William Blake

The Michael Scot trail continues to lead in all sorts of amusing directions. I believe Scot's prominence in history, beyond academic treatises on medieval science, stems largely from his visibility in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy in turn gained quite beautiful illustrations at the hands of William Blake though sadly this project was left unfinished when Blake died. So when my wife and I found ourselves planning a trip south of the border a stop in Cambridge for William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum seemed obligatory. It would have been even without Scot.

The exhibition was a revelation, illuminating the radical humanitarianism underlying his visionary art. It sent me back to this long-neglected book where I lingered over the tale of little Tom Dacre who is sold to be a chimney sweep by his father when his mother dies. His life is miserable but he has a wonderful visionary dream of liberation in which an angel tells him that if he's a good boy, 'He'd have God for his father and never want joy.' The next morning:

And so Tom awake; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Blake would improve Tom's material lot but he's already in a better place spiritually.

Our world is very different from Blake's and most of us nowadays do not share his religious belief. In the world we've created for ourselves, doing your duty is no defence against great harm, maybe cast aside in some global restructuring exercise or suddenly finding ourselves guilty of some unimagined bureaucratic sin. Why should people buy into structures where you can do your duty and come to harm nonetheless?

K-Pop

I was fascinated by this account from the BBC: How jealous 'super fans' try to dictate their idols' private lives. Fans of the K-Pop group aespa are outraged to discover that singer Karina has a boyfriend. Karina has compounded the offence by apologising publicly rather than on a private, fans-only forum. She's only a girl in a band. Can't she have a personal life like everybody else?

A bizarre tale but it's the background that holds the attention, the personal involvement of the fans in the capitalistic project of the band.

"Fans put in labour to ensure the group's success. They consider the idol a product. And if you want to see the product on the stage for a long time, the artistes, the fans, and the management will all have to put in hard work."

We learn of "fan labour": streaming their idols' music, even at night while sleeping, to move them up the charts; studying the voting rules of the several fan polls; dividing their voting efforts to get their group as far up the rankings as they can; responding to negative comments in online forums.

Karina is not 'like everybody else'. She is a component of a corporate entity, filling a role that precludes a personal life. Her reality has to be that perceived by the corporate organism, not the human one she grew up with; just as other human components of such organisms need to abandon their human moral values to fulfil their functions. The striking K-Pop innovation is to transform the super fans from consumers to constituents. They also must embrace the reality perceived by the corporation, 'put in hard work' alongside artistes and management to help it optimise its position in the landscape it perceives, of money, charts, prizes. They don't need it for insight, balm, enlightenment, support... they need it to succeed. Its success, on its own terms, is their success. What a wheeze!

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Karina image: 티비텐, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Green banks

Greenbank Garden is a National Trust for Scotland property on the very south edge of Glasgow, actually in East Renfrewshire council area. It's a couple of miles from my house and I pass there quite often on walks; a liminal territory, suburbs shading into farmland. The house and garden both date from the 18th century but it's the garden that's the real draw, lavishly stocked and creatively laid out. Also there's a café!

No doubt Greenbank's garden sees thousands of visitors each year. It would probably lose a fame contest, however, to Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. The Green Bank Observatory has operated since the late 1950s and has played host to several large instruments, including now the Robert C Byrd Telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.

In the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), astronomers look for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, perhaps incidental to the normal conduct of their business, perhaps sent out deliberately to say, "we're here!" to anybody who might be listening (for a sense of this work, see the film Contact, science fiction of course but realistic in its depiction of SETI research). Green Bank has been central to these efforts: in Project Ozma (1960), Project Phoenix (1995-1998) and currently in Breakthrough Listen. The chances of success are small but the implications would be enormous, comparable in importance to the Copernican revolution. SETI inevitably catches people's imaginations far beyond the professional community so Green Bank is a pretty famous place.

Meandering past I wondered if there is any connection between the two 'green bank's? Greenbank Garden has played no role in SETI or indeed any science other than horticulture. I'm sure Green Bank Observatory's grounds are well maintained but I doubt the shrubs and grass attract visitors.

Many Scottish place names have been reused in the former colonies. Could Green Bank be one of them? The name is mundane, likely to occur independently to many people for local, topographical reasons. There are several 'Greenbank's across central Scotland. In West Virginia we learn that the name was given in Civil War times, 'from a little green bank on J Pierce Woodell's land beside the stream.' Nonetheless we can look a little closer.

The phone snapshot at left is very poor but possibly gives some sense of how atmospheric Greenbank House is at the end of the day. It was built in 1763 by Robert Allason. Mr Allason started out as a baker in Port Glasgow but diversified to become rich from transatlantic trade. His half-brother William established a store in Falmouth, Virginia. Robert sourced goods for William's store which were exchanged for tobacco, a valuable commodity on this side of the Atlantic. The Allasons had farmed for generations at Flenders, just south of what is now Clarkston. We might imagine some degree of pride and satisfaction when Robert was able to buy Flenders Farm and other parcels of land and build Greenbank House. After the American Wars of Independence he went bankrupt, however, and he had been forced to sell Greenbank by 1784.

From an excellent Inverclyde local history blog we learn that William Allason travelled 'extensively' in Virginia before establishing the store in Falmouth. It does then seem possible that William passed through the very country that would come to be called by almost the same name as his brother's mansion in Scotland. Could he have bequeathed the name? That doesn't seem likely. The account referenced above places the naming of Green Bank a century later. So all we probably have is the most ethereal of resonances, feet that knew one Greenbank treading the earth of the other. Perhaps, in an obscure way, a barely perceptible trace of the sort that will eventually reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The Allasons traded also in the Caribbean and owned property there. I've seen Robert Allason described as a 'slave trader' and he definitely profited from plantations where slaves carried out the work. Yuck. But look also at the full address of Green Bank Observatory. It's in 'Pocahontas County, West Virginia'. Both green banks also bump us against the brutality of colonialism.

Ending on a milder note, here's my wife Margaret in the beautiful woodlands surrounding Greenbank, after a working day.