Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Stretching Credulity

Here's another in our occasional series 'Media Misrepresentations of Clergy and Churchy Stuff' and given the last post it's a coincidence that it comes courtesy of a TV drama scripted by former Dr Who  showrunner Steven Moffat and starring David Tennant, having a break in between stints portraying the good Doctor themselves. Not having a TV licence I have no option of watching Inside Man as broadcast, and judging by the reviews I am not much inclined to seek it out. The story begins as parish priest Harry Watling agrees to look after a memory stick from a parishioner who wants to hide it from their mother. His son's tutor ends up looking at it, finds it contains child porn, the vicar's son claims it's his without knowing what's on it, and his father knocks the tutor over the head and locks her in his cellar while he works out what to do next. Needless to say, this is not a wise move. What's more, he does this not to protect his son, but the parishioner who gives him the USB stick because he claims he has a duty of care to a vulnerable person. Several reviewers have pointed out how weird and unrealistic the whole show is. I will merely observe that Rev Watling has somehow managed to avoid the umpteen and endless safeguarding courses that all the rest of us have had to go on over recent years which lay out in pitiless detail what we are supposed to do whenever anything remotely like this comes our way. The procedure is roughly:

1. Break out in a cold sweat

2. If you are in a safe place, such as your parsonage, run around screaming

3. Call the Diocesan Safeguarding Department and gabble an incoherent explanation

4. Do what they tell you

5. DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE LIKE LOCKING PEOPLE IN YOUR CELLAR

That this drama has come out at the same time as the Church of England's Past Cases Review is especially ironic, as it's clearly written by someone who doesn't know how we now all have safeguarding processes positively riveted into our heads by those responsible. Perhaps Mr Moffatt should have conversed with his fellow Dr Who writer Paul Cornell, who's married to the Vicar of Fairford. Nothing like having a clerical consultant on hand.

The Manner of Our Departure

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, an earlier version of herself. And every Dorset native will have been squee-ing to see where she chose to watch ‘one last sunrise’ – the unmistakable outline of Durdle Door on the Purbeck coast. My first thought was how lovely it was, and my second how aghast the Dorset emergency services would be at the prospect of viewers thinking it might be fun to try and recreate the moment. Sure enough, the Lulworth Estate which owns Durdle Door has denounced the BBC’s ‘duplicity’ (now that’s a strong word) in not telling it what the request to film at the limestone arch would actually produce. There’s no safe way along the top of the headland and people have been badly injured diving off it. Unless you actually have access to a TARDIS, it’s best admired from a distance.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t pick the date, time, place and manner of departure, isn’t it? Well, you can in some sense, but that’s obviously more likely to be a messy route, and I don’t like mess’, mused Ms Kittywitch to us the other day. Ms K, who has battled a bewildering variety of medical dangers since before her heart-and-lung transplant at the age of 13, now faces a new diagnosis I can barely remember, and a new drug which might buy her another X years or finish her off with an allergic reaction. She is right, though I would choose not a sunrise on Durdle Door (or indeed chucking myself off it), but a rainy late afternoon on Chesil Beach, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ of the Lyme Bay seas on the shingle. I can’t see how that could be managed, though, and might have to settle for Dorothy Parker’s more realistic option: ‘O let it be a night of lyric rain/And singing breezes when my bell is tolled’.

Most of us will be ushered from this earthly existence as part of a medical drama. On Thursday night I was called to the hospital to see Edgar: Jackie, his wife, apologised for calling me on my day off once she realised that’s what it was, but I’ve learned that you mustn’t delay these things if you can help it, and had we left it to Friday morning Edgar would have been unresponsive. It was hard to understand him, beyond the single word 'Amen'. His operation months ago to correct an essential tremor was successful but his enjoyment of it never materialised as his recuperation was interrupted by a fall and broken ankle, pneumonia and finally a fatal infection. That’s how it goes. Not for most of us the singing breezes or the crashing waves, but the quiet of a ward side room and the hiss of an oxygen mask, and as much faith as, with God’s grace, we can muster.

The Vortex of Opinion

The great Terrance Dicks, referring to the time he was Script Editor of Dr Who, pointed out that the show had nothing like a continuity guide at that stage: ‘continuity was what I could remember of my predecessor’s shows, and what my successor could remember of mine’. I rather yearn for those days, before the series became run by uberfans endlessly dropping in references to a line in an obscure story from 1984, and then not even the good bits. I was almost tempted into commenting on a series of videos posted on Youtube by a young Dr Who fan who clearly knows far more about it than I ever will, and who was trying to prove that some plotline or other was foreshadowed back to the Hartnell era: this, in a show that often can’t maintain a consistent narrative across one episode, let alone sixty years. But I reasoned that they are looking for different things in a TV series from me, and refrained.

It struck me, facetiously, that Christians arguing about the Bible, or US lawyers debating what is or isn’t in the Constitution, are a bit like Dr Who fans discussing continuity, only less acrimonious: it’s just as well they don’t have access to ballistic weapons, I can tell you. All three groups are, in similar ways, working to resolve a problematic text, to draw conclusions from it about cases which are not necessarily explicitly mentioned in it.

Now I’ve enjoyed Dr Who since I was a child, if you can describe as ‘enjoyment’ being reduced to a quivering wreck watching the end of the first episode of Pyramids of Mars in 1976 as Marcus Scarman kills Namin by apparently roasting him from the inside out (‘I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity!’ – unsuitable for almost anyone, let alone children); I have of course a professional interest in scriptural theology, and a fascination with law and the role it plays. In all three areas I find myself something of a moderate textual conservative: I would prefer at least to begin from what’s patently in the text, rather than draw in matter from elsewhere or use the interpreter’s own preferences. I like canon to have clear boundaries.

When, about a year ago, I decided to look up what the 1973 US Supreme Court judgement in Roe v. Wade actually included, I was rather shocked at how tendentious it seemed to be. Clearly abortion itself couldn’t have been explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, and I realised the Court’s decision rested on reading into that two-century-old document a right of privacy. Was that right really there? Not in so many words, of course. I found I had some sympathy with what has eventually, and inevitably, emerged as the 2022 Court’s criticism of its predecessor of 1973’s analysis: you must rely predominately on what is explicitly in your legal text, or you hand far too much authority over to the opinions of justices arbitrarily sampled at any particular moment. It’s also a very bad move for a polity to delegate decisions on contested matters to courts because the politicians can’t or won’t reach a judgement about them: that generates resentment and powerlessness, and you can see where it takes you.

But equally clearly you can’t be too much of a textual conservative. The US Constitution’s very opening words, ringing as they are, about all men (sic) being created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, were never intended to apply to black people, for instance: they were penned and signed by cheerful and unrepentant slaveholders. You can’t simply rest content with what that document’s drafters either actually wrote, or intended by what they wrote. As time goes on, our interpretation of what those words mean and imply changes, and changes quite legitimately; which means there has to be some means of bringing those developing insights to bear on the text.

The 1973 Court relied on the knotty and very contested doctrine of ‘substantive due process’, which I think I only just about understand. The 5^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution both state that citizens shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without ‘due process of law’. This tiny but momentous phrase is understood to have two applications. First, ‘due process’ means, very basically, that all such deprivations must be valid, fair and impartial, decided by legitimate authority and properly enacted. There is plenty of scope to discuss what that actually means. Secondly, such deprivations must be ‘lawful’: that is, not just procedurally correct, but in accordance with the whole body of law. It’s that concept that allows the Constitution to be interrogated by changing ideas derived from legal precedent or legislative action, and prevents the legislature from simply doing anything it wants (I’m not sure UK law, controlled as it is by the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty, contains such a safeguard). The 1973 Court decided that US law, taken as a whole, did contain a right to privacy and therefore to procure termination of pregnancy, which, given the state of the various legal provisions across the States at that time, was quite a leap.

Nowadays those who take a liberal view of abortion rights would almost certainly rely on different arguments from those of fifty years past; we might talk about the notion of ‘bodily autonomy’ as a fundamental principle of law in a free society, and I suspect it would be far easier to discern the outline of that in the legal practice of the US than a right of ‘privacy’ even if, in this practical case, they amount to the same thing: of such nice distinctions are legal arguments made. Even if the 2022 Court has criticised the 1973 one for its quasi-legislative investigation of the gestational process, any bench grappling with this issue would still have had to decide what the Constitution thinks ‘life’ means, and would have to do something very similar to what happened fifty years ago.

I did cast an eye over the 2022 judgement, and I’m afraid the Court reveals its true colours when Chief Justice Thomas includes the 63 million abortions carried out since 1973 in the ‘harms’ wrought by reckless application of the ‘substantive due process’ doctrine. Beneath its superficial concern for judicial correctness, and no matter what sympathy I as a ‘textual conservative’ might feel for its arguments, the 2022 Court is a partisan bench selected for partisan purposes, or rather, for this one purpose, posing as a defender of juridical purity. It has no interest in uncovering a principle of bodily autonomy in US law, as a more liberal bench might, even if it might be there. 

We all know that interpretation of Biblical texts, especially about sexual and gender matters at the moment, is conditioned by what people want to find in them. In the same way, the young Dr Who fan I almost tackled on Youtube has decided that whoever queries the current trajectory of the series, no matter what reason they may state, is in fact a sexist bigot covering up the fact that they can’t get past a woman being cast as the central character. That fan may well, in many cases, be right. The interpreters of your legal code also bring their own ideas to bear on it, and how you choose who you get to do it - in the US, one single elected politician abetted by a gerrymandered legislature, or, in the UK, basically the legal profession as a whole - is perhaps even more important than who decides where the Doctor’s fezzes fit in the narrative.

Lizzie Dripping

Part of the wonder of the internet is that it allows you to prove that random bits of memory from your childhood did actually have some relationship to reality. It has been like that recently with me and Lizzie Dripping. This TV series, made by the BBC in 1973 and 1974, starred Tina Heath as the eponymous Lizzie who meets a witch in the graveyard of her village church and spends the nine episodes of the series trying to work out whether she is real and what her relationship to her really is: can anyone else see her, is Lizzie herself a sort of witch, and is the witch tied to the village or can she go elsewhere? Of course we viewers can see instantly that the witch is a projection of something inside Lizzie, an outlet for dreams and desires that don’t fit the life of a 12-year-old working-class girl living in a small village in 1970s Nottinghamshire. In fact, I didn’t really remember any of this, not surprisingly as I would have been no older than 5 when the series was broadcast: I did recall the title sequence of Lizzie running down the village street and turning a corner, and her encounters with the witch including the one where she pops up to interrupt a family trip to the seaside, but that was all.

Looking at Lizzie Dripping now (and I’ve just watched all of it) you can see an intriguing mixture of 1970s verisimilitude and unreality. The location, Eakring near Mansfield, feels very real as does the life of Lizzie’s family the Arbuckles, laid-back plumber dad Albert, often quite stressed mum Patty, flowerpot-hatted Gramma who is always on hand with strongly-worded advice which (even Lizzie notices) she does not consistently follow herself, and baby Toby. When Albert wins the village leek-growing competition in ‘Lizzie Dripping and the Leek Nobblers’ the prize is nothing other than a spanking, shiny front-loading washing machine! – we must have acquired ours at roughly the same time – and although Albert drives a truck for work purposes that’s no good for taking the family to the seaside so he borrows a car from a customer as payment for a job. It’s all quite period, and even daring in a way nobody would now even think of being daring: showing ordinary, mostly nice people living very ordinary lives and speaking in extremely strong accents full of beautifully incorrect grammar. Good.

And the grammar, or dialect, leads us to the unreal side of the series. For a start, ‘Lizzie Dripping’ isn’t the character’s name (which is Penelope), but supposedly a Nottinghamshire phrase for a girl who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The fact that everyone in the village calls her this, including her sympathetic teacher, and parents, is odd and unexplained. I use the word ‘supposedly’, because I rather suspect author Helen Cresswell made it up. She claimed she heard a neighbour in Eakring using the term for their daughter, but I can’t easily find any indication that it existed before the TV series; we need a dictionary of northern slang but I have none to hand! The 19-year-old Tina Heath has a good stab at being a pre-teen but when placed alongside actual children looks a bit awkward, most acutely when she’s surrounded by a class of singing kids in what is nearly the final scene.

You never see any scenes specifically relating to religious life but in the first episode everyone assumes Lizzie should be at Sunday School (the teacher is away) which I would have thought unusual even for 1970s rural Nottinghamshire. Lizzie teases her very unhumorous Aunt Blodwen that she could help with Sunday School - 'I know it's Church and not Chapel', when it's clear Blodwen would never countenance any such thing. How many children even then would know what that was about? And in the last episode Lizzie refers to the unseen vicar as 'parson'. This all has a slight air of anachronism and I wonder whether Helen Cresswell was remembering her own childhood rather than what she could see around her in 1973.

There are lots of lovely moments: ‘leek nobbling’ prime-suspect Jack Jackson’s face as he only gets third prize in the competition; Gramma following up scolding Lizzie by giving her a mint imperial; snobby Aunt Blodwen’s appalled discomfort on the journey to the seaside when, just after her tirade against ‘day-trippers’ (which of course the family are), Albert strikes up ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ and everyone except Blodwen lustily joins in; the school children singing a deliciously eerie song about the Pendle Witches which just happens to have been written for the BBC’s schools Music Workshop series in 1971 by Yorkshire poet Harold Massingham and Irish composer Gerard Victory; and just the sights and sounds of Eakring, rechristened Little Hemlock for the series, the flower meadows, the streams, the sunny or rainy churchyard.

It’s the final episode which is something of a masterpiece.  The title ‘Lizzie Dripping Says Goodbye’ flags up the theme but what we get is much more than we might expect. The summer holidays are nearly here and the village school is assembling a time capsule to be opened in 2074; right at the start, Lizzie’s mum tells her she is growing up and the valedictory atmosphere is maintained when Lizzie and irritating southern cousin Jonathan go out to take photos of wild flowers for the archive, prompting Lizzie to meditate on memory and impermanence. She wishes she could put the whole day in the archive. ‘They’ll have days like this, even in 2074’, counters Jonathan. ‘Nor’ exactly’, insists Lizzie, ‘Never have a day again exactly like today. Even we’ll never have one exactly the same. Coz we’ll be different, see.’ She inspects the photo she’s just taken of the meadow. ‘No. That ain’t it. That ain’t it at all. Nowt like, really.’ Show me a contemporary children’s show that philosophical. In the end a bitterly regretful Lizzie has to cope with the departure of the witch, and, as she leaves the graveyard having committed the story to tape, her life is ahead of her. Though her mum’s already accused her of being so morbid that ‘I sometimes think you won’t be happy till you’re buried’, it won’t all be like that. The last sound we hear is the churchyard crows. They really don't make them like that anymore.

The Root of All Fears

Here’s a question. What connects an old Dr who story, Alexander the Great, a Russian neo-fascist philosopher, and the doyen of Anglican spiritual directors? You are, of course, about to find out, so bear with me as I know this is tortuous and very possibly completely wide of any kind of mark.

We’ll start with the philosopher, if one can call him that. Like everyone else I have spent probably too much time reading around the Ukraine conflict trying to understand where we all went wrong in our assessment of the way Russia, or certain Russians, have been thinking over the last few decades (when one of your congregation wants to talk to you about the Russo-Finnish winter war of 1939-40 and its possible relevance to current events, you know something unusual is happening). I had heard of Alexander Dugin but hadn’t given him much thought until his name kept cropping up as an influence on Mr Putin and his generation of Russian leaders. His widest-read book is called The Foundations of Geopolitics: there is a lot of reason to think even Mr Putin doesn’t buy into the wilder aspects of the Dugin programme which involve ‘dismantling China as far as possible’ – one wonders what Mr Xi makes of that if he’s aware of it – but at the heart of it is the interesting if tendentious idea that power relationships between states are determined fundamentally not by economics or ideas but simply by the position they occupy on the globe: that conflicts between nations whose power is based on land and those whose power is sea-based are bound to arise, and that Russia, occupying the centre of the Eurasian landmass, must inevitably be a paramount state regardless of anything else that might happen to it. In 1997 this was just what the Russian elite (and lots of others) wanted to hear: the idea that the Russian state would ineluctably return to dominance just when it had gone through several years of being close to a basket-case had an understandable attraction.

That ‘geopolitical’ concept has something going for it and I suspect that’s really what Mr Putin and those who surround him have taken on board. We have to hope they aren’t much interested in ‘the Finlandization of Europe’ which Dugin favours and so on, even if they have adopted many of his suggestions about fomenting unrest in the USA and detaching the UK from Europe. But why bother to rule the world - what’s the point, in Dugin’s thinking? It is to roll back modernity. Dugin loathes the contamination of ‘liberalism’: he can’t see any point to the internet and would like to abolish it, he bangs on about traditional family units, he talks about Russia championing collectivism over individualism – which leads him to his oddest suggestion, a combination of Orthodox Christianity and Russian neopaganism which he sees as having a common interest in ‘intuition’ as opposed to the rationality of the west. It all made me think how fascist thinkers manage to gather such collections of ideas which to the rest of us seem so weird. What underlying theme unites them? What’s really motivating them?

I considered how my own thinking over the course of my life so far has developed in completely the opposite direction, and how very little I really want to control anything, order anything, or tell anyone else what to do. The things I am most interested in are the smallest and least ideological – my friends, my family, beautiful things, a nice cup of coffee and a chat with someone I am well disposed to, some music, or indeed watching a creaky old episode of Dr who. These things seem the real and valuable ones, and everything else is irrelevant.

Kinda is a very uncharacteristic and highly weird Dr Who story. It sees Peter Davison’s Doctor and companions encounter a colonial exploration unit on a jungle planet whose natives don’t speak but communicate telepathically. Three of the mission have disappeared and the Security Officer, Mr Hindle, is clearly becoming mentally affected by the strain. When the mission commander Sanders goes off on a recce leaving Hindle in charge he has a complete breakdown, obsessing about the threat to the base even though there doesn’t seem to be any clear danger (it’s a very good performance by Simon Rouse). He threatens, shouts, cries, rambles about ‘microbes’, and finally rigs up a system of explosives which will obliterate the base itself and everything in a thirty-mile radius: ‘and then we’ll be safe’, he says. When the Doctor asks him what exactly he thinks the threat to the colonists is, he replies, ‘the plants’: there is something about the lush, abundant landscape outside the base that unhinges him. In the story’s Buddhist way of thinking, what Hindle cannot cope with is life: the fact that life keeps changing, that it continually has to be renegotiated with, never stops in one form. ‘Change and decay in all around I see’, he tells the Doctor a little before descending into complete looniness.

Jesus says (I read it at a funeral only this Tuesday) ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly’. Fascists, on the other hand, generally seem to hate life, like Mr Hindle. If they gain power, they rarely use it to indulge physical appetites particularly (except via architecture: they do like their monumental buildings) and are usually on the puritanical side of the scale. They tend to be misogynistic and want women to occupy traditional roles; they obsess about the family and tradition, which is why you often find them trying to rope in the support of the Church. They rail against the simple business of people enjoying themselves in the differing ways they choose. Why would you hate life so much? Because it involves constant change. Fascists are trying to stop things changing, to freeze the world at a particular point, to conquer it; the social or military conquest expresses a sort of existential conquest. And why would you be afraid of change? Because, ultimately, you are afraid of the death which change prefigures.

Of course most of us are afraid of death to some degree: one of the two experiences that come the way of all human beings, and yet we know nothing about it (beyond what our faith may tell us). We all want to ‘go home’; we all want things to be under control, just enough to manage; to maintain our comforting routines; to tell ourselves that we will wake up in the morning. But we don’t all experience these things as a constant underlying scream pushing us to obliterate the signs of change and movement that prove to us the fact that one day, we will die.

Perhaps Alexander the Great was the first expression of this futile attempt to cheat death by establishing physical dominance over as much of the world as he could. Whatever the point may have been to his conquests at the beginning, pressing on to ‘the ends of the world and the great outer sea’ had no rationale apart from getting there and planting a pillar with his name on it in the sands. Earth’s farthest shore would been trodden by the Macedonian’s foot, imprinted by his identity. It would be comprehended. Alexander was an oriental despot and of course ideological authoritarians are very different, but they too are trying to reach the shore of the farthest sea and claim it for their own.

Fr Somerset ward’s great sequence of Spiritual Instructions spreads from 1919 to 1959, forty years of reflection and the fruits of meditation: his very first was entitled ‘A Sermon on Fear’. Fear of death only forms an incidental example of his theme, but Somerset ward was convinced that it lay at the root of much human sin. It brooded in the soul, hidden, and emerged in morbid and disguised forms. I think we can see it wherever grandiose schemes of political organisation turn away from what human beings actually want, and chain them into someone else’s utopia.

We Interrupt This Programme

'I quite liked the man until about three hours ago, but now I don't mind if I never hear about him again', my mother told me about 6pm yesterday, 'and I'll be very annoyed if they don't show the final of Masterchef', which of course they didn't. She is not the only person I have heard about making the same comment regarding the return of normal TV service, and I have to say when Radio 4 broadcast an old episode of Great Lives yesterday evening and it turned out to be about Mary Anning (a clever gay girl in a peak bonnet picking fossils! It doesn't get better than that. OK, well, she may not have been gay) I almost cheered. I don't dislike the late Duke of Edinburgh particularly but it was a huge relief to hear about someone different after six hours of the same thing over and over again.

Meanwhile the Establishment (including, I strongly get the impression, a lot of clergy) is hugely enjoying itself with protocol and speaking-for-the-nation stuff, and normally sensible souls can be found saying daft things. 'I always wondered', said Simon Schama on the wireless, 'why he volunteered to join this establishment and sacrifice so much. It was, I think, because he thought so much of Britain'. The great historian didn't seem to believe - and nobody else on the programme corrected him* - that it might have had something to do with the fact that young Lt Philip Mountbatten had fallen in love with the heir to the British throne and thus accepted what came with it. But I wonder whether the British people is not quite where the Establishment thinks it is. I rather suspect the British people doesn't regard the death of Prince Philip as the epoch-making event that it is supposed to, certainly not worth postponing the final of Masterchef for. In Swanvale Halt, I have heard absolutely nothing about it at the Co-Op or the café. The Diocese advised churches to have lots of spare candles available, but here, Rick the verger, who commemorates the death of anyone famous, printed off a set of Wikipedia pages about HRH and sat in the church all day, and the only person who came in to light candles was Selina. She always lights candles for her relatives but is increasingly unclear whether they are alive or dead, and certainly doesn't really know which day it is. It isn't indifference, as I think people definitely care about the situation the Queen is left in, thinking, surely, of their own bereavements; it isn't hostility. It's simply not regarding the Forth Bridge event as that much more important, say, than the death of Albert down the road who didn't quite make it to 100 and who they spoke to a couple of times and wasn't he a character. 

The Diocese has suggested we change the altar hangings to purple, which we are not doing: as my friend Cara in Emwood put it, 'the last time I looked, Jesus was still alive'. Instead our republican mayor and her republican husband our senior churchwarden will come to church and she will read a short Bible passage and light a candle while Rick will toll the bell and I will attempt to record the scene for posterity. I wasn't really a republican at midday yesterday but now I think I probably am, too.

London Bridge will of course be a different scale of event, even I will concede that. It really will mark the passage of an epoch. But even then, I wonder whether the national mood will really be grief, as the Establishment will imagine, rather than a stoic awareness of time sweeping all its sons (and daughters, and those who identify as neither) away, a sense that from that point on we will have to conceive of ourselves differently. They will misread things, as a way of imagining that they matter more than they do.

(* But said show did furnish one wonderful quote from a journalist who stated 'I have refused to watch The Crown on the grounds that I am still upset at Matt Smith leaving Dr Who')

Future Forecasting

My nine-year-old self found James Burke’s 1978 TV science programme Connections absolutely compelling, at least the bits of it I saw. I didn’t have much of an idea what he was talking about, of course, and my knowledge had only incrementally increased by the time his subsequent shows were broadcast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the most interesting thinkers about scientific matters are not, strictu sensu, scientists, but those who can see science in a broader perspective: Burke’s first degree was in English, specialising in Middle English language and literature, not the most obvious way into a career examining and explaining science to the public. That’s what made the series fun.

The core conviction of Connections is that scientific and technological change does not take place in intellectual isolation, but that individuals take decisions based on their own motivations with no idea of what the results will be, and that consequently predictions of how change will pan out are nothing more than conjecture. Some people make accurate guesses, but that’s just luck.

That belief hasn’t stopped Burke having a good go at predicting where technological change will take the world, as I was reminded when he popped up on the radio again a couple of days ago with what I discover is his customary spiel about nanotechnology (which I’ll return to in a minute). As well as his exhilarating analysis of the history of science and thought, Mr Burke’s reputation as a prophet of the modern world rests on some of the statements he made decades ago about the effect of the onset of the digital society on how we behave. This year someone dug out a clip from the 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed and popped it onto Twitter to demonstrate how Burke foretold the chaos wrought in our political life by the Internet.

Note that what he doesn’t describe is how established political forces will manipulate that chaos for their own ends. Now let’s cast even further back to 1973, when Burke was presenting the series The Burke Special, a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of futurology almost all of which was wiped from the BBC archives. That year, the Radio Times decided to get him to make his predictions about what might be going on twenty years hence.

Burke’s world of the future is a world of databanks, citizens’ dossiers, identity cards, and restrictions on the individual. He believes the storage of personal information in databanks will be accepted, not resented, at least by the young … In 1993, ideas about personal liberty will probably be as different from ours as ours are from those of a century ago.  Citizens will be generally far less reluctant to provide information about themselves, because they will realise that it will help society to organise itself better: they will accept that they must live for one another, because if they don’t, they’ll be headed for anarchy. It will be an open, honest society, in which the distant hum and chatter of the machines will be as commonplace as birdsong. Computer-aided learning systems will provide every child with his own plug-in superteacher … each [computer in a factory or office] providing rapid forecasts on the effects of management decision-making.

You would expect some predictions to be right and some wrong, and you can set aside the timescale, but what strikes me most here is that where Burke was right, it was for the wrong reasons. Citizens share so much information now not out of altruistic consideration for one another, but because it enables them to buy things faster and because they’ve been softened up for it by social media, seeking an addictive rush of validation by Likes and Loves.

This brings us back to nanotechnology. I’ve spent ages trying to find James Burke’s recent contribution to what was probably an episode of Today in which he predicted over the course of a couple of breathless minutes what was going to be happening in 2030, but I can’t chase it down so you’ll have to take my word for it. He envisaged the development within ten years of ‘computers the size of dust’ that would manipulate matter at a sub-atomic level to turn any substance into anything else, mud into plastics and plastics into gold, straws that would convert polluted water into clean as you sucked them, and microscopic machines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air, ‘so that’s climate change solved, by technology instead of by destroying the world’s economy as we seem about to’.

Hmm, I thought. It turns out that Burke has been talking about nanotechnology for ages. In a 2013 discussion on Radio 4’s PM revisiting his 1973 Radio Times prophecies, he harped on the theme using almost precisely the same terminology as he did this year (nanoscale is ‘weeny-weeny’; making things out of ‘air, water and dirt’). It’s the same thesis he laid out in 2018 in his think-piece The End of Scarcity, a world in which all our existing political systems are rendered obsolete by ‘personal nanofactories’ making everything any individual could ever want from food to music.

As Burke points out, this is a future first glimpsed as long ago as 1959 by Richard Feynman in an impromptu lecture to the American Physical Society, ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, and it’s true that a team from Manchester University led by Professor David Leigh has indeed developed a ‘programmable molecular machine’ which can manipulate atoms. But note this: a ‘molecular machine’ is only a machine conceptually, and Professor Leigh’s machines are ‘programmable’ in that by the addition of a positive or negative electron they can operate in a right-handed or left-handed direction. Such machines are not ‘clever little nanobots’ as the good Doctor encounters on TV, which we might imagine as microscopic robots made of metal and silicone and capable of independent decision-making: they are artificial chemicals designed to do one specific task at a time. So far nanotechnology hasn’t got us any further than putting molecule-thick layers of graphite on a metal sheet, and we can’t yet envisage saying to a future iteration of Alexa, ‘Make me a strawberry milkshake’ and moments later the concoction will arrive. I’m not sure we can wait for this to solve our more pressing problems.

Mr Burke mentioned the plug-in superteacher this year again, just for good measure. Technologically I can’t see why that can’t happen now, with the knowledge we already have available: the fact that it hasn’t presumably means we don’t really want it to, and there are different constraints operating than merely what we can and can't do.

Rebellion!

Before I set off for Warwickshire last week, the first act of my Autumn break was to stand very awkwardly in the drizzle outside the Council office in Hornington at 8am with a sign expressing my support for the Extinction Rebellion action beginning in the capital that day: 'I'm not at the Rebellion, but people I respect are.' At that point not only did we not know that anyone would be daft enough to obstruct Tube trains in Stratford and, as some XR members said, put at jeopardy everything else the movement was trying to do, but I wasn't at all sure that the action would last the full intended fortnight, given the harder line the police were almost sure to take compared to the event around Easter. For all I knew, everyone would have been driven away long before I could play any practical part.

Only two people spoke to me, a little girl who knew me from the Infants School and a gentleman whose opening gambit was to ask me what the Church thought of XR and its tactics. He then said he was a plant biologist working for a company advising on the growth of trees and crops, and in his opinion it was irresponsible to spread alarm about climate change when nobody can be sure what's going to happen: 'I remember watching An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore said that all the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2012, and that wasn't right, was it?' I agreed that it was rash to be very definite about dates, but that the overall direction of movement was fairly clear. He then told me carbon dioxide 'isn't a greenhouse gas anyway', that because conifers evolved when atmospheric CO2 was twelve times what it is now the climate could easily absorb similar levels without anything bad happening, and that his greatest fear was that someone would invent a way of extracting all the CO2 from the atmosphere and kill all the plants. At that point I decided not to worry too much about his ideas, great though I'm sure he is at growing trees. I did only last a few more minutes before the rain got the better of me and I cycled home.

By the end of this week, of course, the protests were still going, so I did travel up to London to join in. I don't mind admitting that part of my motivation is to support my friends Ms Trollsmiter and Lady Metalmoomin who are far more active in the cause: if they're prepared to take the risk the very least I can do is to back them up. There is nothing wrong in being influenced (in what you do, if not what you think) by people you respect. Quite apart from the climate issue itself, I felt the Metropolitan Police's blanket ban on all Extinction Rebellion activity in the capital was so sweeping (and has yet to be proved legal - opinion is that they were just chancing their luck in the hope that demonstrators would be put off) that for the sake of freedom of assembly if I was going to do anything, it ought to be this, and now. As I turned into Whitehall Gardens and found what was then a few hundred people but which became probably a couple of thousand I was extremely nervous at how I might be received but in fact nobody paid me any attention. I spotted a figure in a clerical collar who turned out to be from another Surrey church (though in the Southwark Diocese) and of course clergy always at least pretend to be glad to see each other. That put me a bit more at my ease.

It took ages to set off. Ms Trollsmiter turned up at 12.25 and warned she could only stay an hour: I said that at the rate we were going, we'd be lucky if we'd made it out of the gardens by then. As it turned out, the march was so slow that by the time we got to the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall and then turned round to head south towards Downing Street, she and I were able to go and have coffee and a sandwich, and when I emerged I could still catch the procession up along Tothill Street which was where I met Lady Metalmoomin ('Yah, apart from the end of the world, things are really good at the moment'). We halted in Petty France outside the Ministry of Justice for a couple of very short speeches and not long after that I peeled off to go home, via what turned out to be a most circuitous route as the police had closed off Westminster Bridge, presumably to stop anyone protesting on it: like the famed Vietnam War general who stated 'to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it', the bridge had to be closed to stop it being obstructed.

It was an odd occasion. Technically the whole thing was an illegal gathering, but there the police were, facilitating it, and talking perfectly amicably to the XR liaison people. Admittedly, they did seem to be picking demonstrators at random for arrest, just to make the point, which was why I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but it was all quite good-natured otherwise. I was struck by the levels of preparedness and organisation: this is not just a group of people turning up in a London street. Whenever someone was arrested the cry would be passed down the line 'Legal observer! Legal observer!', sometimes in call-and-response form: Legal Observer (Legal Observer!), Up the front (Up the front!), On the left (On the left!). And you know you're not in a normal political demonstration when, as the police lay hands on someone or other, everyone around the spot cries 'We love you! We love you!' to the officers of the Law. You could also tell because - in contrast to every other political demonstration I have ever taken part in - the obligatory couple of Socialist Workers Party activists making sure as many people as possible are given their SWP placards to wave were nowhere to be seen.

Of course I have my quibbles with the XR approach, both its style and aspects of its rhetoric, but I am also a representative of the Church of England and I don't go along with all of that, either. Wait until you find an organisation which suits you in every detail, and you'll wait a long time. Some people don't like XR's Red Brigade, who symbolise the destructiveness and suffering of climate change, but I find their sombre presence a masterstroke. Doing nothing but walk slowly and make simple hand-gestures, they manage to be an intensely powerful visual and emotional focus. But, watching them in the flesh for the first time, as an old Dr Who aficionado my mind flies back to The Fires of Pompeii, and I speculate whether there's a Whovian in the XR design department. Spot the difference.

Doing It The Old Way (Probably)

Apparently this video 'does the rounds' every few years, but I didn't know about it until my friend Fr Thesis of Kentish Town posted it on LiberFaciorum. 

It concerns the astonishing Fr Quintin Montgomery-Wright, a Cornishman who became a Roman Catholic in 1946 while curate at a church in Hoxton, as he explains, and then having been trained for the Roman priesthood in an English seminary got sent to France to join the worker-priest movement; in 1956 he arrived in the little Norman village of Le Chamblac and stayed there. At first, so it is said, he was quite enthusiastic about the reforms emerging from the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, but then changed his mind and ever after maintained Le Chamblac as an island of trad-Cath practice. He became a friend of rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, but steered well clear of the sort of sour right-wing politics that so often characterises traditionalist Catholicism (and not just in France). Amazingly the liberal diocese of Evreux in which Le Chamblac is situated - and with which, funnily enough, Guildford is twinned - left Montgomery-Wright completely unmolested, probably because his people were as devoted to him as he was to them, rather like extreme Anglo-Catholics were left alone in England. He eventually took his confirmands to the Lefebvrist Bishop Le Tissier miles away, but one suspects this was because he could be sure it would be done in a way he approved of rather than for any sectarian reason. 'I get on very well with my bishop, I just don't like some of the things he does,' he says disarmingly, 'I'm not an agitator.' 

There are in fact two films, one from 1988 and the second, 1990. Both are lovely, and Fr Quintin comes across from them as a genuinely humble and utterly unassuming. He had already come to some media attention in France (one journalist marvelling that the presbytery was 'une veritable caverne d'Ali Baba' in terms of ecclesiastical tat), and was clearly afflicted by some of the romanticism which could and still can be found from time to time among clergy of his ilk. He acquired the 'Montgomery' half of his name some time after moving to France, and in the second film takes us to Ste-Foy-de-Montgomery, not far from Le Chamblac, which he believes, rather fondly I suspect, is his ancestral seat. Still, he does it all in a delightfully unstuffy way. He acquired his sacristan, Christian, from a family who asked the priest to find him a basic job at a farm somewhere; he couldn't, so kept him, a 'housekeeper' who needed keeping himself. 'What you appreciate most as a priest is that you never grow old ... You are always dealing with successive generations ... One doesn't realise one is getting older, one lives very much in eternity ... and the prayer at the start of Mass says ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam, I will go to the altar of God who gives joy to my youth, it's a perennial experience.' The first film is narrated wonderfully by the great Ray Gosling, but then the TV people obviously realised Fr Quintin was quite capable of doing it himself and so he presents the second. 

Ray Gosling points out Fr Quintin's devotion to his car, which was to prove his undoing. A notably reckless driver, he crashed in 1996, an accident in which Christian was killed outright and the priest himself dying from his injuries shortly afterwards; an incongruously violent end for someone whose life seemed so gentle and, in the best sense, naive. It's a sort of naivety any ordained person would do worse than to cultivate.

A Mystery Solved and a Saga Discovered

Unbeknownst to him, my friend Fr P from Kentish Town recently answered a question that has haunted me for years by posting on LiberFaciorum about a book he’d recently read – the story of an unfortunate priest in a remote corner of mid-nineteenth century Spain. Alarums rang in my mind as I recognised what was almost certainly the origin of a TV series I’d caught hallucinatory bits of years and years ago, and all of which I retained in my memory was a priest making his way with a donkey through dark woods dripping with rain, a menacing theme tune, and the suggestion of ‘goings on’ which in the fragmentary narrative I encountered were never clear. The book is Los Pazos de Ulloa by the late-19^th century Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo Bazan and I can barely express my astonishment and joy that this ghost was laid to rest in so unexpected a fashion after nearly 20 years! I found that I could watch the TV series via the archive of a Spanish broadcaster, if I was prepared to put up with a moderate quality picture, occasional stumbles and jams as the internet caught up with itself, and a painfully literal translation which was almost as much a hindrance as a help.

There are four episodes, comprising not only Los Pazos de Ulloa itself but also its sequel, Madre Naturaleza, crammed into a single chapter. The story concerns Fr Julián, newly arrived in Ulloa, buried in the Galician mountains and a long way from anywhere, as domestic chaplain to the Marquis, who isn’t really the Marquis but the nephew of the real one who lives a much more civilised life in Santiago. Julián’s introduction to his new employer is when he, the Marquis, knocks him off his donkey next to a wayside cross and puts a gun to his head. The priest soon discovers that the Manor House of Ulloa is not a haven of the spiritual life. The Marquis gets a filthy little boy who hangs around the kitchen, and who, it turns out (though nobody will talk about it) is his illegitimate son, drunk to shut him up; he is having a long affair with his maid who later tries to shock Julián by stripping and throwing herself on his bed; the Marquis’s majordomo (the maid’s father) is a malign fraudster; the chapel is a rat-infested ruin; and the local clergy have long since given up trying to affect their parishioners’ lives for the good. The whole estate is dreadfully run down and the people are superstitious and brutish. Julián decides optimistically that God has sent him to sort it all out, and he starts with trying to civilise the Marquis by finding him a wife from among his four cousins in Santiago. They both pick the virtuous Nucha and bring her back from shiny city life to moss-encrusted Ulloa. Predictably this all goes horribly wrong, and in the last episode the disgraced and sacked Julián appears as a sad figure in a battered hat and besmirched cassock, living in a hut in the woods and praying at Nucha’s tomb. ‘You have brought nothing but misfortune here’, Sabel the maid told him as he packed to leave the manor, and indeed it doesn’t even stop when he has left: the Marquis’s son by Sabel and his daughter by Nucha, unaware of their shared patrimony, fall in incestuous love which ends with him running off and her going into a convent.

This tale has elements of the Gothic novel: based around a run-down, isolated house, peopled by extreme individuals, and pervaded by an atmosphere of inevitable doom. ‘What will happen will happen,’ the residents of Ulloa tell Nucha’s brother Gabriel who has come to rescue and ideally marry his niece, when he confronts everyone with the truth about her and her half-brother. It’s that kind of place. The theme tune starts with a melodramatic shriek and Julián and Nucha are both prone to having terrifying dreams as the lightning flashes around the Manor and its shutters batter its walls in the wind. Julián, especially, has a vision of witchcraft and devilry on his first night there, and how much is real and how much is dream is hard to discern. The cackling old village woman La Sabia certainly looks the part of a rustic witch. But Ulloa’s real tone is more social satire than anything else, like a less relentlessly miserable and more mocking take on Thomas Hardy.

Because Julián is really the central character, it’s his flaws and those of the Church he represents which are most to the fore. He seems to have lofty intentions but neither the resolve nor the realism to carry them through, and for all his moping about the woods in the last episode never even manages to face his own responsibility for the disaster, getting no further than a limp ‘perhaps it would have been better had I never come to this House’. Deluded by his own idealism throughout, he never stops being shocked and baffled.

There were two odd elements I couldn’t get past, though, apart from various plot elements I missed because of the risible translation. Right at the end, Gabriel insists that, as she makes her confession, Julián makes clear to his niece Manuela that he will still marry her despite what’s happened. What we see on-screen, to ominous music, is Julián, from behind, describing to the girl that God will be her only earthly consolation and that she should concentrate on Him, implying that he has sent her unknowing to the cloister. When Gabriel confronts her, though, she states that she knows full well what he’s prepared to do, but that she still feels she must take the veil. Finally, the voice-over narrator – God? – states that ‘Julián fulfilled his revenge’. One can’t imagine the daft priest having any such thoughts, really, although seeing Manuela wrested from the poisonous atmosphere of Ulloa might have come to him as a sort of victory. Did he or didn’t he? And secondly, given that Manuela’s relationship with her half-brother is incestuous, were late 19^th-century Spanish mores such that nobody batted an eyelid at her uncle planning to marry her? As she and Nucha are both played by beautiful Victoria Abril, I so wanted her to say, ‘So, quite apart from you being about 30 years older than me, you’re saying you mainly fancy me because I remind you of your dead sister? That’s not creepy at all, is it?’

I will have to read the books now ...

Unexpected Find

Even for just a couple of pounds from a second-hand bookshop in Cranborne on a wet morning I wasn't sure about this book. A tie-in with a TV series: it didn't necessarily bode well but I thought I might get something out of it. 

I never saw the original TV series, looking at archaeological finds uncovered by members of the public and which have, with a few extreme exceptions, now found their way into museum collections. Perhaps that was just as well, as thinking about it I now have nightmarish images in my mind of reconstructions of a chap sweeping a metal detector over a damp field in Leicestershire  (low-level camera angles, perhaps, or maybe a camera actually swooping from one view to another) while dramatic music plays in the background and Bettany Hughes says things like 'Brian never expected what would happen next'. Well, obviously he didn't. Anyway, I escaped anything like that, and in fact the book is rather fun. It assumes no knowledge at all, but somehow manages to do this without being irritating and is written with a level understatement which is most welcome. No matter how interesting the subject, the wrong treatment would have ruined it, but far from it: instead the charisma of the artefacts, whether grand (and you get the Crosby Garrett Roman cavalry helmet, which is certainly that) or commonplace, and the human detail not just of the stories they embody but those of their discovery, shine through. Thankfully, it's all about the stuff, and the people the stuff represents. 

Juana Ines (2016)

The first couple of episodes of the Mexican miniseries on Netflix about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juana Inés, I found intriguing but pretty broad-brush. It was a glimpse into (someone’s version of) a period of history most English people know next to nothing about, Spanish Mexico in the 17th century. Sor Juana is perhaps the greatest figure of Mexican letters, a genius far from neglected even in her own lifetime: the Tenth Muse, the Minerva of the Americas, they called her, even while many of the religious authorities in New Spain chafed and grumbled at the idea of a woman (and a nun!) writing profane verse and speculating on theology. The amazing portrait of Sor Juana by Miguel Cabrera misleads with its sheer swagger (remember it was painted long after her death) and the most authentic image, created about 1680, is far more conventional while still emphasising the scholarly pursuits of its sitter, but she was highly thought of and clearly had no doubts about her own abilities. The series majors on the conflict of the learned nun and the Church hierarchy, but despite this restrictive set-up it becomes remarkably subtle by the end, an exploration of the nature of the religious life, albeit a contradictory and ultimately inconclusive one.

The show looks wonderful: the various New Spanish dignitaries remarkably resemble their contemporary portraits, and the clothes are fantastic. It’s all a bit static, as a great deal of the ‘action’ consists of characters talking to each other in cloisters, and often via a grille (any conversation between the Sisters of St Jerome and anyone who isn’t, for instance); and sometimes a bit repetitious, as young Juana first becomes the uncomfortable love-object of the desperately lonely and frustrated Vicereine Leonor, and then middle-aged Sor Juana enters into a not-quite-consummated relationship with Vicereine Maria-Luisa. The central relationship of the whole narrative is between Juana and her Jesuit confessor, Fr Antonio Nunez de Miranda, and that goes through thirty years of repeated conflict too until she dumps him and then, at the last, re-admits him. At first it seems that all the ecclesiastical figures are simply bigots, intent on reining-in this contumacious woman. There is Fr Antonio, apparently determined on saving Juana Inés’s soul from her own intellectual pride but full of his own unacknowledged motives; her cynical Prioress at the Hieronymite convent, Sor Maria, who cares mainly about preserving the comforts of the house against interference from outside; and the misogynist Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas who seems frankly psychopathic. Only easygoing Archbishop Payo de Rivera, the cleric who admits Juana to her final vows and who likes a good poem and some Indian sweets, comes over particularly sympathetically.

Then after all this churchy and courtly to-ing and fro-ing, we have the last episode-and-a-bit where all these characters emerge rather differently. Poor Fr Antonio, who has spent thirty years harrying and manipulating Juana into giving up her intellectual life yet (as Archbishop de Aguiar points out) never quite forcing her, finally admits to her through the convent grille that he has been at least partly motivated by envy at her cleverness: that he has tried to ‘bring you down to my level’ by using the confessional to get her to stop writing. ‘I’ve never hated you … I’ve always admired you’, he stutters, and then passes through the grille the bundle of Juana’s romantic letters to the Vicereine that could get her denounced, surrendering the last hold he has over her. He gets shockingly beaten up by the Archbishop, and finally succumbs to a fever after a botched cataract operation: it’s not a happy end. When the Archbishop scours the convent for evidence to put Juana on trial, the Prioress is one of the very few sisters who refuses to collaborate (‘At my age, I can’t be expected to remember everything that’s happened over the last 25 years’, she comments innocently to the investigators), and organises the copying of her books so that they can be published in Madrid against the wishes of the colonial Church hierarchy. Finally, it’s the man who should be Sor Juana’s most bitter antagonist, the monstrous Archbishop de Aguiar, who liberates her: he visits the convent garden (overcoming his repugnance of female contact) to tell her she is free to choose what to be – a nun, or in her heart still a courtier, living in her imagination a life she claims to have left behind, to be ‘Juana Inés de Asbaje, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’. He’s not going to force her. You can see the scales fall from her eyes as she realises how much of her literary endeavour has been motivated less by pure delight in learning than by the very opposition she has aroused. Liberation from pressure means she can lay down her pen. She sells her books and equipment and gives the money to the city’s poor.

Except she doesn’t, quite. The series has to accommodate the fact that, although the historical Sor Juana Inés made a public act of penance and never published again, after she died ministering to the other nuns in a plague, manuscripts and books were found secreted in her cell proving that she never gave up writing completely. The story shows her treating this as a spiritual conflict, an addictive habit she has to combat: she even blames herself for the plague that hits the convent, scourging herself so that the aghast Prioress has to tear the whip out of her hands, and then breathing in the infected breath of one of the sisters so she too can die.

In the end I was impressed by the genuine way the series treats religion when at first I thought it was going to be a bit of a panto. Of course, from a secular-humanist point of view, Juana Inés’s change of heart is nothing more than a defeat, and it’s to the show’s credit that it hints otherwise. Sor Juana and Fr Antonio, at the centre of the maelstrom of misogyny and power, are shown taking the business of sin and redemption absolutely seriously. Both deeply flawed people, they see in the end how it goes to their very hearts. ‘God moves in mysterious ways’, says Fr Antonio somewhat pathetically as they talk about Juana Inés’s life at their last confession, which is as much his as hers; ‘God himself is the mystery’, she answers.