoples such as Armenians, at their own time they go to the kingdom of the Gujurat, bringing large quantities of valuable merchandise; and they go to the kingdom of Gujurat to take up their companies in the said ships of that land, and they take the said companies in large numbers. They also take from the said kingdoms to Cambay, merchandise of value in Gujurat, from which they make much profit. Those from Cairo take their merchandise to Tor, and from Tor to Jidda, and from Jidda to Aden, and from Aden to Cambay, where they sell in the land things that are valued there, and the others they bring to Malacca, sharing as aforesaid.
Those from Cairo bring the merchandise brought by the galleasses of Venice, to wit, many arms, scarlet-in-grain, coloured woollen cloths, coral, copper, quicksilver, vermilion, nails, silver, glass and other beads, and golden glassware. Those from Mecca bring a great quantity of opium, rosewater, and such like merchandise, and much liquid storax. Those from Aden bring to Gujurat a great quantity of opium, raisins, madder, indigo, rosewater, silver, seed-pearls, and other dyes, which are of value in Cambay. In these companies go Parsees, Turks, Turkomans and Armenians, and they come and take up their companies for their cargo in Gujurat, and from there they embark in March and sail direct for Malacca; and on the return journey they call at the Maldive Islands.
Four ships come every year from Gujurat to Malacca …
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires vol. 2, p. 268
Besides a great number of islands there are other regions from which come many slaves and much rice. They are not places of much trade and therefore no mention is made of them, only of the above-mentioned people who come to Malacca with junks, pangajavas and ships; and in cases where they do not come to Malacca, people go there from here, as will be said in detail under the title for each region. Finally in the port of Malacca very often eighty-four languages have been found spoken, each one distinct, as the inhabitants of Malacca affirm; and this in Malacca alone, because in the archipelago which begins at Singapore and Karimun up to the Moluccas, there are forty known languages, for the islands are countless.
Because those from Cairo and Mecca and Aden cannot reach Malacca in a single monsoon, as well as the Parsees and those from Ormuz and Rumes, Turks and similar peoples such as Armenians, at their own time they go to the kingdom of the Gujurat, bringing large quantities of valuable merchandise; and they go to the kingdom of Gujurat to take up their companies in the said ships of that land, and they take the said companies in large numbers. They also take from the said kingdoms to Cambay, merchandise of value in Gujurat, from which they make much profit. Those from Cairo take their merchandise to Tor, and from Tor to Jidda, and from Jidda to Aden, and from Aden to Cambay, where they sell in the land things that are valued there, and the others they bring to Malacca, sharing as aforesaid.
Those from Cairo bring the merchandise brought by the galleasses of Venice, to wit, many arms, scarlet-in-grain, coloured woollen cloths, coral, copper, quicksilver, vermilion, nails, silver, glass and other beads, and golden glassware. Those from Mecca bring a great quantity of opium, rosewater, and such like merchandise, and much liquid storax. Those from Aden bring to Gujurat a great quantity of opium, raisins, madder, indigo, rosewater, silver, seed-pearls, and other dyes, which are of value in Cambay. In these companies go Parsees, Turks, Turkomans and Armenians, and they come and take up their companies for their cargo in Gujurat, and from there they embark in March and sail direct for Malacca; and on the return journey they call at the Maldive Islands.
Four ships come every year from Gujurat to Malacca …
from The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires vol. 2, p. 268
23.6.04
The Dorak Affair: A Movie
James Mellaart, the excavator of Çatalhöyük, is a Dutchman of Scots descent. His surname is a version of Maclarty, a sub-branch of the MacDonalds of the Isles; the family fled Scotland in the 17th century. Mellaart was educated in Holland during World War Two but, in 1944, having turned eighteen and therefore become eligible for call up by the Nazis, he went to the Swiss Consul for help. The Consul found him a job in Leiden, mending pots in the Egyptology department. His tertiary studies took place in London after the war; then, in 1951, he won a scholarship to the British Institute in Ankara.
Mellaart spent his Turkish summers hiking Anatolia looking for ancient mounds, hoping to prove that the fabled Sea People had been based on the shores of Asia Minor. His first significant discovery was the Neolithic site near Hacilar, which he found by tracing local gossip to a coffee house where he met a chauffer by the name of Şevket Çetinkaya who took him to his house and showed him two strangely decorated pots. Şevket later became a millionaire by trading in Turkish antiquities.
In the summer of 1958, Mellaart was on a train going to the ancient Mediterranean port of Izmir to complete a survey of potential sites there, when, in an empty compartment, he was joined by an attractive young woman. On her wrist was a solid gold bracelet of ancient design - the kind of thing that had thus far only been found at Troy. Mellaart asked to have a closer look at it, the two fell into conversation and the young woman, whose name was Anna Papastrati, invited him to her home to see more ancient artefacts.
They crossed the harbour by ferry at night, then Mellaart spent three or four days at her house, not going out once, making detailed sketches of a range of objects there: goddess statues decorated with gold and silver ornaments, jewelled bracelets, ceremonial axe heads and sceptres in marble, lapis lazuli, obsidian, amber and gold, a woven rug upon which a king had lain, a dozen or so swords and daggers: the contents of two royal tombs found on a hill near Dorak, on the shores of Lake Apolyont, south of the Sea of Marmara and excavated between 1919 and 1922 during the Turko-Greek war.
One find dated the hoard: fragments of a sheet of gold which had once covered a wooden throne. The hieroglyphs upon it identified the throne as a gift from the Pharaoh Sahure, who ruled between 2487 and 2475 BC. This seemed to prove that the Yortan culture, a neighbour of Troy, to which the tombs belonged, had been in contact with the Egypt of the Third Millennium.
Mellaart later wrote a sixty thousand word account of his find and published a summary, with his drawings augmented by another hand, in the Illustrated London News of 29 November, 1959. After a strange hiatus of a couple of years, all hell broke loose among the Turks, who have never forgiven Schliemann for his rape of Troy. Schliemann, a seminal contributor to the genealogy of the swastika as the Nazi symbol, carried away vast amounts of loot in the late 19th century.
When the artefacts Mellaart had drawn could not be found – they have not been seen again from that day to this – he was accused of having aided in their removal out of the country. Further progress of his excavations at Çatalhöyük, discovered soon after the Izmir incident, was impeded in various ways, as were the digs of many other archaeologists working in Turkey in the early to mid 1960s.
Mellaart has always denied any wrong doing and it seems possible, on the basis of the investigation by the two Sunday Times journalists ten years later, that he was in fact used: the hoard probably mixed genuine and fake artefacts, as well as items from different times and places. Anna Papastrati was a honey trap; Mellaart’s role, which he fulfilled to perfection, was to authenticate the treasure for some wealthy, anonymous, overseas buyer who, we must assume, has it still.
Anna Papastrati has never been seen again either; the only family of that name in Izmir were Greek tobacco dealers who lived in the commercial district during the Greek occupation in the early 1920s – at the same time that the items were allegedly recovered from the graves. Nor has the house where she entertained Mellaart been found. Number 217 Kazim Dirik Street is unlocatable because in the ensuing years both the street name and the street numbering have been changed not once, but several times.
There is, however, a letter from Anna Papastrati to Mellaart. It is typewritten, dated 18.10.1958, and reads in full: Dear James, Here is the letter you want so much. As the owner, I authorise you to publish your drawings of the Dorak objects, which you drew in our house. You always were more interested in these old things than in me! Well, there it is. Good luck and goodbye. Love ...
Reading this, it is impossible to disbelieve in the existence of Anna Papastrati, whoever she was; further, it is difficult not to wish to recreate her somehow: in a movie, perhaps, as the young Gina Lollobrigida, with Mellaart played by Peter O’Toole.
Mellaart spent his Turkish summers hiking Anatolia looking for ancient mounds, hoping to prove that the fabled Sea People had been based on the shores of Asia Minor. His first significant discovery was the Neolithic site near Hacilar, which he found by tracing local gossip to a coffee house where he met a chauffer by the name of Şevket Çetinkaya who took him to his house and showed him two strangely decorated pots. Şevket later became a millionaire by trading in Turkish antiquities.
In the summer of 1958, Mellaart was on a train going to the ancient Mediterranean port of Izmir to complete a survey of potential sites there, when, in an empty compartment, he was joined by an attractive young woman. On her wrist was a solid gold bracelet of ancient design - the kind of thing that had thus far only been found at Troy. Mellaart asked to have a closer look at it, the two fell into conversation and the young woman, whose name was Anna Papastrati, invited him to her home to see more ancient artefacts.
They crossed the harbour by ferry at night, then Mellaart spent three or four days at her house, not going out once, making detailed sketches of a range of objects there: goddess statues decorated with gold and silver ornaments, jewelled bracelets, ceremonial axe heads and sceptres in marble, lapis lazuli, obsidian, amber and gold, a woven rug upon which a king had lain, a dozen or so swords and daggers: the contents of two royal tombs found on a hill near Dorak, on the shores of Lake Apolyont, south of the Sea of Marmara and excavated between 1919 and 1922 during the Turko-Greek war.
One find dated the hoard: fragments of a sheet of gold which had once covered a wooden throne. The hieroglyphs upon it identified the throne as a gift from the Pharaoh Sahure, who ruled between 2487 and 2475 BC. This seemed to prove that the Yortan culture, a neighbour of Troy, to which the tombs belonged, had been in contact with the Egypt of the Third Millennium.
Mellaart later wrote a sixty thousand word account of his find and published a summary, with his drawings augmented by another hand, in the Illustrated London News of 29 November, 1959. After a strange hiatus of a couple of years, all hell broke loose among the Turks, who have never forgiven Schliemann for his rape of Troy. Schliemann, a seminal contributor to the genealogy of the swastika as the Nazi symbol, carried away vast amounts of loot in the late 19th century.
When the artefacts Mellaart had drawn could not be found – they have not been seen again from that day to this – he was accused of having aided in their removal out of the country. Further progress of his excavations at Çatalhöyük, discovered soon after the Izmir incident, was impeded in various ways, as were the digs of many other archaeologists working in Turkey in the early to mid 1960s.
Mellaart has always denied any wrong doing and it seems possible, on the basis of the investigation by the two Sunday Times journalists ten years later, that he was in fact used: the hoard probably mixed genuine and fake artefacts, as well as items from different times and places. Anna Papastrati was a honey trap; Mellaart’s role, which he fulfilled to perfection, was to authenticate the treasure for some wealthy, anonymous, overseas buyer who, we must assume, has it still.
Anna Papastrati has never been seen again either; the only family of that name in Izmir were Greek tobacco dealers who lived in the commercial district during the Greek occupation in the early 1920s – at the same time that the items were allegedly recovered from the graves. Nor has the house where she entertained Mellaart been found. Number 217 Kazim Dirik Street is unlocatable because in the ensuing years both the street name and the street numbering have been changed not once, but several times.
There is, however, a letter from Anna Papastrati to Mellaart. It is typewritten, dated 18.10.1958, and reads in full: Dear James, Here is the letter you want so much. As the owner, I authorise you to publish your drawings of the Dorak objects, which you drew in our house. You always were more interested in these old things than in me! Well, there it is. Good luck and goodbye. Love ...
Reading this, it is impossible to disbelieve in the existence of Anna Papastrati, whoever she was; further, it is difficult not to wish to recreate her somehow: in a movie, perhaps, as the young Gina Lollobrigida, with Mellaart played by Peter O’Toole.
Matthias Grünewald's Crucifiction
Among his surviving works are four Crucifixions. The earliest, at Basel, shows five people gathered around the cross: three Marys, John and the armoured centurion, Longinus. The Marys are the Virgin, the Magdalene and either Mary wife of Cleophas or the mother of Zebedee. The John is the Evangelist, not the Baptist, who appears in the next Crucifixion, on the great alterpiece formerly at Isenheim, now in Colmar; here the Evangelist holds the swooning Virgin in his arms; at their feet the Magdalene kneels and holds her clasped hands up in lamentation; while the Baptist stands on the right, a book in one hand and the finger on the other raised in admonition, with a text behind which translates: He must increase, but I must decrease. In the third version, sometimes called the Little Crucifixion, now in Washington, the Virgin and the Evangelist stand either side of the cross, hands clasped, he looking up, she, shrouded, looking down; while the Magdalene kneels with her two hands raised but separated. In the last version, at Karlsruhe, simply called Crucifixion, there remain only two attendant figures, the Virgin and the Evangelist, hands clasped, either side, as before, she downcast, he looking up. The Virgin in each picture is the same Virgin; the Magdalene too (though none of the portraits of women is very detailed); while the Evangelist, a thin, tall, flaxen haired man with a tragic face, in the last seems younger and has grown a beard. So: a family group, which decreases, from five figures, to four, to three, to two. While the monstrous and monstrously tortured Christ increases towards the overwhelming physicality of the Kalsruhe version, swollen with mortality, gross with suffering, atrocity made flesh.
20.6.04
Three
Nepenthe is forgetfulness, she brings the herbs of oblivion. Ariadne is guidance, she shows how to thread the labyrinth. Mary is mourning. There are three Marys: the Mary of forgetfulness, the Mary of guidance, the Mary of yearning. In the winter gardens, a statue of Nepenthe, cold stone under a rainy white sky. Ariadne wears gold bracelets on her graceful arms. She dances on the tiles at Knossos, and she laughs. There are three Marys, Mary mother of god, Mary Magdalene and who is the third? Ariadne threads the labyrinth. Nepenthe is forgetfulness. Memory.
More about Çatalhöyük
from: The Dorak Affair by Kenneth Pearson & Patricia Conner
"Its list of inventions was astonishing. Here ... the world's first mirrors, its first pottery, its first textiles, its first wooden vessels, and its first paintings brushed onto man-made walls. The region provided a peculiar ecological niche in which wild animals grew to immense proportions, and their size was venerated in Çatal's murals. From the distant hills, the ancient tribe supplemented its diet with apples, juniper berries, acorns, pistachio nuts, and they collected hackberries for their wine. They wove animal hair into felt, and made every use of the bones that remained after they had eaten. Ribs were transformed into spoons, knees into scoops. They played with knuckle bones in mysterious games, and decorated horns for ritual."
'The world's first mirrors' were made of obsidian, a piece large (or small) enough to be held in the hand, with a highly polished flat reflective surface. Ten were found, each buried with the body of a woman. The ubiquitous statuary of twinned female images comes to mind: whether or not these are the first, clearly at Çatalhöyük the doubling mirrors suggest had already begun: from those black depths, who was looking back, the self or another?
"Its list of inventions was astonishing. Here ... the world's first mirrors, its first pottery, its first textiles, its first wooden vessels, and its first paintings brushed onto man-made walls. The region provided a peculiar ecological niche in which wild animals grew to immense proportions, and their size was venerated in Çatal's murals. From the distant hills, the ancient tribe supplemented its diet with apples, juniper berries, acorns, pistachio nuts, and they collected hackberries for their wine. They wove animal hair into felt, and made every use of the bones that remained after they had eaten. Ribs were transformed into spoons, knees into scoops. They played with knuckle bones in mysterious games, and decorated horns for ritual."
'The world's first mirrors' were made of obsidian, a piece large (or small) enough to be held in the hand, with a highly polished flat reflective surface. Ten were found, each buried with the body of a woman. The ubiquitous statuary of twinned female images comes to mind: whether or not these are the first, clearly at Çatalhöyük the doubling mirrors suggest had already begun: from those black depths, who was looking back, the self or another?
18.6.04
Çatalhöyük
In his book After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC, Steven Mithen imagines his surrogate, John Lubbock, visiting the Neolithic Cappadocian town of Çatalhöyük in its prime. It is a maze of rooms, each of which can only be entered via a ladder in the roof; like cells in a hive, the rooms are practically identical and identically set up: sleeping platform, hearth, oven, grain bin, upon which there is sometimes a throned clay figure with a leopard on either side. She rests a hand on each cat’s head, and their tails wrap around her body; often she is giving birth, either to a human child or to an animal such as a lamb or a calf. There are clay figurines everywhere and most of them are women; these women are frequently doubled, or, at the very least, have two heads. One figurine shows two large women back to back, one holding a child in her arms, the other, a lover.
The walls of many of the rooms are painted with images of giant bulls: white heads striped black and red; heads with long twisted horns; heads with faces covered in exotic designs. Bulls’ heads are sometimes stacked one upon another from floor to ceiling. Some rooms have free-standing stone pillars with bucrania, sculptured horned bulls’ heads, fixed to them. Others feature long lines of horns set into benches. The painted bulls are associated with bold geometric designs and black and red handprints. There are boars’ skulls as well, and also images of great black vultures, one with human legs, attacking tiny headless people; and scenes of enormous deer or aurochs hunted by tiny people. Sometimes the nipples of a pair of woman’s breasts modelled out of the mud brick and plaster of the wall split apart to show skulls of vultures, foxes or weasels within. Some of these walls have been repainted at least forty times. When individual houses at Çatalhöyük needed rebuilding, they were reconstructed to the same design in the same place. It has been suggested that different types of people – old, young, male, female, toolmakers and those without special skills – were severely restricted as to where they could sit and work in these rooms.
The vulture frescos at Çatalhöyük may show excarnation practices. Bodies were exposed, as in Tibet or among the Jains, in open funeral houses, to the tearing beak of the griffin vulture which stripped the skeletons of soft tissue. After excarnation, the dead were buried under the floors of the houses, only a foot below the surface; people would sleep, make love, and give birth lying over bones. This practice was common throughout Neolithic Anatolia and the Levant. No provisions, no food or water vessels, and no figurines of any kind were buried with the bodies. Instead, graves held personal items - necklaces, rouge, and bone tools for women, knives, wooden boxes, or belts for men. The dead, in foetal position, were wrapped in cloth.
It has been said that the family of the people of Çatalhöyük was different from ours. Where our pattern is Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh: Father-Mother-Son-Daughter, theirs was Heh-Heh-Vav-Yod: Mother-Daughter-Son-Father. Michen’s view of a nightmare world at Çatalhöyük, in which people live a highly regimented life, and sleep huddled fearfully beneath terrifying images they have painted themselves, is in direct contradiction to those who believe, following James Mellaart, the first excavator of the site in the early 1960s, that the frescoes were evidence of a benign goddess cult in which death held no fear for people. Mellaart also claimed that the wall paintings were copies of kilims woven by the women of Çatalhöyük at the head of an 8000 year old tradition which continues, somewhat debased, today. He has been severely criticised for this view by contemporary weavers.
Before excavation began, the mound at Çatalhöyük was covered in shrubs of Syrian rue, whose seeds contain significant amounts of harmine and harmaline, the psychoactives in yage. Harmine, once called telepathine because it was believed to cause shared hallucinations, is reliably said by those who have used it to inspire visions of panthers, leopards, and other large cats. Amanita muscaria, cannabis and ergotized grain may also have been consumed at Çatalhöyük. The economy of the ten-thousand-people-town was based upon domesticated sheep and goats, cultivated cereals and legumes, wild tubers, wild deer – and obsidian. Cappadocia is the source for much of the obsidian found at Neolithic sites throughout Western Asia. Eight miles to the east of Çatalhöyük is Hasan Dağ, a ten thousand foot high then-active volcano, which is itself the subject of a wall painting. This painting consists of a rectangular grid which has been interpreted as a version of the terraced houses of the town itself, with the volcano erupting above it. The twin peaks of Hasan Dağ, strangely, resemble both a leaping bull and a pair of breasts; and they are dotted the way the skin of some big cats is dotted.
The walls of many of the rooms are painted with images of giant bulls: white heads striped black and red; heads with long twisted horns; heads with faces covered in exotic designs. Bulls’ heads are sometimes stacked one upon another from floor to ceiling. Some rooms have free-standing stone pillars with bucrania, sculptured horned bulls’ heads, fixed to them. Others feature long lines of horns set into benches. The painted bulls are associated with bold geometric designs and black and red handprints. There are boars’ skulls as well, and also images of great black vultures, one with human legs, attacking tiny headless people; and scenes of enormous deer or aurochs hunted by tiny people. Sometimes the nipples of a pair of woman’s breasts modelled out of the mud brick and plaster of the wall split apart to show skulls of vultures, foxes or weasels within. Some of these walls have been repainted at least forty times. When individual houses at Çatalhöyük needed rebuilding, they were reconstructed to the same design in the same place. It has been suggested that different types of people – old, young, male, female, toolmakers and those without special skills – were severely restricted as to where they could sit and work in these rooms.
The vulture frescos at Çatalhöyük may show excarnation practices. Bodies were exposed, as in Tibet or among the Jains, in open funeral houses, to the tearing beak of the griffin vulture which stripped the skeletons of soft tissue. After excarnation, the dead were buried under the floors of the houses, only a foot below the surface; people would sleep, make love, and give birth lying over bones. This practice was common throughout Neolithic Anatolia and the Levant. No provisions, no food or water vessels, and no figurines of any kind were buried with the bodies. Instead, graves held personal items - necklaces, rouge, and bone tools for women, knives, wooden boxes, or belts for men. The dead, in foetal position, were wrapped in cloth.
It has been said that the family of the people of Çatalhöyük was different from ours. Where our pattern is Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh: Father-Mother-Son-Daughter, theirs was Heh-Heh-Vav-Yod: Mother-Daughter-Son-Father. Michen’s view of a nightmare world at Çatalhöyük, in which people live a highly regimented life, and sleep huddled fearfully beneath terrifying images they have painted themselves, is in direct contradiction to those who believe, following James Mellaart, the first excavator of the site in the early 1960s, that the frescoes were evidence of a benign goddess cult in which death held no fear for people. Mellaart also claimed that the wall paintings were copies of kilims woven by the women of Çatalhöyük at the head of an 8000 year old tradition which continues, somewhat debased, today. He has been severely criticised for this view by contemporary weavers.
Before excavation began, the mound at Çatalhöyük was covered in shrubs of Syrian rue, whose seeds contain significant amounts of harmine and harmaline, the psychoactives in yage. Harmine, once called telepathine because it was believed to cause shared hallucinations, is reliably said by those who have used it to inspire visions of panthers, leopards, and other large cats. Amanita muscaria, cannabis and ergotized grain may also have been consumed at Çatalhöyük. The economy of the ten-thousand-people-town was based upon domesticated sheep and goats, cultivated cereals and legumes, wild tubers, wild deer – and obsidian. Cappadocia is the source for much of the obsidian found at Neolithic sites throughout Western Asia. Eight miles to the east of Çatalhöyük is Hasan Dağ, a ten thousand foot high then-active volcano, which is itself the subject of a wall painting. This painting consists of a rectangular grid which has been interpreted as a version of the terraced houses of the town itself, with the volcano erupting above it. The twin peaks of Hasan Dağ, strangely, resemble both a leaping bull and a pair of breasts; and they are dotted the way the skin of some big cats is dotted.
16.6.04
“We are victims, I thought, of a double hallucination. If we look outward, and concentrate on entering things, our external world begins to lose solidity, and if we conclude that it exists not in and for itself, but exists because of us, it ends by dissolving. However, if, moved by our private reality, we turn our eyes inward, then the world pushes in on us, and it is our interior world, our being, that disappears. What to do then? Weave the thread given to us, dream our dream and live; it is the only way we can achieve the miracle of growth. A man attentive to himself and trying to overhear himself drowns the only voice he could hear – his own; but other voices confuse him. Are we then doomed to be merely observers? But when we see, reason is present, and reason analyses and dissolves. The reason will soon bring the whole theatre down, and, finally, our shadow alone will be projected against the background. As for the poet, I thought that his job was to create new poems out of what is eternally human, spirited stories that have their own life, even though they came from him."
Antonio Machado, Madrid, 1917
Antonio Machado, Madrid, 1917
scared
How I felt when I started this we/blog.
How I feel now.
These images by Colin McCahon from a 1976 show at the Peter McLeavey gallery in Wellington.
How I feel now.
These images by Colin McCahon from a 1976 show at the Peter McLeavey gallery in Wellington.
15.6.04
The Night of Counting the Years
Yesterday I saw the Egyptian film The Night of Counting the Years screened by the Auckland Film Society at the Rialto in Newmarket. It's the second time I've seen it; the same print, in a rather better condition than it is now, was shown by the Wellington Film Society circa 1975 or 6. The film was made by Shadi Abdel Salam in 1970, the only feature he completed; he was an architect by training and profession, who worked in film as an art director and costume designer and got his chance to direct through the good offices of Roberto Rossellini. I guess it's always risky going back to see a film you loved when you were young, but in this case there was no shadow of disappointment and, probably, I enjoyed it even more than I did when I first saw it all those years ago. While the technical quality wasn't as high, because of wear on the print, the screenplay, the performances, the cinematography, the art direction were of an order I simply wouldn't have appreciated then. It is a wonderful film. From the first shot - a sepulchral reading from the Book of the Dead at a meeting of archaeologists in Cairo - to the last - the hero, Wannis, covering his face and stumbling away up the shores of the Nile at Thebes - it has a gravitas which never falters. Shadi Abdel Salam told Rossellini he wanted to make an undramatic film, by which I think he meant he didn't want lots of action or dialogue, because there's very little of either in El Mumia, as it's also known. What it has instead is an inexorable fatality, as Wannis, the younger son of Selim, the recently deceased chief of his tribe, step by step approaches the only possible course of action open to him: the betrayal to a young archaeologist from Cairo of the whereabouts of a cache of sarcophagi of three dynasties of pharoahs, removed from their tombs in the Valley of the Kings 3000 years before and hidden in a hill on tribal lands. The tribe has, since time immemorial, plundered these sarcophagi for artefacts to sell on the black market for cash; but as the old generation passes, the young are appalled to learn that their bread came from the dead, and revolt. Much of the film takes place at night - or rather over two nights, with one day in between - and most of it was filmed in amongst the ruins at Thebes. The contemporary (1880s) illiterate Muslim tribespeople do not know who the the ancient Egyptians were, even though they are most likely their direct descendants; their writing cannot be read and their names are unknown. This theme of naming runs throughout the film and is echoed in the old ones' own beliefs: without a name, there is no rebirth and therefore no immortality. The Night of Counting the Years in its hieratic grandeur, pathos and - yes - tragedy, takes me back to Alan Brunton's The Excursion. Alan wasn't Egyptian, and in fact I don't even think he went there, but there is in his stage scenario the same gravitas, the same sense of inevitability and the same splendour as you find in The Night of Counting the Years.
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