Oliver Sacks' Love of Fossils

From yesterday's NYT, a short piece on the prehistoric and lapidary devotions of the neurologist/essayist:

Dr. Sacks can be even more primeval, turning the clock back as far as it will go. To demonstrate, he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, among earth’s earliest life forms. They date from the Archean era, more than three billion years ago. Stromatolites, once thought to have been long extinct until a large living colony was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia in the mid-1950s, are made up of large colonies of bacteria, often blue-green algae, and sedimentary deposits, which grow naturally in a style that Dr. Sacks likened to a layer cake.

Maybe not the most appetizing cake, but he pointed out that stromatolites are held to be responsible for converting the abundance of carbon dioxide in the earth’s Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said.

This should endear them to even the most squeamish. It is their longevity, however, that enchants Dr. Sacks, a man who still writes on a typewriter. “They’re survivors,” he said. “I like the idea of ancient things which have adapted.”

“I am horrified by poor quality and transience,” he added. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

As this suggests, his feeling for stromatolites and other long-lived natural-history curiosities is no casual attitude. While he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood, he cherishes them more now that, as he often sees, their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

Seamus Heaney on Tara

Veteran readers of ITM know that I was last in Ireland in April 2006, when I wandered the island with my brother. On a day that could be kindly described as blustery and moist, he and I arrived at Tara. With its melding of the prehistoric and the contemporary, this regal mound surveilling burials pagan and Christian was just the place for me ... even if the post I offered was a bit snarky. Tara is, like Stonehenge or Avebury, a numinous expanse, but -- as with Stonehenge and Avebury -- it is difficult to say if that impingement is the result of knowing some fragments of the place's long history, or if the architecture of the space itself causes that feeling of being touched.

The Hill of Tara has recently become a controversial space, where the demands of a burgeoning and future-focused economy battle the desire to preserve a landscape which has come to embody the past itself. The Irish government would like to ease Dublin's congestion by building a motorway nearby. At stake: Ireland's national identity in its relation to modernity and to history. Letting go of Tara's enchantment and building the road has come to mean letting go of a heritage-focused Irishness (and by that I mean an Irishness which reveres a misty past that may never have in fact existed, but certainly seems better that what had been until recently a fairly dismal modernity). The lure of the ancient has long anchored what it means to be Irish. The booming economy on the island has deeply challenged this nostalgia, and the Hill of Tara has become the point at which past-loving and future-obsessed currents meet. The past that Tara is made to embody, I hasten to add, is as that of a temporally frozen heritage site rather than the landscape as it has actually been lived and is now experienced, with its church and its instructional signs and its temporal thickness and anachronisms and its busloads of pilgrims passing through. Tara is spoken about in the controversy mostly as space that answers the demands of the dead, or as a space that serves the needs of the living, not as a coinhabited geography.

Here's Seamus Heaney on the controversy. Needless to say, he sides with the preservation of history, but does so in an interesting way: by stating that Ireland's heritage was better preserved under its colonial administrators than under its present government:

On the attitude of the Irish government, Heaney said: 'Tara had been protection under British rule. I was reading around recently and I discovered that WB Yeats and George Moore and Arthur Griffith wrote a letter to the Irish Times, some time at the beginning of the last century, because a society called the British Israelites had thought the Arc of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill. And they [Yeats et al] had written this letter and they talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work.'

The Nobel literature prize winner said Tara was 'a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit'.

The Phenomenology of Landscapes

I have been nearly successful in upholding my vow not to stimulate a single neuron between December 24 and January 1.

In years past a chunk of this time has been lost to the great vortex of MLA. For once, though, I don't have to attend this Convention of the Bespectacled, a fact both good and bad: good, because -- well, because I don't have to be there; bad, because that means we are not hiring this year, and we are down one early modernist. I have vowed to spend the hiatus as a normal person would: resting, eating, resting from eating, eating to assuage the hunger of resting from eating, resting from eating to assuage ... well, you get it. The best part of this week has been the liberation of my family from the tyranny of its schedule. No ballet classes, Hebrew school, fencing lessons, piano lessons, EcoDefenders meetings, readings, business meetings: almost nothing at all for any of us. This gift of time has given us the chance to halt our constant motion and reacquaint ourselves with each other. Interesting fact: until recently I had forgotten that I have TWO children. How wonderful it is to possess both a son and a daughter.

Today, though, most of the family has vanished to spend some time without The Killjoy (I think they mean our dog Scooby, but they seem to have forgotten that I am in the house as well. Odd.) I've been reading through an excellent book and thought I'd share it with ITM's readership, since it bears so directly on some conversations centering around the "Weight of the Past" project, on MKH's dissertation proposal, on Eileen's enduring interest in capaciously rethinking the human, and on Karl's animal-focused thoughts about boundaries and borders. Liza, a frequent contributor, will see that I have her in mind as well.

Readers may remember that not long ago in the comments to one of MKH's posts I suggested the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty as offering a usefully embodied way of thinking about horizons. Right now I'm working through an e-book heavily indebted to M-P, on the experience of stone and observer, and thought I'd share some of its foundational precepts as useful for other projects. So here is Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, laying out some guiding principles for his scholarship on neolithic stone structures:

A phenomenological perspective provides an ontological ground for the study of
things, places and landscapes, a means of approach and a way of thinking through
the body in its participatory relation with the world. I summarize some fundamental principles.

1. A phenomenological approach to landscape and place, as discussed here, using
the framework of Merleau-Ponty's thought and interpretations of this thought
by others, is not a philosophical approach emphasizing the personal and the
subjective. It is an approach emphasizing the intertwining of subject and object,
things and persons, mind and body, places and Being in the world. The rejection
of any possibility of an objective approach does not mean that we pass into a
realm of personal subjectivity, because meaning is grounded in the sensuous
embodied relation between persons and the world, an invariant ontological
ground for all feeling and all knowing taking place through persons with similar
bodies.
2. Any study begins with lived experience, being there, in the world. It must
necessarily be embodied, centred in a body opening out itself to the world, a
carnal relationship. The exploitation of basic bodily dyads provides one entry
point into the study of place and landscape. A concentric graded sense of place
and landscape provides another basic way in which meaning may be explored.
Both originate in the body and extend outwards.
3. Perceptual meanings of place and landscape are constituted as gestalts, themes
against horizons, to which the human body and the external world both contribute,
a lived structure of experience formed through engagement and interaction
in which the body-subject and the world flow into each other and form part of
each other. The body is concretely engaged in the world from a particular point
of view that is always unfolding and changing in space-time. The mobile
interaction of the body in the world creates a framework for experience which
is produced in this lived interaction. What is experienced is an articulated
sensuous theme, against a horizon, in which perception is a meaningful bodily
organization of the perceptual field. There is a dialectical exchange between the
embodied structures of the engaged perceiver and the structures of that which
is perceived.
4. This involves a dehiscence, an opening of my body to things, a reversible
relationship between touching and being touched, myself and other, the effect
of myself on things and those things on me.
5. In an experiential relationship with things there is always a chiasm, an intertwining between 'outside' and 'inside', which mediate each other but never
totally fuse. So my body is in contact with the world but still separate from it.
My body experiences from the inside but opens itself to the outside. Since, as
an embodied observer, I perceive the world through a set of frameworks which
are habitual and grounded in the body, to a certain extent anonymous, these
frameworks cease to be mine alone and are not therefore 'personal'. They are,
however, both objective and subjective insofar as they simultaneously stem
from my own body. First-person experiences can be used to gain access to the
experiences of other persons because of the incarnate and sensuous opening
out of the 'primal' embodied subject to the world.
6. Our primordial experience is inherently animistic, disclosing a field of phenomena that are all potentially animate and expressive because our perception
involves the reversibility born out of our participation in the world.
7. Direct prereflective perception is inherently synaesthetic, disclosing the things
and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects
of experience, born out of our multidimensional sensorial participation in the
world.
8. There is a fundamental temporal dimension to the body, place and landscape
carried through movement and sedimented into what places and landscapes
are and how we experience them.
9. Persons do not passively receive information and knowledge about the world
but always act in accordance with practical projects, values, needs, desires and
interests. What information and knowledge is indeed received can only be
understood in the context of these needs, desires, etc. It is in the context of a
needful body reaching out to the world that meaning and significance are
found. The manner in which we experience place and landscape is, however,
forever unfinished, uncertain and therefore ambiguous. The ambiguity inherent
to both that which we investigate (place, landscape) and how we perceive
is not a problem for analysis. Instead it provides an inexhaustible field of
affordances for us.
10. The aim of a phenomenological analysis is to produce a fresh understanding
of place and landscape through an evocative thick linguistic redescription
stemming from our carnal experience. This involves attempting to exploit to
the full the tropic nature of our language in such a way as to seek the invisible
in the visible, the intangible in the tangible. The mode of expression must
resonate with that which it seeks to express.

Reference: Tilley, Christopher. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004) pp 29-30.

Cf. this summary, p. 31: "What I have been suggesting is that rather than regarding things, placesor landscapes primarily as systems of signs, or as texts or discourses which encode meaning and reflect social identities in various ways, we can regard them as agents which actively produce that identity. In other words we need to think about places and landscapes animistically, in an analogous manner to the way in which we like to think about persons, as entities who can and do make a difference. The move is from considering things as representing the world to us to things as producing that world for us. It is a move from the cognitive sign value of things to the embodiment of things, from the code of the world to the flesh of the world, from symbol to action. Producing human meaning in the world is all about establishing connections between ourselves and the disparate material phenomena with which and through which we live, the plants and animals, landscapes and artefacts that surround us, and this is the work of tropic language, of metaphor and metonymy."

Return of the Latin Mass: Comments?

I read this recently:

Pope ends Latin Mass restriction

Pope Benedict has lifted restrictions on celebrating the Latin Tridentine Mass, pleasing some traditionalists.

The Latin Mass was largely abandoned in the 1960s, as part of reforms to make Catholicism more relevant to its worldwide congregation.

Traditionalists wanted to bring the Mass back, though some Jewish groups opposed it because of a prayer calling for their conversion.

The Pope denied claims the reversal could cause a schism in the Church.

Rift-healing

The late Pope John Paul II partially relaxed the prohibition in the 1980s, allowing bishops discretionary powers to let priests celebrate Mass in Latin if members of the congregation asked for it.

The Pope wanted to heal a rift with ultra-traditionalists who rebelled against Second Vatican Council changes.

The Church believes the majority of its congregation will continue to hear Mass in their local languages.

Catholic commentator John L Allen told the BBC in April he did not believe there would be much call for the Mass - and 40 years after the Second Vatican Council, there would be few priests able to read it.

It's Sunday, so someone somewhere is saying "Credo in unum Deum" right now (EDIT: or, if it were Good Friday, "Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis"), which is why, I guess, I thought today would be a good day for this post. I can tell you what I thought of when I was reading the BBC article, but I simply don't know enough to make anything even imitative of a final or just judgment (knowing of course that such things are impossible). First I thought of what I wrote here:

In his chapter on Derrida in The Premodern Condition, Bruce Holsinger describes at length the "interventionist medievalism" (120) of the Radical Orthodoxy group, in particular, Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. As Holsinger explains, Pickstock "aims at a wholesale dismantling of Derrida's critique of Western logocentrism through a 'recasting of the premodern' against what she sees as its pernicious recruitment by deconstruction" (121). After Writing presents a pretty easy target for a medievalist, at least so far as Holsinger summarizes it. This is despite Pickstock's erudition in Western philosophical traditions, in fact despite her insistence that the deconstructive critique of language inadequately accounts for the bodily presence necessary to produce language (a point I know I find attractive, even as I find the implied prediscursive body-as-presence argument suspicious). For Holsinger, Pickstock's work presents an easy target because she mourns the loss of the "liturgical civilization [that] existed in its purest form in the Western Middle Ages and achieved its most coherent expression as the liturgy of the Roman Rite" (125) and because she longs for something she calls "genuine liturgy" (qtd 127) to restore "real language" (qtd 127). Far from being a medieval artifact, the ideal(ized) liturgy from which Pickstock quotes dates from the Counter-Reformation, a period of intense religious longing, nostalgia, and reaction against Protestantism, and now, I suppose, recuperated for much the same purposes to inveigh against a secular "nihilistic" philosophy that suspects all promises of presence.

What leapt out at me, I suspect wholly uncharitably, was the Jewishness of two of Pickstock's bêtes noires, Lévinas and Derrida. Keeping this in mind renders Pickstock's "commitment to credal Christianity...to deploy this recovered vision systematically to criticise modern society" (qtd 119) a bit pernicious, at least to my eyes, right now.

Also, when I think of the Latin Mass and traditionalists, I think of the most famous enthusiast for the Latin Mass, Mel Gibson:

An avowed family man still on his first marriage, with seven children to show for it, Gibson smokes, raises cattle, publicly shuns plastic surgery and seems wholly unmoved by most of the liberal-left causes favored by industry peers. Recently, however, something beyond the impulse to entertain has been showing up in Gibson's work. Last year he played a former minister who rediscovers religion amid an alien invasion in ''Signs'' and a reverent Catholic lieutenant colonel in the war drama ''We Were Soldiers.'' In these films, but especially in a new movie, a monumentally risky project called ''The Passion,'' which he co-wrote and is currently directing in and around Rome, Gibson appears increasingly driven to express a theology only hinted at in his previous work. That theology is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives -- including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson's father.

Gibson is the star practitioner of this movement, which is known as Catholic traditionalism. Seeking to maintain the faith as it was understood before the landmark Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, traditionalists view modern reforms as the work of either foolish liberals or hellbent heretics. They generally operate outside the authority or oversight of the official church, often maintaining their own chapels, schools, seminaries and clerical orders. Central to the movement is the Tridentine Mass, the Latin rite that was codified by the Council of Trent in the 16th century and remained in place until the Second Vatican Council deemed that Mass should be held in the popular language of each country. Latin, however, is just the beginning -- traditionalists refrain from eating meat on Fridays, and traditionalist women wear headdresses in church. The movement seeks to revive an orthodoxy uncorrupted by the theological and social changes of the last 300 years or so.

Michael W. Cuneo, a sociology professor at Fordham University who reported on right-wing Catholic dissent in his 1997 book, ''The Smoke of Satan,'' wrote that traditionalists ''would like nothing more than to be transported back to Louis XIV's France or Franco's Spain, where Catholicism enjoyed an unrivaled presidency over cultural life and other religions existed entirely at its beneficence.''

Finally, I think of Caroline Carolyn Dinshaw in the current issue of the GLQ (thanks Michael O'Rourke for recommending it), who observes, and cautions:

I’m yet another subject of anachronism, experiencing a kind of expanded now in which past, present, and future coincide. My point in all this is that one way of making the concept of temporal heterogeneity analytically salient, and insisting on the present’s irreducible multiplicity, is to inquire into the felt experience of asynchrony. As I was suggesting earlier, such feelings can be exploited for social and political reasons; the evangelical Christian movement in the United States, for example, works off of people’s feeling out of step with contemporary mores. (190)

And that's all I have for the moment. Surely our readers have something to say, even, I hope, corrections for me and my obviously suspicious mind. Have at it.

Little Quote of the Day: Fetchez la vache

Been quiet around these parts. Here's a placeholder QOTD to supplement our various posts on heterogeneity and the English past (for example, here and here).

While browsing in a library, I ran across Bernard Ribémont's modern French translation of Jean Corbechon's Middle French version of Bartholomew the Englishman's De proprietatibus rerum. My curiosity did not disappoint me when I wondered what Jean would have to say about England.

We have the usual descriptions of England taken from Bede, but then Jean hits a snag: a wild praise of England as a land so rich that it needs nothing from other lands, a land whose people are generous, honest, fun loving, and then--you can just see him throwing his quill down in disgust--he declares that there's just too much to summarize and that the work praises England rather too much. It is 1372, after all. He then writes:

... il croit louer son pays et, en fait, il le blâme, car il dit que les Anglais descendent des Géants tout d'abord, puis de Brutus et des Troyens, enfin des Saxons. En disant ainsi, il en fait des bâtards en leur donnant plusieurs pères. Et puis il parle très imparfaitement de cette question, car il oublie la conquête faite par le duc Guillaume et les Normands, qui conquirent l'Angleterre si vaillamment qu'il en reste encore les traces dans les armoiries et les coutumes. Cela ne doit par être oublié, car il y a moins de honte à avoir été conquis par les Français ou les Normands que par les Saxons. (238)

He believes that he is praising his country, and in fact, he is scorning it, because he says that the English descended from giants first of all, then from Brutus and the Trojans, and then finally from the Saxons. In saying so, he makes them bastards by giving them several fathers. Moreover, he speaks very imperfectly on this issue, because he forgets the conquest of Duke William and the Normans, who conquered England so valiantly that there are still traces [of the conquest? of the Normans?] in the heraldry and customs of England. This should not be forgotten because there is less shame in having been conquered by the French or the Normans than by the Saxons.

(image taken from here)

Postscript: ALK just asked me, "Are there medieval accounts of boring people? Like some monk writing about another monk who was really boring." I had to say that I didn't know. Any suggestions?

London

Gibbous Moon, London
The hum of cars, the cool of night, and a gibbous moon linger at the window.
I lay in a small bed in a small room in an unfamiliar city,
drowsed by the hum, contented by the breeze, disquieted by the moon.
I have walked the streets of London.
I have tasted what wine the city offers --
tasted too much of the good wine.
Today I climbed the dome of St paul's
and seeing the crowd undistinguished from the floor tiles
thought I knew a god's eyes.
Today I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
I had read the play once and thought Brilliant.
This day I have seen a city that swallows its astonished pilgrims
into green parks and streets that glow all night.
But the gibbous moon is draining the wine
And the sober beams remind me how much I paid the priest at the cash register
for that climb up the dome.
The rays recollect how bored I was during that play
and how angry I grew at myself for being bored in the midst of brilliance.
For all the color, for all the music, for all the marvel,
there were shabby sleepers in doorways
and others sifting the refuse.
Rising from the bes, I cross to the window,
pull down the dirty glass,
and draw the fading curtains.
London, gibbous moon.

Ah, London. It brings out the failed poet in all of us.

I composed these wretched lines twenty years ago. In the summer that separated the end of undergraduate study from the beginning of a doctoral program, I found myself on a humid night a tenant of a decrepit London hotel. As an aspiring teacher, I'd been awarded a small amount of money to pursue something educational and research-oriented in these months, so I decided to buy a plane ticket and backpack through as much of the British Isles as three months and my limited funds would allow.

I arrived in London filled with all the fantasies of the place an American English major could possess. From my study of Chaucer I learned to expect a cosmopolitan bustle; from Dickens some picturesque poverty; from Samuel Johnson a city of dreams. London turned out to be far more than the museum of distant literature I'd expected, alive with a vibe in many ways more modern than many American cities (and certainly much more contemporary in its ardors than Boston, where I grew up). London was also far more marked by its colonial past than I had anticipated. This was 1987, after all, and England was smarting from racial violence, anti immigrant sentiment, IRA bombs in the subway. Somehow everything seemed less romantic and more difficult than my books had led me to believe.

But, you know, two decades ago I was pretty much an idiot. My family had not been well off enough to travel internationally -- in fact, we barely traveled locally. I hadn't experienced many big cities other than Boston, Toronto, and New York. London, England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland were imagined geographies, places I'd studied in my literature and history and political science classes but locales more abstract than real, historical rather than possessed of a vivacious present.

Despite the effusions of poor poetry the trip triggered, a lasting positive outcome of that sojourn is this: meandering through the isles and wandering especially through London cured me of wanting to keep the past a monumentally still domain. If the London of 1987 could be possessed of so much vitality, shouldn't the London of 1387 be granted just as much ambivalence, joy, danger, messiness? I suppose I was fairly late in coming to this lesson, but I've always suspected that late bloomers are the ones who learn best.

I've returned to London frequently over the years and watched in wonder as the city has changed. Whenever I'm there I also can't help encountering the me of two decades ago, usually wandering some dusky street in Bloomsbury with his own portable cloud of gloom. If I could just touch that phantom, I'd grab him and shake him and tell him to snap out of his unearned melancholy. But then again, I'm happy that the ghosts of former selves have to remain as they are. They mustn't realize the future selves congregating around them, or it would be trouble for all of us.

This year for the first time the family is joining me on my London research junket. We've rented a flat not far from the British Museum for a few weeks. My wife lived in London as a student, and other than a week we spent there together in 2002 hasn't been back since. Kid #1 has been eagerly anticipating this trip for (according to him) his ENTIRE life (that would be ten years). Talk about former selves: he's a better adjusted version of me at that age, filled with enthusiasm for castles and dungeons and relics. He can hardly wait to be able to touch as solid objects the fortifications he's only dreamt about so far. Kid #2 likewise knows London only through books, and likewise feels quite confident that she will encounter the city as those books inform her it should be. Primarily this means that she KNOWS Peter Pan will appear by her bedside some evening to escort her past Big Ben skyward into Never Land. She has had a pink nightgown set aside for this trip for over two months. She realizes that you must be wearing a nightgown to be invited to Never Land.

So expect few postings from me in the future. I return on Friday July 13th (luckily I am not superstitious), but even then I anticipate being so slammed by work upon my return that it will be tough to blog. I will drop a note or two from London, though ... and promise not to compose any more poetry. Only Young Me did that. He was so sweet in his dire little way -- but Old Me will likely slap him if he catches him speaking of hunchbacked lunar bodies again.

Happy summer, and love to all.

Jeffrey

Wæs hal, the British tongue, and English as infection

From the intriguing blog Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Gervase of Tilbury inspires a meditation on toasts:

Otia Imperialia, Book II, chapter 17:

It was Hengist's daughter who introduced the well-known custom of extending a solemn invitation to drink by saying, 'wes hāl', which means 'be merry'; to this the guest in turn replies: 'drink hāl', that is, 'drink merrily'. In the British tongue the corresponding words are cantinoch and boduit.

Nowadays we write, 'wassail' and 'drink hail'—and that's 'hail' as in hale, ie. whole or healthy, rather than merry. According to the OED, the words are not attested as toasts in either Old English or Old Norse, but were probably first used as such by the Danes in England; the earliest reference is from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in English from Lawman's translation of Wace's Brut, itself based largely on Geoffrey. The first time I toasted a health with Mrs. Roth—it was a small glass of port, my favourite drink, which she was happy to essay, and relieved to enjoy, on the occasion of her 30th birthday, spent in the City of Love; we were not yet married, but on our way—I softly called 'wassail', and was disappointed not to receive the correct response. (You say I have unreasonable standards? This I expected purely because she counts herself a mediaevalist, and an Anglo-Saxonist to boot. Still, she knew for next time.)

Gervase's editors footnote thus:

Professor Patrick Sims-Williams and Dr Marged Haycock suggest that cantinoch could be Old Welsh (or Cornish or Breton) can(t) tin uch, meaning 'with bottom up', while boduit could be Old Welsh (or Breton) bod (d)it, meaning 'goodwill to you' or 'thanks to you', influenced by Middle Irish is buide duit, 'it is well for you', or else equivalent to Modern Welsh boddwyd, 'it/he has been drowned', which is used metaphorically to mean 'celebrate'. The word can is attested in Welsh from the beginning of the seventeenth century with the meaning 'tankard'; it is quite conceivable that this loanword from English can was in the language for centuries before its first attestation, in which case the phrase would mean 'tankard bottom up!'

Conrad Roth then goes on in his blog to lament the fact that we seldom toast anything anymore. It's hard to disagree. In fact I'll toast that sentiment.

What's most interesting to me about Gervase's version of this famous scene from Geoffrey of Monmouth is that he provides -- or attempts to provide -- the "British tongue" version of the toast. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, the originator of the episode, we get a weird moment when Latin is interrupted by an outbreak of English. Geoffrey seldom interjects English (or Welsh, for that matter) into his Latin, "Stonehenge" being the other notable exception. In Wace, Geoffrey's first vernacularizer, the movement is from French to English, since the former language is being used to narrate the British story (though, admittedly, Wace has a way of making Geoffrey seem a historian of England, since Angleterre takes the place of Britannia). In Lawman, the archaic English into which Wace is being rendered is interrupted by ... more English. None of these authors gives the British version of the toast, since in each case Latin, French or English is substituting for the "British tongue." Welsh, it seems, is a language assumed incapable of communicating outside of the southwest of the island into which it has receded.

Further, for Geoffrey the English toast wassail is a kind of infection, propelled towards the British leader Vortigern by a Saxon seductress. Wassail is a fragment of Englishness that, once imbibed with the drink, lodges deep in Vortigern. He madly desires the speaker, whom he marries in a baleful miscegenation. For Gervase, it all seems so much more neutral, perhaps because the cultural stakes had by the thirteenth century become so low.

[The illustration above is a hoard of Roman drinking cups from Roman Britain (late 1st century AD) found in Hockwold cum Wilton, Norfolk. More information from the British Museum here. Though these cups had been crushed before interment, vessels from the underground which, had they been discovered in the Middle Ages, might have told a story of a deeper history of the land than was commonly recounted always remind me of a story from William of Newburgh which features a mysterious goblet purloined from a tumulus.]

Constriction, Circumscription, Critique: More Other Worlds

Why are these possible worlds and alternate realities I've been aggregating necessary, at least to the England that dreamed them?

In part -- as came through in the comments to yesterday's post -- these Other Worlds offer a potentially affirmative vision, a version of the world that doesn't necessarily include the circumscriptions, foreclosures, and abjections through which stable identities come into being. True, many times these worlds open a portal upon memories of historical traumas that limn the present. Just as frequently, through such a portal can be glimpsed a more capacious ordering of that present -- and by more capacious I also mean more enchanted and more just.

One way of explaining the allure of these Other Worlds is to emphasize their escapist potential, since they are in part oneiric geographies that, once entered, could allow the dreamer to depart a troubled present without changing it, at least for a while. But that's only part of the story. By asking what the present would be like if it were configured differently, by wondering what Now would be if Then were remembered either better or simply differently, these Other Worlds offer, at least potentially, the opportunity for trenchant social critique, for imaging the world otherwise.

Fantasy is likely never the best way to change the mundane givenness of a particular life, of a particular world ... but fantasies of alternate realities do emphasize the contingency, the non-inevitability, of the world as currently known. Medieval England's Other Worlds invited the nation to ponder what it had abandoned to become itself, what other possibilities there might be for forming community in the realm.

When dinosaurs roamed Eden

Perhaps you are foolish enough to take the travel advice we offer from time to time here at ITM. Perhaps you have already booked your ticket for JesuslandJerusalem in Orlando, where history comes alive and the Messiah walks the earth to the accompaniment of "original musical productions." So, having shaken hands with a Jesus impersonator, what do you do next?

Book a ticket for the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, of course. Where else can you see dinosaurs roaming the Garden of Eden? According to the New York Times, you can enter the following alternate universe:

Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

What is glossed over blithely by the museum's curators is that the Garden of Eden was not actually large enough to sustain the nutritional requirements of thousands of herbivorous dinosaurs, and what else could God say but "D'oh!" when an especially peckish Apatosauraus devoured the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, snake and all? Then there is also the untold story of how a rebellious T. Rex devoured Abel (there just wasn't a lot of meat to go around) and Cain had to shoulder the blame.

All snark aside, Edward Rothstein's museum review from which I've posted an extract is patient and, given the museum's mission, generous.

PS If you'd like to follow through ITM's ongoing conversation about fantasizing the past as a place for the present to inhabit, you may be interested in these earlier posts:

• History Comes Alive -- with "Original Musical Productions"
  
• History, Living and Otherwise (a bit on what might be at stake in -- following Dr. V -- could be called speaking for the dead)
  
• Ever Dream of Being Red Cross Knight?
  
• Raising a Modern Day Knight
• Of Poisoned Landscapes, Variant Memories, and Undetermined Futures (attempts to theorize some of what is at stake in these discussions of popular medievalisms)
  
• Giving the Word "Retro" New Meaning ... (On The Shire Residential Community; the comments here are especially lively and should not be missed)
• An Embarrassing Revelation (something more personal on fantasies of the past and their relation to the present)