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A Devout Meditation for the Feast of Fools
It is All Fools’ Day, the day that utopyr calls “the national day of our people,” and given the combined testimony of La Strada, The Greater Trumps, and Russian Orthodox monastic practice, I cannot but agree wholeheartedly.
Someone’s memorial poem for William Carlos Williams would also have agreed if I were able to remember more of it than the affectionate “For you’re a fool, Bill Williams,” or some line dissimilar enough to make it less than amenable to a Google search, even if it were in the database. (Actually, I recall it was Kenneth Rexroth, who usually is the source of poems by "somebody or other" that have stuck in my memory.)
Shakespeare’s fools may be a more appropriate comparison for our historical moment—creative folks at the bottom of their economic niche, but in a niche, as distinct from completely disinherited. Such folks are compelled to operate in a mode that combines passive resistance with analytical skill, in an environment in which the stress of constant dissimulation encourages, eventually, actual dysfunctionality. Most royal courts operated along these lines, and they still do.
This was brought to mind by a passage in Marjorie Jones’ Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition regarding Yates’ The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, one of the many books that I have acquired for the sake of completeness but never read, believing that the day would come when they would seem relevant.
Coming in the wake of her growing understanding of Giordano Bruno, this 1947 book was proposing a more complex view of the state of Catholic-Protestant relations in France at the level of the intellectuals and the monarchs they served. This is the beginning of Yates’ famed thesis that the various phenomena she studied were being used as vehicles for the hoped-for “reunion of religions,” part of the goal for which Bruno had been dispatched to England (where he wrote The Ash Wednesday Supper) by King Henri III to study the Anglicans who “had taken the step of reforming themselves because they could not wait any longer for the constantly deferred reform of the Church as a whole.” (All quotes regarding this are from Yates as quoted by Jones, and summarize Yates’ opinion as of 1947.)
Now, the curious thing is that Yates at this early stage of her involvement with the Warburg Institute was already discussing larger historical issues in terms of realizing the extent to which simple binary oppositions were seldom accurate (as put succinctly by someone other than Yates, “Those who say there are two sides to every question are lost already. For there are always more than two sides.”)—a fact long obscured in academics by the fact that history is interpreted from only one side, the winning one (which lumps its enemies into one mythic category), as Yates apparently was already declaring in public lectures during the Second World War.
It is also obscured, and this is so evident that only a fool would bother to point it out, by the fact that every so often in the unfolding of a complex sequence of events the choices really do become binary: you stay in the unsatisfactory job, or you do not; you accept the non-negotiable demands, or you literally or metaphorically throw the emissaries out the window. And a new set of multiple options follow in the garden of forking paths.
Only the mountebanks of history like Karl Kraus say “When faced with a choice between two evils, I shall choose neither,” and even Kraus had to admit that there was a point at which something had to be done, even if it was wrong.
And Kraus may not have said it in exactly those words, even given the variables of translation.
Yates admitted the foolishness of rushing preliminary conclusions into print, but wrote in the preface to her book, “Its excuse for appearing in the present form, without waiting for further findings from more detailed research in France, is that the conditions under which it was written, unsatisfactory from the scholarly point of view, were from the spiritual point of view perhaps not unrevealing. It might be difficult to recapture the atmosphere in which the FA of the 16th century first presented themselves as a steadying subject in a disintegrating world.”
All history is local history, and most of it is personal history, in this sense: The questions are framed by the circumstances of the historian, whether the historian knows it or not, and part of the task of writing history is to become aware of the extent to which the immediate environment of the historian is framing the approach to the topic under discussion. This is now a commonplace, and certainly a topic that has been discussed ever since Nietzsche if not ever since Plato or since the Neolithic. But outsiders like Yates are more likely to feel and see the issue with intensity.
It doesn’t mean that they get the questions right, unfortunately; and as we know from Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids that I probably quote inaccurately, if They can get you to ask the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about answers.
But Yates was right to ask the now much more popular what-if question, but not in terms of the parlor exercise of imagining all the complexities that would have unfolded if, say, Pickett’s charge had succeeded at Gettysburg.
Her wish was simply to open up the state of complexity that had once actually existed, and that might eventually suggest models for present practice (though it is Yates’ admirers to seem to extract this from her writing): “The political and religious history of the sixteenth century in France is usually written from the point of view of its disunity…. Such a picture is a true reflection of the grim events which actually occurred. Nevertheless, history as it actually occurs is not quite the whole history, for it leaves out of account the hopes which never materialized, the attempts to prevent the outbreak of wars, the futile efforts to solve differences by conciliatory methods. Hopes such as these are as much a part of history as the terrible events which falsify them, and in trying to assess the influence of their times upon idealists and lovers of peaceful activities such as our poets and academicians the hopes are perhaps as important as the events.”
Yates’ path into finding the history of failed hopes led through the Warburg Institute’s multidisciplinary approach, its refugee scholars having had their way to acceptance paved by what Institute director Fritz Saxl called “the rising interest in British education in the study of the visual documents of the past.” Yates in turn saw her work on the sixteenth century French Academies as “an expression of the kind of historical writing which I hoped would develop after the war—history in the round, encyclopedic history, the history of symbolism and imagery integrated with general history—in short, Warburgian history.”
And that is how interdisciplinary academia has in fact developed, with more than a few false starts and dead ends along the way, and more than a few insistent rejections of such an approach. And it has helped us to realize that not just the sciences humaines but all the sciences are, in fact, carried out by humans who are all too human, though this insight has all too often been extended to the preposterous assertion that therefore we are free to believe any old thing we choose.
The pages from Jones’ biography of Yates reminded me of why I wanted to study “lost world’s fairs,” the world’s fairs that never happened such as the Tokyo Exposition of 1940 that were, in fact, points at which the later supporters of reconciliatory efforts and peaceful enterprises apparently planned to present models of a possible future that was foreclosed by the grim events that actually occurred.
The imagination cuts both ways, of course; I see there is a new book that I cannot afford to buy and probably would not get round to reading, anyway, called The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, which examines the glorification of aestheticized violence in prewar Japan and the currents of Japanese culture that have continued in this vein since the war.
I would assume that the book quotes Walter Benjamin’s familiar assertion regarding fascism’s aestheticizations of relations of political power.
Jones’ discussion of how Yates’ life shaped Yates’ scholarly interests also brought me up short as I remembered looking out my window at Governor Ronald Reagan’s National Guardsmen patrolling the streets of riot-ruined Isla Vista and shouting, “A plague on both your houses!”
I recall my sense that history was presenting me with two sets of powerful opposing forces, both of which had fundamentally unsatisfactory elements. I chose neither.
I chose the avoidance of power as much as history would permit, and the knowledge that there are not only third ways, but fourth ways and fifth ways and x+1 ways, though history puts limits to the number, always.
Some might find it amusing that Yates began her lifelong friendship with D. P. Walker, already a fellow researcher of Renaissance mysteries, when he was “stationed with the army at Bletchley Park, where German codes were deciphered.”
It is All Fools’ Day, the day that utopyr calls “the national day of our people,” and given the combined testimony of La Strada, The Greater Trumps, and Russian Orthodox monastic practice, I cannot but agree wholeheartedly.
Someone’s memorial poem for William Carlos Williams would also have agreed if I were able to remember more of it than the affectionate “For you’re a fool, Bill Williams,” or some line dissimilar enough to make it less than amenable to a Google search, even if it were in the database. (Actually, I recall it was Kenneth Rexroth, who usually is the source of poems by "somebody or other" that have stuck in my memory.)
Shakespeare’s fools may be a more appropriate comparison for our historical moment—creative folks at the bottom of their economic niche, but in a niche, as distinct from completely disinherited. Such folks are compelled to operate in a mode that combines passive resistance with analytical skill, in an environment in which the stress of constant dissimulation encourages, eventually, actual dysfunctionality. Most royal courts operated along these lines, and they still do.
This was brought to mind by a passage in Marjorie Jones’ Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition regarding Yates’ The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century, one of the many books that I have acquired for the sake of completeness but never read, believing that the day would come when they would seem relevant.
Coming in the wake of her growing understanding of Giordano Bruno, this 1947 book was proposing a more complex view of the state of Catholic-Protestant relations in France at the level of the intellectuals and the monarchs they served. This is the beginning of Yates’ famed thesis that the various phenomena she studied were being used as vehicles for the hoped-for “reunion of religions,” part of the goal for which Bruno had been dispatched to England (where he wrote The Ash Wednesday Supper) by King Henri III to study the Anglicans who “had taken the step of reforming themselves because they could not wait any longer for the constantly deferred reform of the Church as a whole.” (All quotes regarding this are from Yates as quoted by Jones, and summarize Yates’ opinion as of 1947.)
Now, the curious thing is that Yates at this early stage of her involvement with the Warburg Institute was already discussing larger historical issues in terms of realizing the extent to which simple binary oppositions were seldom accurate (as put succinctly by someone other than Yates, “Those who say there are two sides to every question are lost already. For there are always more than two sides.”)—a fact long obscured in academics by the fact that history is interpreted from only one side, the winning one (which lumps its enemies into one mythic category), as Yates apparently was already declaring in public lectures during the Second World War.
It is also obscured, and this is so evident that only a fool would bother to point it out, by the fact that every so often in the unfolding of a complex sequence of events the choices really do become binary: you stay in the unsatisfactory job, or you do not; you accept the non-negotiable demands, or you literally or metaphorically throw the emissaries out the window. And a new set of multiple options follow in the garden of forking paths.
Only the mountebanks of history like Karl Kraus say “When faced with a choice between two evils, I shall choose neither,” and even Kraus had to admit that there was a point at which something had to be done, even if it was wrong.
And Kraus may not have said it in exactly those words, even given the variables of translation.
Yates admitted the foolishness of rushing preliminary conclusions into print, but wrote in the preface to her book, “Its excuse for appearing in the present form, without waiting for further findings from more detailed research in France, is that the conditions under which it was written, unsatisfactory from the scholarly point of view, were from the spiritual point of view perhaps not unrevealing. It might be difficult to recapture the atmosphere in which the FA of the 16th century first presented themselves as a steadying subject in a disintegrating world.”
All history is local history, and most of it is personal history, in this sense: The questions are framed by the circumstances of the historian, whether the historian knows it or not, and part of the task of writing history is to become aware of the extent to which the immediate environment of the historian is framing the approach to the topic under discussion. This is now a commonplace, and certainly a topic that has been discussed ever since Nietzsche if not ever since Plato or since the Neolithic. But outsiders like Yates are more likely to feel and see the issue with intensity.
It doesn’t mean that they get the questions right, unfortunately; and as we know from Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids that I probably quote inaccurately, if They can get you to ask the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about answers.
But Yates was right to ask the now much more popular what-if question, but not in terms of the parlor exercise of imagining all the complexities that would have unfolded if, say, Pickett’s charge had succeeded at Gettysburg.
Her wish was simply to open up the state of complexity that had once actually existed, and that might eventually suggest models for present practice (though it is Yates’ admirers to seem to extract this from her writing): “The political and religious history of the sixteenth century in France is usually written from the point of view of its disunity…. Such a picture is a true reflection of the grim events which actually occurred. Nevertheless, history as it actually occurs is not quite the whole history, for it leaves out of account the hopes which never materialized, the attempts to prevent the outbreak of wars, the futile efforts to solve differences by conciliatory methods. Hopes such as these are as much a part of history as the terrible events which falsify them, and in trying to assess the influence of their times upon idealists and lovers of peaceful activities such as our poets and academicians the hopes are perhaps as important as the events.”
Yates’ path into finding the history of failed hopes led through the Warburg Institute’s multidisciplinary approach, its refugee scholars having had their way to acceptance paved by what Institute director Fritz Saxl called “the rising interest in British education in the study of the visual documents of the past.” Yates in turn saw her work on the sixteenth century French Academies as “an expression of the kind of historical writing which I hoped would develop after the war—history in the round, encyclopedic history, the history of symbolism and imagery integrated with general history—in short, Warburgian history.”
And that is how interdisciplinary academia has in fact developed, with more than a few false starts and dead ends along the way, and more than a few insistent rejections of such an approach. And it has helped us to realize that not just the sciences humaines but all the sciences are, in fact, carried out by humans who are all too human, though this insight has all too often been extended to the preposterous assertion that therefore we are free to believe any old thing we choose.
The pages from Jones’ biography of Yates reminded me of why I wanted to study “lost world’s fairs,” the world’s fairs that never happened such as the Tokyo Exposition of 1940 that were, in fact, points at which the later supporters of reconciliatory efforts and peaceful enterprises apparently planned to present models of a possible future that was foreclosed by the grim events that actually occurred.
The imagination cuts both ways, of course; I see there is a new book that I cannot afford to buy and probably would not get round to reading, anyway, called The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, which examines the glorification of aestheticized violence in prewar Japan and the currents of Japanese culture that have continued in this vein since the war.
I would assume that the book quotes Walter Benjamin’s familiar assertion regarding fascism’s aestheticizations of relations of political power.
Jones’ discussion of how Yates’ life shaped Yates’ scholarly interests also brought me up short as I remembered looking out my window at Governor Ronald Reagan’s National Guardsmen patrolling the streets of riot-ruined Isla Vista and shouting, “A plague on both your houses!”
I recall my sense that history was presenting me with two sets of powerful opposing forces, both of which had fundamentally unsatisfactory elements. I chose neither.
I chose the avoidance of power as much as history would permit, and the knowledge that there are not only third ways, but fourth ways and fifth ways and x+1 ways, though history puts limits to the number, always.
Some might find it amusing that Yates began her lifelong friendship with D. P. Walker, already a fellow researcher of Renaissance mysteries, when he was “stationed with the army at Bletchley Park, where German codes were deciphered.”
