But when times were hard in Nineveh and the economic hardships of the city rippled out all the way to the little town of Joppa, when business profits were up only a mere 74 per cent and the wealthy Joppites were constrained to sell one of their ornamented six-horse chariots, or close down a couple of their upland sweatshops, then the presence in Joppa of the prophesying artists was openly frowned upon. The tolerance and whimsical generosity of wealthier days seemed now sinfully wasteful to the citizens of Joppa, and many of them felt that the artists who came to their quaint little haven should make no demands at all and feel grateful for whatever they got: grateful when they were lodged in the frumpiest buildings of Joppa, grateful when they were denied appropriate working tools, grateful when they had funds cut for new projects. When they were forced to move out of their rooms to accommodate paying guests from Babylon, the artists were told to remember that they, as artists, should know that it was an honourable thing to lie under the stars wrapped in smelly goat hides just like the illustrious prophets and poets of the days before the Flood. Above all, they were told to dismiss their elitist ideas: such as the notion that artists need to be among artists in order to exchange ideas, discuss craft, collaborate and learn, or that they should be free to move about dressed however they liked, and do whatever they wanted, without having a visiting Babylonian conference participant stare at them in amusement or disgust.
And yet even during those difficult times, most Joppites retained for the prophets a certain sincere fondness, somewhat akin to the affection we feel for old pets who have been around since our childhood, and they tried in several ways to accommodate them even when the going was not good, and attempted not to hurt their artistic sensibilities by being too blunt in their dealings. Thus it was that when the storm rose and the ship from Joppa was tossed by furious waves, the Joppite sailors felt uneasy, and hesitated before blaming Jonah, their artistic guest. Unwilling to take any drastic measures, they tried praying to their own gods, who they knew commanded the heavens and the seas—but with no visible results. In fact, the storm only got worse, as if the Joppite gods had other things to think about and were annoyed by the sailors’ whiny requests. Then the sailors appealed to Jonah (who was in the hold, sleeping out the storm, as artists sometimes do), and woke him and asked him for advice. Even when Jonah told them, with a touch of artistic pride, that the storm was all his fault, the sailors felt reluctant to toss him overboard. How much of a gale could one scraggy artist raise? How angry could one miserable prophet make the deep, wine-dark sea? But the storm grew worse, the wind howled through the riggings, the planks groaned and cried out when the waves hit them, and in the end, one by one, the sailors remembered the old Ninevite truisms, learned in Joppa at their grandmother’s knee: that all artists were, by and large, freeloaders, and that all Jonah and his type did all day was compose poems in which they kvetched about this and moaned about that, and said threatening things about the most innocent vices. And why should a society in which greed is the driving force support someone who does not contribute in the least to the immediate accumulation of wealth? Therefore, as one of the sailors explained to his mates, don’t blame yourselves for bad seamanship, simply accept Jonah’s mea culpa, and throw the bastard into the water. He won’t resist. In fact, he just about asked for it.
Now, even if Jonah had had second thoughts, and had argued that perhaps a ship, or a ship of state, could in fact do with a few wise prophecies to serve as ballast and keep it steady, the sailors had learned from long familiarity with Ninevite politicians the craft of turning a deaf ear to artistic warnings. Zigzagging their way across the oceans of the world in search of new lands on which to conduct free and profitable trade, the sailors assumed that whatever an artist might say or do, the weight of money would always provide a steadier ballast than any artistic argument.
When they threw Jonah overboard and the sea became calm again, the sailors fell on their knees and thanked the Lord, the God of Jonah. No one enjoys being tossed about in a rocking boat, and since the rocking had stopped as soon as Jonah hit the water, the sailors immediately concluded that he was indeed to blame and that their action had been fully justified. These sailors had obviously not had the benefit of a classical education, or they would have known that the argument for the elimination of the artist was to acquire in the centuries to come a long and venerable history. They would have known that there is an ancient impulse, running through the very foundations of every human society, to shun that uncomfortable creature who keeps attempting to shift the tenets of our certitudes, the rock on which we like to believe we stand. For Plato, to begin with, the real artist is the statesman, the person who shapes the state according to a divine model of Justice and Beauty. The ordinary artist, on the other hand, the writer or the painter, does not reflect this worthy reality but produces instead mere fantasies, which are unfit for the education of the people. This notion, that art is only useful if it serves the state, was heartily embraced by successions of diverse governments: the Emperor Augustus banished the poet Ovid because of something the poet had written and which Augustus felt was secretly threatening. The Church condemned artists who distracted the faithful from the dogma. In the Renaissance, artists were bought and sold like courtesans and in the eighteenth century they were reduced (at least in the public imagination) to garret-living creatures dying of melancholy and consumption. Flaubert defined the nineteenth-century bourgeois view of the artist in his Dictionary of Clichés: “Artists: All clowns. Praise their selflessness. Be astonished at the fact they dress like everyone else. They earn fabulous sums but they squander every last cent. Often invited to dinner at the best houses. All female artists are sluts.” In our time, the descendants of the Joppite sailors have issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria. Their motto, regarding artists, is the one coined by the Canadian immigration functionary in charge of receiving Jewish refugees during the Second World War: “None is too many.”
So Jonah was thrown into the water and was swallowed by a giant fish. Life in the dark soft belly of the fish was actually not that bad. During those three days and three nights, lulled by the rumblings of ill-digested plankton and shrimp, Jonah had time to reflect. This is a luxury artists seldom have. In the belly of the fish there were no deadlines, no grocer’s bills to pay, no diapers to wash, no dinners to cook, no family conflicts to be dragged into just as the right note comes to complete the sonata, no bank managers to plead with, no critics to gnash teeth over. So during those three days and three nights Jonah thought and prayed and slept and dreamed. And when he woke up, he found himself vomited onto dry land and the nagging Voice of the Lord was at him again: “Go on, go seek out Nineveh and do your bit. It doesn’t matter how they react. Every artist needs an audience. You owe it to your work.”
This time Jonah did as the Lord told him. Some degree of confidence in the importance of his craft had come to him in the fish’s dark belly, and he felt moved to put his art on display in Nineveh. But barely had he begun his performance piece, barely had he said five words of his prophetic text, when the King of Nineveh fell on his knees and repented, the people of Nineveh ripped open their designer shirts and repented, and even the cattle of Nineveh bellowed out in unison to show that they too, repented. And the King, the people and the cattle of Nineveh all dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and assured one another that bygones were bygones, and sang Ninevite versions of “Auld Lang Syne” together, and wailed their repentance to the Lord above. And seeing this orgiastic display of repentance, the Lord withdrew his threat over the people and cattle of Nineveh. And Jonah, of course, was furious. What my great-uncle would have called the “anarchic” spirit rebelled inside Jonah, and he went off to sulk in the desert at some distance from the forgiven city.
You will remember that God had caused a plant to grow from the bare soil to shade Jonah from the heat, and that this charitable gesture of God made Jonah once again thankful, after which God withered the plant back into the dust
and Jonah found himself roasting in the sun once again. We don’t know whether God’s trick with the plant—first placing it there to shade Jonah from the sun, and then killing it off—was a lesson meant to convince Jonah of God’s good intentions. Perhaps Jonah saw in the gesture an allegory of the grants first given to him and then withdrawn after the cuts by the Nineveh Arts Council—a gesture that left him to fry unprotected in the midday sun. I suppose he understood that in times of difficulty—in times when the poor are poorer and the rich can barely keep in the million-dollar tax bracket—God wasn’t going to concern Himself with questions of artistic merit. Being an Author Himself, God had no doubt some sympathy with Jonah’s predicament: wanting time to work on his thoughts without having to think about his bread and butter; wanting his prophecies to appear on the Nineveh Times bestseller list and yet not wanting to be confused with the authors of potboilers and tearjerkers; wanting to stir the crowds with his searing words, but to stir them into revolt, not into submission; wanting Nineveh to look deep into its soul and recognize that its strength, its wisdom, its very life lay not in the piles of coins growing daily like funeral pyramids on the moneylenders’ desks, but in the work of its artists and the words of its poets, and in the visionary rage of its prophets whose job it was to keep the boat rocking in order to keep the citizens awake. All this the Lord understood, as he understood Jonah’s anger, because it isn’t impossible to imagine that God Himself sometimes learns something from His artists.
However, though God could draw water from a stone and cause the people of Nineveh to repent, He still could not make them think. The cattle, incapable of thought, He could pity. But speaking to Jonah as Creator to creator, as Artist to artist, what was God to do with a people who, as He said with such divine irony, “don’t know their right hand from their left”?
At this, I imagine, Jonah nodded, and was silent.
X
REMEMBERING THE FUTURE
“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s
memory works both ways.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V
St. Augustine’s Computer
We must let the contradictions stand as what they are, make them understood as contradictions, and grasp what lies beneath them.
HANNAH ARENDT,
Love and Saint Augustine
IN THE FIRST YEARS OF THE sixteenth century, the elders of the guild of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice commissioned the artist Vittore Carpaccio to paint a series of scenes illustrating the life of St. Jerome, the fourth-century reader and scholar. The last scene, now set up high on the right as you enter the small and darkened guild hall, is not a portrait of St. Jerome but of St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Jerome’s contemporary. In a story popular since the Middle Ages, it was told that St. Augustine had sat down at his desk to write to St. Jerome, asking his opinion on the question of eternal beatitude, when the room filled with light and Augustine heard a voice telling him that Jerome’s spirit had ascended to the heavens.
The room in which Carpaccio placed Augustine is a Venetian study of Carpaccio’s time, as worthy of the author of the Confessions as of the spirit of Jerome, responsible for the Latin version of the Bible and patron saint of translators: thin volumes face forward on a high shelf, delicate bric-à-brac lined beneath it, a brass-studded leather chair and a small writing-desk lifted from the flood-prone floor, a distant table with a rotating lectern beyond the door far left, and the Saint’s working-space, cluttered with open books and with those private objects which the years wash onto every writer’s desk—a seashell, a bell, a silver box. Set in the central alcove, a statue of the risen Christ looks towards a statuette of Venus standing among Augustine’s things; both inhabit, admittedly on different planes, the same human world: the flesh from whose delights Augustine prayed for release (“but not just now”) and the logos, God’s Word that was in the beginning and whose echo Augustine heard one afternoon in a garden. At an obedient distance, a small, white, shaggy dog is expectantly watching.
This place depicts both the past and the present of a reader. Anachronism meant nothing to Carpaccio, since the compunction for historical faithfulness is a modern invention, not later perhaps than the nineteenth century and Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelite credo of “absolute, uncompromising truth (…) down to the most minute detail.” Augustine’s study and Augustine’s books, whatever these might have been in the fourth century, were, to Carpaccio and his contemporaries, in all essentials much like theirs. Scrolls or codexes, bound leaves of parchment or the exquisite pocket-books that the Venetian Aldus Manutius had printed barely a few years before Carpaccio began his work at the guild, were variant forms of the book—the book that changed and would continue to change, and yet remained one and the same. In the sense in which Carpaccio saw it, Augustine’s study is also like my own, a common reader’s realm: the rows of books and memorabilia, the busy desk, the interrupted work, the reader waiting for a voice—his own? the author’s? a spirit’s?—to answer questions seeded by the open page in front of him.
Since the fellowship of readers is a generous one, or so we are told, allow me to place myself for a moment next to Carpaccio’s august reader, he at his desk, I at mine. Has our reading—Augustine’s and Carpaccio’s and mine—altered in the passing centuries? And if so, how has it altered?
When I read a text on a page or a screen, I read silently. Through an unbelievably complex process or series of processes, clusters of neurons in specific sections of my brain decipher the text my eyes take in and make it comprehensible to me, without the need to mouth the words for the benefit of my ears. This silent reading is not as ancient a craft as we might think.
For St. Augustine, my silent activity would have been, if not incomprehensible, at the very least surprising. In a famous passage of the Confessions, Augustine describes his curious coming upon St. Ambrose in his cell in Milan, reading silently. “When he read,” Augustine recalled, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Augustine, in the fourth century, usually read as the ancient Greeks and Romans had read, out loud, to make sense of the attached strings of letters without full stops or capitals. It was possible for an experienced and hurried reader to disentangle a text without reading it out loud—Augustine himself was able to do this, as he tells us when describing the tremendous moment of his conversion, when he picks up a volume of Paul’s Epistles and reads “in silence” the oracular line that tells him to “put on Christ like an armour.” But reading out loud was not only considered normal, it was also considered necessary for the full comprehension of a text. Augustine believed that reading needed to be made present; that within the confines of a page the scripta, the written words, had to become verba, spoken words, in order to spring into being. For Augustine, the reader had literally to breathe life into a text, to fill the created space with living language.
By the ninth century, punctuation and the greater diffusion of books had established silent reading as common, and a new element—privacy—had become a feature of the craft. For these new readers, silent reading allowed a sort of amorous intimacy with the text, creating invisible walls around them and the activity of reading. Seven centuries later, Carpaccio would have considered silent reading part and parcel of the scholar’s work, and his scholarly Augustine would necessarily be pictured in a private and quiet place.
Almost five centuries later, in our time, since silent reading is no longer surprising and since we are always desperately searching for novelty, we have managed to grant the text on the screen its own (albeit gratingly disembodied) voice. At the reader’s request, a CD-ROM can now usurp the post-Augustine reader’s magical prerogative: it can be either silent as a saint while I scan the scrolling page, or lend a text both voice and graphic features, bringing the dead back to life not through a function of memory and a sense of pleasure (as Augustine proposed), but through mechanics, as a ready-made golem whose appearance will
no doubt be perfected in time. The difference is, the computer’s reading voice isn’t our voice: therefore the tone, modulation, emphasis and other instruments for making sense of a text have been established outside our understanding. We have not as much given wing to the verba as made the dead scripta walk.
Nor is the computer’s memory the same as our own. For Augustine, those readers who read the Scriptures in the right spirit preserved the text in the mind, relaying its immortality from reader to reader, throughout the generations. “They read it without interruption,” he wrote in the Confessions, “and what they read never passes away.” Augustine praises these readers who “become” the book itself by carrying the text within them, imprinted in the mind as on a wax tablet.
Being able to remember passages from the essential texts for argument and comparison was still important in Carpaccio’s time. But after the invention of printing, and with the increasing custom of private libraries, access to books for immediate consultation became much easier, and sixteenth-century readers were able to rely far more on the books’ memory than on their own. The multiple pivoting lectern depicted by Carpaccio in Augustine’s study extended the reader’s memory even further, as did other wonderful contraptions—such as the marvellous “rotary reading desk” invented in 1588 by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, which allowed a reader ready access to ten different books at almost the same time, each one open at the required chapter and verse.
Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 21
