A Cultural Guide to Palmyra

Dressing fashionably for the desert journey to Palmyra.

Palmyra and Islamic State have been in the news a lot recently.  Which can be testing for one's cultural awareness. But thanks to Zippy the Pinhead, who has made a visit to the ancient city in the centre of the Syrian desert, all is now clear. 

Zippy and his companion prepare themselves for a cultural visit to the desert.

A procession of women veil themselves for a ritual
at the Temple of Bel. 

Zippy looks for the procession of women at the Temple of Bel but discovers that they, along with the entire temple, have been blown up.

Zippy reports that there is really not much you need to know about Palmyra as most of the cultural bits are not there anymore.

Animals Talk on Christmas Eve

They talk.

Once upon a time I was told that on Christmas Eve rivers flow as wine, trees blossom into fruit, mountains open and reveal precious jewels and that the ringing of bells can be heard from the bottom of the sea. 

I was also told that on Christmas Eve animals can talk.  They talk to one another and have much to say.  Animals always talk to one another but humans do not hear them or do not understand.  But on Christmas Eve when animals talk we can hear and understand.  

I do not know about the rivers and the wine and the mountains and the jewels and the blossoming trees and the bells ringing at the bottom of the sea but I do know about the animals.  I have heard them talk on Christmas Eve.  These two in particular, the ones in this photograph.  Not that they say much, but they say a few simple words and that is enough. 

To hear them talk you just have to be there.

Winter Solstice Sky in London

Church Row on the eve of the winter solstice.

Usually the winter solstice falls on 21 December, but this year the exact moment - that is the moment when the night is shortest and the day longest - fell at about four o'clock in the morning on 22 December. 

So this photograph (another one taken with my mobile phone) was taken on the eve of the solstice, at 4.30pm yesterday afternoon, looking along Church Row towards St John's Hampstead Parish Church which is at least as good for its dead as for its living.

Tenth-Century Egyptian Nativity

Close up of the tenth-century Nativity at Deir el Suriani.  The inscription is in Syriac, a version of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

The Coptic Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on the same date as the Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia and elsewhere, on 7 January.  I have several times travelled through Egypt visiting Coptic monasteries - in Upper Egypt, along the Red Sea and in the Western Desert at the Wadi Natrun.  These are some photographs appropriate to the season now upon us that I took at Deir el Suriani, the Monastery of the Syrians, at the Wadi Natrun, halfway along the Desert Road between Cairo and Alexandria.

Deir el Suriani in the Western Desert.

Christian asceticism first most widely flourished at a place once known as Scetis or Scete, now the Wadi Natrun, its monasteries standing as citadels of the Coptic faith through all the adversities of the past 1700 years. After years of decline, all four monasteries (St Macarius, St Bishoi, the Syrians and Baramous) are now thriving monastic communties.

The place called Scete is set in a vast desert, and the way to it is to be found or shown by no track and no landmarks of earth, but one journeys by the signs and courses of the stars. Water is hard to find. Here are men made perfect in holiness, for so terrible a spot could be endured by none save those of austere resolve and supreme constancy.

          - A pilgrim’s account in the late fourth century Historia Monachorum

As you approach, the monasteries give the impression of enormous arks for the faithful sailing in a desert sea. But their high walls were raised only in the ninth century to protect them from Bedouin raids. The monasteries were founded much earlier.

The Church of al-Adra in Deir el Suriani.

During the great Roman persecutions of Christians in Egypt, beginning in 202 under Septimius Severus, continuing in 250 under Decius, and reaching its most awful climax under Diocletian from 303, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were martyred for their faith.

A few sought refuge in the desert, but it was only after Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 313 when the need to flee had passed, that the great exodus began. Martyrdom had offered a direct route to God; now the way would be found in the desert. In an astonishing act of anarchy, Egyptians in their thousands, rejecting any interference by the hierarchy of state or church, deserted the towns and cultivation for the barren wilderness with the aim of shedding all worldly possessions and distinctions, wishing if possible even to shed their sense of self, the better to unite with God. 

Through them Christianity explored another dimension, as they strove to embody eternity in their lives. St Antony said, ‘Let no one who hath renounced the world think that he hath given up some great thing. The whole earth set over against heaven’s infinite is scant and poor.’ That quiet voice from the Egyptian desert, which said that each living moment carried its eternal freight, was to have as profound an impact on the Western imagination as all the Greek sophistication of Alexandrian thought.

It is Deir el Suriani, the Monastery of the Syrians that most suggests a desert ship, its undulating ochre walls riding a wave of sand. Domes, towers and crosses make the superstructure, and palms wag within like prizes bound for Kew Gardens.

The tenth-century Annunciation fresco at al-Adra
in Deir el Suriani.

You pass through this northern wall by a small doorway into a forecourt, then left into the courtyard before the church of the Virgin, al-Adra, remarkable for its frescoes in the semidomes of the choir.

The tenth-century frescos in the south semidome, where the theme is the Annunciation and the Nativity, are the finest still to be seen in situ in a Coptic church in Egypt, the colours as striking as in an illuminated manuscript. 

Gabriel is shown approaching Mary who stands within the doorway of a building. The Virgin is then shown reclining on a couch, the Christ child wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger, though in an unusual feature his legs are bare. Joseph is seated pensively below, while around are angels, shepherds and the Three Kings.

The fresco in full of the Nativity in the semidome of al-Adra Church in Deir el Suriani in the Wadi Natrun.

The monastery has a particular attachment to the Virgin Mary; originally it was founded in her name as the Theotokos, the Mother of God. But the death and resurrection of Jesus is also marked; at the west end of the church is an ebony reliquary containing the hair of Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene and the Shroud of Jesus

The volcano rising behind Madelena.

The island of Pico in the Azores is named for its mountain, its peak, which is a towering volcano, the highest mountain in Portugal, except that the Azores are nowhere near Portugal, they are almost halfway across the Atlantic.  But that is by the by.

The capital of Pico is Madalena.  And in the middle of the town, overlooking the sea, is the Igreja de Santa Maria Madalena, the Church of Mary Magdalene, built in the sixteenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

I was looking round the church and noticed something odd about the statue of Mary Magdalene which stands by the altar.

Devotional card showing Santa Maria Madalena.

This devotional card which I picked up at the church illustrates what I mean.  Mary Magdalene is clutching a cloth to her breast. The cloth is the shroud of Jesus.  She has been to the tomb but has found it empty.  Only the cloth remains.

This is what Peter saw when he went into the tomb, he 'seeth the linen clothes lie.  And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself'', says the gospel of John 20:6-7.

Piero della Francesca has Mary Magdalene in a familiar pose, 
holding a big anointing jar. 

But in John's gospel Mary Magdalene does not enter the tomb.  She does enter the tomb however in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and though none of them mention the linen clothes we can suppose that Mary Magdalene saw them there and perhaps picked them up and clutched them to her breast as portrayed by this statue of her in the church.

There is nothing odd about any of that.  It is what you would expect.

Except that this is the only time I have seen Mary Magdalene clutching the shroud of Jesus.  Maybe there are plenty of examples and I have just missed them.  But what I do see ad infinitum is Mary Magdalene holding the jar of anointing oils. This painting at Arezzo by Piero della Francesca is typical.  

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus on the third day.  The jar announces the expectation that she will find him at the tomb.

But the shroud says something else.  It says that she has found the tomb empty.  

This is a shocking moment.  It is not a moment conveyed by the anointing jar.  But it is conveyed by the shroud.  The tomb is empty and the body is gone.  No explanation is offered.  In the original version of the gospel of Mark which ended at 16:8 there is no resurrection appearance.  Verses 16:9-20 were added very much later.  Originally there is only the empty tomb.  

That is why this statue of Mary Magdalene struck me as unusual and odd.  It directs our attention to that moment when there was nothing there.

Late Winter Afternoon in London

I took this photograph at about 4.30 this afternoon while walking through Hampstead Green. I used the camera in my mobile phone - which is the great virtue of mobile phones.  I never phone anyone and nobody phones me but mobile phones give you a small convenient camera that allows you to take photographs on a whim. 

Nessim Hosnani in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet

A present for me from Jonathan Dawson.

A while back I had a correspondence with Jonathan Dawson of Tangier.  In the middle of that he went to Egypt, as I believe he does from time to time.  From Alexandria he sent me an email saying he had a present for me, something he had picked up in a second hand bookshop.  Some weeks later a copy of English Public Schools by Rex Warner, of all people, arrived in the post.

Winchester College as illustrated in Rex Warner's English Public Schools.

English Public Schools turns out to be a short book with many illustrations, colour and line, and text which gives a brief history of ... well, of English public schools.  It was published in 1945 by William Collins of London as part of a series called 'The British People in Pictures'.  I suppose this was a follow-on from the war effort, a book to show ourselves and the world how we are and how we got here, thanks to English public schools. 

A line drawing in the book.

It is a pretty little book and perhaps sold to the parents of children who were in the appropriate public schools (not all of even the best are covered in the book). I doubt it was a bestseller overseas. And yet here it had come from a second hand bookshop in Alexandria. 

And anyway, why on earth had Jonathan Dawson sent me this book?  I supposed he saw it as a curiosity because it was written by Rex Warner, a classicist who had taught in Egypt for a time, had done an introduction to Cavafy's poems, and had translated Xenophon's Persian Expedition, the version that Lawrence Durrell had drawn on when he gave Nessim Hosnani his historical dream in Justine. 

He saw so clearly the shrine the infantry built to Aphrodite of
the Pigeons on that desolate alluvial coast. They were hungry. The
march had driven them all to extremities, sharpening the vision
of death which inhabits the soldier’s soul until it shone before
them with an unbearable exactness and magnificence. Baggage-
animals dying for lack of fodder and men for lack of water. They
dared not pause at the poisoned spring and wells. The wild asses,
loitering so exasperatingly just out of bowshot, maddened them
with the promise of meat they would never secure as the column
evolved across the sparse vegetation of that thorny coast. They
were supposed to be marching upon the city despite the omens.
The infantry marched in undress though they knew it to be mad-
ness. Their weapons followed them in carts which were always
lagging. The column left behind it the sour smell of unwashed
bodies — sweat and the stale of oxen: Macedonian slingers-of-the-
line farting like goats.

Bookplate showing the the book had been given to the
English Girls' College in Alexandria by Baron George de Menasce.

And then I noticed the bookplate stuck on the front flyleaf.  'English Girls' College, Alexandria, Library', it said.  And 'Presented by'. Presented by Baron George de Menasce, February 1954.  Now George de Menasce was the son of Baron Felix de Menasce; his stepmother was Baronne Rosette de Menasce; and hs niece was Rosette's granddaughter Claude Vincendon, the third wife of Lawrence Durrell. 

Baron George de Menasce.

Durrell met Claude in Cyprus in 1955 while he was writing what would become Justine.  She would help him complete the book; she also told him of her family background  which decided Durrell to transform what he had intended as a single-volume novel into a quartet with the Coptic Hosnani family actually based on Claude's own Jewish family in Alexandria.

In particular Durrell drew on the secret activities of Baron George de Menasce, the man who throughout the war gave wonderful piano concerts and afternoon teas for the British troops in Alexandria, and who was awarded an OBE for his services to Britain.  The man who was also secretly working to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.  The idea for the Palestine conspiracy in The Alexandria Quartet comes from Claude's revelations to Durrell about the clandestine actvities of her uncle George de Menasce - whom Durrell turned into the Coptic leader of the conspiracy, Nessim Hosnani.

The English Girls' College in Alexandria in 1939.  The girls are preparing themselves for English public schoolboys.

I had wondered when George de Menasce got out of Alexandria.  I knew he had been transferring his valuable collection of oriental porcelain to Britain, mostly by giving it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge which I reckon involved a trade-off of some kind - so much for the Fitzwilliam and so much for George.  I knew he was in London in 1956 because Claude went to see him there then; he paid for her children to go to English public schools while she went off to live with Durrell in the South of France.  And now I know that Baron George de Menasce was still in Alexandria in 1954.  The world there looked like it would go on in the same way forever and ever.  Within a few years it was gone.  And so was George.

The Mother of Stupidity

Metaphor can be the mother of invention.  More often it is the mother of stupidity as Zippy the Pinhead has found out.

For more about my friend Zippy the Pinhead see here.

Beyond the Limit with Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said and Lawrence Durrell

Beyond the limit.

I am told that Mustapha Marrouchi is highly thought of among those who like a bit of theory.  Marrouchi is Algerian and he writes about Edward Said and postcolonial theory.  As the tag says to a recent article of his (about Paris, see below), 'An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, Mustapha Marrouchi lives on borderline between the West and Rest. He is the author of half-a-dozen books, including The Fabric of Subcultures'. He has been invited to speak at the Durrell School in Corfu where, I gather, he made a great impression.  So what is there not to like? 

Not that it should matter in the world of postcolonial theory and relative values but it also turns out that Marrouchi, recently fired from his position as a professor of English literature at an American university, is a plagiariser on a grand, indeed an imperialist, scale.  Twenty-three of twenty-six works turn out to be based on material stolen from other writers, including John Updike, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said (yes, he not only writes about Said but he steals from Said what he writes).  Has he stolen from Lawrence Durrell?  I wish somebody would say.

What I find especially endearing is that he would barely change a word except to convert British spelling to American.  As the Las Vegas Review Journal reports, 'The investigation revealed Marrouchi primarily stole from works published in the London Review of Books and would often change just a few words, specifically words with British spellings to American spellings'.

Retraction Watch reports that 'Perhaps most eyebrow-raisingly, Marrouchi plagiarized whole passages from Salman Rushdie’s London Review of Books essay “Imaginary Homelands” in an essay he then sold as a memoir of his own childhood'.  Who needs a childhood when you can steal it from Salman Rushdie? 

The Chronicle of Higher Education gives a sampling of some of Marrouchi's finest moments.

And The Cabinet of Plagiarism makes the point that Marrouchi has been doing this for decades and nobody noticed.  Except occasionally the person who was being plagiarised.  Which suggests, says The Cabinet of Plagiarism, that nobody ever reads postmodernist drivel anyway. 

But Marrouchi is far from finished.  In January this year, after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, Marrouchi wrote an article (in this case the words ring true of the man) saying that murdering people in Paris is what you would expect in a country which allows, for the sake of freedom of speech, cartoons to be drawn of the Prophet Muhammed. 'What else did these cartoonists expect? When you attack the last rampart, the terminus, the citadel of a religion that struggles on a daily basis to shield itself from all sorts of invasions coming from the West: Nike, CNN, BBC, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, you must take responsibility for your actions.'  There you have it!  Twitter and the BBC and the blood flows on the streets of Paris as it did last January and Mustapha Marrouchi wants us to understand that 130 more dead just the other day is the consequence of the intolerable assault of Nike and Facebook on Islam. 

The problem began, says Marrouchi, back in 1987.  'Here, one particular culprit comes to mind, someone who opened the Pandora Box for many to follow. That person is Salman Rushdie. Muslims have never had a break ever since The Satanic Verses came out in 1987. Oddly enough, I have a copy signed by Monsieur Rushdie himself. The team of cartoonists who were killed in Paris were marching in the footsteps of Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Anne Coulter, Niall Ferguson and Co. Their main objective is to insult in the most hideous way Muslims and what they hold dear, very dear.'  That is the very same Salman Rushdie whose childhood memoir of India was thieved by Mustapha Marrouchi and transposed to Algeria. A hideous blasphemer but good enough to steal from. 

And so it goes with theory. As for the practice I gather that the Durrell people in Corfu still stand four square behind Mustapha Marrouchi (even while misspelling his name as Marouchi).  Or maybe they have not read the newspapers for a year or so.  And maybe they do not read Marrouchi's books either but just repeat his plagiarised theories.  

For more of this, see here.

Sub Tuum Præsidium

Mother of God

Ὑπὸ τὴν σὴν εὐσπλαγχνίαν or in Latin Sub tuum præsidium is one of the oldest Christian hymns, certainly the oldest to Mary the mother of Jesus.  It was found in Egypt in Greek on a papyrus dating to about AD 250.

The hymn was used in a Christmas liturgy and is still used in various revised forms and languages in the Coptic, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches and it has been beautifully rendered as Byzantine and Gregorian chants and as Mozart’s K198 Offertorio. 

In the hymn Mary is called the Theotokos, which literally means the God-bearer, but this is invariably and erroneously translated into Latin and other languages, including English, as Mother of God.

Mother of God.

The original Theotokos was Isis, mother of Horus who was the son of Osiris.  The term Theotokos was first used of Mary the mother of Jesus by Origen (whose name means Child of Horus) in 246 and its spread, thanks to Dionysius, patriarch of Alexandria, was all part of a battle to condemn the gnostics who accorded a special position to Mary Magdalene whom they identified with Sophia, that is Wisdom, whom the Egyptians identified in turn with Isis.

In the process of condemning the gnostics the Church defamed Mary Magdalene, turning her into a whore while they themselves identified Mary the mother of Jesus with Isis and raised her to the status of virgin and God-bearer.

And so we sing:

We fly to thy protection,

O Holy Mother of God;

despise not our petitions

in our necessities,

but deliver us always

from all dangers,

O glorious and blessed Virgin.

Click here for a polyphonic version of the hymn by Dimitri Bortniansky.

Michael Haag's Quest for Mary Magdalene will be published in Britain by Profile Books in March 2016 and in the United States by HarperCollins in May.

A Remarkable New Insight into Cavafy

Cavafy revealed.

I have mentioned Reframing Decadence by Peter Jeffreys in an earlier post.  That was when it was still in proof.  The book has now been published and I have a copy in my hands. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the formation of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

Reviews on the back cover.

After reading the book in proof I contributed a review which is reproduced on the back cover and which I repeat below.

Until now Cavafy’s adolescence in England has been buried in obscurity; and much of his creative life in Alexandria has been unexplained.  But now we have a work of literary criticism backed by genealogy and solid ethnography which places the extended Cavafy family at the heart of the artistic avant garde in 1870s London.  Peter Jeffreys reveals the family’s intimacy – both as patrons and lovers – with leading painters and poets.  The precocious young Cavafy was raised in a milieu that gave shape to his poet’s technique and sensibility, that encouraged him to be sexually bold and shameless, and that directed his art for the rest of his life.  Linking aestheticism in England to the decadence of Cavafy’s poetry, Jeffreys has done more than follow a literary thread; he has shown how Cavafy was literally a child of these movements. With this new advance, Jeffreys is well on his way toward a comprehensive literary biography of Constantine Cavafy. 

More about the book can be learnt by going to the website of Cornell University Press.

The Tragedy of the Templars in Slovakia

The Tragedy of the Templars will be published in Slovakia in a Czech language edition by Slovart Publishers who are already publishing The Templars: History and Myth - otherwise known as Templari: Fakta a mytus.

The Slovak Coat of Arms.  The double-barred cross was introduced to Slovakia by Byzantine missionaries in the ninth century.  It also found its way westwards where it takes the form of the Cross of Lorraine - which by permission of the Patriarch of Jerusalem was carried into the crusades by the Knights Templar.

Liverpool: A Day in the Life

Halloween along Penny Lane.

Recently I was in Liverpool.  I did a lot of walking around, for example across The Mystery and along Penny Lane and also between Wavertree and the docks.

Cakes and teas.

Liverpool was once a great city but the basis of its prosperity collapsed during the latter part of the twentieth century.  Recently however the city has been attempting to remake itself.

View from the Mersey of the Three Graces: the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building.

Along the Mersey and across from the Albert Dock I came upon the new Museum of Liverpool and went inside to learn something of city's history and way of life.

The Museum of Liverpool is the modern white building at the extreme right.

It turned out to be a Mickey Mouse museum, big on emptiness, low on content, aggressively propagandistic.

I noticed this sign.  Not that it was attached to an exhibit.  The museum is good at signs that tell you what is wrong with the world.  That is all you need to know; any exhibit or argument or demonstration or background or context would only detract from the propagandistic purposes of the idealogues who run the museum whose qualifications appear to be ignorance and idiocy.

All you need to know.

The excuse for this sign, I take it, is to explain that Liverpool has long had an immigrant population.  But only in the bottom paragraph does it allude to this.  The first paragraph tells us that Britain had an empire against which the Indian subcontinent rebelled. The second paragraph tells us that the Partition of India into a secular India and a Muslim Pakistan was the work of 'British politicians who decided to "partition" the country', forcing vast numbers of people to move and causing millions of deaths.

Fears and hatreds did indeed cause vast numbers of Muslims and Hindus to flee for their lives and millions did die.  But it was not British politicians who decided to partition the country; the demand for partition came almost at the last minute from Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who went on to become the first president of Pakistan.  It is a bit more complicated than that, as this recent article by William Dalrymple makes clear, but as Dalrymple says the overwhelming drive came from Jinnah; Britain oversaw the division only because it was demanded by Indians themselves.

Anyway, I came away from the Museum of Liverpool feeling that the city was determined to regard everyone as a victim, including itself.  If the museum is the best the city can do then Liverpool is not about to regenerate itself very soon.

The Mystery.

Templari: Fakta a Mytus

The Templars: History and Myth has been been translated into Czech and published in Slovakia and is selling very well.  A reprint is underway.

The Czech-language edition published in hardback by Slovart in Slovakia.

The Templars established themselves in Prague, capital of today's Czech Republic, where there is a story of the Headless Templar who still haunts the city's streets.

Text and illustations in the Czech-language Slovak edition.

And the Templars are also said to have crossed over into what is now Slovakia.

Back cover of new translation published in Bratislava.

Saint-Raphael and London and the War

Saint-Raphael in the South of France 1938.

Some while ago I did a post about a postcard sent from Saint-Raphael in the South of France in 1939, two months before the outbreak of the Second World War.  This has led a friend to send me another postcard sent from Saint-Raphael, this time in 1938.  So now I have two views of Saint-Raphael before the war, this one less chic than the first; it looks like something of a workaday port, though it does possess several fine sandy beaches.  

But as I said in my earlier post, old postcards make me curious.  They are small pieces of the past, ostraka you might say, or shrapnel, and they almost always have something interesting to say.  

Operation Dragoon in the South of France 15 August 1944.

It turns out that the commune of Saint-Raphael was the landing place for Napoleon Bonaparte and his forces when they arrived by ship from Egypt in 1799 prior to his coup d'état in Paris. Saint-Raphael also played a significant role in the Second World War.  

On 15 August 1944 it was the landing place for Operation Dragoon, the American, British and French attack against the Germans who until then still occupied southern France.  Little is heard about Operation Dragoon as it has been overshadowed by the larger landings at Normandy two months earlier.  Nor was it popular with the British; Winston Churchill wanted to land in the Balkans in order to deny as much of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.  But by 1944 the Americans were sending more troops than the British into the war against Germany and the decision to go ahead with an attack in southern France fell to American generals, not Churchill, who according to an apocryphal story complained he was dragooned into the operation, hence its name.

American soldiers coming ashore in Operation Dragoon.

Stiff German resistance was expected but in the event the German defences quickly collapsed.  So sudden was the Allied victory that the planners had not provided enough petrol to make a rapid advance thus allowing the bulk of the German army to retreat into the Vosges mountains far to the north.  What ultimate strategic benefit Operation Dragoon had is not clear to me but it certainly made the French feel good.  Within two weeks all of France as far north as Grenoble was free; on 28 August Free French forces liberated Marseille and Avignon.

British paratroopers dropped behind German lines
from gliders towed by American C-47s.

But back to the postcard. As you see on the reverse it was sent by 'Mummy' to 'My Sweet', her daughter Melissa Benton at 19 Norfolk Crescent, London W2. Mummy is responding to a letter just received from her daughter, a letter dictated by her daughter to her secretary. Mummy was travelling with Papa and had bought the picture postcard at Saint-Raphael but they had kept moving east, into fascist Italy, and she eventually sent it from Ventimiglia.

I have never been to Ventimiglia and the only thing I know about it comes from a letter by E M Forster written in 1917 from Alexandria in Egypt while he was there during the First World War.

'As an escape from the war Alexandria is matchless: or rather escapes', Forster wrote to Robert Trevelyan in August 1917. 'The Syrians dance. The Bedouins lay eggs. The French give lectures on Kultur to the French. The Italians build il nostro Consolato, nostro Consolato nuovo, ricco, grandioso, forte come il nostro Cadorna, profondo come il nostro mare, alto come il nostro cielo che muove l'altre stelle, e tutto vicino al terminus Ramleh Tramways. The English have witnessed "Candida" or "Vice Detected"'.

But Forster's preferred escape was the Greek, 'for the Greeks are the only community here that attempt to understand what they are talking about, and to be with them is to reenter, however imperfectly, the Academic world. They are the only important people east of Ventimiglia --: dirty, dishonest, unaristocratic, roving, and warped by Hellenic and Byzantine dreams -- but they do effervesce intellectually, they do have creative desires, and one comes round to them in the end'. Of the Greeks he singled out Cavafy: 'with much help I have read one or two [of his poems] and thought them beautiful'.
 
All that is another story, however; back to the postcard of Saint-Raphael sent from Ventimiglia to 19 Norfolk Crescent in London. 

Postcard from Mummy.

I have had a look at Norfolk Crescent on Google Street View; it possesses a rim of unattractive houses clearly built after the war. I wondered what had happened to the houses that had stood there in the time of Mummy and Papa and My Sweet.

It is said of London that the greatest damage done to it has been by town planners, greater than anything done by Hitler, and that is true. Urban planners should be shot at birth.  Nevertheless it is true that the German bombing of London did great damage and I thought I should check to see if Norfolk Crescent was a victim.  There is an excellent website for this where you can see where the bombs fell.

And sure enough Norfolk Crescent was blown to smithereens one night by a high explosive German bomb.

Norfolk Crescent off Edgware Road is at the upper left. Marble Arch is at bottom centre; Selfridges is on Oxford Street which runs off to the right.

Maybe Mummy and Papa Benton were at home that night. Maybe their daughter Melissa was there too. Maybe they were all killed by that German bomb. I have tried to find out but have learnt nothing. All I have, as usual, is the postcard.

19 Norfolk Crescent London W2. The bomb fell during the week of 7-14 October 1940.

Mary Magdalene: the Sensual and the Spiritual

I have been seeing a lot of Mary Magdalene lately.  In writing my book The Quest for Mary Magdalene I have been looking for what can be discovered of the real woman, the historical figure, such as might be found of her in the few but highly significant references to her in the gospels.  But that has been only part of the quest, for Mary Magdalene is most of all a woman whose identity has been formed in later centuries by the Church to suit its changing ideology and also by the popular imagination.

Sebastiano del Piombo self-portrait 1518.

At any rate I have been seeing a lot of Mary Magdalene lately, looking at thousands of images of her.  And in doing so I have discovered a painter I had not known before, Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547).  He was Venetian but was much in Rome where Michelangelo worked with him hand in glove, Michelangelo admiring Sebastiano's command of colour; in several paintings, according to Vasari, Michelangelo provides the line and Sebastiano provides the brilliant Venetian sense of colouring.

But I like Sebastiano's line as well.  His figures are at once monumental and contained, sensual and spiritual.

He began life as a musician, mostly a solo player on the lute, then turned to painting.  His first work that drew wide attention turns out to be the one including Mary Magdalene that I have shown in a previous post that was done for the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Venice.

Another Mary Magdalene is the one below, a detail of the deposition of Jesus' body from the cross.  Painted in 1516 it is now at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.  Once again Mary Magdalene has a contained and powerful feminine presence, a sensitivity and a knowing.

Sebastiano is not much noted these days, an oversight that I intend to correct for myself by looking more into his life and work. 

The Deposition by Sebastiano del Piombo.