Visit to York: The End of History Experience. Part I

I wish to God he was right but with Godfathers like Xi, Putin,
Kim Jong-un & Trump at large not to mention those religious  
hegemonists Francis has had to think again! 

Francis Fukuyama popularized the phrase "The End of History" with the publication of his book "The End of History and the last man" in 1992.  With the end of the cold war and Western democratic values in the ascendency and their capitalist economies generating technology & wealth undreamt of since the beginning of history it might have seemed that we were now all going to live happily ever after in the democratic lap of luxury. Moreover, many smaller countries still under authoritarian yokes wanted to join the rich democratic club, naturally enough. Well, we now know what happened:  Russia and China became powerful dictatorships, religious fundamentalists of differing brands sought the universal hegemony of their oppressive ideas and in the West a recrudescent far-right promoted lies and conspiracy theories in order to reinstate the demagoguery of Godfather style Government and the conceptual world-view of the unwoke. Does this mean we are on the way back to the Sauline worlds of monarchs (1 Samuel 8: 7-18) vying for as much power as possible and magnifying their personal glory via the violent extension of their empires of power? Such are the slaves & dupes of games theory as they make and break alliances in the monarchical ebb and flow of political influence. Traditional history with its unstable games theory feedback systems is very much back with us. 

And yet in a recent visit to the historic city of York (with the wife) the phrase "The End of History" kept coming back to me. I had had a sheltered and comfortable life untroubled by the privations of having to scratch an existence and free from the war & strife stirred up by Godfather rule. I had the education, health, time and comfort to take stock of the world around me. This privileged position allowed me to evaluate in a detached sort of way, the human condition and all that happens under-the-sun.  In a few more years, like my parents, I'm likely die in my bed. and history for me personally ends in a whimper. How anti-climatic!

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On the way up to York we visited the Palladian Cusworth Hall which overlooks Doncaster from its far-seeing hillside (see picture above).  The remnant of its aristocratic owners sold the hall to Doncaster city council about 70 years ago. The estate is now run as museum by the council with free entry. (But we made a donation). The council keep the hall in good condition, and it has become a specimen in a protective "resin block" ready for curious "end of history" visitors like ourselves with the time on our hands to be thoroughly nosey about the affairs of those who came before us.  

With the wind whistling through the crevices of the house, few other visitors about and the architectural vestiges of a past glory still evident, the house had an abandoned feel about it. It was no surprise when a steward told us that the Hall was haunted and he himself had heard the stories. I've never seen or felt anything that remotely classifies as a haunting. In fact, the wife and I have visited places with the scariest of ghostly reputations and never experienced anything spooky (most notably Bodmin Jail). I was three years working at the haunted Blickling hall and saw and felt absolutely nothing. 

The above picture is of Cusworth Hall's grand staircase, just inside the entrance. After the long driveway with the Hall sitting conspicuously at its end the staircase is the next item on the chorography of status, a chorography designed to impress the visitor. In halls larger than Cusworth I've seen grander staircases but given a hall's size architects would endeavor to make the staircase a statement of the owner's wealth by making it as impressive as possible. Compare the above picture with the main staircase of No 1 the Crescent, Bath:

Being a terraced house, the staircase at No 1 is not as grand as Cusworth's, but nevertheless it does what it can to impress the visitor.  It's worth comparing these staircases with the entrance hall of our own late Victorian terrace house, constructed for the bottom of the end of an aspiring lower middle class where similar ideas about aggrandizing entrances were employed:

With its small footprint in a crowded city street the hallway of our house is inconveniently and painfully narrow, but the Victorian architects tried to mitigate this limitation by increasing the height of the house and its main rooms thus enhancing the illusion of space; it is affected grandeur on a small scale. But to those whose houses had no hall it sent out subliminal signals of being on the next rung of the status ladder and an illusion of keeping up with the De Montegues with their aristocratic Norman ancestry.  

Back at Cusworth Hall we found the main reception room to be decorated with some elegant Georgian plaster work. This would be the room where guests were entertained with music and formal dancing. 

In one of the wings, we found the chapel: In my opinion they should have decorated the chapel with similar elegant Georgian plaster work: Instead, we get a poor imitation of Italian mannerist/baroque art, in an attempt to echo Micheal Angelo's Sistine chapel. I'm no art critic but somehow the figures in this depiction looked as though they were made of dough rather than flesh. They should have stuck with stucco, but then the artist was probably good enough to convey, at first look, a sense of sophistication, & opulence and perhaps even help the owners affirm their faith in God.

To finish let's have look at Osterley House which we visited in 2010. It is much bigger and grander than Cusworth Hall. With its ogee turrets it is a peculiar blend of Elizabethan and later Georgian modernization. But somehow the pedimented Collonade goes well with the turrets although I doubt classicists would have thought so. And just look at that grand reception room below making Cusworth's reception look rather pokey. 

I include this house because of the part it played in Sir Keneth Clark's Civilization series at the beginning of the episode "The Fallacies of Hope".  See the end of this post where I wrote the following: 

 ***

At the start of the 12th episode of his Civilisation series we find Sir Kenneth Clark in the clean rational and regular neoclassical interior of Osterley House in England. As he looks upon this epitome of rational control he says:

A finite reasonable world, symmetrical, consistent and ….enclosed. Well, symmetry is a human concept because with all our oddities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth. And “consistency”… again and again in this series I’ve used that word as a term of praise. But “enclosed”, that’s the trouble. An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit, one longs to get out, one longs to move. One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits are the enemies of movement……and what is that I hear, that note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger, yes it’s Beethoven, it’s the sound of European man reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave this trim finite room and go to confront the infinite. We’ve a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can’t say how it will end because it isn’t over yet. We are still the off spring of the Romantic Movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

The romantics of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries rebelled against the deconsecration of the cosmos through the symmetries and regularities of enlightenment thinking and yearned for the infinite. They attempted to return to a much more intuitive apprehension of the natural world. As Clark says the journey isn’t over yet and even today our romantic intuitions and aspirations continue to do battle with our reason. I would suggest that two words are missing from Clark’s last sentence….victims of the fallacies of hope…in man!  !  ….. I want to look at the question of why science has left us high and dry…..

***

According to Clarke, then, we are still very much in the middle of history and Francis Fukuyama has had to go back to the drawing board! In the meantime, in Part II, I'll continue to play out this end of history fantasy as we move on to York and back to times a thousand years or more before the snobbish, self-satisfied and Whiggish post-Newtonian Georgian upper-class who to us feel very familiar and so close to our own times.

Heritage Custodians Behaving Badly

National Trust’s Heritage Custodians have some quite off the wall ideas about bringing history to life.

According to Wikipedia: The term Custodian may refer to:

• Janitor,  a person who cleans, maintains, provides security and initiates repairs or makes minor repairs to buildings;


Under Wikipedia’s reference for “Custodian” the above is as near it gets to a definition of the National Trust’s job. It’s not surprising then that the National Trust may feel they have an image problem and are looking to reinvent themselves as a creative, edgy, risk taking breed. I have to confess that some of the comments I have made on this blog about the role of the NT heritage custodians may not have been helpful in this respect: I have hinted that NT properties have a fossilized feel about them when compared to owner occupied mansions. I have likened the NT to Canute figures engaged in the impossible task of trying to halt the eroding seas of time.

In the light of these remarks I was fascinated to read the January edition of the NT’s “Arts Buildings and Collections Bulletin” (or “ABC” for short. See here ). The lead article of this edition is entitled “The Curator: No-Sayer, Custodian, Interpreter, Impresario or Host?” In the article the current chairman of the NT converses with a district curator and they discuss the role of the Trust. The chairman affirms that their “baseline” is preservation of heritage, but goes on to say that the NT’s PR calls for creative and dynamic thinking. To this end the two interlocutors bandy radical ideas about the work of the NT, and we hear talk of it as an interpreter of history, a creative story teller of history, the presenter of historical theatre, and the “Jim’ll fixit” for visitors wanting to play at being invited guests at prestigious historical venues. In order to get away from that fossilized feel of NT sites they even moot the idea of giving some of their houses the cluttered homely look of a truly lived in mansion. Here are a few comments I have extracted from the article:

You’ve described various aspects of curatorship. You’re suggesting that the curator has a mediating role, and even that the curator is almost an impresario…… I see the curator of the future as having a more creative task, to unlock the spirit of a place, to tell its story, to hold a microphone up to it and let it speak….The genius of the curatorial profession is not to impose the dead hand, but the opposite: to find what is unique in a property and bring it to the fore. …. Only the curator can release their stories. I suppose my concern—and again this is controversial —is whether the peculiar skills that the Trust curator brings to this task are sufficiently broad ……It seems, then, that a curator should take risks and stick his or her neck out; a curator should say: ‘This is my creation, it’s my doing, and I take responsibility for it’.

This is curatorship with attitude – preferably a dynamic creative attitude. The ideas being submitted here promote the notion of a proactive NT – and don’t we all want to look proactive. Today’s NT doesn’t want to just bring history to a halt in the resin blocks and cabinets of the museum, but also sees itself as bringing history to life, even a maker of history and not merely a passive preserver of it. To this end the article tells of some idiosyncratic redecoration and interpretation that took place in a property during the 60s that is now part of the history of that particular property. One curator’s creative work of interpretation is another’s object of iconoclasm and so history ever moves on in incremental steps, even under NT “conservation”.

Particularly intriguing, I thought, was the acknowledgment that managed decay may be one of the stories the NT would like to tell and reference was made to the ephemeral nature of some fragile artifacts and buildings owned by the NT that are now crumbling to dust. Thus, the NT invites the visitor to see the irreversible processes of decay at work, processes that ultimately entail the loss beyond recovery of both buildings and artifacts, providing all the more reason to value them.

Under the current chairman, the NT is an organization that, whilst it has no chance of rivaling Disneyland, would nevertheless like to move away from the stuffy tranquility associated with the work of the heritage custodian. However, like the organic bleached specimens one finds in preservation jars one has to say that there is an inevitable air of unreality about a preserved heritage site: The fact is such sites have no chance of looking as they did in their halcyon days when they probably looked at once both newer and yet older than they do under the auspices of a heritage custodian: Newer because time was yet to have its way with them and older because clutter, grime and damage were more likely to accumulate in a real work-a-day environment. The heritage custodian is thus caught between the preservation jar and the creation of a bogus show of clutter, grime and damage. It seems that authenticity at heritage sites is an in principle impossibility. In the final analysis we must accept them for what they are - museum pieces.

(I have commented on some of the above issues in previous postings – see here, here and here)

The Riddle of the Sphinx

King Canute has been misinterpreted. The true story is, I believe, that Canute was a wise king whose apparently quixotic act was intended as an acted parable demonstrating that no matter how powerful a man may be there are things over which he has no control. Likewise, there is no human way to stop history and we are all destined to be ephemeral players who are very much trapped inside it, whoever we are. The Canutian message may be an important lesson the heritage custodian can teach us. The players inside history may be tempted to believe that history has ended with them. That history creeps forward slowly and imperceptibly like the hands of clock, even in a museum. Moreover, people of the pre-industrial era lived in times far more technologically stable than our own; decades, even hundreds of years could pass with little change and yet history eventually passed them by: One must always be mindful of the nonlinear processes of chaos.

Museums, old halls, and gardens cluttered with decaying stone ornamentation will forever be associated in my mind with H.G. Wells’ book “The Time Machine”. In that book Wells’ Time Traveler happens upon a museum of the future. The museum’s custodians have long since departed and now the museum, along with its surrounding disheveled garden setting, are slowly starting to suffer the ravages of time; their short day of quasi-stasis has ended. When the Time Traveler comes across the fossil bones of a megatherium eroding under the leaky roof of the museum we are reminded of the depths of time and repeated cycles of deposition and erosion this fossil has already witnessed and which are now slowly restarting. Accordingly, our attention is drawn to the outermost frame of human history:

Wells' time traveler .. has to learn to accept his limitations as a human being and to become perceptive to the cosmic perspective, the view of human reality that an impartial external judge might have. (Benison, “The Time Machine”, Cideb Reading classics, 1994 Page XXXVIII).

There is a sense in which we all find ourselves in a position similar to Wells’ time traveler in as much as we inevitably inhabit somebody’s future, surrounded by their defunct and decaying artifacts. Moreover, in the absence of a specialist’s acquaintance with history, we, like the Time Traveler see these artifacts uninitiated by an historian’s knowledge. We therefore experience the full force of their mystery and enigma. They were not put there to pique our curiosity or to provide intelligible clues as to their story. Therefore like Wells’ Time Traveler we must find within ourselves the curiosity and native wit needed to unlock their history, and above all their meaning. As so often is the case when we happen across the legacies of the past there is, as there was for Wells’ Time Traveler, no kindly NT interpreter waiting to explain it all to us; instead we are thrown on our own resources and thus have to make our best guess as to the story, meaning and purpose of what we see. In "The Time Machine" the mystery of story and meaning is symbolised by a stone sphinx set in the garden world of the future.

The Riddle of The Sphinx: Answer the riddle and the sphinx will let you pass.

The adventure in which we find ourselves is no less exciting than that of H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler who was faced with almost impenetrable riddles of history and meaning. A mood of deep mystery pervades all historical sites. For the insatiably curious problem solver whose daily bread is enigma, it is great comfort to know that the supply of mystery is all but inexhaustible.

Stuff the sphinx, I had better get back to my job.

The Custodians of Time

The Custodians: Some people have a rather idealised view

I have remarked before on the heritage custodian’s role in preserving the property of the past, suggesting that its main task is to bring about a kind stasis should a heritage site fall into its hands. However, in my last post I hinted at the difficulties of this role: “…. it has fallen to the National Trust to carry out the difficult task, Canute like, of doing its best to halt the eroding seas of time and preserve the country’s treasures.” At the time of writing little did I know just what these NT King Canutes are up against.

Recently I was privileged to get an insight into these difficulties when a curator of a heritage organization expressed the imponderables of his job using as an illustration a particular property in his care.

The story is this. Between the wars “the Lord of the Manor” was well into politics. This and, his devotion to Christian Science, may have tempered his interest in his home. The upshot is that he furnished his home comfortably but not extravagantly with medium quality contents. He also did away with the heavy and fussy Victorian décor and restored the Georgian 18th century interior makeover, a style probably more sympathetic to the first stirrings of modernism seen between the wars.

It was in this state that the heritage custodians eventually acquired the house. According to the curator we must appreciate that a house with its collection of items is not just a house plus a collection. As the curator made clear, the configuration of the contents is itself an exhibit because that configuration tells us how its original occupants lived.

OK then, the custodian takes possession of the house and puts it into “deep freeze”. Job done; history for that property has come to an end, and it now awaits judgment day. Or has it ended? Seemingly not. To cut a long story short let me express it in abstracts: Like the random walk of Brownian motion a heritage site is constantly being perturbed this way and that by a myriad causes. These numerous perturbations, over a period of time, add up to something significant, something in fact that we call history. Blow the custodians, history is intent on moving forward.

Heritage custodians are up against the engine of history and that engine has the ability to completely transform all that it finds in its path. Ironically, as it turns out, the custodians are themselves the main agent of change, if unwittingly. When a prodigy house owner hands over his home to a heritage custodian the owner may take away some of the contents thus leaving a rather inappropriate arrangement. This arrangement can only be made good by rearranging the remaining contents. Thus, the configuration of the exhibits starts to shift as soon as the custodian takes control. Moreover, certain items may have to be moved for environmental reasons. The custodian has to decorate from time to time and decoration may not capture exactly what was there before. If décor and content restoration become too fussy the house then becomes a fanciful simulacrum. (Hever castle?) Priceless decor may have been covered up by later owners of a house. Thus depending on the aims of the custodian the question arises as to whether this anachronistic decor should be uncovered. In fact in the particular connection in point a ceiling became water damaged and had to be removed. Underneath a richly decorated ceiling from an earlier period was discovered. But now there was an unconformity between the ceiling and the 18th century style of the room. Should the custodian cover the old ceiling in order to produce a style consistency? And occasionally the forces of time itself step in directly and bring unstoppable change; flood and fire damage being the main culprits.

However as I have already remarked, one of the biggest causes of change is probably the custodian himself and this is a consequence of the custodians changing and uncertain goal posts. Should the custodian do a straight “deep freeze” or should he also rearrange and modify a property on the basis of ambiance, artistic taste, bringing to the fore any material that is of particular historical interest? The dilemmas resulting of these competing criteria means that their resolution is likely to vary as successive custodians are influenced by changing phases of knowledge, opinion and fashion. Changing opinions and fashion? But isn’t that one of the major engines of history? Yes it is; the custodian, then, isn’t just the preserver of history but like everyone else the maker of history as well. There will come a day when the custodians activity is far back enough in time to for it to attract an aura of nostalgia and thus will be of historical interest itself. The custodian’s history will then become history.

The Custodians: This is more like it; watch what you're doing with that broom handle mate or those exhibits will be history.