We have to ask ourselves why T. E. Shaw would have wanted to use the portrait illustrated here as had been claimed in Wikipedia (See comment from Tobi, below, about having it removed). The Mint started out as a series of notes about his service in the R. A. F. in England from August until December of 1922. He had enlisted as "John Hume Ross". His previous job (as T. E. Lawrence) is described by J. M. Wilson in his preface to the Penguin edition of The Mint as "...at the Colonial Office as adviser to Winston Churchill on Middle Eastern affairs." He had planned to leave that post as he wanted to put his former identity as "Lawrence of Arabia" far behind him. He could have used the pencil portrait by William Rothenstein (1920) which did not show him in Arab garb, or he could have commissioned another.
The bookplate on the left had been pasted in my first edition of T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, Ed. A. W. Lawrence, Jonathan Cape, London, 1937. It bears a T.E.L. monogram; the Latin motto of the R. A. F. and a desert scene with camels (I placed the coloured square on the graphic to prevent forgery). The only T. E. Lawrence bookplates apparently known are posthumous, made for his estate and are on books from his Clouds Hill library. In a letter to Edward Garnett of October 5th, 1933 Shaw is discussing someone else's bookplate and says "I'm not able to put any mark in my books - unless, sometimes, T.E.S. in pencil on the fly-leaf...". The incongruity in design of the bookplate puzzled me: the normal format for a monogram contrasted with the T.E.L. used by his fans to this very day but the R. A. F. motto is odd for a fan fantasy bookplate. I contacted Nicole Wilson about it and she thought it was curious and that they (her and J. W. Wilson) had never came across any statement in his letters about him thinking of having one printed. She also said "One can only think that this plate was the work of some artistic person who wished to represent Lawrence's life in that way. We haven't seen it anywhere else". I had about the same thoughts, thinking, too, that it was an odd design to use. I did expect, though, that it would be a well-known "fantasy" piece, so I was surprised to hear that they had not encountered it before, even though I could find no record of it through Google. If anyone would have known about it would have been them. Now, I am thinking that the iconography of the bookplate is no more strange than the iconography in what was claimed as Shaw's choice of a frontispiece for The Mint.
I can add nothing substantial to the description of this book and its history to what is covered already by J. M. Wilson in the link I gave for the book and in the Wikipedia entry for it, but I can say that I think the iconography of both suggests the meaning of transition. That Lawrence had twice changed his name and had become an enlisted man in the military is more than just trying to lose the "Lawrence of Arabia" identity. He could have become anything at all and still have done that. The first part of his process was to obliterate the old and that is explained in the use of the word "mint". We will start to look at the second part tomorrow. It becomes especially clear with the absence of unpleasant distractions which his service in India gave him.
"Something about this Odyssey effort frightens me. It's too big: Homer is very very great: and so far away. It seems only a sort of game, to try and bring him down to the ordinary speech of my mouth. Yet that is what a translation ought to mean. I do it, tacitly, every time I read him: but that is for my own belly. Isn't there a presumption in putting my version abroad?"
"Obviously the tale was the thing; and that explains (without excusing it to our ingrown minds) his thin and accidental characterisation. He thumb-nailed well; and afterwards lost heart. Nausicaa, for instance, enters dramatically and shapes, for a few lines, like a woman - then she fades, unused. Eumaeus fared better: but only the central family stands out, consistently and pitilessly drawn - the sly cattish wife, that cold-blooded egotist Odysseus, and the priggish son who yet met his master-prig in Menelaus. It is sorrowful to believe that these were really Homer's heroes and exemplars."
Shaw's translation attempts to recreate the underlying meaning which he accomplishes through his intuition (ingrown mind). Any sort of history, even that of the translation of myth is tempered by its time, and in our time, we see in The Odyssey a description of the ideal father, wife, and son. Shaw might have been somewhat unjust to Homer as Homer was writing from his time, too. But myth is the realization of the unconscious and the Introverted Intuitive sees deeper than most. Personally, I think that Shaw's compensation of his perception of Homer is very good in the actual translation.
Compare Shaw's translation (Book 11 excerpt):
"Penelope is so careful, knowing, and of such excellent discretion; the dear daughter of Icarius. Let me see, a young wife was she not, when we left her for the war? The infant then feeding at her breast may now be sitting with the men, one of them: a happy son to see his father's return and dutifully fold him in his arms."
with the others here:
W. H. D. Rouse translation (Published in 1937, but he says ""To guard against possible mistakes I add that the translation was made before T. E. Lawrence's Odyssey was published"):
"She is full of intelligence and her heart is sound, your prudent and modest Penelopeia.
"Ah, she was a young bride when we left her and went to the war; there was a baby boy at her breast, and I suppose by this time he counts himself a man. Happy boy! His father will see him when he comes, sure enough, and he will give his father a kiss as a good boy should."
A. T Murray, 1919:
"...for very prudent and of an understanding heart is the daughter of Icarius, wise Penelope. Verily we left her a bride newly wed, when we went to the war, and a boy was at her breast, a babe, who now, I ween, sits in the ranks of men, happy in that his dear father will behold him when he comes, and he will greet his father as is meet."
Samuel Butler, 1900:
"...for Penelope is a very admirable woman, and has an excellent nature. We left her a young bride with an infant at her breast when we set out for Troy. This child no doubt is now grown up happily to man's estate, and he and his father will have a joyful meeting and embrace one another as it is right they should do,..."
See, also, the Greek text with which those very familiar with the language (unlike myself) might better judge the various translations.
On Monday, another project on T. E. Shaw's mind while serving in India: The Mint. Have an ideal weekend.
The perceptions of T. E. Shaw in India are quite different as expressed by B. V. Jones and Shaw, himself. Jones' accounts are very personal as one might expect being written as a memorial to Shaw, but they also omit much about the landscape and climate. Shaw's own accounts says much about the place but he speaks of the people he served with in generalities. It would be easy to interpret that by saying that Shaw did not build any personal relationships with the men he served with, but most people do not understand the Introverted Intuitive. We do build close personal relationships quite slowly, but more importantly, we compartmentalize our lives so that one group of friends might have little or no contact with other groups of friends. These groups are constructed around shared interests as cultural frames and we become a typical part of the dynamic of the group "one of the guys" you might say. However, our interests are so numerous and varied that we would seem to be an entirely different sort of person by each group. Only at the outset of each relationship would we express our true selves, and then, it would be limited and guarded until some mutual trust was achieved.
This same process happens with individuals as well as groups and it would be very rare for any individual to know us completely, even our own family members. Very close relationships usually take years to develop. Since the death of my wife, people have asked me if I thought that I might marry again. My answer is always "No". Sometimes I give a brief and "clever" answer as to why, but the complete reason is that I was with my wife for about twenty years and it took almost that whole time for us to build a very close relationship. Part of the problem was the "opposites attract" phenomenon: my wife was an extravert.
In the play starring Max Adrian"An Evening with GBS", sometimes given as "By George" and based on the words of George Bernard Shaw, GBS explains that on discovering some letters between his wife Charlotte and T. E. Lawrence after her death that there were things about her that he never knew "for she poured out her heart to Lawrence". This demonstrates the depth of communication that, rarely, can occur with an Introverted Intuitive. Yet some people who have studied T. E. have thought of him as duplicitous. The word gives a very wrong impression of the person.
What follows is a set of photographs I took this morning of B. V. Jones published account of T. E. Shaw in India from the first edition of T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, 1937, which was omitted in the subsequent abridgments. Click on them to enlarge or right click for other options (depending on your browser):
Next, I have selected excerpts from what T. E. Shaw had said about India in some of his letters:
In a letter to his mother of June 16th, 1927:
"...What else? Nothing to speak of. I came out here to avoid the publicity which would inevitably be fanned up by the sale of Revolt in the Desert . In this I have succeeded excellently. There is not enough local press to bother me: and the local people who might try to see me are not allowed into camp, and I never go out. So only the airmen know of my existence, and they are too used to me, as a daily object, to be interested in a reputation which comes to them as a faint echo from the London papers. Very few of them read books: fewer still read any but the English provincial papers which their parents send them. Consequently I am not bothered by anybody at all. The officers steer clear of me, because I make them uncomfortable. It is very good to be left so much alone."
To Robert Graves, June 28th, 1927, He ends the long letter:
"...Will you, finally, make clear that I like the R.A.F.? The being cared for, the rails of conduct, the impossibility of doing irregular things, are easements. The companionship, the interesting labour, the occasional leisures are actively pleasant. While my health lasts I'll keep in it. I did not like the Army: but the RAF is as different from the Army as the air is from the earth. In the Army the person is at a discount: the combined movement, the body of men, is the ideal. In the RAF there are no combined movements: its drill is a joke, except when some selected squad is specially trained for a tattoo or ceremony. Our ideal is the skilled individual mechanic at his bench or machine. We grudge every routine duty, and perform our parades deliberately ill, lest we lose our edges, and become degraded into parts of a machine. In the Army the men belong to the machine. In the RAF the machines (upon earth) belong to the men, and in the air to the officers. So the men have the more of them. Whenever the public see a detachment of airmen on a ceremonial (bull-shit) parade, they should realise that these their very expensive servants are being temporarily misemployed:- as though Cabinet Ministers should hump coal in Office hours.
"...I haven't been outside the camp bounds yet, and haven't seen an Indian house, nor any Indians except the degraded denationalised ones who work as servants in the camp. I mean not to go out while I am here. Most of my time passes in reading and thinking, while I wander or sit upon the huge aerodrome, a flat clean stretch of sand, nearly a mile square. At night I lie down on my back in the middle of it, and speculate on the chances that some of you will perhaps see these same stars a few hours later over England."
"...Penance, promise, obstinacy, a vow, self-hypnotism... you catalogue my motives. Isn't it possible that I like being in the R.A.F.? Agreed that exile to India is an unmixed misfortune, for a person whose fit years are nearly run out. But I brought the exile deliberately upon myself, by selling Revolt to just have met them, without Cape's help: but it would have meant my leaving the R.A.F. and three lost years in India were a lesser price to pay."
"...I chose Shaw at random. The recruiting Staff Officer in the War Office said I must take a fresh name. I said 'What's yours?'. He said 'No you don't'. So I seized the Army List, and snapped it open at the Index, and said "It'll be the first one-syllabled name in this".
"Please do not let anything I may have carelessly written to you about the R.A.F. give you the wrong impression that I am miserable or uncomfortable in it. It has been a real refuge to me, and I am grateful to the Air People for taking me in. The airmen are not in the least like soldiers, except in their standard of living. I like many of them, and Service life makes up for its roughness in many ways:- for instance one is never lonely - far from it... and it is soothing to know that one's bread and margarine is safe for the term of one's engagement, and that the standard of work expected of one is so reasonably low that one can be positively sure of meeting it. If I were working for any ordinary employer I would be always worrying if I were doing as well as he expected, and I desired. Cheap labour is let off easily."
To R. D. Blumenfeld, February 2nd 1928 I have given the quoted passage in italics to differentiate it from Shaw's own words and the notes within brackets are Shaw's own and can be found at the end:
"AIRCRAFTSMAN SHAW. There is a glamour attached to the name of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, 'the uncrowned King of Arabia', which many ambitious men must envy.(1) There was glamour long before he became Aircraftsman Shaw, and it has been multiplied a thousand-fold (2) since his disappearance from the world of his intellectual equals. (3) NO SIDE. A correspondent (4) sends me some interesting details concerning the existence of this boyish looking blue eyed dreamer. (5) He has been at the air depot near Karachi for the last twelve months and seems perfectly happy.(6) The other men like him because he has no 'side' (7) and do not resent his and do not resent his refusal to accompany them on occasional jaunts to Karachi LURE OF THE DESERT. Karachi he never visits. Instead, he goes, when off duty, to the edge of the desert (8) with a pocket full of cigarettes purchased out of his daily pay of a few shillings. 9 There he chats with the villagers, (10) and joins in their profound Eastern meditations. Punk, that is. Villagers in all countries have their thoughts centering on those parts of their bodies which lie, as the Arabs say, between the navel and the knee. Food and sex: and I don't meditate, not even profoundly, about either.
- - -
Dear Blumenfeld,
Tell your bright young thing that it's a rotten effort. I could do better than that in my sleep. I hope he'll be content, however, to forget it. I'll promise, in return, not to write fancies about him. India, or Karachi at any rate, is a dust-heap. For Karachi read 'Drigh Road' seven miles outside the town, where our aerodrome lies. I have not been outside the camp since I got here, so the dimensions of the dust heap, to which (by which, and at which) I swear, are one mile by one mile and a quarter. If it's a fair sample of India, then so much the better is England. The climate is astonishing. Never hot enough for a sun-helmet, never cool enough for an overcoat. If it is ever brought near England by an air service, the poor old Riviera will pack up. Twelve months of an Italianate spring!
Not being very fond of Italy I'll relish my life sentence to England, when the good gods give it me in 1931. Indeed, it will be very good. I don't care if it snows and rains and floods and freezes.
If anybody else writes a book about me I'll kill him, painlessly and naturally, but very quickly. Nor will I ever write another book about myself. That Revolt made £17,000 by the way, for the royalty owner. who wasn't me! Good going. It's dead now.
Please remind your wolves, on the 1st of each year, that 'Colonel Lawrence' is on the Daily Express Black List, and never to be mentioned: and then you may believe me.
Your very sincere
T. E. Shaw
1 Let 'em have it. 2 Only 1000 fold? Dear me. Rotten effort. 3 If I have a world of intellectual equals? What a gang we'd look. 4 ! 5 I don't think. 6 A 'profound meditation,' that. 7 If I had any side, they would knock off what they call my 'block'. Sides are very expensive and dangerous parts, for lightweights 8 'edge of the desert'. Man we're in the middle of it, anyway! 9 Only unluckily I have never smoked! 3 shillings is a few, perhaps: too few, if so. 10 Knowing not one word of any Indian language; but I suppose they talk English: if there is a village. I haven't seen one.
.
I am leaving Karachi soon, for some squadron up-country: and shall not regret going, on the whole. Will let you have my new address, when I have it. ..."
To Edward Garnett, May 17th, 1928:
"...I leave for Peshawar (20 Squadron, R.A.F.) on Wednesday 23rd May."
You see, I have changed dust-holes. This is all ringed by mountains, and on the edge of Afghanistan. There are only 25 of us. We live behind barbed wire. The life contemplative. The peaks around us are sharp, like bottle-glass, and our Fort is in a pit.
To H. S. Eade, June 30th, 1928:
"Well, I've moved from Karachi, and come to the most remote R.A.F. station in India:- and the smallest. We are only 26, all told, with 5 officers, and we sit with 700 India Scouts (half regulars) in a brick and earth fort behind barbed wire complete with searchlights and machine guns. Round us, a few miles off, in a ring are low bare porcelain-coloured hills, with chipped edges and a broken bottle skyline. Afghanistan is 10 miles off. The quietness of the place is uncanny - ominous, I was nearly saying: for the Scouts and ourselves live in different compartments of the fort, and never meet: and so there's no noise of men: and no birds or beasts - except a jackal concert for five minutes about 10 p.m. each night, when the searchlights start. The India sentries flicker the beams across the plain, hoping to make them flash in the animals' eyes. So sometimes we see them.
"We are not allowed beyond the barbed wire, by day, or outside the fort walls by night. So the only temptations of Miranshah are boredom and idleness. I hope to escape the first and enjoy the second: for, between ourselves, I did a lot of work at Karachi and am dead tired.
"Here they employ me mainly in the office. I am the only airman who can work a typewriter, so I do D.R.Os. and correspondence: and act postman, and pay-clerk, and bottle washer in ordinary. Normally flights do two months here, and get relieved: but I will try and get left on. It's the station of a dream: as though one had fallen right over the world, and had lost one's memory of its troubles. And the quietness is so intense that I rub my ears, wondering if I am going deaf...."
Tomorrow, what else T. E. Shaw was doing while in India.
The primary document is a signed autograph manuscript by B. V. Jones; blue ball-point pen on thin, pale cream wove paper with "Century" watermark, folded in half making four pages with holes from two staples on the fold. 32 X 20 cm. ca. 1961. For the background on the documents see Introduction. Other than reducing the image size (Sinc (Lanczos3) resampling), no post-photography processing was done. A transcript of the narrative follows the first four images.
Page 1. Public Domain photograph (click to enlarge or right click for new tab or window)
Page 2. Public Domain photograph (click to enlarge or right click for new tab or window)
Page 3. Public Domain photograph (click to enlarge or right click for new tab or window)
Page 4. Public Domain photograph (click to enlarge or right click for new tab or window)
Transcript of the narrative: "(line 5) from Peshawar on my next visit, and this simple request I was pleased to be able to gratify on my return the following day. He said that he was happy at Miran Shah and spoke wonderfully of the beauty of the nights and the brilliance of the stars. It was a place, he said, of magnificent silence and a great peace. Normally, the place might well have been a monastery rather than a fortress, and it seemed at last as though Shaw had found a corner in which he was content. "Shaw's peaceful sojourn at Miran Shah was to be of short duration. Not many weeks had passed when trouble had started in Afghanistan, which culminated in the abdication of Amanulla, and the captain of Kabul. The R.A.F. operating from Peshawar, was engaged in evacuating the British residents from Kabul. Aware of Shaw's identity and his proximity to the seat of the the trouble, the vernacular press began an agitation which presently resulted in the insistence by the Government of India that Shaw should be returned home. He resigned himself to the inevitable at Peshawar. I did not know that he was passing through, and the machine which was to take him to Karachi and the boat for England, had already been refuelled before I was aware of his arrival. I caught a glimpse of him, and incidentally my last, as he adjusted his parachute harness and climbing on the gun-ring into the cockpit, the machine moved forward and he was gone. "As I look back, I see him once again in the barrack-room at Karachi, that slight insignificant figure outwardly one of us yet so infinitely remote. "having done something with my life, I am content to go back,..." he had said. This maker of kings was greater in his humility than he had been invested with any earthly honour, and I hear again the tremendous music of Siegfried's Funeral March ringing through the great bare rooms, so expressing of victory and a great triumph -- music he loved well and appropriate to his passing.
B. V. Jones"
The only parts of the above which appeared in Jones' entry in the first edition of T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, Ed, A. W. Lawrence, Jonathon Cape, London, 1937, pp 411-416 are at the very end:
"from Peshawar on my next visit" which is immediately followed by: "He said that he was happy at Miran Shah and spoke wonderfully of the beauty of the nights and the brilliance of the stars. It was a place, he said, of magnificent silence and a great peace."
The complete sentence in the book of the first quote is: "He asked me if I could manage to bring him a blanket from Peshawar on my next visit." the subsequent statement either omitted or edited out in the published version.
Jones concluding remarks about Siegfried's Funeral March is foreshadowed in the published article:
"The personality of Shaw was best interpreted to many of us through his choice of music. By reason of their spaciousness, the barrack rooms at Karachi had very good acoustic properties. Music at first so strange and unintelligible to many of us, by its constant reiteration, impressed something of its significance, until there was born, even to those who had voted it an insufferable 'bind', an appreciation of the immortal masters. Shaw was never tired of music, and often from tea-time to lights out, would run through a whole gamut of composers, Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert, Brahms, Purcell, Delius and Bach."
The second document by Jones is an envelope with a written excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with added dates in exactly the same style and format as was written by Lawrence, himself. Inside the envelope is a receipt. The identity of the addressee (Miss H. MacDonald) and her relationship to Jones is currently unknown. This document will be discussed later in the series.
Back of envelope. Public Domain photograph (click to...)
Front of envelope. Public Domain photograph (click to...)
Enclosed receipt. Public Domain photograph (click to...)
Tomorrow, discussion on Jones' narrative and the following notes.
Everyone knows him as Lawrence of Arabia. He became the most famous military figure of the First World War.
In November of last year, my friend Kyriacos Kyriacos wrote to me about finding a couple of documents written about T. E. Shaw (Lawrence's legal name change) by B. V Jones who served with Shaw in India and knew him well. The documents (one incomplete) were inside a copy of the 1935 first trade edition of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Kyri had found these documents earlier and recognizing their importance, wanted to research them further but being a very busy person, he found little time to do so. I offered to do that research and to publish them on this blog as he wanted to make them available to the T. E. Lawrence Society and to all of the biographers and researchers of T. E. Lawrence. Later, Kyri generously gave me the documents and one of the biographies I used in this project.
Right from the start, I realized that this was a daunting project. I have researched quite a number of objects, but these were mostly newly discovered antiquities. To attempt to do something original in biographical research about someone who was the subject of more than a hundred biographies is far from easy. "Write what you know" is a piece of good advice usually attributed to Mark Twain and as I knew that T. E. was an Introverted Intuitive and I shared that general personality type, I realized that a psychological portrait would be the best approach for me. These types (INFJ and INTJ) are the most difficult for others to understand of all of the personality types. T. E. is mostly identified as an INTJ whereas I am an INFJ but the similarities seem to be greater than the differences.
The author of the documents, B. V. Jones, also contributed an article to T. E. Lawrence by his Friends ed. A. W. Lawrence, Jonathan Cape. London, 1937. No reviews of this book appear on the web, but there are four brief reviews of the 1954 abridgment where B. V. Jones and some other's articles were omitted. The main interests in 1954 were not so much of T. E.'s later years as they were of "Lawrence of Arabia" and you will remember thatDavid Lean's epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia starts with his death and then flashes back to the First World War and ends with his return to England. It capitalized on the public interest that grew on Lawrence of Arabia right after WW1 and the public were not, and still are not, as interested in T. E.'s later life. No one suffered more from this lack of interest as T.E., himself: he became a myth and was hounded to death. His downfall was neither as dramatic nor as direct as the death of Princess Diana but in each case, both the press and the public with their obsession for an incomplete myth had blood on their hands.
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The one oasis for T. E. Shaw was his service in India and it is the least understood part of his later life. B. V. Jones reveals what I consider to be an important detail about that time that never made it into Jones' original 1937 account. Perhaps that quote from T. E. Shaw was something that Jones was only able to realize as important in his later years as it reflects on the path of life and at the time that Shaw said it he was psychologically much older than his physical years.
Tomorrow I will provide an image archive of both of the Jones documents and their associated ephemera together with a transcript of Jones' main account of T. E. Shaw in India. I will also include excerpts from the 1937 published account by Jones and more of that will appear later in this series.
Every so often, I find that I accumulate a number of ideas that do not justify a blog post, let alone a series. These include events in my life; ideas about things; and general observations. I'm starting to think that if I don't clear them out from time to time, I might be limiting available space for new ideas. So random musings will appear here from time to time. I suppose that must make them, collectively, a series after all, but they will be neither be scheduled nor numbered.
The most important recent event is that I now have a new computer with Windows 10. I was going to start saving for one but when my friend Robert heard that my main computer was "circling the drain" rather too rapidly he kindly loaned me the money for a new one right away. I picked a Calgary Memory Express build as they are essentially "home made" and thus far more expandable than name brands. I picked the cheapest one that had enough oomph for good quality high definition video streaming as I am not too much into modern games. It is not expandable enough for my planned future machine to run Oculus Rift virtual reality mind you, but I did not expect to get anything like that right away. That one will really be "bleeding edge". My son in law will be helping me to build it. I spent quite some time, last night downloading and installing applications previously purchased and my old machine is on the recycling pile waiting for the hard drive to be removed first.
I do like Windows 10 and it only gave me about half an hour's frustration when first using it. I also signed up for the monthly Microsoft Office which comes with a free terabyte of Cloud service (One Drive), so now my files lists get sent to my tablet where I can download them if I wish. My other computer (XP and gutless) is mainly used for old applications such as Fauve Matisse, which never could be made to work on the 64 bit Windows 7. I just realized and discovered, though, that I can install DOSBox on Windows 10 and then install Windows 3.1 in that. Afterward, I can install all of those programs into Windows 3.1 because that is what they originally ran on, "Install" is perhaps too grand a word as the programs run from a single folder with the exe file and so it is just a matter of pasting in the folder and then entering out the registration number (if it has one) into the application when it opens.
Yesterday, I went to Calgary's "Dog Festival". Officially, it is called the Lilac Festival, but people started bringing their dogs and it became a custom and also you would be really hard-pressed to see an actual lilac there at all. It is a long street market with entertainment added. Tristan greeted all the dogs he encountered, but when I bought a hot dog, I bought another smoked sausage without the bun just for him. We found a shady place to sit down for lunch but Tristan refused both the sausage and the water I offered him. I realized that he was stressed from the crowds there (and the other dogs looked about the same, too). So we went to a nearby well-treed dog park which was quiet. He ate the sausage, drank the water and played in the Elbow River.
Procrastination is a funny thing. In 2006, I decided that I needed a break from writing my book on the Gundestrup Cauldron, so I wrote a novel. Now that I have just published it as an Amazon Kindle book, I have joined Goodreads with the idea that other Indie authors would have many tips about promotion and sure enough, they do. This was just after I thought that I should really get busy with the Gundestrup book again. I just realized that is another form of procrastination and I should really tone it down a bit. I wondered about what other projects I have taken on could also be classified thus. Perhaps even this blog! The blog, though, does give me both new ideas and new ways of presenting the old ones. It also improves my planning, writing and even eliminates "writers block" through its strict, virtually ritual scheduling. I am thinking that I will both work on the new book and blog about its production as I do so.
There are a few things scheduled before I do that, though: most important is my series on T. E. Shaw (formerly T. E. Lawrence or "Lawrence of Arabia"). Also yesterday, I finished reading the last book I needed for that research: Marie-Louise von Franz's The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. I think I now have a good grasp on T. E.'s psychology. A few people had expressed the idea that he was an example of the Puer Aeternus, but I have concluded that this is not the case and that only certain aspects of it were expressed and from a completely different cause than is ascribed to the Puer Aeternus. I had thought, before reading the book, that I would only need a few quotes from it, Although I found those, I found so much more that supported my hypothesis. The series will start this week (as soon as I have finished some necessary preparations) and it revolves around an unpublished document from one of T. E.'s friends about T. E's Service in India for the RAF, perhaps one of the most contented periods of his life after Arabia. The document was generously given me specifically for this research by my friend Kyriacos Kyriacos who lives in the same general area of London where I grew up.
Another post or series will be titled "Coyote Mom" and will feature a currently ongoing saga about a woman and her family in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Other than this "teaser" I am keeping tight-lipped about this amazing story, but I predict that it will become very popular. It has certainly touched me and I am really looking forward to writing it.
The latest addition to my Jung eBook library is volume 8 of the Collected Works: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche. I had two of the contained works in paperback, but this volume has much more. Here is a current favourite passage from The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology, (pp. 110-111):
"There is still another factor, of which those who are engaged in investigating the constitution take no account at present. This is the fact that the psychic process does not start from scratch with the individual consciousness, but is rather a repetition of functions which have been ages in the making and which are inherited with the brain structure. Psychic processes antedate, accompany, and outlive consciousness. Consciousness is an interval in a continuous psychic process; it is probably a climax requiring a special physiological effort, therefore it disappears again for a period each day. The psychic process underlying consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, automatic and its coming and going are unknown to us. We only know that the nervous system, and particularly its centres, condition and express the psychic function, and that these inherited structures start functioning in every new individual exactly as they have always done. Only the climaxes of this activity appear in our consciousness, which is periodically extinguished. However infinitely varied individual consciousnesses may be, the basic substrate of the unconscious psyche remains uniform. So far as it is possible to understand the nature of unconscious processes, they manifest themselves everywhere in astonishingly identical forms, although their expressions, filtered through the individual consciousness, may assume a diversity that is just as great. It is only because of this fundamental uniformity of the unconscious psyche that human beings are able to communicate with one another and to transcend the differences of individual consciousness."
So all of the above clears out some of the clutter in my own consciousness, but I'm sure it will start to fill up again right away.
Detail of estimated flood level (light blue overlay) for
part of the town of Banff, Alberta. John Hooker, 1998.
I am no stranger to the effects of catastrophic floods: even before the Calgary floods of 2013, my assistant Natasha and myself had drawn innumerable flood evacuation maps, not just for the Bow River which flows through Calgary, but for the North Saskatchewan River which flows through Edmonton to the north of us. These were not projections of natural disaster floods but worst-case scenario dam breach maps. Such a Bow River flood would render Calgary uninhabitable for about three years. Banff would get little warning time, being so close to the dam. Happily, the only danger to that earth dam (the safest kind), would be rapid erosion from an overspill and the sluices to avert that were successfully tested for the first time during the 2013 Bow River flood. The potential danger was not announced to the media (probably to avert panic), but I certainly breathed a sigh of relief after the danger was over, as I had been studying the lake's water levels in the days preceding the sluices being opened. People in the general area who were affected by the escaping water damaging a power relay station and were without electricity for a while had no idea how lucky they were. Despite the maps carefully-designed prettiness (done, also, to avert panic and to lower blood pressure and create calmness), the digital to print files were accurate to a single pixel and each map was proof-read to maintain that quality. The maps were designed for local officials directing evacuation and all extraneous map government map data was removed and contrasts were adjusted to make them quickly understandable for those people. Wasted minutes caused by confusion can result in lives lost.
It might seem strange, considering the recent dryness and the gigantic Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta that global warming estimates had determined that southern Alberta was predicted to become much wetter. Fort McMurray is in the north, though, and we did not even get any smoke from it. it was not until yesterday that any fire was burning further south than Edmonton. Now there are two minor fires at Rocky Mountain House one being held, the other under control. The Fort McMurray Wildfire is now 581,695 ha in size and is still out of control.
Concerns about global warming causing heavy flooding in Europe have been voiced for many years and it is not so much about the frequency of these events but their severity and unseasonable arrival. A freak snowstorm here in Calgary in 2014 destroyed a great number of trees and cost many millions. The wildfire season also started far earlier than usual. I am sure that communities in Europe are already planning for the future to avert the sort of damage that the floods have caused. Of course, this gives little comfort to those who have lost friends and relatives to flash floods or who have had their property destroyed or badly damaged and my sympathy goes to them all.
Have a safe weekend and help those less fortunate than yourself.
"“I ask you, by bread and salt, that you send as soon as possible the 26 denarii in Victoriati [older coins with higher silver content] and the 10 denarii of [the man] Paterio.” The total amount was the Roman equivalent of around £3500 – and the need for it seems to have warranted a plea from the heart (“by bread and salt”, probably meaning metaphorically “in the name of our friendship”)."
His main interest was with the term "Victoriati" as no clear explanation was offered in any of the news reports. He wondered about the debasement of coins under Nero and the earlier coins of better silver (as the article seems to imply) but also whether this might refer to a common copper alloy of Nero depicting the figure of Victory. In early Imperial Britain, troops were paid in copper alloy coins and there was a general shortage of coins from Rome. Lugdunum was an important mint for Gaul, and I wondered about the coins of Tiberius from there with their depiction of the Altar of Lugdunum which featured two Victories in the design. First, though, I thought of the coins depicted above. As I have little knowledge of Roman Republican coins I was thinking of it as an equivalent of the later quinarius, but Robert told me that it was struck using an early Greek weight standard. I also knew that because of the money shortage in both Gaul and Britain, Republican coins were commonly being used very late there. I suggested that he post the problem (including the cryptic remark "10 denarii of Paterio") to Moneta-L and he did that right away. Another friend of ours (Terry Cheeseman from Edmonton, Alberta) responded and one of his suggestions validated and clarified my first thoughts. He said that in the mid-Republic, the usage of the Victoriatus was replaced with the quinarius. So here we have a strong possibility of an early British Roman idiom which retained the subject matter of the original coin, even though the types had changed.
Later, David L. Tranbarger of Siesta Key, Florida agreed with this idea citing (with caveats) this Wikipedia entry on the Victoriatus. In the same article we see a misuse of ancient idiom with "the coin was intended as a replacement for the drachma or half-nomos". Nomos had been identified (although the author and the circumstances are unknown to me) as the name of a denomination in ancient Greek Italy. Presumably, some inscription had been found referring to a nomos of Taras (or some other city there). The word is the singular of νόμισμα (nómisma) and that means:
None of these definitions refers, at all, to any single coin denomination and a "nomos" of Taras is still a didrachm and the Byzantine "Nomisma" is still a solidus. In English, the two usages are given as "coin" official currency and "token" used as an unofficial replacement for a coin.
If we do not translate the idiom, and just translate the words much can get lost. My favourite example of this is with Aristophanes' comedies, especially some dialogue in Thesmophoriazusae (The poet and the Women). To get the same effect from the comedy as did the Athenian audiences, you really need one of the translations like that of George Theodoridis from 2007 which includes the line: "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! Utter crap!". ["Bombalobombax" in the actual text] In school versions, you are more likely to get the direct translation and the lost idioms and actual words are not going to seem that funny to the students. What made the original Athenian audience laugh and be shocked must be balanced with what modern audiences require for the same, otherwise there is no real translation.
During a very bad recession many years ago, my wife and I were able to support ourselves and our daughter by working about three days a week to run a Sunday flea market set of tables selling just about everything: housewares; collectibles; books; music. We were the most successful dealers at the market and had eight tables with mostly fresh stock each week being sold at reasonable prices. People shopped at our tables to set up that first apartment; to find something to read; to buy an eight foot long python skin to have cowboy boots made from; or to get a Danish Chalcolithic flint dagger. Eclectic was the theme. If you find out what the public wants, offer it to them at an attractive price and then add a few things they have never even seen before, then the public comes. Pretty simple right?
Archaeology frequently makes the claim that the past belongs to everyone and then works very hard to restrict everyone from having any personal connection with it. Jung called that sort of behaviour enantiodromia:
"When he defined enantiodromia in Collected Works 6, Jung described how he uses the term: “I use the term enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.” Jung came to realize, through personal experience, in his own life and the lives of his patients, that this emergence of unconscious material always occurs when an extreme one-sided tendency dominates the conscious life. Over time an equally strong countertendency builds, eventually breaking through conscious control."
A recent Guardian article: "Archaeology must open up to become more diverse.", from the title, seems to recognize the problem and promises solutions. In the text, however, such hopes are quickly dashed:
"We don’t need to pander to people from diverse backgrounds to get their attention; we just have to do a better and more strategic job of sharing what we have already got."
Note the use of "pander" instead of "cater". Implicit in this choice is the idea of a particular moral viewpoint being pushed down everyone's throat (imagine a butcher's shop that sold only liver). Then, "diverse backgrounds" is mentioned but not diverse interests.
Later, "tailoring our messages to the audiences we want to engage with.." reveals a desire for exclusivity, but fails to identify its nature, and the article linked by the phrase "lose the jargon" starts with a photo of George Orwell, but references his writing tips rather than his writing on mind control. Could we have a Freudian slip here? That same article also omits the possibility of primate tribal and territorial behaviour outlined in Lirpa Loofouy and Mike Haseler, The Academic Ape (complete text).
Finally, It is hoped that technology will eventually save the day, and feedback is hoped for on what is already presented and not on what should be presented
With the current economic downturn and cutbacks, perhaps a few unemployed archaeologists might get a little inspiration by running a flea market business. Perhaps the sale of a few common and well understood antiquities among the kitchenware and paperbacks might finance more archaeology. Perhaps some of them might start to understand people different from themselves. One can hope, right?
Disintegrating pie. Soon, no one will see the pie at all.
The past is increasingly being divided up, but "having a slice of the pie" might not be the best way to look at what is happening. We hear of "stakeholders"; "warring camps"; "special interest groups"; "opposing theories". We have historians; archaeologists; mythographers; curators; dealers; collectors; taxonomists; and many specialists within these areas. And there are academic; independent; hobby and commercial interests.
For a short time during the cold war I had volunteered to work with the RCMP Security Service as an an operative to combat a terrorist threat. An agent explained to me who the real enemy was: it was not the terrorist group I had stumbled upon, it was the instigators of that group. They had no interest at all in the problems and aims of the minority group involved, all they wanted to create was division within the country, "to break its backbone", the agent said. The instigators would create the terrorist groups along what is now called the clandestine cell system, but back then it was called the communist cell system because the various groups here were instigated by the KGB at that time.You can see how it evolved from the structure of the lower levels of the Soviet Communist Party. There would be only one person within any given cell who would have contact with someone in another cell. As there was a never-ending supply of instigators, the agent told me, prosecuting any of them through legal system was just a waste of time: more would arrive before the process was even completed. I decided that I did not want to hear any further clarification of this matter. All I had to do was to gather intelligence and I would regularly meet with various agents to pass that on. No agent was allowed to come into personal contact with anyone who was being investigated. Everything was done through operatives. We were the "cannon-fodder". We were expendable
Minority groups were, and are, being used in many different ways and it goes far beyond terrorism: they can be used as justification for new laws (which can then be used for other purposes); they can be used for international shady deals. There is no end to their usefulness. And there are so many of them. Of course, any power that they have is something bestowed on them and it can just as easily be taken away again. They have no power of their own.
In any statistical analysis of anything, there is always a danger of having samples that are too small when the data is divided into questions. At such times the questions have to be reworked to be more general. There is the joke about the specialist who knows more and more about less and less until everything is known about nothing. Powerless things come in small packages.
The best way to lessen any interest is to break it up into smaller and smaller pieces. A corollary to this is that the best way to increase any interest is to apply many different methods to it. In archaeology, interdisciplinary methods are always being promoted but not always very effectively. I have seen "interdisciplinary conferences" where most people just experienced only that which was within their own specialty. If the building had been sentient, it would have benefited from what was being spoken about within it but building are not sentient. At such conferences, any sort of unity is an illusion that just makes people feel better.
Transdisciplinary pie
The interdisciplinary pie is really just the pie that gets gets sliced up and everyone hopes to get a big slice. But there is another sort of pie that is far better than the interdisciplinary pie and the disintegrating pie as it never vanishes into almost invisible crumbs: You look at it in slightly different ways and in different lights, but it is always whole. Not only does the pie stay together, it keeps improving. This is the transdisciplinary pie. Everyone gets a whole pie! Unfortunately, although transdisciplinarity is being used for all sorts of social and industrial applications, it is barely even spoken of with regard to the past. Its absence, however, has been noticed and we will look into that tomorrow.
