Over the Easter break the wife and I visited my daughter and son-in-law and also my father-in-law and his wife (in Eastbourne). During that time we visited Hever Castle, the British Museum, the London Aquarium, and Beachy Head. In the great association game of life every concept is connected to every other concept by a few links in a kind of conceptual “small world”. So, I asked, what links all these visits? Life and death seemed a good bet and sure enough they ran through the whole of our long weekend like the letters in a stick of rock.
1. Hever Castle
Hever castle was built in the 13th century but it has been so altered and renovated that it would probably be unrecognizable to the original builders. In Edwardian times the interior was completely “updated” in a romantic Tudor recreation by the wealthy and enthusiastic American medievalist W.W. Astor. Although little that the visitor sees is original, the interior is beautifully decorated with finely carved woodwork and paneling and no expense has been spared. The overall aspect is of a cozy homely castle. Hever is just how we imagine the rich Tudors lived, either because it is has become the standard by which we judge all things Tudor or because it really does accurately portray the Tudor environment. All said and done W. W. Astor did the country a huge favor by helping to create a beautiful building and setting that may well otherwise have become ruinous desolation.
In spite of its slightly synthetic feel Hever castle has an authentic history. In the mid 15th century Hever passed into the hands of Geoffrey Bullen, a man with no known aristocratic lineage, a man who may well have been one of the peasant beneficiaries of the breakup of feudalism brought about by the Black Death. His very intelligent great granddaughter, Ann Bullen, did her finishing school in fashionable France, and in what may be one of the best PR maneuvers in history subsequently changed her name from Bullen to the French and elegant sounding “Boleyn”. Thus began a legend as a member of an obscure family moved to take up a pivotal place in the history of the nation; as everyone knows Anne went on to marry the opportunistic reformer Henry VIII. History suggests that it was Henry’s affair with Anne that precipitated him reviewing his relations with Rome and sowing English antipathy to the catholic cause, antipathy that grew as the reformation got underway. This paved the way for an independent England. In the to-and-froing between Catholicism and Protestantism over the next century and half English mercantile interests were more often than not bound up with the Protestant cause, and so the English middle class, who were such an important force in the industrial revolution, were better served by Protestantism. Since a commercialized Britannia and its industrial revolution in effect created the modern world, it is therefore arguable that the young Anne Boleyn was not just a pivotal character for English history but also for world history.
2. British Museum
The next day saw us visiting the Egyptian rooms of the British museum. As we wandered through these rooms I was struck once again by just how much Ancient Egyptian life style was thrall to the last enemy - death. From the monumental stonework of pyramids and elaborate rock cut tombs, to embalming and elaborate funerary rites, death was big business for the Egyptians and consumed a large part of their economy. But who can blame them; death confounds men of all cultures. Life seems full of promise, colour and rich experience, but then it is all so easily snuffed out, rudely truncating human purposes, often leaving questions of truth, justice and fairness dangling. It just doesn’t make sense. With man death is unfinished business and the many lose ends it leaves demand a solution. The Egyptians, it seems, were sure they had a solution. For them this life was just a beginning and the best part was to come; the husk of their mummified bodies were sown as seeds for a future life, a life that they believed must surely must go on beyond the grave eternally. But as I looked at the funerary effigies, the sacred models, the amulets and the dried out blackened corpses lovingly prepared they were more moving than any monumental engineering effort made with huge stones. There was a pathos here, like a child's game of let's pretend, all so ultimately ineffectual. This just wasn't how the world worked and yet on an engineering level they had considerable skill, a skill that incongruously contrasted with their almost childish take on spiritual realities.
3. London Aquarium
Our next visit was to the newly opened London Aquarium, an appropriate place for someone like myself who is interested in evolutionary theory. Baring a few star fish and jelly fish most of the swimming organisms on view where roughly bullet shaped alimentary canals, no doubt a body plan emanating from the Cambrian explosion. Although I couldn’t quite see where the bizarre looking sea-horse fitted in, this was the environment of the first eras of vertebrate history. Evolution, I hardly need say, requires death to work - like a laborious computer algorithm it is a search, reject and select method repeated many times over. Thus, in evolution death paradoxically becomes the means of genesis and the passage to pastures new. Perhaps it would not have been such a surprise to the Ancient Egyptians who viewed death as a beginning to new life. But the unchanging eternity of the Egyptian after life is at much at odds with earthly morphological disequilibrium as it is with the thermodynamic disequilibrium of the wider cosmos.
4. Easter day service
The same issues of death, seeding, rebirth, eternity and escape from the last enemy were back on the agenda for the next day when we attended an Easter Sunday communion service at my daughter’s local C of E church, Henry VIII’s church. Instead of the elaborate funerary monuments, rituals, and interment of the husk of the cadaver, which was in any case largely for the Egyptian upper class, Christian rebirth is universally available and extremely simple to appropriate and practice. All who call on the name of Christ shall be saved and communion symbolizes the daily death to self, the ongoing daily renewal of the soul and ultimate assurance of eternal life, when as in Ancient Egypt, the dead body is sown for life everlasting.
5. Beachy Head
Our final outing was a walk on the chalk downs of Beachy Head with father in law and his wife. These downs are made of chalk to a depth of hundreds of feet thick, formed by the gentle deposition of millions of carbonaceous bodies of Coccolithophores as they perpetuated endless cycles of, birth, life, bodily renewal and death. Beachy Head forms a mound of chalky limestone of greater height than the Great Pyramid which is also made of (a harder) limestone. As we sat in the Beachy Head restaurant having our dinner my father in law reminded us of a book by Richard Hilary called “The Last Enemy”. It was this conversation that gave me the title of this post. Richard Hilary was a World War II fighter pilot who started his career with a self consciously chosen philosophy of self serving. This philosophy of self, he believed, provided the only arguable rationale to life, if such it could be called. And yet in a kind of conversion experience Hilary discovered a spark within him that could not endure a life of service to self. He was surprised to stumble across this seed of compassion whose growth he could not staunch.
Summing up
The Black Death of the fourteenth century help bring Europe out of the feudal era but it took until the century following the sixteenth century reformation before the popular medieval mindset started to go the way of feudalism. With the reformation salvation and the defeat of the last enemy became folk possessions rather than belonging exclusively to an institution. But the decentralization of the liturgy of death was accompanied by another form of decentralization symbolized by the Copernican system, science’s Wittenberg door. This first step in cosmological decentralization was to ultimately threaten man’s view of himself, whether catholic or protestant. Thanks to Henry VIII and the desire created in him by the socially ambitious Anne Boleyn, England was maneuvered into Protestantism. One of the consequences of this was that English resistance to the Copernican system, which thanks to Galileo had become a bogy of the Catholic Church, was lowered. (Conversely England made heavy weather in accepting the very convenient but “papist” Gregorian calendar). The break up the medieval mind set brought man face to face with the role that mechanism and symmetry play in the cosmic order. Today localised physics and cosmic decentralization have now been developed to the extreme: highly speculative Multiverses have been envisaged where symmetry has gone mad: Everywhere and everywhen looks the same and probability is spread evenly and thinly over the possible states a particular universe can assume. However, asymmetry cannot be completely expunged from our thinking about the cosmos; in the final analysis something must be a special case and sheer existence, something rather than nothing, is the one-off that challenges hyper symmetry. But who would have guessed that a country girl made good would inadvertently help put the whole world on track for the frenetic industrial age of plenty, an age when these issues would ultimately barge their way on to the modern conceptual agenda and rustic innocence lost to material ambitions and a spiritually alienating materialist vision.
A verse allegedly* written by Anne Boleyn goes:
A captive, I in this dread Tower, scenes of childhood gaiety recall,
They comfort bring in this dark hour, now gaiety hath flown,
Through Blickling’s glades I fain would ride, soft green sward,
Sequested shade, no cruel intrigues to deride my simple rustic day.
A child, I watched the timid fawn, gentle eyed, steal to the lake.
With thirst to quench when mists of dawn had from cool waters fled.
Strutting peacocks, shimmering blue, roseate arbour, scented walk.
Gladly I left, ’tis strangely true, for pageantry at court.
False vanities my pride hath tricked, this place of damp and anguished stone
By sullen river surges licked, doth mock my hopeless lot
Oh, were I still a child in stature small
To tread the rose-lined paths of Blickling Hall.
According to Hever castle’s guide “The ghost of Anne Boleyn is almost as famous as the lady herself was in life holding the record for the most sightings of any spirit. Since her execution in 1536, Anne is said to have been spotted 30,000 times in 120 locations, including Hever, Blickling and the Tower of London”. There is a story told at Blickling Hall that a butler intercepted a “grey lady”, presumed to be Anne’s shade, standing by Blickling’s lake, who in reply to the butler’s inquiry responded “That for which I search is lost forever”. The veracity of this story is an immaterial as Anne’s ghost, because given its compelling symbolic content, it might almost explain those many sightings as some kind of collective dream emanating from the subconscious, rich in Freudian meaning. For the world has grown up, partly in thanks to Anne, a world that can’t unlearn what it’s learnt. As a culture we have long since left behind the rustic innocence of the ambitionless contentment described in the above verse, although like Anne’s ghost we may from time to time nostalgically and wistfully revisit it. We have lost the apparently tranquil agrarian world just as the first farmers who lived a life of backbreaking toil had lost the freely roaming world of the hunter gatherers. Like Anne many yearn for a fanciful romantic Acadian idyll, and Anne’s plight is symbolic expression of that fancy and the subliminal unresolved angst with the modern world. And yet the stasis of the idyll only serves to bring to the surface human restlessness and ambition as it did for Anne, although we are often ill at ease with the products of our ambitions and strivings. The fact is humanity is built more for the journey and the pilgrimage than the destination. For destinations, unless they be God himself, are partial, incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying to the heart of man – and, if Anne is to be believed, woman as well. But we must be careful in our peregrinations – they can become nightmares if journeys are conflated with destinations. It helps, I think, to develop a studied detachment from this world’s vaunted goals, the sort of detachment that John Bunyan was well aware of. We are then ready for the last enemy.
Footnote
* I have doubts about the authenticity of this verse
1. Hever Castle
Hever castle was built in the 13th century but it has been so altered and renovated that it would probably be unrecognizable to the original builders. In Edwardian times the interior was completely “updated” in a romantic Tudor recreation by the wealthy and enthusiastic American medievalist W.W. Astor. Although little that the visitor sees is original, the interior is beautifully decorated with finely carved woodwork and paneling and no expense has been spared. The overall aspect is of a cozy homely castle. Hever is just how we imagine the rich Tudors lived, either because it is has become the standard by which we judge all things Tudor or because it really does accurately portray the Tudor environment. All said and done W. W. Astor did the country a huge favor by helping to create a beautiful building and setting that may well otherwise have become ruinous desolation.
In spite of its slightly synthetic feel Hever castle has an authentic history. In the mid 15th century Hever passed into the hands of Geoffrey Bullen, a man with no known aristocratic lineage, a man who may well have been one of the peasant beneficiaries of the breakup of feudalism brought about by the Black Death. His very intelligent great granddaughter, Ann Bullen, did her finishing school in fashionable France, and in what may be one of the best PR maneuvers in history subsequently changed her name from Bullen to the French and elegant sounding “Boleyn”. Thus began a legend as a member of an obscure family moved to take up a pivotal place in the history of the nation; as everyone knows Anne went on to marry the opportunistic reformer Henry VIII. History suggests that it was Henry’s affair with Anne that precipitated him reviewing his relations with Rome and sowing English antipathy to the catholic cause, antipathy that grew as the reformation got underway. This paved the way for an independent England. In the to-and-froing between Catholicism and Protestantism over the next century and half English mercantile interests were more often than not bound up with the Protestant cause, and so the English middle class, who were such an important force in the industrial revolution, were better served by Protestantism. Since a commercialized Britannia and its industrial revolution in effect created the modern world, it is therefore arguable that the young Anne Boleyn was not just a pivotal character for English history but also for world history.
2. British Museum
The next day saw us visiting the Egyptian rooms of the British museum. As we wandered through these rooms I was struck once again by just how much Ancient Egyptian life style was thrall to the last enemy - death. From the monumental stonework of pyramids and elaborate rock cut tombs, to embalming and elaborate funerary rites, death was big business for the Egyptians and consumed a large part of their economy. But who can blame them; death confounds men of all cultures. Life seems full of promise, colour and rich experience, but then it is all so easily snuffed out, rudely truncating human purposes, often leaving questions of truth, justice and fairness dangling. It just doesn’t make sense. With man death is unfinished business and the many lose ends it leaves demand a solution. The Egyptians, it seems, were sure they had a solution. For them this life was just a beginning and the best part was to come; the husk of their mummified bodies were sown as seeds for a future life, a life that they believed must surely must go on beyond the grave eternally. But as I looked at the funerary effigies, the sacred models, the amulets and the dried out blackened corpses lovingly prepared they were more moving than any monumental engineering effort made with huge stones. There was a pathos here, like a child's game of let's pretend, all so ultimately ineffectual. This just wasn't how the world worked and yet on an engineering level they had considerable skill, a skill that incongruously contrasted with their almost childish take on spiritual realities.
3. London Aquarium
Our next visit was to the newly opened London Aquarium, an appropriate place for someone like myself who is interested in evolutionary theory. Baring a few star fish and jelly fish most of the swimming organisms on view where roughly bullet shaped alimentary canals, no doubt a body plan emanating from the Cambrian explosion. Although I couldn’t quite see where the bizarre looking sea-horse fitted in, this was the environment of the first eras of vertebrate history. Evolution, I hardly need say, requires death to work - like a laborious computer algorithm it is a search, reject and select method repeated many times over. Thus, in evolution death paradoxically becomes the means of genesis and the passage to pastures new. Perhaps it would not have been such a surprise to the Ancient Egyptians who viewed death as a beginning to new life. But the unchanging eternity of the Egyptian after life is at much at odds with earthly morphological disequilibrium as it is with the thermodynamic disequilibrium of the wider cosmos.
4. Easter day service
The same issues of death, seeding, rebirth, eternity and escape from the last enemy were back on the agenda for the next day when we attended an Easter Sunday communion service at my daughter’s local C of E church, Henry VIII’s church. Instead of the elaborate funerary monuments, rituals, and interment of the husk of the cadaver, which was in any case largely for the Egyptian upper class, Christian rebirth is universally available and extremely simple to appropriate and practice. All who call on the name of Christ shall be saved and communion symbolizes the daily death to self, the ongoing daily renewal of the soul and ultimate assurance of eternal life, when as in Ancient Egypt, the dead body is sown for life everlasting.
5. Beachy Head
Our final outing was a walk on the chalk downs of Beachy Head with father in law and his wife. These downs are made of chalk to a depth of hundreds of feet thick, formed by the gentle deposition of millions of carbonaceous bodies of Coccolithophores as they perpetuated endless cycles of, birth, life, bodily renewal and death. Beachy Head forms a mound of chalky limestone of greater height than the Great Pyramid which is also made of (a harder) limestone. As we sat in the Beachy Head restaurant having our dinner my father in law reminded us of a book by Richard Hilary called “The Last Enemy”. It was this conversation that gave me the title of this post. Richard Hilary was a World War II fighter pilot who started his career with a self consciously chosen philosophy of self serving. This philosophy of self, he believed, provided the only arguable rationale to life, if such it could be called. And yet in a kind of conversion experience Hilary discovered a spark within him that could not endure a life of service to self. He was surprised to stumble across this seed of compassion whose growth he could not staunch.
Summing up
The Black Death of the fourteenth century help bring Europe out of the feudal era but it took until the century following the sixteenth century reformation before the popular medieval mindset started to go the way of feudalism. With the reformation salvation and the defeat of the last enemy became folk possessions rather than belonging exclusively to an institution. But the decentralization of the liturgy of death was accompanied by another form of decentralization symbolized by the Copernican system, science’s Wittenberg door. This first step in cosmological decentralization was to ultimately threaten man’s view of himself, whether catholic or protestant. Thanks to Henry VIII and the desire created in him by the socially ambitious Anne Boleyn, England was maneuvered into Protestantism. One of the consequences of this was that English resistance to the Copernican system, which thanks to Galileo had become a bogy of the Catholic Church, was lowered. (Conversely England made heavy weather in accepting the very convenient but “papist” Gregorian calendar). The break up the medieval mind set brought man face to face with the role that mechanism and symmetry play in the cosmic order. Today localised physics and cosmic decentralization have now been developed to the extreme: highly speculative Multiverses have been envisaged where symmetry has gone mad: Everywhere and everywhen looks the same and probability is spread evenly and thinly over the possible states a particular universe can assume. However, asymmetry cannot be completely expunged from our thinking about the cosmos; in the final analysis something must be a special case and sheer existence, something rather than nothing, is the one-off that challenges hyper symmetry. But who would have guessed that a country girl made good would inadvertently help put the whole world on track for the frenetic industrial age of plenty, an age when these issues would ultimately barge their way on to the modern conceptual agenda and rustic innocence lost to material ambitions and a spiritually alienating materialist vision.
A verse allegedly* written by Anne Boleyn goes:
A captive, I in this dread Tower, scenes of childhood gaiety recall,
They comfort bring in this dark hour, now gaiety hath flown,
Through Blickling’s glades I fain would ride, soft green sward,
Sequested shade, no cruel intrigues to deride my simple rustic day.
A child, I watched the timid fawn, gentle eyed, steal to the lake.
With thirst to quench when mists of dawn had from cool waters fled.
Strutting peacocks, shimmering blue, roseate arbour, scented walk.
Gladly I left, ’tis strangely true, for pageantry at court.
False vanities my pride hath tricked, this place of damp and anguished stone
By sullen river surges licked, doth mock my hopeless lot
Oh, were I still a child in stature small
To tread the rose-lined paths of Blickling Hall.
According to Hever castle’s guide “The ghost of Anne Boleyn is almost as famous as the lady herself was in life holding the record for the most sightings of any spirit. Since her execution in 1536, Anne is said to have been spotted 30,000 times in 120 locations, including Hever, Blickling and the Tower of London”. There is a story told at Blickling Hall that a butler intercepted a “grey lady”, presumed to be Anne’s shade, standing by Blickling’s lake, who in reply to the butler’s inquiry responded “That for which I search is lost forever”. The veracity of this story is an immaterial as Anne’s ghost, because given its compelling symbolic content, it might almost explain those many sightings as some kind of collective dream emanating from the subconscious, rich in Freudian meaning. For the world has grown up, partly in thanks to Anne, a world that can’t unlearn what it’s learnt. As a culture we have long since left behind the rustic innocence of the ambitionless contentment described in the above verse, although like Anne’s ghost we may from time to time nostalgically and wistfully revisit it. We have lost the apparently tranquil agrarian world just as the first farmers who lived a life of backbreaking toil had lost the freely roaming world of the hunter gatherers. Like Anne many yearn for a fanciful romantic Acadian idyll, and Anne’s plight is symbolic expression of that fancy and the subliminal unresolved angst with the modern world. And yet the stasis of the idyll only serves to bring to the surface human restlessness and ambition as it did for Anne, although we are often ill at ease with the products of our ambitions and strivings. The fact is humanity is built more for the journey and the pilgrimage than the destination. For destinations, unless they be God himself, are partial, incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying to the heart of man – and, if Anne is to be believed, woman as well. But we must be careful in our peregrinations – they can become nightmares if journeys are conflated with destinations. It helps, I think, to develop a studied detachment from this world’s vaunted goals, the sort of detachment that John Bunyan was well aware of. We are then ready for the last enemy.
Footnote
* I have doubts about the authenticity of this verse
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