Toledo, take 0

We (Margaret and I) followed Michael Scot to Toledo in Spain. Well, we travelled eight centuries after him and by train but his memory took us there. Setting aside the myths and romances, his place in the history of science rests on the translation work he began in Toledo. It's one of the key locations in his story, the first place - almost - that he appears in reliably recorded history. I would learn nothing not already known about him by physically going there but I would come a little closer to his world. Barely digested reading would start to be knocked into some sort of understandable shape. Our trip to Sicily worked well in this spirit.

From the maps, we knew we were dealing with quite a small city, its central, historic quarters easily explored on foot. "A few days should do it," we thought, planning other stops out and back on the return train journey. That was a mistake. Toledo is a very rich, dense, multicultural stew ("I found it a bit overwhelming," said a friend, comparing notes on our return). Of course one can wander the streets, take in the cathedral and a couple of other historic sites in a day or two but you don't even start to get under its skin until you've been there for a few days. If I go back (hope so!) it'll be for a week at least.

"In a land where all is old, men marvel at the antiquity of this city" says Calvert. Romans, Visigoths, Moors in turn held sway until it passed in 1085 to the control of Alfonso VI of Castile. A great city of the bibliophilic Muslim world became accessible to Christians and word spread of the riches to be found there, works of the classical world preserved in Arabic editions as well as expositions and developments of the Muslim thinkers. The Arab and Jewish inhabitants were also critical, invaluable partners in the translation effort. Multiculturalism has always fostered the development and dissemination of knowledge and ideas.

Violet Moller's book, The Map of Knowledge is a great overview of the preservation of classical learning in the Arabic world and its transmission to Christendom. The chapter on Toledo focuses on Gerard of Cremona who made his way there sometime in the middle of the 12th century. Gerard is still remembered particularly for his translation of Ptolemy's Almagest but he was only one of several translators working there towards the end of the 12th century. One often reads of "the Toledo translators", even although it's unclear whether they were an organised group working under somebody's auspices, or just a collection of individuals drawn to Toledo's unique attractions. Michael Scot's arrival there sometime around the beginning of the 13th places him in the second wave.

Violet Moller writes about Gerard's arrival in Toledo: "He would have crossed the gorge over the old Roman Alcantara Bridge and then begun the steep climb up the narrow alleyways into the city. It is easy to imagine the Toledo he found himself in, because it has changed very little since. The narrow alleyways are still steep and shaded, the shops still sell a dizzying array of knives and swords, the glittering blades neatly fanned out on velvet cushions, guarded by fearsome suits of armour..." Ms Moller is really good at these alluring descriptions - certainly didn't dissuade me from going there. But she's writing about medieval Toledo, not offering any sort of modern travel guide, and she doesn't mention the biggest difference from the Middle Ages: the thousands of people wandering around, taking photographs, filing through the historical sites, going, "this is just like the Middle Ages".

We arrived about 10 PM on a Saturday evening, about an hour later than planned thanks to a train delay earlier in the day. I had read that Toledo is a very popular day trip from Madrid but that it gets much quieter in the evening so people overnighting are favoured. It was rather shocking, then, to find the squares jumping, queues for all the bars and restaurants, people milling about exploring even the wee, off-the-beaten-track lanes, even at 1130 at night. We gave up on finding something to eat and took refuge in the only bar we could find a seat in. O'brien's had very little "local colour" of the sort tourists desire but possibly offered a more authentic experience of real, 21st century Toledans. A very welcome refuge late on a long, hot day. Five stars.

For about 24 hours I thought we had made a terrible mistake, coming to somewhere so historically interesting that it is completely swamped by tourists. It began to dawn on us, however, that we had arrived at the busiest possible time of the week and the experience improved immensely after the weekend - still busy but not overwhelming and not so much until late morning (I even googled "Toledo over-tourism" and learned that, despite the pressure of numbers, the city in fact does quite a good job of managing its visitors in a way that minimises their impact on its full-time inhabitants).

Here you see the Puente de San Martin which was constructed in the 14th century - after Scot's time there but still a long time ago. Note the tour buses parked at the far side. Every few minutes one of these buses would arrive to disgorge a party of tourists; an example can be seen here making its way towards the city. We rubbed shoulders with many such groups during our visit, trooping along more or less dutifully behind their guides, pausing to inspect solemnly some architectural or historical marvel before marching on to the next. I shouldn't be too critical. Their introductions to what they were seeing were doubtless much more structured and complete than our self-guided meanderings, although the guides seemed to vary enormously in expertise and enthusiasm and they did not get anything like as much time as we took just to look. Probably I needed a couple of our valuable days to start really seeing the city, that has been there for hundreds of years, behind the cloud of our fellow tourists in the foreground.

After Toledo, take 2, really about sporadic blogging, this is probably "Toledo, take 0", preliminaries and some first impressions. Maybe now, months after the actual events, I can put "Toledo, take 1" together.

Toledo, take 2

The original idea for this blog stemmed from the character of the old Department of Adult and Continuing Education (DACE), and the increasingly turbulent circumstances we found ourselves in, from about 2010 on. I did not want an initial burst of enthusiasm to lead to something moribund so I sounded out some of my DACE colleagues. "I won't start this unless you guys will definitely be able to contribute too," I said. "Great idea, Alec, do it, we'll definitely contribute," they said so I pressed on. Needless to say, almost all of the posts, with a couple of honourable exceptions, are mine.

For a while I tried cajoling: "a blog post doesn't need to be a lengthy essay, just a wee story of something that happened, nice or nasty, a wee thought that occured to you that other people might like, something amusing and/or interesting. Please, don't get bogged down in trying to make it fully referenced, nuanced, watertight in argument. You only need fifteen minutes to rattle out something amusing." Maybe this was the heart of the problem. Serious, responsible academics, authors of books and learned journal articles, maybe did not find it easy to turn to something lighter, possibly closer to journalism.

After a certain point I had to keep it going myself or allow it to join the innumerable graveyards of good intentions that litter the internet. It never gained any huge audience so there is no pressure to churn out brief, entertaining snippets of wisdom. Maybe I now suffer from the same reservations my old colleagues did. The posts are fewer and further between and they often take quite a while to put together, checking facts, finding useful links, etc. Vert often they're for my own purposes, kind of a notebook. If there are any interested readers, so much the better.

All this comes by way of background to the non-appearance of the latest post. I've just spent a few days in Toledo, where the medieval Scottish savant Michael Scot makes his first appearance in history. This is my third Scot-inspired jaunt after Melrose, Scotland and Palermo, Sicily. After a day or two I thought I could rattle out a quick, provisional post about Toledo and its place in the Michael Scot story. But I've started this about three times now, each time I have to edit what I say about where I am in the visit and even the quick rattling out involves fact- and quote-checking. Finally, after a couple of post-Toledo days in Madrid, I'm "rattling out" this totally different, stupid post on a train to Barcelona, one of the stages on the homeward journey. So, you get, "Toledo, take 2" and you haven't even seen "Toledo" yet. Maybe by September.

Palermo

"next stop: Toledo" I wrote, eagerly anticipating the continuation of the Michael Scot trail. Melrose was great fun but it yielded only memories of legends of Scot, the medieval astrologer, astronomer, 'wizard' of legend. Getting nearer to the real man would mean mainland Europe. We don't really know where in Scotland he came from and his first unambiguous appearance in documented history is in Toledo (well, actually Rome, in 1215, but he was there in the party of the Bishop of Toldeo). For a variety of reasons that next step has taken more than a year but Toledo still awaits; we went to Sicily.

Michael Scot's enduring fame certainly owes a lot to his association with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Jerusalem. Scot joined Frederick's Court sometime between 1220 and 1224 and spent the rest of his life with him, dying in 1235 (probably). Frederick was, apparently a remarkable man, intellectual, tolerant, bold, ruler of a huge swathe of Europe, favoured even by fate - at least at first; '...one of a small band of medieval rulers who possesses modern admirers,' as Abulafia notes (if you doubt us, Abulafia and me, just take a look not only at this tweet in which Frederick is depicted as 'literal coolest dude ever', but also at the thousands of likes and the many responses). Stupor mundi, he was called, 'wonder of the world'. The hyperbolic sense of epoch-making ubermensch has hardly lessened since.

He would always have been noted in scholarly circles but his role as Frederick's Court Astrologer brought Michael Scot and his esoteric knowledge to the eyes of the wider world. According to Kantorowicz, 'The shuddering awe which Frederick II inspired was shared by his Court Astrologer, whom people called a "second Apollo".' Dante placed both men in the appropriate circles of his Inferno, possibly boosting Scot's fame for many more centuries than might otherwise have been the case. Grasping Frederick's story is thus essential to understanding Michael's. Books and articles discussing Frederick are often useful sources for Michael. A visit to Palermo, Frederick's childhood home, capital of his Kingdom of Sicily, home at least some of the time to his Court, seemed like a great way to get closer to the latter stages of Michael's life and times.

Here is The Court of the Emperor Frederick II in Palermo as represented in 1865 by German painter Arthur von Ramberg; a vision perhaps tailored to Frederick's place in the German national origin myth. The great Emperor, noble of mien, receives some awed Muslim visitors. I was intrigued by the turbanned gentlemen conferring surreptitiously at upper right: Court Astrologers and Philosophers?

This picture was pretty much all of my Palermo-specific preparation. I think I wanted to let the city itself lead me deeper into the times and tales of Frederick and Michael. If nothing else, being there led me to read more. I found a vigorous city of great character languishing in many layers of history.

This is Palermo Cathedral. It was built in 1185 on top of a mosque that had been built on top of an earlier Christian church and was modified and augmented several times in succeeding centuries. It is one of the major buildings of the Arab-Norman architecture that emerged in Sicily in the 12th century as the conquering Norman invaders employed Arabic styles and craftsmen, indulging in the 'enthusiastic but often inelegant juxtaposition of ideas and practices derived from several cultures' (Abulafia). Palermo Cathedral is impressive if not 'elegant' but its present-day appearance owes a lot to additions and alterations on top of the Normans' characteristic eclecticism. Its fundamental Arab-Norman identity points to the cultural melting pot Sicily must have been at this time, similarly to Toledo; the right sort of place for Michael's own cross-cultural activity.

Despite the stories we don't know where or how Michael Scot died, or where he was buried. How strange, then, to stand in Palermo Cathedral just a couple of feet from Frederick's sarcophagus, from the mortal remains of the man who, 800 or so years ago, added Michael to his court, came to value his teaching and counsel, incidentally brought him to enduring prominence; sat, possibly no further away than I was from the sarcophagus, asking Michael for astrological counsel on some course of action or posing questions like, 'on what does the Earth rest?'

In the 12th century Palazzo dei Normanni (Norman Palace) we saw the beautiful, famous Capella Palatina with its blend of Norman, Arabic and Byzantine form and decoration, but also the royal apartments: ancient wood paneling, high ceilings, decorated again with Byzantine style mosaics. The palace was built not by Frederick but by his grandfather, Roger II, but he would have lived there and used it as headquarters when he was in Palermo. What trusted advisers would have been admitted to the Emperor's own, private apartments?

The great architectural attractions of Palermo were mostly built by Frederick's predecessors in the 12th century. He himself left fewer buildings to posterity. He spent much time away from Sicily and probably had less money to spend. The Castello Maniace in Syracuse is one of the few buildings of his that remains so of course we had to visit it, when we found ourselves on that side of the island. While the H P Lovecraft fan in me likes the idea of a "castle of the maniacs" this is not the meaning of the name - its name comes from the Byzantine general who originally established a fort on the island of Ortigia, perfectly placed for the defence of Syracuse. No trace of that original castle remains and what we see now is something like the building constructed on Frederick's orders between 1232 and 1240, plus some modifications in the years since. A planned second storey was never added.

Everywhere we went in Sicily we saw towns marked by or reconstructed after the earthquake of 1693. The Maniace Castle also suffered an explosion in 1704, in a room being used as an armory. The repairs after the 1693 earthquake were recent enough that the associated documents still exist, incidentally revealing more detail of the original building despite its great temporal remove. The outstanding feature of the castle is doubtless its vaulted Great Hall whose function is quite mysterious, within a military, defensive structure. Frederick may have spent time here but Michael was dead before it was completed. Is it fanciful to suggest that its incorporation of classical motifs into something Gothic mirrors the introduction of classical thinkers to medieval philosophy?

Palermo's great medieval buildings are world-famous, in great condition, very busy as tourist attractions (I might write a separate post on that topic) but the medieval city does not really persist. Perhaps one begins to get some sense of it in the Kalsa district, towards the Piazza Marina, a grand square standing where Palermo's medieval harbour has long since silted up. Frederick spent years at a time away from Palermo taking his Court with him, astrologers, animals and all so it would be wrong to imagine Michael making himself a happy home there. Nonetheless Palermo rubbed my nose in Frederick's times and the environment he grew up in, with all its geopolitical superstructure and, most importantly of all, human depth and complexity. In coming a little bit closer to Frederick's world, so that it starts to feel less cartoon-like, I feel I've also come a little bit closer to the world in which Michael Scot functioned; a fine consequence of a couple of weeks' holiday.

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.

Gerald Balfour; H P Lovecraft

This splendid portrait by G F Watts shows Gerald William Balfour, 2nd Earl of Balfour (1853-1945). Balfour was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1906, occupying various Cabinet positions; his elder brother Arthur was Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905. Gerald also followed his brother as President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). I'm not a political historian. I came across the Balfours when I read Archie Roy's great book, The Eager Dead. Archie, a past SPR President himself, tells a detailed tale from the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, drawing on previously unseen Balfour family papers he'd been given access to. It's an amazing story! Gerald Balfour plays a central role which particularly caught my imagination.

In very brief summary: Gerald and his lover, Winifred Coombe-Tennant conceived a child. Mrs Coombe-Tennant had had difficult experiences giving birth and did not relish the prospect but both of them believed they were being directed to do this from beyond the grave by the founding fathers of the SPR, Frederick Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. Their child, guided by the deceased eminences of the SPR, was meant to grow into a sort of messiah who would lead mankind into a new golden age. While Henry Coombe-Tennant had an unusual and remarkable life, it was lived largely away from the limelight. He spent his last 29 years as a Benedictine monk, perhaps a big disappointment to the dead founders of the SPR.

I was particularly struck that people at the heart of government could believe such things and act on them. I found myself wondering what people at the heart of government now might believe - well, apart from the obvious.

Andrew Conway told me about The Lovecraft Investigations, an updating of the stories and themes of H P Lovecraft in the form of a fake podcast from the BBC. I love it! Many films have started from Lovecraft's stories and few of them do him any sort of justice. By far the best adaptation I've seen is The Call of Cthulhu, an ultra-low-budget production of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, a black-and-white, silent movie, the sort of film that would have been made at the time the stories were originally written. Short on gloss, long on atmosphere, it really catches the feel of the original story. We can't call it an updating, though, it's more like an attempt to fake an artifact from Lovecraft's own time.

A cinematic or televisual updating would demand images, CGI stuff, that would leave nothing to the imagination; even worse, would compete destructively with your own imaginings. The podcast form is utterly contemporary but doesn't suffer from this problem at all. Conversations and sounds can build atmosphere in a truly Lovecraftian way while leaving any amount of room for the listener's own mental images. Since they are gathering material the podcasters leave their microphones on all the time and provide narration for the listener. Recording machinery may of course prove more sensitive than the human ear.

All sorts of updatings become possible that don't break the Lovecraftian essentials. I just loved the detailed histories that blend almost imperceptibly into the real world so you start googling names to work out who's real and who's imagined for the story. It seems absolutely correct that followers of Nyarlathotep would be found at the heart of the British establishment, that the Esoteric Order of Dagon would melt into the British Union of Fascists.

I was amused also to discover that Kennedy Fisher, one of the two (fictional) podcast hosts, has her own blog. It leads in many disturbing directions, one of them the Wikipedia biography of Oswald Mosely. There in turn it was surprising to learn about Mosley's involvement with organic farming in Britain, the origins of the Soil Association and ... someone called Lady Eve Balfour. Yes, from the same Balfour family, one of the six children Gerald had with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton. Henry Coombe-Tennant was her illegitimate half-brother.

There's no suggestion Eve Balfour had any fascist sympathies whatsoever. She lived for 50 years with another woman and may have been a sort of person the fascists would have preferred to stamp out. She and Mosley come together only in their shared interest in organic farming. But I was slightly spooked to follow a trail from these early 20th century psychical researchers and bump up against a famed British fascist, a real-world mirror of the sort of trail Dr Eleanor Peck would have drawn out so convincingly.