A Photographic Entr'acte

The Imaginative Power of Forms in Light

I often wonder whether the suggestive forms that I see, photographed "straight" (point-and-shoot if you like, though framing and vantage point are not considerations that many point-and-shoot photographers are wont to think of before pressing the button) will convey what I hope for.  Digital cameras are very good now in capturing the really neutral gray of a paved street or a concrete sidewalk; they even get the greens of plants and the lavender of agapanthus.  Also, as many are discovering, the little miracle in the new iPhone is just that, miraculous.
Opposite my house, in the parkway (i.e., the grassy or flowery area between the sidewalk and the curb) there is one of the tallest pin oaks (or swamp oaks or red oaks, all current names) in the neighborhood, where the oldest houses are now nearing a hundred years.  No true oak tree, even if not the noble quercus robur, can get by in a parkway no more than a meter wide.  All over the older neighborhoods in southern US cities, the Department responsible for gutters and drains and the like has industriously cut the obtrusive roots back.  They look like parts of carcasses badly mangled.
Often, besides, they recall to the mind's eye mankind's own creations, in art.  Not always.  Today, after being soaked by two inches of constant rainfall, this one (above), which I called snarly and gnarly in the Picasa album,  immediately made me remember the Shang bail-handled bronze vessel in the shape of a tiger or a bear (depending on the interpretation) which is swallowing a man.  It also evoked all the most powerful Guardians of the great Chinese and Japanese shrines.  When the root is half dry, and the colors are differentiated, the suggestion is strongest.  That the 'head' seems to strain against the mossy stretched bark only makes it more like a living thing.  Of course, what it evokes for each viewer depends on his or her previous visual experience and how great its effect has been.  In my case, Prof. Otto Maenchen-Helfen's course, Art 1D, a survey of the art of India, China, and Japan, was the initiation.  In 1953, there were not so many picture books readily available, and, a Freshman, I had never seen Asian art, except for a few bamboo paintings reproduced in women's magazines—not even in Art News.*  I continued taking his courses, eventually even graduate seminars, though eventually I had to choose between Greece and China.  Professor Maenchen was a mysterious idol to his devoted students.  He came from Vienna.  He had spent time in a Tibetan monastery.  He invited his graduate students to meet in his home (in fact, near the end of his career, he had a weak heart).  He treated us with interest and respect.  What I never guessed until I ran across it several months ago in a Note in Mary Gabriel's biography of Karl and Jenny Marx was that he had been the co-author of one himself, years before he came to Berkeley.  Not only did he never discuss political ideologies with us, such a life episode could not compare with his knowing everything, it seemed, about the Huns, for example.  He seemed far above any politics!  I shall never forget him; he was the most wonderful person and scholar imaginable.  So I think myself most fortunate to see Asian images in other things.
In the warm and humid atmosphere a few days ago, when I walked around to the other side of the same tree, standing on the sidewalk and seeing a bit of the pavement beyond, without having any notion of its "standing for" anything other than spreading roots and a dry fallen twig, I had a visual feeling about it that reminded me of Japanese gardening and of album-leaf paintings.  Literally, it is just another plain photo, unaltered by any post-processing, with no additional cropping (since I had seen what I wanted, though if I had wanted a square image I'd have cropped, of course).  Aesthetically (the Greek verb, aisthanomai means to perceive through the senses), it is for me something quite different.
It was a good afternoon's taking pictures for me.  You can find them all, dated Jan 22, in the same album as the snarly, gnarly root.

*Actually, so long as the gallery was in existence, C. T. Loo had a full page advertisement in every issue of Art News.  Some of the best ones were for Shang and Zhou ritual bronzes.  I had had that periodical for several years (as I related above, a bill collector who had to give up on my mother took pity on the 12-year-old who had stayed home from school, and brought me a stack of Art News).  I kept them for years and pored over them.  Indeed, I had them until 1973.  So it is remarkable that only when I took a course in Asian art, and had a boxful of University Prints to go with it, did I pay serious attention to C. T. Loo (Sherman Lee's big Asian equivalent to Janson's History of Art was still a decade in the future).  C. T. Loo keeps recurring, most lately in Edmund de Waal's Hare with Amber Eyes.  Nothing given to an observant child is truly wasted.  If only one is fortunate to live long enough it all comes together to enrich the decades when hiking all over the world's great cities is too difficult (since true aesthetes seldom get rich).

Cosmological Words

Nothing and Chaos, with or without Strings

Here is the NASA link to the photograph used to illustrate, in part, a galaxy cluster at the limit of visible space.  See Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 2012, Ch. 2 (on a Kindle, search CMBR, ff. or gravitational lensing where, at "location 622-625" the NASA photo is reproduced to illustrate it).

Krauss, whatever other physicists may be saying right now, is incomparably the best teacher among them, barring perhaps only Richard Feynman.  He isn't merely being cute when he says that everything, and you and I, are literally made of stardust: our basic constituent elements were born in the cores of the first stars.  Before that there was only plasma.  That is OK in physics, I guess, but it's misleading if you think Greek (for the word is Greek).  Plasma is any substance that one can model things in, so think of the God of Genesis 2, or of Prometheus modeling Pandora.  Generally, though, he is wondrously good with words.  He knows that 'data' are plural, and he is as concrete as it is possible to be.  He knows that his readers are not stupid but also that it is hopeless to try to explain Dirac's equation (for example) to them.  He can be humorous, but without being low, when the context permits: "Infinity is not a pleasant quantity, however, at least as far as a physicist is concerned", a neat rebuke to the metaphysical tribe.  Before I say any more I'll have to read the book a second time, but I do not hesitate to recommend it heartily (or you can take Richard Dawkins' "Afterword", if you want his authority).  It is a wonderful book to read, only I have read it so fast that I need to read it again.  As my heading indicates, he does not like string theory.
What I can address, though, is the antiquity of his mentality.  Epicurus and Lucretius, even the pre-Socratics,  are downright modern by comparison with Hesiod.
Hesiod, who in the Theogony is not, I suppose, later than Homer (once the obligatory window dressing to the Muses is done—it is not his own), begins, II. 116, ff., "First of all Chaos came into being, next broad-bosomed earth... Out of Chaos came Darkness and black Night, and out of Night came Light and Day..."  It is not the order we'd put things in, but Hesiod's cosmus comes before any deities or heroes are named.  As I was taught, this is earlier than Genesis 1.  And Chaos should not be translated as "void" or "space" or "yawning gap" (ginnungagap is the Norse word).  The big lexicon, LSJ, itself refuses to further define Chaos, "the first state of the universe" (citing Hesiod, as above).  Chaos, undifferentiation, is prior to cosmus, order.  Now, that is tantamount (and in the 8th century BCE!), to Nothing (with the upper-case initial supplied by Krauss to make it clear).  It is as good as Odysseus making the befuddled Polyphemus think that he is Oudeis (Nobody).  Chaos does seem to be the Undifferentiated, so No-Thing.
Greek thought, even so early that abstract words have not yet evolved to meet the task, is from our earliest records cosmology and physics, not metaphysics.  Lawrence Krauss is up to his eyeballs in it, and, like the Greeks, he is highly verbal (not that he cites Hesiod!).
Working through Epicurus philologically will take me a bit more time, but I haven't forgotten it.
Credit
Though by now most of my thoughts or opinions are as mixed as my all-American genealogy, it is mete and right to say that my idea of Chaos came straight from one of my favorite professors, Joseph Fontenrose, at UC Berkeley.

Belfast on Antiques Roadshow

Harlan and Wolff, Titannic, Canberra, and Belfast

6 Jan 12  Buster's bath.  Only tangentially relevant.

One of our treats on Public Broadcasting is hours of the original Antiques Roadshow.  Occasionally, these are more than usually interesting.  Not that surprising remarks don't occur on the American one.  Once a representative of a big firm, such as Christie's, said of a wonderful little picture of a cat in that complicated pose, which Leonardo da Vinci himself drew (and I think it's in one of the notebooks at Windsor) that unfortunately most people would be offended by the cat's being shown washing more than its face, and so the picture would realize much less at auction.  But what is more admirable than an elderly cat that, rain or shine, keeps its white underside as white as an albino rabbit?  And the posture is one of the miracles of nature.  So when I came home Friday afternoon, and saw Buster at work, I grabbed the little camera; he was so industrious, and the sun was so low at 5 pm, that 1/25 second couldn't quite stop his action, since the wonderful little camera correctly read its object as needing f 4.8 for depth of field: Buster, my favorite model, was posing for Leonardo, no less.

Earlier this week, though, we had an hour of the UK Antiques Roadshow from Belfast, at the monument in the building site of the Titannic and her sisters.  To read even the Wikipedia article on the Titannic, you'd think that the iceberg, the loss of life, the passenger list, the lifeboats and all were the whole story.  This is to ignore the most important human and socio-economic side of this equivalent of an Empire State Building or, for that matter, a World Trade Center, though icebergs cannot be blamed of plotting.  As one after another showed memorabilia and recited recollections of their assorted relationships to Harland and Wolff, I realized that I had understood nothing much at all about the city of Belfast (and probably about Northern Ireland in general).  Here were the most modest and proud and devoted people you could ever dream of meeting and their sweet and unaffected children.  For almost my whole life I've known nothing, seen nothing of Belfast but the "troubles", which, of course, were all too real and tragic.  But here were men, women, and children quite unaffected in front of the camera and enjoying the occasion, too.  Their pride in shipbuilding was unforgettable, not least that of the gentleman whose pride was in Harlan and Wolff's last great ship, the Canberra, 1961 and not scrapped till 1997.  Shipbuilding is for Belfast what automobiles are to Detroit, steel to Pittsburg, filmmaking to Hollywood, but I have never seen a finer identification of a community and great industry than that evinced by the builders of the Titanic and their descendants.  They had given their all to shipbuilding.

And Buster, now somewhat arthritic, is unaffectedly doing what a clean animal ought to do.

I must go and see what the eleventh Britannica, 1910, for which I have three update volumes, has to say.

More Lucretiana

Scriptoria, Invocations, and a Philological Note

From Lorna Price, The Plan of St. Gall in Brief, an overview of the three volume work by Walter Horn & Ernest Born.  UC Univ Press, Berkeley, 1982.  Here I refer to the plan, whole, opposite p. 1, to the index drawing on pp. 10-11, to the reconstruction drawing on p. 29, showing the E end of the church amd the novitiate and infirmary complex, and the detail of the abbot's house on p. 40.  In the Index drawing, "a" marks the "Scriptorium below" and "Library above", tucked into the NE angle of the transept (in the SE angle is the Sacristy, below, and the Vestry, above).  The legends, the longer ones scanning, are in a fine Carolingian miniscule of their date, AD 820.

As you can learn on line, if you don't know, Fulda as you see it today is no longer the Carolingian monastery church that was indeed famous as a center of learning.  You can see original parts of the church of St. Michael, and the article from the Catholic Encyclopedia gives a good idea of how important Fulda was.  Based on archaeological studies over nearly two centuries, a reconstruction of the abbey church can be made.  But to get an idea of its place in the development of transalpine European architecture, it still is best to go to Kenneth Conant and Nicholas Pevsner, if English text is wanted.  And Greenblatt, in The Swerve, was wise not to insist that Poggio Bracciolini had to have found his manuscript of Lucretius at Fulda (the actually Carolingian Oblongus and Quadratus weren't known yet; modern texts rely heavily on them).  Yet, for all the reasons he gives, Fulda is not unlikely.

So the room where the monks sat to copy as well as the library space that housed Fulda's collection of manuscripts do not exist.  For that matter, if you go to St. Gall, the architecture you see is Baroque (and later in details), but the Abbey Library owns the plan made for the abbot of St. Gall, evidently (from the dedication on it) in AD 820.  We don't know if it was ever built in full this way, but it tells us more about Benedictine monastic organization and building north of the alps and the communal life lived in them than all the tomes of Mabillon. The scriptorium is labeled (and the sedilia are shown: see a on the Index drawing). It even tells us which buildings were provided with permanent privies, necessaria naturae, and how many posts were thought necessary in each outhouse (you can see those for the bloodletters' building, next to the infirmary, in the detail above at top left, and those for the abbot's mansio, at bottom left, by and large the same buildings that had rooms with a caminus (cheminée) built into a corner.

One of the great experiences of my student life was a seminar on the St. Gall plan under Prof. Walter Horn.  I happened to be the only member of that seminar with enough Latin to read and interpret all the legends on this tabletop-size vellum document (yes, made from three skins).  Everyone else had the task of enlightening me on the architecture.  I no longer have my card file of every single word on the plan.  On its web site, you can study and zoom and read everything for yourself, though I haven't found a list of the Latin yet.  If you can find Lorna Price's book, it is invaluable (though the legends are not given in full or in Latin).  The main point is that almost every novel or film or social studies textbook depends on the St. Gall plan for its evocation, if it has any substantial elements, of Benedictine monastic life, either from this plan or on the many studies, a few in English, many in German, based on it.  Monte Casino itself was less informative.  Notice the arcaded porticoes of the Abbot's house: at least this building had stone walls, as, of course, the church had, but Horn and Born are surely right that these monasteries had roofs steep enough to shed snow, and not tiled!
I do wish Greenblatt had shown the same familiarity with this material as Umberto Eco did in The Name of the Rose.
The example above suggests how the reading of Greenblatt's book is enhanced if one brings assorted bits of substantial knowledge to it.  It also helps to know at least a little Latin and Greek and to have read, probably in translation, the three evidently authentic Letters of Epicurus preserved by Diogenes Laertius.
First, though, concerning the Invocation to Venus.  I think that Greenblatt may make too much of its Venereal properties.  That is to say, any  long poem written in hexameters must have an invocation and it needn't be to the Muses as such.  If Epicurus had chosen hexameters, he'd have felt obliged to have one, too.  To address the force of Nature, of Physis, pervasive in everything (barring the atoms themselves), Nature which is generative and forcibly active in us all, is a sound Epicurean choice.  And an invocation must be to mythological entities (not to Poetic Inspriation but to Muses, for example), so to Venus rather than to Physis.   That is what Lucretius means by it, and he exploits it most gloriously for pages of poetry.  Why, in an Ode to St. Cecilia, for example, Nicholas Brady (co-author with Nahum Tate of a new singable translation of the Psalms, Tate who wrote the libretto for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) for Purcell's 1692 Ode does invoke Cecilia, though in terms that do not stress her martyrdom, then provides Purcell and the audience with a virtual Middle Baroque Guide to the Orchestra, whose verses illustrate the virtues of each section of instruments, as if evoking the provinces of all the Greco-Roman pantheon, after hymning the Soul of the World.  That's just poetry, nothing to do with theology and not much to do with philosophy.  No more, I think, does Lucretius mean to worship Venus (rather, to reverence Nature profoundly and provide an appropriate opening to de Rerum Naturae).  But when "the jarring seeds of matter" kept singing in my head, recognizing the setting as just like that in the Frost Scene of King Arthur, I had to go and check on the Lucretian credentials of Nicholas Brady (which is fact are excellent).  Also, by the end of the 17th century, those "jarring atoms" were a common trope.  That is why I rather wish that Greenblatt had written one more chapter!  If you like Henry Purcell, as I do, you will love the 1692 "Ode for St. Cecilia's Day".
Back to Epicurus.  I had not read the only substantial surviving works, and I still have to find myself a good text of Diogenes Laertius, heaven help me (even for the 3rd century AC he is not the most inspiring writer).  But the Epistle to Herodotus is easily obtainable in Perseus, on line, even if you have trouble getting the Greek text there, and in The Epicurus Reader, inexpensive on Kindle.  Both of these include all the scholia (and distinguish them, too, from proper Epicurus); the Perseus** is the nicer translation, and the Reader doggedly excludes any Greek words, but the Kindle word-search comes up with all the swerve references.
Now, 'swerve' not only provides Greenblatt with his title.  It translates clinamen  (both the i and the a are 'long'), which proves to be a strictly Lucretian Latin word, though in its meaning plain as all the other -clin- stem words).  The dictionaries cite an "obsolete" Latin verb, *clinare, which per se does not occur in preserved texts.  Given that it is obviously cognate to Greek klino, one immediately suspects that Lucretius has done just what Cicero would have done: taken the Greek, formed from a Middle Voice participle, and used it, as we do such French as "de luxe" and "souvenir".  Consider, too, that LSJ (Liddell, Scott, and Jones, the big lexicon), in one of its citations uses the English swerve as a translation: eklínthê, he swerved.  We usually use that word for what an vehicle does to avoid hitting another vehicle, or a pothole.  As an absolute noun it is unusual, even rare, and poetic.  So clinamen would have seemed to Romans reading de Rerum Natura.  Besides, the Notes in the Kindle Epicurus Reader cite two studies on the Epicurean 'swerve', and by that name: "Epicurus on the Swerve and Voluntary Action," Atlanta, 1987, and H. Jones, "The Epicurean Tradition", London, 1989, AA Long.
** Under Epicurus in Perseus, the reference is D. L. 10.1, sections 55—83, where D.L. stands for Diogenes Laertius.
So my immediate suspicion that Greenblatt had not personally chosen 'swerve', though he made it his title, is borne out even by these elementary inquiries, and the range of translations for all the forms from klino in LSJ made clear why Lucretius had chosen clinamen (wherever it would scan) to explain why atoms in motion sometimes colliding and prior to space or distinguishable matter do account for...well, for everything.  And this is why the Church couldn't stomach Lucretius.  It isn't just that no gods are accessible (though their names can be invoked).  And, Lucretius got pretty nearly all of the Epicurean material from Epicurus himself.  Epicurus's dissolution of the soul at death is utterly antipathetic to any stretch of Christian philosophy.  The Church rather cherished the Stoics and certainly wallowed in neo-Platonism, but Epicurus and Lucretius are pure and serene atheism.  Like many moderns today, good Epicureans in antiquity could happily enjoy the art and architecture, the poetry and rhetoric of traditional religion (and they had no need for personal salvation), without believing in anything in them.  I mean, if Epicurus and Lucretius were alive today they'd be passionate about the Higgs boson.
It is more astonishing than I had ever dreamt: Epicurus realized that there was no beginning, because there was no 'what' to be a beginning of.  He had no mathematics relevant to the tasks at CERN.  He had no instruments to speak of.  He had a most remarkable human brain and in its exercise developed a most exceptional human mind.  Lucretius was his greatest disciple, evidently, and he barely escaped extinction; the two Carolingian Mss that we have seem to be the basis of the later medieval ones such as that found by Poggio Bracciolini.
To me, being able to read some of Epicurus and consider the questions in his language and the lack of mathematics beyond plane geometry, is profoundly reassuring; to be human surely is enough and more.
And the conscious mind is what makes one human.
I want to celebrate the New Year by making this post in time for it.  If I find more in further reading, I'll write another post.  For now, once again, I thank Stephen Greenblatt for his book and the Loeb library for endless good things and Perseus for surviving so many evolutions of formats.
And a Happy New Year to all readers.
CLINAMEN addendum
My excuse for fascination with the noun clinamen was its being the rarest, to my knowledge, of the “bare” neuter nouns formed on verb stems, that all are declined like nomen.  All are neuter 3^rd declension. “Bare” because there is no qualifying element and nothing to suggest agency: nomen barely names the ‘know’ stem.

I have never shed my adolescent pleasure in inflections and etymologies.  I suppose it is due to having begun Greek, Latin, and German at about the same time and in that order.

Later, in that St. Gall seminar, dealing with the hypercorrect spelling, toregma for toreuma, only cemented it.

How wonderful that Latin has the consistently adverbial ablative case to help make sense of Greek use of the remaining oblique cases, not least genitive ‘absolutes’.  That Greek has the middle voice of the verb to explain Latin deponents.  Not to mention each other’s sequences of moods / tenses.

Anyhow:

• clinamen, n. ‘swerve’ is perfect for Epicurean atoms (or sub-atomic particles, for that matter) that in their unqualified, undirected state of motion prior to time and space (and shape) may bump into one another, to be propped by one another, without any purpose or will or agency;

• flamen, n., cf. ‘blast’ as well as compounds like ‘inflate’ (unrelated in its stem to the masculine gender ‘flamen’ for a young priest), is the name for the motion of air;

• certamen, n. is the name, contest, for matching;

• flumen, n., memorized as meaning ‘river’, and, of course, the same as Italian fiume, is the name of streaming or (liquid) flowing.

Those are the ones that come to mind.  Like the stem verbs themselves they are intransitive, i.e., without agency.

The apparent Greek form from which the noun clinamen may derive (this is why I need to read the Epicurus epistles in Greek) is a Middle Voice participle, i.e., a verbal adjective of the Middle Voice of klinô, in Greek a very common noun both bare and in compounds.

I decided not to make this part of my Essay, proper, because my infatuation with the comparison of the bare bones of languages, at their most elementary, might not interest everyone.  But is it fatuus when it dawns on a young mind that the stuff in grammars is not the invention of schoolteachers or philologists but rather the natural science of language?

What I've Been Thinking . . .

Buster: Fast Food

When in doubt, post the cat

A couple of weeks ago, when the five finalists for the National Book Award in non-fiction were announced, I found that I had read three of them, all with interest.  Loving Lucretius for most of my long life, I may have enjoyed Swerve most, and Stephen Greenblatt writes wonderfully well; seeing a mature scholar give himself so wholeheartedly to my favorite Latin author gave me great pleasure, and though I had read accounts of the Council of Constance I had never read one so alive as his.  I was so surprised by his chapter on Montaigne that I decided to get the Essays complete and read him, as I never had done before.  I also pulled out my good old Budé text of Lucretius and re-read a good deal of it, using the French as I had done in university when I got stuck, to avoid slowing down too much by using a dictionary; Lucretius, however, is not so hard as Greenblatt says.  Greenblatt was reveling in aspects of the Renaissance that I have always enjoyed dabbling in, not least Poggio Bracciolini.  Yet I didn’t dare think he’d win the prize.  I was afraid some readers might think he was proposing that, if the Lucretius manuscripts hadn’t been discovered just when they could be copied and printed, Reason might not have prevailed in the way that it did.  I don’t think he meant that, though no man could fall for Lucretius more whole-hog than Greenblatt does.  I was, however, disappointed that he stopped at the point that he did, and I know that there still are lots of educated readers whose temperament makes them assess Lucretius by each and every error (e.g., the size of the sun) that he made rather than by the power and depth of his inquiry and the glory of his poetry (Screech’s Penguin Classics Montaigne is almost Thomist in considering the essayist’s faith, and he certainly does not make much of his references to Lucretius).

I was surprised that Deborah Baker’s The Convert, which certainly I had read with great interest, was among the finalists; I thought it insufficiently well structured and was disconcerted by its relationship to its living subject.  In sum, I thought that Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital, on Karl and Jenny Marx would be the winner.  I had never read anything about Marx and his family and Engels that was both serious and treated them as living persons, persons living in a particular history, too, not merely domestically.  Though works on Marx and Engels fill libraries (not that I have read very much, for when I was a student one did not want to be noticed reading about the founders of Communism, and I don’t like ideologies of any kind very much, especially not when they’re argued as political science is), I think that Mary Gabriel has done an outstanding piece of work in this biography, and I thought it was the best balanced and most complete and likely to endure of the three finalists I had read.  I cannot overstate how much I have learned by reading Mary Gabriel.  I thought Greenblatt would get torn limb from limb, though his vulnerability, which almost asks for attacks, is no excuse for failing to read him, as one would read any poet, I hope, for what he offers, which is important if not exclusively so, and for the self-portrait, if I may say so, that his book provides.  I mean, we don’t attack poets, do we, for laying themselves bare?  But evidently the committee saw it my way; usually I am at odds with committees.  Stephen Greenblatt did win.

And then there is my fascination with theoretical physics and with astronomy.  Not wishing to confine myself to Brian Greene’s books or rely too much on the perhaps too lively video assistance of the NOVA programs (the books are really clearer, if you want to try to learn so far as a lamentable lack of mathematics permits, by reading and thinking over and over), I have tried and tried to get through Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and I just can’t.  She explains indefatigably, as if for the very stupid and stubborn, what I don’t need to have explained, and she does not explain at all some things at the very heart of her work at CERN, for example, that I do need help with.  And her writing has all the worst characteristics of, say, Scientific American articles, only aggravated by efforts to entertain by talking about her encounters with popular culture.  I was prepared to like her book, from an interview that I saw, but I can’t.

Never mind.  I see that the difficulty of explaining Branes and Dimensions and the rest is due to human verbal language being created by and for our empirical, sensory experiences in Newtonian space and time.  I have to try to think my way through concepts that are, literally, ineffable.  Likewise, my brain’s ability to envisage needs not to be worried by a video that looks as if a here-and-now figure or object or event were visibly here-and-now elsewhere or otherwhen, too.  And I probably cannot ask for a resolution of exceeding the speed of light as recorded by instrumentation made by and in terms of a Newtonian (or Einsteinian) model.  It suffices to keep reading and thinking about it all.  History is full of funny language, as funny as black energy.  Someday it may be possible to name better what is being learned (it always has been possible).  After all, the only thing is that I want to know that everything, including parallel universes and other oxymorons, has no beginning and no end—and what it has, instead.  I mean, some enigmas are for Six Year Olds:

Elizabeth Ann said to her Nan: “Please, will you tell me how God began?  Somebody must have made Him.  So who could it be, ‘cos I want to know?”

            A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, “Explained”, pp. 76–78.

To punctuate the series

22 Nov 2011  Not on Pearl Harbor Day, as usual, but even before Thanksgiving Day (actually on the 50th anniversary of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy), as I was returning from collecting the old cat before an oncoming deluge, at the bottom of the Japanese Camelia tree, where its blooming always begins, and almost in the dark in the shade of the tree, I saw this new camelia (which the heavy rain surely damaged), so I took a chance that the baby Nikon could take it without flash, which these camelias respond to badly in a photograph

I had already decided to interrupt the series of essays on vase-painting.  Among the reasons are copyright laws and the abundance of good literature (as well as appalling stuff) on the great masterpieces of Greek vase painting, since I object to the use of most of the old drawings instead of the real vases.  Even more critical to my decision is the fact that the subject becomes far more complex in the periods from Late Archaic through Late Classical, and the best work (which fortunately was done on fired vases rather than some biodegradable ground, but is no less great for being on a pot) needs to be discussed in individual essays, treated in the same way as I have done the Miletos lion or the "Barberini Faun", for example.
In the album, for the time being, I can call your attention to a great Late Corinthian black-figure krater, Louvre E 638, Payne's no. 1474, for which I do have an acceptable digital image:

Louvre E 638 (Payne NC no. 1474; Amyx CorVP, pp. 574-5, often considered
mainly for its inscriptions, since, like the EC Eurytios Krater, it stands alone,
without another known by the same hand.  It represents the Departure of Hektor
for battle at Troy.

I could write a whole essay on a vase like this; indeed, it is pointless just to say how interesting and fine it is, and no more.  The very fact of Corinth's rubbing red clay onto the surface of these kraters requires discussing their Attic contemporaries along with them, the very works of Sophilos and Kleitias of which I have no photos that I can use here.

So, though I haven't at this moment decided what to write on next, I shall return in Teegee: Essays to just that, essays instead of lessons.  That also will allow me write true Opera Nobilia essays on some of the masterpieces of drawing and design for their own sake.
See: http://teegeeoperanobilia.blogspot.com/2011/11/homage-to-berlin-painter.html

V. Middle Corinthian Black Figure

Middle Corinthian Black Figure, c. 600–c.570 BCE

Munich.  The Dodwell Pyxis

I used to have a 19th-century dictionary of antiquities (in a paperback reprint) that dated the Dodwell Pyxis, named for the famous traveler who acquired it in the Corinthia, to the time of the Dipylon vases, then recent finds in that cemetery, which bore figures that the writer (was it Nettleship?  William Smith?) thought extremely primitive and childish.  He had a similar opinion of the letter forms on the lid of this pyxis.  In any case, it was the cast of characters in the Boar Hunt that interested him.  Of course, we know now (and some knew then, in the 1880s) that the spelling and writing on the lid are simply the work of someone less than a calligrapher (though about two decades later than the Eurytios Krater), and its animal friezes, as well as the shape of the pyxis itself, are Middle Corinthian.  The Dodwell Painter typifies much of the animal frieze work of the first quarter, or so, of the sixth century BCE.  Usually insouciant, his work is occasionally ambitious, as on a huge oinochoe (made as pretentious grave goods) in the Richmond, VA, Museum.  I can add nothing to the work of my friend and mentor, D. A. Amyx, on the Dodwell Painter and his followers (not to say that other work is not useful, too).  Humfry Payne, though, was surely right in regarding Middle Corinthian (MC) frieze work as more commercial than EC, let alone Protocorinthian.

BM Large trefoil oinochoe with triple handle and three friezes.  Late in MC, perhaps ca. 570 BCE.

One gets pictures of details for study as one can:

BM Large trefoil oinochoe with triple handle and three friezes.  Late in MC, perhaps ca. 570 BCE.

This large trefoil-mouthed oinochoe, with three friezes and a triple handle, is less idiosyncratic than work by the Dodwell Painter's best followers, but generically it is of much the same kind.
My own favorite work in Middle Corinthian is by the Corinthian Chimaera Painter and the painters in his group; I posted the one that first took my fancy last month, in this blog, before deciding that many of  the pots were after all not what you'd call opera nobilia.  His best plates, though, such as the Louvre one, have as much distinction as anything I can think of.  A companion of his, The Painter of Louvre E574, has a tighter manner of drawing but also is very fine.

Munich, Antikensammlung, 6449 (346A).  Purchased in 1904 from a Paris auction.
 Payne, NC 1047.  Amyx, CorVP 171, AP1.  Lawrence, most recently,  Hesperia,
 Supplement 28 (1996), pp 72-73, 123, L14.  MC/LC plate by the Painter of
Louvre E 574, who also decorated the famous Copenhagen plates.

These horses are rather comparable with those on the great Attic François Vase by Kleitias, in the next post, and are probably not much earlier.

Apart from the kylixes of the Gorgoneion Group (see Amyx in AJA 65 (1961), pp. 1–15, pls. 1–15, for a very enlightening discussion of the Medallion Painter and the rest of this group), the finest miniature work of Middle Corinthian—I have already illustrated the Brussels Aeneas kylix above—the finest, perhaps the finest of all miniature work in MC, is that of the Samos Painter, and for him the kotyle Louvre CA 3004:

Louvre CA 3004.  The Hydra and Herakles' companion
Iolaos at right.  Both the figure work, the floral chain, and
the lettering, in my opinion (AJA 88 (1984) pp. 59–64,
pls. 21–23), give this a relative date of c. 585 BCE.

The front of the kotyle is noble and sprightly and elegant, but the dancing komasts, dipping wine from the dinos that you can just see under the handle to the right of Iolaos, each one named by an epithet to characterize their nature, go around the back of the cup and are the most delightful of their kind.  Since Amyx and I published our studies, excavations at Samos have been published that, in my opinion, really link this artist with the Attic KX Painter and suggest that at least the latter spent some time actually working on Samos.  The Corinthian Samos Painter, however, made his cups of Corinthian clay.  My photo, above, though at least it shows the little cup in a lifelike way, is slightly too pink.

Here, copied from my article, are those komasts:

Louvre CA 3004.  Here are the komasts, Playful, BigButt, Phallios, Komios, and the rest.  At right, the horses of the chariot that brought Herakles and Iolaos.  There is a great publication of this kotyle in the Mon.Piot 40 (1944) pp. 23–52, figs. 1–17, pls. 1–3, by Pierre Amandry.

Just how great these komasts are can be appreciated by comparing them with those on the Berlin kotyle, Payne's no. 953, published as early as Gerhard, which are like wooden puppets rather than human dancers wearing padded festival costumes:

Kotyle, Berlin.  Payne's Necrocorinthia no. 953.  Condition outstanding; art OK

Alabastra continued to be made larger and larger, as much as 30 cms. tall.  Consider the two from Delos (illus. below) and from Tocra (Boardman, no. 369—he was part of that excavation and he published the Tocra (Taucheira) one.  This artist, rather fantastical, on whom I have published in Hesperia 67 (1998), pp. 302–322, pls. 50–60, began in the period of EC style and worked through most of MC.

Delos 431, Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting, no. 370, by
the Taucheira Painter, who often doesn't know which wing
he's engraving!  But splendidly.  Notice the fashion for showing
a potnia theron as if she were an ancient statue of herself.

Here are two large alabastra in Berlin, both with tritons, as we call them.  The one at left
is itself part of the heavily embroidered "Luxus Phenomenon" that the Tocra and Delos
alabastra exemplify.

I think this will do for Middle Corinthian.  It is too much my specialty for me to write about it with too few illustrations, and where I disagree with my elders I want only to say what I think without being contentious.

But, between Boardman's book and these posts, I daresay you are getting more of these things than you are used to seeing.  Or are you?