“Little Road and a Stone to Roll”
John Stewart
Finding Your Feet
Patrick Preaching to His Disciples
Harry Clarke
The song suggests that we all need something to do and time to think about what we will do. Kicking a stone down the road is one way we pass the time as we think about the the things we want to do. There might also be a suggestion of trying to work at things we want to do that others want to keep us from doing.
Tina Brown and Catherine Nicholson reviewed a book by Ramie Targoff’, Shakespeare’s Sisters. The title is an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own. Brown begins her review with a reference to Woolf’s book:
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.” (Some of the Best Bards Were Women)
Woolf’s suggestion is there can be no Elizabethan women writers because a woman would not have the time, the income, or the education necessary to write fiction, or anything else, I suppose. As both reviews point out, Woolf was wrong about there being no women writers in the age of Shakespeare (which Woolf knew because the book points out she had read some of them). But she was right about the necessity of time alone, a sufficient income, and an education. One might also add being allowed “opinions of her own.” Of the women writers that are the focus of the book all but one was born into a wealthy aristocratic family that afforded them the time they needed to work at their writing. The fourth was born into a family without means. Nicholson points out:
The last of Targoff’s four protagonists came remarkably close to Judith’s fate. In 1587, eighteen-year-old Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian, likely Jewish, immigrant court musician and his common-law English wife, found herself orphaned, friendless, and near-penniless in the city of London. Like Woolf’s imagined heroine, Lanyer sought protection in an affair with an older man and, also like Judith, she eventually became pregnant. But here history diverges startlingly from myth. Where young Judith Shakespeare takes up with the playhouse impresario Nick Greene, Lanyer caught the eye of Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain of England, cousin to Queen Elizabeth herself, and a married father of thirteen. When she realized she was expecting his child, rather than kill herself to avoid ignominy, Aemilia informed Hunsdon, who wed her to a member of his staff, Alfonso Lanyer. It does not seem to have been an especially successful union, but Aemilia would later look back on the affair that had prompted her marriage with equanimity and a hint of pride. The old Lord Chamberlain, she reflected, “kept her long . . . maintained her in great pomp,” and “loved her well.” Her years as his mistress were, in many ways, the happiest time of her life. If their relationship had not ended, she might never have written a word. (Renaissance Women)
We see Lanyer, unlike Woolf’s example of the woman who longed to write but lacked the necessities of being a writer, time, income, and education, went on to become a writer because she acquired these necessities where poor Judith Shakespeare did not.
There is an anime film, Whisper of the Heart about a young girl in junior high school who aspires to be a writer. She stops focusing on her studies so that she can begin her writing career. She is very motivated and, in a month or two, writes a novel. She realizes that it is not very good because she also realizes she does not know enough about writing to write well. So, she recommences her education. Virginia Woolf was right, £500.00 a year and a room of one’s own is not enough by itself to become a writer of fiction, male or female, an education is also necessary.
Education
Louis Comfort Tiffany and Tiffany Studios
#/media/File:Tiffany_Education.JPG){kind=link}
The book suggests a few things that are important to remember, the generalities we are taught about any time or place ought not to be accepted at face value. Perhaps, the age of Shakespeare did not make it easy to be a woman and a writer, but women not only did write, but they were also published. The works of the women referenced in the books were not in manuscript form found in hidden corners of a house. They were published books that, though not published or read much today, were published and read in their own day. These writers were, perhaps, more like Jane Austen than Judith Shakespeare.
September
Bernard van Orley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry#/media/File:Hunt_of_Maximilian,_September,_Louvre.jpg
I also find it interesting that Queen Elizabeth I was herself a writer. I have somewhere around my house Queen Elizabeth’s translation of Boethuis’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Lysbeth Em Benkert in “Translation as Image-Making: Elizabeth I’s Translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy” says, “Elizabeth’s intellectual powers were already widely known and celebrated. She remained justifiably proud of her skill as a linguist and corresponded often in Greek and Latin.” In addition to translations, she also wrote poetry. She was also a powerful orator as can be seen in this speech to her forces before they went to battle against the Spanish Armada:
We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm . . . (https://www.elizabethfiles.com/resources/speeches/the-tilbury-speech/)
We have only the words of the speech, but the language of the speech suggests she was probably a powerful speaker as well. She also displays great courage.
Portrait of Pietro Manna, Doctor of Cremona
Lucia Anguissola
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Anguissola%2C_Lucia_-_Pietro_Manna_-_Prado.jpg
Another assumption is there were no Renaissance women painters. Lucia Anguissola was one of many Renaissance women painters. For me, this painting of Doctor Manna evokes Rembrandt. We can debate if it rises to that standard, but as a painting it has merit. I like the touch of the snake winding itself around the doctors walking stick. It suggests the staff of Asclepius, a symbol of medicine and health care linking Pietro Manna to his profession.
If, as we like to believe, the compulsion to create art lives in all of us to some extent, or is at least a common human attribute, we should expect to find artists in all genders in all times and in all mediums. Sappho is not the only woman poet of Classical Greece, though one of very few women poets that survived from that era.
The Fruit Seller
Louise Moillon
The painting above by Louise Moillon is also compelling, it draws us into itself. I find the fruits and vegetables well painted and I like the variety. But what draws me into the painting are the expressions on the faces of the women in the painting. One is richly dressed and has a pleasant expression on her face, she seems to be the one doing the buying and enjoying her purchases. She also seems a bit aloof. The other woman, the fruit seller, has a more ambiguous expression on her face. Is it sadness, discontent? She looks like someone who must work but does not really enjoy her work and perhaps cannot afford for herself what she sells to others. I also enjoy the cat hiding behind the pumpkins in the mid to lower right hand corner. Complexity is an aspect of beauty. The content of the image may be simple, like fruits and vegetables and people and pets. But it is a simplicity that provokes complex questions and makes demands on us. Understanding is a step in the process. But so are the issues that understanding provokes. It also uses color and composition to provoke our interest, it’s a painting that encourages us to look, and rewards the looking.
Magnolia and Irises
Louis Comfort Tiffany and Tiffany Studios
https://www.wikiart.org/en/louis-comfort-tiffany/magnolia-and-irises-1908
In “The Witness of Women Is Written on the Walls” Lanta Davis writes about her search for role models. She is a Christian woman who grew up in the Evangelical Christian church. Outside the church she did not see any obstacles to success. She writes”
I grew up believing women could do it all. In rural South Dakota, I was surrounded by farm women, who are some of the toughest, most resilient people I have ever met. My mom could bake delicious chicken and also slaughter them.
South Dakota also frequently leads the nation in the percentage of women and mothers who work outside the home. So as a young girl, I never doubted that women could do whatever they wanted, that they were as equally capable as men. I could become president. I could be an astronaut. I could do whatever I set my mind on doing.
But she found that within the church she was not afforded the opportunities she was afforded outside the church. She was interested in studying theology. Though she believed Scripture supported women in leadership and other positions of responsibility within the church, the modern church, or at least the church she grew up in, did not. And whatever her personal beliefs she, like many of us, “wanted heroes.” Maria Tatar wrote in The Heroine with a Thousand and One Faces:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces while teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His classes on comparative mythology at the then all-women’s school were in such high demand that he was soon obliged to limit enrollment to seniors. During his last year of teaching there, one of those seniors walked into his office, sat down, and said: “Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the hero. But what about the women?” The startled professor raised his eyebrows and replied, “The woman’s the mother of the hero; she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?” “I want to be the hero,” she announced. (Quoted in The Heroes Journey Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work)
We all need not just heroes, but heroes that look like us. Davis wrote about a visit she took to Ravenna:
In the Basilica of San Vitale, Empress Theodora stood equal in size and standing to her husband, Justinian. Along the length of the walls in the New Basilica of Saint Apollinaris, each side featured a procession of saints marching toward Christ. On the left was a line of women, and on the right, the men, equal in stature, equal in standing. The design and placement of the mosaics mirrored each other, so that as I stood in the church, I could plainly see what it meant for men and women to be “one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28). These weren’t women hiding in the margins or in the background but visibly leading the church toward Christ.
These early church heroes were distinctly concerned with their experience as women. And they weren’t afraid to talk about their female bodies.
These women were leaders in the early church. She found her heroes. Attitudes towards women may have changed in some churches since that time, but it would appear that not only is Scripture not on the side of these modern churches, neither is history.
I find it interesting that women did many things long ago that culture, and not just western culture, forgot that they did. In her book The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller writes:
There had always been plenty of wise women dispensing advice and remedies to their local community, but, in Southern Italy, there were also—remarkably—learned female doctors, trained and educated in Salerno and Naples. Tragically, this enlightened aspect of Salernitan medicine did not catch on elsewhere, and, with a very few exceptions, women had to wait until the twentieth century before being able to study and practise medicine in significant numbers. These medieval women were especially skilled in gynaecology, obstetrics and female health; their combined knowledge was expounded in the twelfth century in a series of three texts known as the Trotula. The origins of the Trotula are unclear, but a woman from Salerno called Trota or Trocta may well have been involved with their creation and thus given them her name. (p. 179)
There is also a book, Sacred Trash, about the Cairo Geniza. Geniza means “hidden treasure” and was where worn-out sacred books were stored because sacred books could not be thrown in the trash. In Cairo that extended to anything written with Hebrew letters. One part the book talks about a beautiful lyric poem, written in Hebrew that was put in the geniza. In 1944 a scholar, Ezra Fleischer, found first a fragment and then a complete version of this poem. Its heading was “Dunash ben Labrat to him.” He found the complete version in Israel’s National Academy of Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry and found that the heading of the poem was incomplete. He discovered:
It seems that the 1944 fragment had been missing only a single Judeo-Arabic word in the heading, but that word was critical: lizawjat, meaning, “By the wife of.” The full poem with its restored heading was, in other words, described as being “By the wife of Dunash ben Labrat to him”—making it almost certain that she, not her husband, was the author of this lyric. (p. 179)
I find the citations from these two books an interesting contrast (I also find it interesting these two passages came from the same page number in two different books). In medieval Salerno women were trained as doctors and likely wrote some of their medical texts, while in the other, in Cairo, a woman can not be credited with her own writing. Her work survives but her name does not.
Jesus is Condemned to Death
Harry Clarke
https://sacredwindows.com/stunning-stained-glass-on-a-penitential-island/
Stained glass credits: Harry Clarke stained glass windows – Lough Derg, Pettigo Co Donegal; James Edward photographer. Photo Credits via Wikimedia
Lanta Davis also wrote about a trip she took to Ireland to visit Station Island, “Saint Patrick’s Windows into Grief.” The Island was “nicknamed Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.” Davis said of the island, “Legend says that Saint Patrick visited the island to pray for something to help the stubborn Irish pagans convert. On Station Island, he found it. After descending into a cave, he experienced the pains and perils of purgatory, ‘proof’ of the eternal beyond.” She went to Station Island to see not only Patrick’s Purgatory, but the stained-glass windows in his church, which have been called the most beautiful stained-glass windows in the world.
A website devoted to Saint Patrick’s Basilica and its stained-glass windows says, “So, if these stained glass windows are literally the best in the world, how is it possible that so few people know about them? Well, there’s a very simple answer to that question. It’s probably because you have to spend three days cut off from civilization and do a good bit of penance for your sins just to lay eyes on their radiant beauty.” (“Stunning Stained Glass on a Penitential Island”). I suppose to experience the best of anything comes at a cost of one kind or another.
The windows were designed and made by Harry Clarke. I had never heard of him before reading the article, which also included a sampling of the stained-glass windows. I was overwhelmed by their beauty. The stained glass above is one of the windows, it is the first of the fourteen stations of the Cross. The image of the condemned Jesus is on a shield held by St. Peter. This suggests that the apostle is telling us the Gospel story by showing us a picture of what happened in the Gospel story, not unlike illuminated Books of Hours with pictures that showed those that could not read what was happening in the text for those that could.
Part of what overwhelmed me was how alike in some ways these stained-glass windows were to traditional stained-glass church windows, but also by how they were in so many ways very different.
Cathédrale de Chartres – Life of Charlemagne (detail of bay 7)
Anonymous
Both Clark’s windows and those from historic cathedrals, like the one above from Chartres, are very colorful. But they reflect different times. Clarke’s windows have an informality to them. They evoke his artistic influences, the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionism, and the Art Nouveau movement. They include the common people of Christ’s day in common dress. Even the leaders, spiritual and political, are dressed, like Christ, in the clothing of their day. Though we know St. Peter holds the shield, no one in the shield’s image is identified by name, though we know who Jesus is because He has a halo. The images in the glass are also more impressionistic and the narrative in the window is one of conflict with the good guys and the bad clearly identified. They not only behave as bad guys, there is a nastiness to their expressions that underscore their badness. The story that is told is one that touches everyone regardless of their station in life. Clarke’s window focuses on Jesus and His oppression at the hands of powerful people of His day. It is easier for the “common person” to see in Jesus a person whose life experience is closer to their own. The story told by the stations of the cross is a story which many, if not most, have some familiarity.
The Chartres window, on the other hand, reflects the arts of its time, illuminated manuscripts, Islamic Art, paintings and statuary of Biblical and historical themes. The paintings of the time are realistic, but not as sophisticated as the art of the Renaissance. Though the window also tells a story, it is more realistic and more formal. The window tells a different kind of story, the life of Charlemagne (the stations of the cross were put in churches many years after Chartres was built). It is important to know that many kinds of stories are told in the Chartres windows, from parables of Jesus to the lives of saints, from events from The Bible and History to the stories of important people like Charlemagne. The Chartres window above depicts historical events that may not have needed explanations at the time the cathedral was built, but they are not entirely clear today to one who does not know the history. The people in the window are soldiers and aristocrats, powerful people, in the dress of Charlemagne’s day. But where Clarke’s window puts more of an emphasis on the powerless, in the person of Jesus, being oppressed by the powerful, the focus in the Chartres window is more political, focused on the life of an important monarch, who may himself have done his share of oppressing the powerless. Also, Charlemagne is always identified by name, Carolvs (the Latin evokes Charlemagne, or Charles the Great). Notice the use of the letter “v” for the letter “u.” At the time the letters “u” and “v” were interchangeable, “u” used at the beginning of words and the “v” internally or at the end of a word, this is why the letter “w” is called a “double u”.
Galileo by Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Joseph Losey
Distributed by American Film Theatre
There are other ways of silencing that have nothing to do with gender or culture or race or nationality, but with the content of the ideas being taught. In the film clip we see Galileo talking to a young boy, Andreas, the son of his landlady. Galileo is teaching the boy what he (Galileo) is learning about the solar system. When Andreas tells his mother a bit about what he is learning his mother becomes worried. She tells him not to bother Galileo, but she also seems concerned about what Galileo is teaching Andreas. Mother also thinks Galileo’s belief that a feather falls as fast as a cannon ball ridiculous. But during one of the moon landings an astronaut dropped together a feather and a stone, and they both hit the ground at the same time. There are no atmospheric pressures on the moon to interfere with the feather’s fall.
Galileo, after mother leaves, tells the boy not to talk to others about what he is learning because it could get him into trouble. We know from history that what Galileo taught did get him into serious trouble. Of course, what Galileo taught is still taught today where those that tried to silence him are largely, like what they taught, forgotten.
What is taught can still get people, and not only scientists, into trouble. There are parts of the United States that do not want the whole of U. S. history to be taught. They want to silence unpleasant aspects of this history and not debate them or learn from them how to make a better, more just nation. What we consider a just nation changes as our understanding of justice changes. Separate but equal was once considered a just system. It is not considered such any longer, at least not by most of the United States. Separate but equal began as an idea, integration began as an idea. Our understanding of justice is an idea, one that is understood differently by different people. We often try to silence ideas we do not like or see as harmful, though others may like them and not see them as harmful. It is important that we debate and not ignore these ideas, because ultimately consensus will be reached and hopefully that consensus will accept the understanding of the most just, the most ethical forms of those ideas.
People often forget silencing an idea breathes life into that idea more often than it kills it, whether the idea is a good or bad one. It generates curiosity and people want to find out what it’s about. Why does the idea frighten some people so much they want to silence it? Ideas should be allowed to live until they die a natural death. Silencing an idea, especially one that is on its deathbed, gives sustenance to and sustains that idea.
We’ve also forgotten the importance of knowing not just what we believe and why but of knowing as well what the opposition believes and why. It is important to know why we believe what we believe, but it is as important to know why we don’t believe what we don’t believe. In his book On Liberty John Stewart Mill wrote, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” We need to recognize much of what we believe proceeds from core convictions that have their roots in conscience. My beliefs are the conclusions of conscience as are those of most people who disagree with me. Neither I nor the other is likely to be debated out of our core beliefs, they are foundational, but we can understand each other and why we each believe as we do. There is no way either of us could reach the conclusion of the other beginning from where we do. But we should be able to recognize the source of each others’s convictions and though we may rarely agree we can respect each others’ beliefs. It is only in this way that a stable democracy can be preserved.
Books also have been banned for many reasons. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were banned in Russia, and it was illegal to publish or read their books. The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Candide were banned in the United States and other countries, as well as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, The Grapes of Wrath, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These authors and books are now read in those places they were once banned, and many are taught in their schools. There are still places in the world where The Bible is banned, but also still read.
The Colloquy of Monos and Una
Harry CLarke
These books and many others not only continue to live but have contributed to overturning the forces that got them banned. Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a strong case against slavery and was banned in southern states where slavery was practiced. Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the book’s author, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” The war being the Civil War that ended slavery. Was the book responsible for the Civil War? Probably not by itself, but it was a voice that contributed to it.
Perhaps education is only as good as what we are allowed to learn. In most western democracies we learn the good and the bad about our countries. We are better off for it because we learn from our mistakes and though there are detours, we move pretty much in a positive direction. It took almost a hundred years from the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution before the Civil Rights movement in America began to dismantle the institutions that kept African Americans from participating fully in American life. There is still work to do and the work continues to go slowly, but as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This suggests that justice does not happen overnight, but also that those that oppose justice are ultimately on the losing side, even if they do not live to see themselves lose.
The Library
Jacob Lawrence
https://www.wikiart.org/en/jacob-lawrence/the-library-1960