George Green: Miller and Mathematician. 1793-41

Green's Mill on its hill

Picture from: http://www.ilkcam.com/2004/040822/Green's%20Mill.html

After visiting Mottisfont Abbey and Bembridge mill on the Isle of Wight in September 2009 I blogged the following:

The aristocratic background of Mottisfont abbey contrasts with the lower class of millers who understood and operated the mill. Conceptually speaking the mill was a precursor and symbol of the industrialised world to come. It is ironic that this lower class of millers were totally unaware that they were dealing with the basic concepts of mechanism, energy, power and control that were eventually to dominate the rationale of an industrialized and instrumentalist society. I was reminded of the fact that my schoolboy introduction to physics was via pulleys cogs, and levers.

If physics is fundamental those prosaic looking principles derived from levers, cogs and pulleys are reckoned to be sufficient to describe the prehistory of the changing face of our planet.

This passage came to me with special force after my recent visit to Green’s Mill in Nottingham. George Green (1793-41) started his life as a miller after inheriting the mill from his father. His lower middle class status meant that he did not receive a classical education, but in spite of that he turned out to be a world class self-taught mathematician who went onto prove Green’s theorem* and develop the Green’s functions. His work has proved foundational to mathematical physics and his fascinating story can be read in the book “George Green Miller and Mathematician” . Largely because of his class recognition came slowly for George Green. In fact it may be only from the modern perspective, with all that we know today, can we properly appreciate the value of Green’s work. However, it is to the credit of the upper echelons of British academic society that Green was eventually welcomed into that society on the basis of his work.

Re-quoting myself from the above:

It is ironic that this lower class of millers were totally unaware that they were dealing with the basic concepts of mechanism, energy, power and control that were eventually to dominate the rationale of an industrialized and instrumentalist society. 

It seems likely that Green himself would probably have been aware of the fundamentals that governed his milling work, but I doubt he would have anticipated just how philosophically dominant they were to become in an industrial world.

A highly symbolic picture showing Green's Mill against a back drop of modern industrialisation. Today's industry, needless to say, is rather  less "green" than Green's Windmill! Interesting that today we are to some extent returning to the use of the wind.

(Picture from: http://www.natures-desktop.com/windmill-wallpapers/greens-mill-dusk.php)

The visitor's centre at Green's mill celebrates modern science.

Footnote

* Green's theorem is a consequence of Gauss's theorem. The latter integrates flows over a volume and sets it equal to the flow across the boundary of the volume. Greens' theorem does a similar integration but instead does it for circulation vectors, thus arriving at the result that the circulation summed over a volume is equal to the circulation over the surface of the volume.

Henge Symbolism at Colney Woodland Burial Park

Colney Woodland Burial Park

The setting of Colony Woodland Burial Park on the outskirts of Norwich is very pleasant and many people visit this facility just to savor its peace and tranquillity  The park is available for use as a memorial and burial ground by people of all faiths and none.

During my recent (and first) visit to the park I was struck by one observation: All structures and memorials are made of wood. What is the significance of this? Part of it is probably connected with the park’s policy to maintain a sustainable burial ground; all funerary paraphernalia must be biodegradable and this presumably allows for plots to eventually be freed up. In many ways this is a very sensible policy in a crowded country that is increasingly aware of the need for sustainability. However, I was left pondering the congruity between the fabric of the park and the modern secular mindset.

I remember hearing a story of a person from a southern culture who visited Stonehenge. Given his foreign (by Western standards) spiritual background it was thought that he may have some insight lost to us in the secular West as to the original purpose of Stonehenge. Consequently, he was asked what he thought it all meant. His reply was immediate; it was a place celebrating the ancestors. This response seems to have been largely predicated on the fact that Stonehenge is built of …. stone. In fact stone memorials have been raised to the dead from time immemorial: The long lasting qualities of stone are apt symbolism for ideas about the unchangeableness and permanence of the eternal world the dead are thought to pass into. The idea that Stonehenge's meaning is about the dead and eternity is perhaps supported by contrasting it with archaeological excavations at nearby Durrington Walls, a henge structure contemporary with Stonehenge but instead built of wood. Archaeological evidence at Durrington Walls suggests that it was a site of large feasts and therefore very much a place for the living. In contrast stone built sacred precincts such as Stonehenge often leave very little in the way of archaeological detritus, a fact that is consistent with the idea that they were mostly frequented by a relatively small priestly elite who were society’s link to eternity. The ancients, like us, were all too aware of the transience of life and yet they aspired to a connection with eternity, a world symbolized by the quasi permanence of stone.

The Woodland Burial Park’s policy is entirely appropriate to the modern demand for sustainability and yet  at the same time its wooden fabric is very symbolic of an almost exclusive stress on the here and now. There is, need I say, far less contemporary investment in ideas of a world beyond the secular. Even when people do believe in the other-worldly it is likely to have little impact in terms of related artefacts such as funerary paraphernalia; contrast, for example, the huge industry the ancient Egyptians supported for the purposes of the dead and their eternal life. Today, however, the emphasis for believer and non-believer alike is on the here and now and the legacy that one’s secular life and work leaves behind; in fact for some the memories and traces one leaves after death is as near as it gets to eternal existence. This modern emphasis goes together well the with wooden structures of the burial park, structures whose material is well known to be associated with death, decay and the cycle of rebirth; in short, all the processes that dominate secular life. For whatever traces we leave behind they ultimately fade beyond recognition if the chaotic processes of change and decay have the last say.

At the remembrance event I attended at the park the point was made by the master of ceremonies, although not very convincingly, that one’s remains partake in the ecology of the wood and thus in a sense one is still present. But significance comes from the unique identity of pattern and configuration rather than identity of substance. The death and decay of the body is a startling example of what happens, if given enough time, to all the configurations and patterns that persist after our death. If a world of change and decay is all there is to it then thermodynamic chaos ensures that those configurations and patterns are slowly but surely erased. There is still a need in the hearts of many for something that will outlast all that this world can offer; something that even outlasts stone. I don’t think that the heart of (wo)man will ever fully come to terms with the idea that one’s ultimate destiny is only bound up with the ecological recycling of one’s substance in a world of change and decay.

Colney Burial Park could be indicative of the modern mind's attempt to come to terms with a purely secular existence and yet even at Colney the ambivalent signals of a doubt were expressed. Maybe the gathering and the remembrance halls are Colney’s equivalent of Durrington Walls and Stonehenge respectively. They both had spiralling roofs, the spiral having connotations of eternity. The spiral in the hall where the life of the dead is celebrated is capped with glass giving the impression of a opening to the sky, thus tastefully and tactfully allowing the celebrant to silently let his thoughts rest on a motif that is so easily interpreted as an open portal to eternity, and perhaps of a hope of chance meeting with dead friends beyond circles of this world. May be this is what henge monuments were meant to convey.

Colney's symbolic portal to eternity.

See here for my Facebook album accompanying this story:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4743918363748.2189364.1468664406&type=1&l=0ba19d5947

Versailles

The grounds of Versailles: Organization for display purposes only.

If civilization is measured by the state of the sciences and the arts then the age of enlightenment represented a great leap forwards. I was reminded of this during a recent visit to the Palace of Versailles. It was hot, crowded and my feet ached but I heard the optimistic strains of Kenneth Clarke’s series “Civilization” in my head as I walked from room to room.  

In the seventeenth century, after 1600 years, the pinnacle of European culture had shifted from the lands of the Roman and Byzantine empires to France. The greater part of Versailles was developed during the reign of Louis XIV from 1643-1715, a period that falls squarely within Isaac Newton’s life time of 1642-1727.

European rulers like the Louis XIV were the focus of great power and wealth, but although they were the patrons of the arts and sciences little of their wealth was used to better the lot of the common people. My reading of history is that this failure to bring the fruits of civilization to the masses was down to a combination of factors, from the legacies of a still largely medieval infrastructure, through poor information and control, to an unwillingness of monarchs to distribute government, particularly amongst the business community.

There may have been many new ideas abroad in society, but at that time there was no more chance of using those ideas to better society as a whole than using the new Newtonian mechanics to get to the moon. Many more elements needed to be put in place before that could happen. Instead the European monarchs embarked on military campaigns and huge building projects like Versailles. Versailles was a statement of Louis XIV’s absolute power and evidence that indulgence in civilization was the privilege of relatively few.

Like the other great houses and halls I have posted on in this blog Versailles was chiefly about ostentation and show, its intention being to glorify the occupant of the palace. But Versailles does it on a scale that is unknown in the British Isles, a place where wealth and power was never as concentrated as it was in the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Some relevant links

My Facebook album on my visit to Versailles and Paris:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4430905378619.2180827.1468664406&type=1&l=964c57b59e

Versailles in 3D:

http://www.versailles3d.com/en/

http://www.versailles3d.com/en/in-video/from-louis-xiii-to-the-french-revolution.html

The Paranormal Part 3: Westall 66, Oz, and the Martian Canals.

 

The video above is a documentary about the 1966 Westall High School UFO incident in Melbourne. This sober production refrains from building imaginative speculations on the weird accounts that fuel UFOlogical interest; rather, it simply provides some space for people to express their memories. This low key approach leaves us with a set of startling core reminiscences unsullied by wild and fanciful interpretations. 

Is there any hope of accounting for these UFO narratives without recourse to the supernormal? In the video one reasonable shot at explaining the Westall 66 events in terms of normalcy is taken by a military expert: He thinks it significant that military personnel (possibly some being American personnel) appeared very quickly after the event; they would not  have appeared so quickly if they had been surprised by the appearance of some strange object. Therefore, in his opinion, it is likely that the object observed was some kind of military drone that had gone astray.

What did the Westall 66 children see?

Nice try, but I feel this explanation is not entirely satisfactory; it fails to do justice to what the school children (now adults, of course) claim they saw; it is difficult to believe that even school children could confuse a chugging drone with a highly maneuverable seamless and smooth disk shaped object. Moreover, if they saw a real object then it is conceivable that the appearance of military personal was a response to the radar tracking of this object.

I’m not particularly persuaded by the theory that UFO reports are the accounts of the visits of little green or grey men from some far flung part of the Galaxy. One of my reasons for not favoring this explanation, as I have said in part 2 of this series, is because the UFO anecdotes are no better (or worse) than the rumours and anecdotes about ghosts. Moreover, UFOlogy is of a piece with the paranormal field as a whole: Stories of alien abductions are in most cases extracted using hypnosis as are so-called past life regressions. These abductions are accompanied by the ”The Oz Effect”, an effect that also seems to have been reported in the famous Morberly-Jourdain incident. Arthur C Clark’s Mysterious World describes Morberly's and Jourdain's "Oz" experience thus: 

Did the two women perhaps share a sort of waking dream? A close reading of "An Adventure" suggests they did, for they repeatedly refer to an eerie, unreal atmosphere that seemed to pervade the park: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still' [p123 1987]

If one is to take the UFO protocols seriously one must also take seriously a whole Pandora’s box of bizarre paranormal protocols. They stand or fall as a whole. As I have already mooted in this series “waking dreams” may have something to do with the paranormal; perhaps some kind of change in the mode of consciousness is involved, something akin to Charles Bonnet syndrome, mingling dream life with the normal coherent mode of consciousness that we usually associate with waking life.

I’m left with the feeling, however, that so far we have no explanation that does justice to Westall 1966. The Fortean feel of the whole subject is difficult to dispel and I’m reminded of the Martian Canal phenomenon because it too has an occult air and has left some people wondering if there is something here that is neither easily explained nor dismissed. In his book on the history of Mars observation [The Planet Mars 1996] William Sheenan spends four or five chapters on the subject of the Martian Canals; not a disproportionate    passage given that the question of these canals dominated the subject of Mars observation for the best part of 30 years from around1880. On the nature of these apparent canals Sheenan says:

 I must admit that I have never seen a fully convincing explanation (p137)

In his book “Cosmos” [1981] Carl Sagan's comments on the subject of the Canals are particularly interesting: (p110)

In reading Lowell’s notebooks I have the distinct but uncomfortable feeling that he was observing something. But what? 

When Paul Fox of Cornell and I compared Lowell’s maps of Mars with the Mariner 9 orbital imagery – sometimes with a resolution a thousand times superior to that of Lowell’s Earth bound twenty-four-inch refracting telescope – we found virtually no correlation at all. It was not that Lowell’s eye had strung up disconnected fine detail on the Martian surface into illusory straight lines. There were no dark mottling or crater chains in the position of most of his canals. There were no features there at all. Then how could he have drawn the same canals year after year? How could other astronomers - some of whom said they had not examined Lowell’s maps closely until after their own observations - have drawn the same canals? 

 …I have the nagging suspicion that some essential feature of the Martian canal problem still remains undiscovered. Lowell always said that the regularity of the canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. This is certainly true. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on. 

Joining the Dots; wrongly, this time!

Many good observers with high quality equipment failed to see the canals and this tends to suggest a subjective component to the Martian Canal experience. That there was something strange going on with human consciousness is perhaps hinted at by the experience of Giovanni Schiaparelli, one of the first observers to “see” the canals: William Sheenan quotes Schiaparelli as follows (p 87):

What strange confusion! What can all this mean? Evidently the planet has some fixed geographical details, similar to those of the Earth……Comes a certain moment, all this disappears to be replaced by grotesque polygonations and geminations which, evidently, seem to attach themselves to represent apparently the previous state, but it is a gross mask, and I say almost ridiculous.

I don’t hold out much hope that a definitive explanation of Westall 66 and many other peculiar paranormal anecdotes will ever come my way; after all, we are dealing with anomalies at the very heart of what makes coherent and rational science possible; namely, the observations of conscious cognition. However, these anecdotes do have some notable features in common; Viz: They hint at apparent changes in the mode of consciousness (the "Oz" effect), a dreamlike/Charles Bonnet type quality pervades these experiences and yet, inexplicably, they can be shared between observers - however, some people are more susceptible than others. We must also add that these reports leave outside observers (like Carl Sagan and myself) uneasy as to what is actually going on, because most difficult of all to account for is the claim that these events sometimes leave physical traces. (Like radar effects) 

As this series progresses I’m hoping to develop another common theme and that is the “Freudian” connection: Like dreams these experiences appear to have an oblique, encrypted if rather muddled connection with what is going on in our waking lives, personally and in society as a whole.

The first two parts of this series can be found here:

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/paranormal-part-2-warning-dont-watch.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html

Do Your Pilgrimage in Style.

My Corgi Chevrolet was my favorite model car when I was young.

In a thought provoking article in the March edition of “Top Gear” magazine Jeremy Clarkson ponders the motivation for buying cars. He acknowledges that there are those people whose interest in cars simply goes as far as its “A to B” capability. These people, as Clarkson puts it, “See the car as a necessary evil”. They will, he says, be quite happy with something bland and ordinary because they are really not interested in cars; as long as the vehicle can get them to the shops and back with reasonable comfort and reliability that’s all they're after.

But if you are Jeremy Clarkson (or me) you are interested in cars for a variety of subtle reasons; in fact so subtle that according to Clarkson he is damned if he tell you what they are. For example, he says he has no idea why he loves the Ferrari 458 Italia, but only respects the McLaren MP4-12C. And of Hyundai’s newest car, the Veloster, Clarkson says that it completely fails to be what it’s trying to be, namely an exciting car:

…what the company doesn’t understand is that when you make a car that’s supposed to be interesting, it needs to be interesting. It needs to make a sporty noise, or look good, or corner well. It needs to have feel, a certain unquantifiable something that sets it apart from the herd. An invisible beckoning finger. A come-hither look in its headlights. It needs to feel like it was made by an enthusiast, someone who likes cars. Someone who understands the mechanics of James’ sausage. Because, if it doesn’t what you end up with is Veloster. An accountant in a clown suit.

Clarkson is no doubt right, but just how are Hyundai going to turn his very subjective expression into an objective specification for nuts and bolts engineering? When it comes to reading the sophisticated auto-tastes of the likes of Jeremy Clarkson it seems that Hyundai suffers from a kind of auto-autism.

But who can blame them? What is at stake here is not just engineering, but style and style is about the signals you send out to the rest of society and how society reacts to them. In fact style is also about sending out signals to oneself. Those signals give information about who you think you are, who you think you should be, your standing in society, what you want other people to think about you etc: In short it’s all about image, swank, status and the feel good factor that status brings. A fine piece of engineering judged from purely technical criteria must also double up as a fashion statement and status symbol. This role played by artifacts probably goes right back to the stone age.

Polished stone: The status symbol of the neolithic.

But to engage at this level requires vast knowledge about people and the society around you: Sending out the signals you want is far less an engineering problem than it is a social problem. Much of the knowledge and motivation we have in this area is likely to be quasi-unconscious and instinctual, dealt with by “The Whisperings Within”. As social animals our most important and complex intellectual task in life is to understand and be initiated into the mores of our culture. This is no doubt achieved with mental processing that depends on hard wired neural packages whose results surface into conscious cognition as conclusions without their supporting workings. This may explain why Clarkson has to say “There is not one tangible reason why I love the Ferrari 458 Italia….”. Auto-autistics keep out.

It is probably true to say of Western civilisation that as far as material wealth is concerned humanity has never had it so good. I often ponder then, just what is the nature of our pleasure in material wealth; in particular, what is the nature of the pleasures derived from sophisticated artifacts like houses, cars and numerous technological devices; what is the mix motives that keeps our interest in them? Clearly it is not just practical; as I have suggested above property as a fashion accessory is very important. But just how much of our pleasure in property is for its own sake and just how much is derived from the signals about us that property sends out to rest of society (and to ourselves)? Artifacts and property can be intrinsically enjoyed for their own sake; for example, for the aesthetic experience they give us. But I suspect the intrinsic pleasures here are inextricably mixed with the extrinsic pleasures whereby material objects relate us to the rest of society via status displays. These motives are managed by background prewired neural packages and their workings are difficult to articulate, as Clarkson has found. And yet those motives are both very persuasive and pervasive. For example, consider a prodigy house like say Blickling Hall and one soon realizes that such buildings were for the most part all about swank. (See also here and here)

One way of trying to precipitate out the social component of property ownership and hold it up for examination is to use what I call the “desert island test”: To do this test, imagine oneself to be fantastically rich, so rich in fact that one owns a huge mansion, with all the technical mod cons, expensive furnishings, decor and fine artworks. OK, so you’ve arrived. But have you? What, if it were possible to so contrive things that no one at all knew about your wealth? In fact imagine that you were so isolated that you may as well be on a desert island. In this scenario any pleasure you had in your property could only be derived from its intrinsic pleasure. Without actually running this experiment it is difficult to say just how much contentment a life of such isolation would bring, but I suspect with the loss of that all important component of status display life would lose a lot of its meaning and joy; our pleasure would be incomplete – at least for the more gregarious of us.

But can our pleasure ever be complete? We’ve all heard those stories of celebrities who seem to have everything and yet fail to achieve self actualization and remain discontented and restless, never really finding what they were looking for. My guess is that the human psyche is not really built for the destination but rather for the journey, the journey of striving for goals. When a goal has been reached we want to move on to the next goal; if there are no more goals to score listlessness and aimless can set in, even to the extent that life becomes empty and meaninglessness. When you possess all that this world has to offer and you have made a sufficiently extravagant statement about one’s status, the final question comes home: “What next?”. There is then only one other thing left to do and that is to give it all up, if only in a figurative sense. Material wealth and its accompanying pleasures of social status all too easily become corrupting idols; but in any case these idols are revealed to be ultimately unfulfilling to the heart of (wo)man. In this world our job is to treat the whole thing as a pilgrimage rather than a destination; it is then that we find full satisfaction.

It's better to be on the pilgrim road that at a terminus: Coming from two generations of commercial travelers, going somewhere in a car seems to be in my blood and travelling in style is important. I may have bought the Vauxhall Vectra above because it reminded me just a little of this Bentley……

...I can dream on!

Watchman, What is Left of the Night?

Here's another song by Francesco Guccini with translation from the Italian (interleaved) supplied by my brother-in-law Jonathan Benison:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell
Watchman, what is left of the night?
Watchman, why you don't answer my questions?
Watchman, why am I lost in a silent, red, stony desert?
Watchman, why the darkness is only broken by the lightening of my rage?
Watchman, why you don't let me in?
Don't you know that I can only hear weak echoes from the past?
Watchman, do you really know when the day will break?
Watchman, is your answer too big for my heart?
[based on Isaiah 21:11-12]

La notte è quieta senza rumore, c'è solo il suono che fa il silenzio
e l' aria calda porta il sapore di stelle e assenzio,
le dita sfiorano le pietre calme calde d' un sole, memoria o mito,
il buio ha preso con se le palme, sembra che il giorno non sia esistito...

The night is quiet without a noise, there is only the sound of silence
and the warm air brings the taste of stars and wormwood,
the fingers skim over the calm stones warmed by a sun, memory or myth,
the darkness took with it the palms, looks like the day has never existed...

Io, la vedetta, l'illuminato, guardiano eterno di non so cosa
cerco, innocente o perchè ho peccato, la luna ombrosa
e aspetto immobile che si spanda l'onda di tuono che seguirà
al lampo secco di una domanda, la voce d'uomo che chiederà:
Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...

I, the watchman, the enlightened, eternal warden of something I do not know,
I seek, innocent or because I sinned, the shady moon
and I wait immobile for the thunder wave to spread in the wake
of a lightning sharp question, the voice of a man who will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

Sono da secoli o da un momento fermo in un vuoto in cui tutto tace,
non so più dire da quanto sento angoscia o pace,
coi sensi tesi fuori dal tempo, fuori dal mondo sto ad aspettare
che in un sussurro di voci o vento qualcuno venga per domandare...

I have been standing for centuries or for just a moment in an emptiness where everything is still,
I cannot say since when I feel anguish or peace,
with my senses on edge, out of time, out of the world, I keep waiting in case
within a whisper of voices or of the wind, somebody will come to ask...

(Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell ...)
e li avverto, radi come le dita, ma sento voci, sento un brusìo
e sento d' essere l' infinita eco di Dio
e dopo, innumeri come sabbia, ansiosa e anonima oscurità,
ma voce sola di fede o rabbia, notturno grido che chiederà:

and I am aware of them, sparse like fingers, but I hear voices, I hear a buzz
and I feel I am the infinite echo of God
and afterwards, uncountable like grains of sand, anxious and anonymous darkness,
but only a voice of faith or rage, a cry in the night asking:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?

La notte, udite, sta per finire, ma il giorno ancora non è arrivato,
sembra che il tempo nel suo fluire resti inchiodato...
Ma io veglio sempre, perciò insistete, voi lo potete, ridomandate,
tornate ancora se lo volete, non vi stancate...

Listen, the night is about to finish, but the day is still not here,
it’s as if time flowed no more but had become stuck ...
But I’m always on the lookout, so you must insist, you can do it, ask again,
come back again if you want, do not tire of it ...

Cadranno i secoli, gli dei e le dee, cadranno torri, cadranno regni
e resteranno di uomini e di idee, polvere e segni,
ma ora capisco il mio non capire, che una risposta non ci sarà,
che la risposta sull'avvenire è in una voce che chiederà:

Centuries will fall, the gods and the goddesses, towers will fall down, kingdoms will fall
and the remains of men and ideas will be dust and signs,
but now I understand my non understanding, that there will be no answer,
that the answer to the future is in a voice that will ask:

Shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell
shomèr ma mi-llailah, shomèr ma mi-lell, shomèr ma mi-llailah, ma mi-lell...

Watchman, what is left of the night?
Francesco Guccini

With thanks to Marco Zuliani in California for the translation (modified here)
http://marcozuliani.blogspot.com/2008/07/shomr-ma-mi-llailah-shomr-ma-mi-lell.html

From the album “GUCCINI” (1983)

The Alfred Waterhouse Experience

Deep reds and blacks at Easneye create a moody atmosphere.

For the second time in as many weeks and for quite unconnected reasons I had the privilege to visit an architectural marvel that is now a concentration of devotion and piety. This time it was Easneye Mansion which currently houses All Nations Christian College, deep in a rolling Hertfordshire woodland. Designed circa 1870 by Alfred Waterhouse for the Buxton family, Easneye mansion indulges Waterhouse’s flare for  Gothic-Romanesque overstatement that we also find at his famous design, the Natural History Museum.

Like the subject of my last post (The Pleasaunce) Easneye was the residence of a devout and philanthropic family. In fact one of the Buxtons was in the Clapham sect. The Buxtons, it seems, had family and/or friendship links with the Batterseas at the Pleasuance (and also connections with the Gurneys and Elizabeth Fry in Norfolk) . These links are not really a surprise given that both families were into a philanthropy that grew out of a common faith. However, in time their properties passed into the management of other Christian users.

For obvious cultural reasons Gothic-Romanesque, particularly the kind of melodramatic and theatrical depiction of it we see at the Natural History Museum and Easneye, has become associated with death; the horror film makers and the computer games designers love such architecture for its mood generating properties. However, in spite of these associations the current occupants of Easneye have a faith that lifts the mildly depressed ambiance; perhaps few other communities could carry this trick off in such a somber looking pile; and so they should; Christianity is about the defeat of death and fear.

My visit was, in fact, the first time I had ever sampled the milieu of a missionary college. I was only there for half a day, but from what little I saw I was generally impressed by an ethos focused on maintaining high intellectual standards; missionary preparation doesn't mean just being fitted for khakis.

Further pictures and comments on Easneye can be seen on my Facebook album here

The Edwin Lutyens Experience

Aerial view of the Pleasaunce

I arrived at “The Pleasaunce” in Overstrand (Norfolk) in the dark of a January evening. After making my way to my room and consulting some floor plans I was struck by the rambling complexity of the building. My first thought was that it must have undergone a considerable number of extensions and changes. I could see no vestige of a medieval hall pattern and my first impression was that it was entirely Victorian or Edwardian. I doubted that a sane architect would build such an informal collection of volumes, surfaces, angles, nooks, and crannies from scratch – in fact its sheer ramification would make it difficult to conceive and implement in one grand slam project. I concluded therefore that it must be an accretion of improvisations.

But then I read the historical blurb in my room. It was a Lutyens. Perhaps then, the late Victorian/Edwardian taste for buildings with an appearance of historical development might explain it. If so it was a remarkable feat; such a pile would require considerable planning in order to reconcile the elements of a seemingly random jumble of spaces. But my mind was to change again. On this web document giving a short history of The Pleasaunce we read:

Deprived of the opportunity to start afresh on the site, Lutyens adopted the solution of disguising the existing villas in a plethora of different architectural elements, forming one of his most odd and perverse designs. As Gavin Stamp put it, the house is “full of clever tricks and eccentricities and touches of Art Nouveau but, as an overall composition [it is] a disaster”.

So it turned to out to be an accretion of improvisations after all. Stamp calls it an “overall disaster”; it’s certainly uncoordinated and Lutyens may have used the excuse to augment to indulge in a series of unconnected architectural essays and experiments making it up as he went along. It is a fact that contriving an appearance of history, given true history’s quirky twists and turns, is very difficult to carry off with authenticity; inventing history is like trying to think of random numbers at one sitting – humans can seldom produce something with an authentic historical ring. Not surprisingly then The Pleasaunce is not a one sitting design. Perhaps the difficulty of creating intricate designs in one shot has something to do with the mathematical fact that only a very few complex patterns can be reached by small short-time algorithms. It is an irony that there are huge continents of apparent random complexity out there that in actual fact are far more demanding of computational resources than are symmetry and order.

It may be that a playful incongruity is precisely what Lutyens had in mind as he designed the Pleasaunce. If so the joke is on us and he is laughing from the grave; he’s achieved what human beings find difficult to achieve; that is to disconnect from their associations and generate something new, something random even. In the absence of any obvious grand-slam plan organising the overall layout of the Pleasaunce the angel appears to be in the detail; namely, high quality of workmanship and materials is paramount as per the arts and crafts tradition of this building.

As I have remarked before in a blog post about Sizewell hall, it is perhaps rather appropriate that a building celebrating arts and crafts should now be a retreat for the Christian community. The arts and crafts movement was a reaction to rapid industrialization; this reaction included a return to the appreciation of hand crafted and natural looking materials. Likewise the Christian community have also reacted to the dehumanising aspects of a machine society by seeking out the human face of Christianity; in particular its irrational and feeling side. In fact they have been knocked for six and destabilized by an encroaching modernity; they often have great difficulty in coming to terms with and making sense of the kind of culture industrialized society throws up.

The architecture of the Pleasuance is also very apposite to the Christian community for another reason. If The Pleasaunce is an eclectic disaster the same could be said of an overall perspective of Christianity. Of course, Christian sectarians attempt to disconnect themselves from the eclectic church by connecting with some purist sect that attempts to “restore” a version of christianity founded on the fancied natural bedrock of the faith, eschewing and purging all other influences. But in effect sectarians simply create another incongruous carbuncular annex atop the rambling development that Christianity has always been. Sectarians simply can’t come to terms with chaotic eclecticism of their faith. In fact during my stay at The Pleasaunce I heard a story that one party of guests (fundagelicals, by the sound of it) left their holiday early because they couldn’t tolerate the presence of another Christian group; stuff like that is all too typical of my overall experience of Christendom I'm afraid to say. What a bunch of pillocks I’ve thrown my lot in with! But I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s an overall disaster; you’ve got to see the funny and ironic side of Christianity to enjoy it and come to terms with it.

Christian Restorationists  periodically drop their worship-warehouse rebuilds on traditional church and tell us they have been dropped from heaven.