Notes on the Romanesque

Pining for Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture in a country dominated by the ghastly and barbarous Northern Gothic, I recently made the lamentable mistake of visiting the Italianate Church of St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton. This was foolish as although the façade is acceptable from a distance, the 19th Century church’s detailing & interior should be avoided like the plague.

Having recently re-visited the utterly perfect San Miniato al Monte, I found the gross vulgarity of Victorian ersatz architecture almost too much to bear. With its lovingly hewn stone & marble, the Italian basilica is a testament to a profound faith – albeit one grounded in humanity – and is the product of generations of skilled artisans; Thomas Henry Wyatt’s concrete neo-Romanesque construction is the product of engineering and Victorian acquisitiveness. It seems that the crass yet somehow aptly named Hon. Sidney Herbert couldn’t bring back an actual church as a souvenir of his grand tour so instead had one knocked up on his estate. Were he alive today, he would doubtless be the proud possessor of a plastic tourist reproduction of Michelangelo’s David or even an oh-so-droll kitchen apron featuring the statue’s penis.

Having said all this, Wilton Church serves a purpose but only if firmly kept in one’s peripheral vision as though it were an afterimage of the real thing. The purpose is, of course, to act as a mute reproach to the horrors of Northern gothic and to the vulgar excesses of Northern nature itself.

To make a proper comparison between the commendable restraint of Italian Gothic and the ill-bred exuberance, or gushiness, of Northern counterpart, take nearby Salisbury Cathedral, a building created by skilled stone masons and other craftsmen rather than by penny-pinching architectural purveyors of holiday souvenirs.

Much lauded by upwardly-gazing dribbling rustics and tourists, Salisbury veers towards an unthinking celebration of the thrust of nature pointing ever upwards. Calling to mind a cabbage run to seed or – more obviously and crudely – a rampant rampaging phallus, the thing is out of all proportion both aesthetically and spiritually. A lapidary ode to vascular congestion, Salisbury is at one with the perfectly foul club-wielding Cerne Abbas Giant and is, incidentally, the subject of Golding’s novel, The Spire (the title is revealing in its use of a synecdoche). Its one redeeming feature is that, being an example of Early English Gothic, it is less infested by the writhing stone tendrils of, say, York Minster or Gloucester Cathedral.

Northern Gothic in whatever form involves a craven submission to both the supernatural and to nature; and by nature I don’t just mean the grossly all-pervasiveness green stuff we find all around us, but also the baser urges so celebrated by writers such as D.H. Lawrence. In the case of Salisbury one might go so far as to see it as at one with the kind of reductionist thought exemplified by the likes of Richard Dawkins. One might speculate that the early Church was so anxious to dominate primitive beliefs and cults through assimilation that it became infected.

A clue to the Romanesque’s superiority to the Northern Gothic is in the name (coined by later art historians). Yes, it possesses Gothic elements but these are subject to severe classical restraint.

Take, for example, the exquisite San Miniato. The building sits full square on the earth; there is no turgid thrust for the skies. The undemonstrative polychrome patterns on the façade are elegantly geometrical; there are no wildly twisting and thrashing organic tendrils. The five arches on the lower register and the decorative ones above are Roman and suggest calm stability (were they Gothic there would be a rippling tension). The building is comfortable as its own focus; it is not pointing elsewhere to some false transcendence. Above all, it is a building that does not seek to brow beat the viewer into submission to some entirely other divinity; rather, it respectfully invites calm contemplation. For its builders the divine and the human were one and the same and both transcended brute nature.

On Not Grasping the Rules

I was slightly preoccupied with code yesterday when my wife asked if a particular handbag was “OK for Florence”. I never really understand questions like that so I grunted in a vaguely positive way. This, it transpired, was something of a mistake.” You aren’t really taking this holiday seriously, are you?”

Trying to redeem myself, I pointed at another handbag & told her with huge, almost maniacal enthusiasm that I thought that one was perfectly lovely and just the thing for Tuscany. It turned out I was digging a far bigger hole for myself. Any halfway decent husband would have remembered that his wife had carried that one last year.

Goings On in HM Prison Service

On the way back from Salisbury Hospital this afternoon, I heard the most inane program on Radio 4, All in the Mind. Sharon, who is obviously very well qualified with presumably nothing less than a full NVQ in gormless therapy and deeply concerned applied niceness, pointed out that many people in British prisons are really quite depressed.

Another of Sharon's astonishingly astute observation was that prisoners had "a lot going on for them" (she repeated this striking expression no less than 3 times). Aside from depression, the things they had mainly got going on for them were severe learning difficulties. So nice of Her Majesty's Prison Service to recruit people with whom these sad wretches evidently feel comfortable.

On the Kindle & Kindling

You would have imagined that a product aimed at bookworms would have been given a better, slightly less biblioclastic sounding name. Books have been kindled throughout history, although only two instances spring immediately to mind: the Nazi bonfires of the 1930s and the burning of the Satanic Verses by Islamofascists in 1988. (An irreverent thought springs to mind: were the latter incident to have taken place today, would the bearded ones have gone to the vast expense of buying lots of electronic ‘readers’, downloading Rushdie’s novel and then burning them?) One wonders at what temperature Amazon’s Kindle kindles – presumably not at Fahrenheit 451.

Of course, electronic gadgets are incredibly attractive … and they remain so for at least a week or so after purchase. When confronted with the choice of a brand new Kindle or a musty second-hand book, one’s inner Caliban reaches out for the digital device, primitive hairy digits trembling with barely restrained excitement. The nasty horrid book isn’t shiny white; it doesn’t have buttons for turning pages or for making annotations; being made from paper, it can’t boast an incredible paper-like screen; and it certainly doesn’t have any USB ports.

Having gazed unenthusiastically at his free copies of ‘classic’ books, Caliban tries not to dribble too much over his new toy as he struggles to download one of the many best sellers available from the Amazon site. Now that he has spent some $489 on the Kindle, he is in the fortunate position of being able to buy electronic books at only $9.99 a copy. Ignoring the Kindle Store’s basic economics section, Caliban turns to popular fiction. Maybe, The Da Vinci Code will be easier to read with a paper-like screen. He reaches for his credit card.

Ariel gazes sadly at the neglected non-virtual second-hand book, The Essays of Joseph Addison. Despite having been published in 1898, there has been no battery failure and it is working surprisingly well. Even the marginalia-feature is still functioning perfectly – the book has been liberally annotated in copperplate handwriting by its extremely erudite Victorian first owner. Ariel turns a page with almost as little effort as Caliban clicks away at his buttons and considers how amazing it is to acquire a completely wireless entertainment device for a mere £2.

Being Thorough in All Things; 101 Uses for NHS Forms

I have the deepest, deepest respect for the National Health Service, particularly as in about fifteen days’ time an amazingly capable and fantastically proficient NHS surgeon is going to drill a tiny, tiny hole into my leg and fix a lumpy-bumpy just above my dear little tummy button. Obviously, it would be preferable if doctors could bring themselves to use adult terms like keyhole surgery, navel and hernia, but they seem to find this kind of inane baby talk strangely comforting. Perhaps it helps them forget the gory butchery of the operating theatre.

I won’t bore you with the technicalities. Suffice it to say that the operation is immensely complicated, very hi-tech and – to use an unfortunate phrase – absolutely cutting edge. As far as can be gathered, it involves a miniaturized submarine crewed by a team of especially athletic and photogenic medical mariners. They nip in through the hole in my leg, travel up my thigh, navigate through the dark and stormy horrors of my pubic region and finally surface just above my diaphragm. There is then a spot of technical wizardry with lasers, photon torpedoes and a largish bit of sticking plaster. As long as that perfidious scumbag, Donald Pleasence, is kept out of the picture, I should survive.

Aside from the very, very slight possibility of dying young(ish), the only trouble with having an NHS operation is that one spends an unconscionably long time hanging about in garish neon-lit waiting rooms filling in forms. For most people, this doesn’t seem to be a problem; they scribble away for a few minutes then returns to the dubious delights of battered copies of Badger Hunting Life or Caravan Owing Fly Fishers’ Monthly. For those of a more ruminative literary-philosophical bent, the forms, coupled with the excessive amount of time one has on one’s hands to complete them, present something of a challenge and – let's admit it – an irresistible temptation.

It is with third question that I first stumble. Ethnicity? I scribble “Mainly Jewish” then pause for thought. I would willingly lay down my life for Israel and hate to admit this but, despite my mother’s laudably sentimental claims, I might not be technically Jewish. It is true that my grandfather rather looked the part but he had a brother called Rollo and did give my mother and uncles exceedingly odd names for putative Semites in the 1920’s (Clare, Eric & Frederic). I make the first modification to my answer: “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction”.

Then, there is the ethnicity my father’s side. His mother went by the name of Morfee (there was an accent in there somewhere) and, despite being a fervent Catholic, she claimed to be of Huguenot descent. However, I strongly suspect that she was really called Murphy and was of entirely Irish extraction.

There is more ethnic certainty on my paternal grandfather’s side. They came from North Devon and were smugglers, wreckers and utter bastards. One had been hung, drawn & quartered for following the family business; another, the infamous and deeply cretinous Edward Squire, suffered the same fate for attempting to poison Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I via their rectums. Doubtless I should fill you in on the Tale of the Notoriously Inept Bottom Poisoner, but I digress.

I finally decide that my ethnicity is “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction with pseudo- Huguenot probably Celtic undertones”. I support this with copious marginalia explaining that I might also have Iberian blood on account of much of the Armada being wrecked off the Irish coast and that I have always felt very Roman (Note: when I tell the receptionist that I think I might be the reincarnation of Nero and ask if this could have some bearing on my ethnicity, she gazes at me with an expression that is several degrees colder than friendly). I decide against mentioning the Celtic-Phoenician theory as this is, after all, merely an NHS questionnaire and no place for excessive prolixity.

Ethnicity out of the way, I move on to religion. This is not quite as tricky as one might think. I shove in “Lapsed Satanist; now wavering between non-Ontological Theism & Humanism” and put in a footnote (cf. Martin Buber and the later Wittgenstein). In fact, by this point there are so many annotations and footnotes on the forms that I have to ask the quite surly receptionist for a continuation sheet.

There are a few tricky questions. For instance, I wasn’t sure if snuff should be classed as a ‘recreational drug’. The receptionist wasn’t especially helpful when asked. First, she tried to ignore me and when I persisted said in an offhand manner “I have never really considered the matter”. I started to get the impression that she somehow found it in her heart to dislike me.

The minutes pass cheerfully and productively. I finally reach the penultimate question: “Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?” Disdaining the paltry little tick boxes, I scrawl “Every possibility” then thinking this a mite brusque I add “Consider the power of the Paraclete”. A moment’s consideration has me worrying that they might think I am some kind of religious nut so I beg another sheet of paper from the exceptionally bad tempered receptionist. I pen a few paragraphs explaining why, as a middle aged man, I’d be more than moderately surprised if I were pregnant but that I couldn’t entirely discount the possibility. As a preamble, I discuss the possibility of surreptitious divine or extra-terrestrial surgical intervention. I then move on to the distinction between belief and knowledge. I conclude by presenting what I trust is a lively rehearsal of Cartesian scepticism and epistemology.

The questionnaire complete, I proudly hand it to the by now furious-looking receptionist remarking that she has really got her money’s worth this time. “You do realise that someone is going to have to type this lot into the computer” is her ungrateful response. I express the hope that she will find it illuminating and return to my book, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.