On Thursday, Ned Rorem, America’s greatest creator of art song and one of the finest of living composers, turned 85. Yet unlike five years ago at his last significant birthday, there are few national performances of his works, even in leading music cities, marking the occasion.
Friday night there will be a chamber program at the Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy on W. 84th Street in New York. Soprano Mary Wilson will perform Songs Old and New Nov. 1 with the IRIS Orchestra in Germantown, Tennessee. Later in the month, the Eleven Studies for Eleven Players will be heard in Urbana, Illinois, and Our Town will be mounted by the Raylynmor Opera in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In January Evelyn Glennie will perform the Mallet Concerto, a work written for her, in Germany.
Still, considering Rorem’s reputation and achievements, the lack of attention is striking. Not that the composer is eager to attend any events. “I hate to travel,” said Rorem recently, speaking from his Manhattan apartment. “Even for a world premiere, I hate to travel. The older I get the more I hate the taxis and the waiting around at the airport.”
Composer, author and diarist, at 85, Rorem speaks a bit more slowly but remains as sharp, witty and opinionated in conversation as the preternaturally handsome young American who took Paris by storm in the 1950s.
“I can’t remember what I’m working on now,” he says. “I have a touch of Alzheimers.”
“Really?”
“No, but it seems that way.”
“I’m okay,” he says. “I complain a lot and I’m tired all the time. But everyone says I look good. And I think about sex every minute. How about you?”
The relative neglect of Rorem on his 85th birthday is all he more perplexing considering how active he has been in recent years. His operatic setting of Our Town was premiered in Bloomington in 2006, and encored at the Juilliard School in New York, receiving glowing reviews. Rorem takes pride in the fact that he managed to live long enough to get the rights to Thornton Wilder’s celebrated play, besting Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
And he has hardly been resting on his laurels, with such recent works as the Mallet Concerto, Four Prayers for Flute and Piano, and others. “I think I’m supposed to be writing a Saxophone Concerto for Marsalis. That will be my next piece. Got any ideas?”
Five years ago on his 80th , Rorem was withering about the state of American culture and the music industry. He cites the even more drastic decline in numbers of critics and space devoted to classical music at newspapers, the reduction of which in the last two years has only accelerated.
“There are a few good critics but they don’t get around very much,” said Rorem. “I haven’t counted them, but for pop music there’s about 150 in America. For opera and symphonic music there are about fifteen. There’s a few in New York, at New York magazine for example and at the Times, but fewer and fewer.
“The world is general is becoming de-cultured. Perhaps there never was an audience for the ‘best things.’”
He also remains acerbic about the conservative programming of most orchestras and musical organizations, with the emphasis on Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and populist crossover even in New York. “The general public couldn’t care at all about what you and I are interested in, in other words, serious contemporary music.”
“I would think that performers would get sick of all of that. The same thing over and over and over,” Rorem says of the concerto and symphonic barnburners. “But of course 150 years ago the only music that was played was contemporary music.”
Rorem has a novel theory that newspapers and critics shaped the county’s musical conservatism in the early 20th century, entrenching a certain Eurocentric repertory because that’s what newspaper people believed their audience wanted to hear and read about. ”The general public avoids contemporary music. But of course now most contemporary musc is comparatively listenable. It’s a twentieth century thing.”
Not that all modern styles are to his personal taste. “I don’t rush out to hear Elliott Carter. I don’t know what other people hear in him. Because he’s difficult, therefore he’s good.”
Rorem prefers composers who, like himself, tend to write in a tonally centered, more lucid and communicative style. “Mark [Adamo] has a certain gift. So does Corigliano. Corigliano’s the real thing. He can do anything.”
David Diamond is a composer Rorem believes remains underrated, and, somewhat surprisingly, says Diamond’s song-writing influenced his own emphasis on vocal music. “As a person he was difficult, but he was very disciplined and very well organized,” says Rorem of Diamond. “They’re not all great but certainly twenty songs of David Diamond’s are as good as anyone’s in history. I miss him. I think about him quite often.”
Rorem is writing less now and orchestrating a few songs, but says his greatest motivation remains a fee. ”I like to be commissioned to do things. But If someone asked me to do a guitar concerto, I would turn them down. I like the money, but . . . .”
“Left to my own devices, I would only write vocal music and probably just small pieces for voice and piano. But, of course, there’s no money in that.”
Rorem’s works span the genres, with three underrated symphonies, five string quartets, concertos for several instruments, from piano, cello, and violin to percussion and English horn, and his many individual songs. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the late cycles Aftermath and Evidence of Things Not Seen. The latter, a sprawling 90-minute epic of 36 settings for multiple voices, was premiered in Chicago a decade ago and still seems like Rorem’s valedictory summing up of his art and his life.
“If I died now, I think Evidence of Things Not Seen is a pretty good piece,” he says with typical understatement of his own music. “I think the opera Our Town is a good piece too. It moves me and I’m seldom moved by my own music.
“I’ve written everything. And I think technically everything I’ve done is pretty good. Like the string quartets. But I guess I’d like to be remembered for my vocal music.”
His art often conveys a strong, philosophically centered sense of morality but Rorem remains an agnostic. “I was raised a Quaker. But my mother and father became Quakers, not so much for the God part of it but for the pacifist part of it. My mother’s younger brother was killed in the first world war and she never got over it.
“I don’t believe in God. There is no God. But I believe in pacifism and good works.”
Rorem’s witty, compulsively readable diaries have seen their last imstallment, as he says he has no desire to write prose anymore and besides his typewriter is broken. The composer also has no desire to learn how to use a computer. “I don’t feel I’m missing anything.” He asks if any writers still use typewriters and is told, probably very few because with a computer, you can write, edit and revise more quickly and easily. Rorem thinks for a moment and says, “But maybe that’s not good.”
He takes heart from the fact that he shares a birthday with Franz Liszt and Sara Bernhardt. And though he is scathing about the media and the crassness of so much domestic pop culture, he believes that today’s American composers stand head and shoulders over their international counterparts.
“Even with all the vulgarity and despite everything, artistically I think America is the most interesting country in the world today,” says Rorem. “It’s certainly more interesting than France or Germany. “I can’t really name you any composers in Europe that I find interesting. But I could name a dozen American composers I find of interest. I couldn’t even name any European composers I find uninteresting.”
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
27.10.08
25.10.08
Roth & McEwan
Theodore Dalrymple
Careful What You Wish For
Two novelists portray the allure—and limitations—of liberation.
The idea that mankind might find life beautifully easy if only the right laws could be promulgated and the right social attitudes inculcated is a beguiling one. It suggests that dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him. Difficulty, however, cannot be abolished; it is the condition of human life itself. We try to avert our eyes from this truth as we avert them from death itself.
In different ways, Philip Roth’s Indignation and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach force us to confront difficulty. Both are short, and both contain surprises at the end. Both raise initial fears in the reader that he will be subjected to a politically correct tract; both subvert political correctness in the end.
The protagonist of Indignation, set in the beginning of the 1950s, is Marcus Messner, the only child of a kosher butcher in Newark. Marcus is a model son, a brilliant and industrious student who delights in helping his father in the shop. His father, who started working when he was ten years old, hopes that his son will do far better than he did. Unfortunately, Messner Senior undergoes a change. Two developments render him anxious and neurotically overprotective of Marcus: the establishment of a supermarket nearby that threatens to undermine his business and the onset of the Korean War. Having lost two nephews in World War II, he fears he will lose his son in the new conflict. To escape his father, Marcus transfers from a New Jersey college to one in Winesburg, Ohio (an artful reference to Sherwood Anderson that conjures a world of quiet desperation). Winesburg is more provincial than the East Coast, of course, but for Marcus, Middle America is a new world: at the price of some social discomfort, he finds that the move broadens his horizons.
Marcus spends what for him is a small fortune on preppy clothes, but finds when he arrives at Winesburg College (which is a Baptist establishment) that he fits in socially among neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. Impoverished, he works in a bar on weekends, where he hears mildly anti-Semitic jibes. He befriends a beautiful young student, Olivia, the daughter of well-to-do parents, with whom he has his first sexual experiences, but he discovers two things about her that undermine his confidence: first, despite her relatively privileged background, Olivia is mentally unstable and has made a suicide attempt by cutting her wrists (itself a warning that life is not automatically made easier by easy circumstances); second, she has a reputation for loose morals. His sexual experience, then, does not make much of a conquest.
Young Messner soon finds himself in conflict with the Winesburg College dean. Having committed to memory Bertrand Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian and accepted its arguments as uncritically as any religious dogmatist accepts the reality of miracles, he engages the dean in a memorable argument. The dean calls Messner to his office because the young student has changed his accommodations twice in a short time, finding his roommates uncongenial. Fearing that this may be a sign of psychological instability, the dean probes the young man’s private life, at which Messner bridles in a prickly young man’s way. The argument proceeds effortlessly to the question of God’s existence, and Messner displays the pride of an adolescent in his own logic. The scene has all the hallmarks of a lived, or witnessed, experience.
One of the book’s crucial episodes is a panty raid by male students on female dormitories. The normally staid and well-behaved students, sexually frustrated by the demure code of conduct then still in force, run riot. The college restores order, and the students are forced to listen to a speech by the college president, Albin Lentz, a self-made man and local politician who eloquently draws attention to the contrast between their frivolous and egotistical behavior and the horrors that American soldiers had to confront in Korea. He speaks with such moral authority that not one student dares contradict him or move from his place. “An army of hoodlums,” Lentz calls the rioting students, “imagining that they were emancipating themselves.” The riot is a precursor, of course, to the unrest of the 1960s; Lentz’s characterization of the motives and conduct of the Winesburg College students could just as well apply to the rebellious students of that decade. They were, and wanted to be, Lentz’s “kiddies in diapers unconstrained.”
Messner’s downfall occurs when he is unwilling to meet the college’s requirement that he attend chapel 40 times before he graduates. He refuses to do so, not as a Jew but as an atheist. A handsome, worldly-wise Jewish student suggests that he pay another student to impersonate him at chapel. The ruse, however, is discovered, and the college expels Messner. He is thereafter subject to the draft; he goes to Korea and is mortally wounded. The reader has just completed Messner’s recollection of his life while he is heavily sedated with morphine, just before he dies of his wounds.
A comparatively slight work, Indignation nevertheless offers several themes that suggest the irreducible challenges of living. Marcus has to contend with good and loving, but suffocating, parents, and establish his own independence; he must negotiate an entry into a wider world full of people very different from himself or anyone he has ever known; he has to discover the meaning of sex; he must confront the realization that happiness is not simply a matter of fortunate conditions; and he pays a terrible, indeed the ultimate, price for the kind of spiritual pride, common among adolescents and young men, that will not allow him to compromise or make himself conform to a traditional but not very onerous requirement. It takes maturity to know when to compromise with what exists, and when to resist. In a sense, Marcus dies because he has read, and placed all of his faith in, Why I Am Not a Christian.
None of the problems Marcus confronts in his short life is susceptible to easy solutions. No simple doctrine could provide any answer, let alone an indubitably correct one: hence, of course, the terminal absurdity of utopian political thought and feeling, of which there was such an outburst in the 1960s, and which turned out to be in the service of selfishness.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the well-known novelist Ian McEwan has written a novella, On Chesil Beach, that prompts similar reflections. His protagonists are two newlyweds on their honeymoon in 1962 on the Dorset coast. Both have just graduated college, he with a degree in history and she as a violinist. England has not yet undergone the sexual revolution: conservative primness remains the rule. The year of the novel’s setting is surely intended to bring to mind Philip Larkin’s famous lines:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up to then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything.
Larkin is to McEwan what Sherwood Anderson is to Roth. McEwan’s protagonists are sexually inexperienced, and their first attempt at intercourse is so disastrous, and so repugnant to the bride, that the marriage founders after only eight hours and is later annulled for nonconsummation.
What is the moral of the story? At first sight, it might seem like a paean of praise to the sexual revolution. The opening sentence of the book reads in part: “They lived at a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Ah yes, one thinks, if only they could have talked it through! Alas: “This was still the era . . . when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”
Thank heaven, then, for the liberating youth culture that abolished all such problems! The bride’s attachment to classical music is a metonym for her sexual repression. We realize that the groom will break free because he prefers Chuck Berry, the only type of music he knows and really likes. What stood in their way, the book asks? “Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity and squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself.” Get rid of all those things, then, and all would be well.
However, this rather easy lesson is rejected at the end of the book, indeed, almost turned on its head. The bride remains timid but becomes a member of a famous string quartet and finds fulfillment in the music of the past. There is depth to her being, even if it is not wholly satisfactory.
The groom, on the other hand, successfully overcomes his inhibitions. He takes part in the youth revolution, runs record shops that sell pop music, and has casual affairs to satisfy his sexual appetite. Forty years on, however, he is lonely and unfulfilled, and realizes that his former bride, who ran out onto Chesil Beach after their unsuccessful attempt at intercourse, is the only woman he has ever loved. If only he had had the wisdom to be patient, instead of rejecting her, his life in a conventional marriage would have been much more meaningful.
I’ve spoken with some readers who do not find the novel’s plot plausible, but this complaint does not trouble me. My experience in medical practice has taught me that almost any description of human behavior is plausible, given the varieties of human self-destruction. What’s important in McEwan’s book is its subversion of the idea that, if only certain obstacles to happiness could be removed, life would automatically become happy; that life will become easy with the eradication of difficulty. This is a lesson particularly hard for secularists—of whom I am one—to accept.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Careful What You Wish For
Two novelists portray the allure—and limitations—of liberation.
The idea that mankind might find life beautifully easy if only the right laws could be promulgated and the right social attitudes inculcated is a beguiling one. It suggests that dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him. Difficulty, however, cannot be abolished; it is the condition of human life itself. We try to avert our eyes from this truth as we avert them from death itself.
In different ways, Philip Roth’s Indignation and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach force us to confront difficulty. Both are short, and both contain surprises at the end. Both raise initial fears in the reader that he will be subjected to a politically correct tract; both subvert political correctness in the end.
The protagonist of Indignation, set in the beginning of the 1950s, is Marcus Messner, the only child of a kosher butcher in Newark. Marcus is a model son, a brilliant and industrious student who delights in helping his father in the shop. His father, who started working when he was ten years old, hopes that his son will do far better than he did. Unfortunately, Messner Senior undergoes a change. Two developments render him anxious and neurotically overprotective of Marcus: the establishment of a supermarket nearby that threatens to undermine his business and the onset of the Korean War. Having lost two nephews in World War II, he fears he will lose his son in the new conflict. To escape his father, Marcus transfers from a New Jersey college to one in Winesburg, Ohio (an artful reference to Sherwood Anderson that conjures a world of quiet desperation). Winesburg is more provincial than the East Coast, of course, but for Marcus, Middle America is a new world: at the price of some social discomfort, he finds that the move broadens his horizons.
Marcus spends what for him is a small fortune on preppy clothes, but finds when he arrives at Winesburg College (which is a Baptist establishment) that he fits in socially among neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. Impoverished, he works in a bar on weekends, where he hears mildly anti-Semitic jibes. He befriends a beautiful young student, Olivia, the daughter of well-to-do parents, with whom he has his first sexual experiences, but he discovers two things about her that undermine his confidence: first, despite her relatively privileged background, Olivia is mentally unstable and has made a suicide attempt by cutting her wrists (itself a warning that life is not automatically made easier by easy circumstances); second, she has a reputation for loose morals. His sexual experience, then, does not make much of a conquest.
Young Messner soon finds himself in conflict with the Winesburg College dean. Having committed to memory Bertrand Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian and accepted its arguments as uncritically as any religious dogmatist accepts the reality of miracles, he engages the dean in a memorable argument. The dean calls Messner to his office because the young student has changed his accommodations twice in a short time, finding his roommates uncongenial. Fearing that this may be a sign of psychological instability, the dean probes the young man’s private life, at which Messner bridles in a prickly young man’s way. The argument proceeds effortlessly to the question of God’s existence, and Messner displays the pride of an adolescent in his own logic. The scene has all the hallmarks of a lived, or witnessed, experience.
One of the book’s crucial episodes is a panty raid by male students on female dormitories. The normally staid and well-behaved students, sexually frustrated by the demure code of conduct then still in force, run riot. The college restores order, and the students are forced to listen to a speech by the college president, Albin Lentz, a self-made man and local politician who eloquently draws attention to the contrast between their frivolous and egotistical behavior and the horrors that American soldiers had to confront in Korea. He speaks with such moral authority that not one student dares contradict him or move from his place. “An army of hoodlums,” Lentz calls the rioting students, “imagining that they were emancipating themselves.” The riot is a precursor, of course, to the unrest of the 1960s; Lentz’s characterization of the motives and conduct of the Winesburg College students could just as well apply to the rebellious students of that decade. They were, and wanted to be, Lentz’s “kiddies in diapers unconstrained.”
Messner’s downfall occurs when he is unwilling to meet the college’s requirement that he attend chapel 40 times before he graduates. He refuses to do so, not as a Jew but as an atheist. A handsome, worldly-wise Jewish student suggests that he pay another student to impersonate him at chapel. The ruse, however, is discovered, and the college expels Messner. He is thereafter subject to the draft; he goes to Korea and is mortally wounded. The reader has just completed Messner’s recollection of his life while he is heavily sedated with morphine, just before he dies of his wounds.
A comparatively slight work, Indignation nevertheless offers several themes that suggest the irreducible challenges of living. Marcus has to contend with good and loving, but suffocating, parents, and establish his own independence; he must negotiate an entry into a wider world full of people very different from himself or anyone he has ever known; he has to discover the meaning of sex; he must confront the realization that happiness is not simply a matter of fortunate conditions; and he pays a terrible, indeed the ultimate, price for the kind of spiritual pride, common among adolescents and young men, that will not allow him to compromise or make himself conform to a traditional but not very onerous requirement. It takes maturity to know when to compromise with what exists, and when to resist. In a sense, Marcus dies because he has read, and placed all of his faith in, Why I Am Not a Christian.
None of the problems Marcus confronts in his short life is susceptible to easy solutions. No simple doctrine could provide any answer, let alone an indubitably correct one: hence, of course, the terminal absurdity of utopian political thought and feeling, of which there was such an outburst in the 1960s, and which turned out to be in the service of selfishness.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the well-known novelist Ian McEwan has written a novella, On Chesil Beach, that prompts similar reflections. His protagonists are two newlyweds on their honeymoon in 1962 on the Dorset coast. Both have just graduated college, he with a degree in history and she as a violinist. England has not yet undergone the sexual revolution: conservative primness remains the rule. The year of the novel’s setting is surely intended to bring to mind Philip Larkin’s famous lines:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up to then there’d only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for the ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything.
Larkin is to McEwan what Sherwood Anderson is to Roth. McEwan’s protagonists are sexually inexperienced, and their first attempt at intercourse is so disastrous, and so repugnant to the bride, that the marriage founders after only eight hours and is later annulled for nonconsummation.
What is the moral of the story? At first sight, it might seem like a paean of praise to the sexual revolution. The opening sentence of the book reads in part: “They lived at a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Ah yes, one thinks, if only they could have talked it through! Alas: “This was still the era . . . when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”
Thank heaven, then, for the liberating youth culture that abolished all such problems! The bride’s attachment to classical music is a metonym for her sexual repression. We realize that the groom will break free because he prefers Chuck Berry, the only type of music he knows and really likes. What stood in their way, the book asks? “Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity and squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself.” Get rid of all those things, then, and all would be well.
However, this rather easy lesson is rejected at the end of the book, indeed, almost turned on its head. The bride remains timid but becomes a member of a famous string quartet and finds fulfillment in the music of the past. There is depth to her being, even if it is not wholly satisfactory.
The groom, on the other hand, successfully overcomes his inhibitions. He takes part in the youth revolution, runs record shops that sell pop music, and has casual affairs to satisfy his sexual appetite. Forty years on, however, he is lonely and unfulfilled, and realizes that his former bride, who ran out onto Chesil Beach after their unsuccessful attempt at intercourse, is the only woman he has ever loved. If only he had had the wisdom to be patient, instead of rejecting her, his life in a conventional marriage would have been much more meaningful.
I’ve spoken with some readers who do not find the novel’s plot plausible, but this complaint does not trouble me. My experience in medical practice has taught me that almost any description of human behavior is plausible, given the varieties of human self-destruction. What’s important in McEwan’s book is its subversion of the idea that, if only certain obstacles to happiness could be removed, life would automatically become happy; that life will become easy with the eradication of difficulty. This is a lesson particularly hard for secularists—of whom I am one—to accept.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
24.10.08
Christianity
Articulating the Church's message in a world in which Christianity is no longer the dominant religion is a challenge Catholicism must face if it is to have a future. The most effective means of communication may be witness itself
Some years ago I served on an ecumenical chaplaincy team during an international athletic championship in Gothenburg, Sweden - a gathering of 2,700 Olympic athletes who competed there over a period of several weeks. One morning as I approached the coffee machine, I encountered a young Italian who immediately struck up a conversation when he noticed that my credentials read: "Chaplain - Italy." He greeted me in Italian and then continued: "Chaplain ... hmm. Would that mean that you're a priest?" "That's right. I'm a priest," I replied. "Interesting," he said. "I need to tell you that I never go to church." To which I responded, "And I need to tell you that I'm actually here to get a cup of coffee and not to get a progress report on your spiritual life." He shook my hand and with a big laugh insisted that I meet his brother - an Olympic athlete and atheist - and their two friends. They were all positive in their outlook on life and hopeful about the future, but not one had even a tenuous relationship with the Church; none had received the Sacrament of Confirmation even though they were all in their late twenties. When I was eventually invited to visit the family home on Italy's Adriatic coast, I asked the parents if they might direct me to the nearest church for Sunday Mass. "Ah, that's right," they replied. "You're a priest; you have to go to Mass on Sunday."
Several years later, on one Advent Sunday at the Oratory of St Francis Xavier "del Caravita" in Rome where I serve on the pastoral staff, the theme of exile ran through the readings that day, as well as the Advent hope of liberation and returning home. After Mass a visitor approached me and said: "Hi, I'm Paul. I'm in exile." He went on to tell me that it was his first time at Mass in more than 15 years. In fact, he had been away so long that he had forgotten that forgiveness was even possible.
These incidents are no longer exceptional. No wonder, then, that we increasingly speak nowadays of post-Christianity. Indeed, an internet Google search of the term yielded 314,000 results when I last checked. The term, often linked to postmodernism, describes the contemporary cultural attitude of parts of the developed world where Christianity is no longer the dominant religion, where cultural values are becoming more secular, and the world view is no longer shaped by Christian ideals and principles. Of course, the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) spoke powerfully about the role of the Church and its missionary activity within the modern world, of the important relationship between faith and culture, and even of agnosticism and atheism. But the bishops gathered at that council could not have envisaged the cultural and religious transformation within central and northern Europe, North America and Oceania in the postmodern and increasingly post-Christian twenty-first century, and the inherent challenges that this brings to communicating faith. Amsterdam, for example, is one of the most multi-religious cities in Europe and there are now more people frequenting the mosque on Fridays then there are at church on Sundays.
The Church in Australia and New Zealand has encountered similar challenges. In representing Oceania during the Synod on the Word, currently being held in Rome, Bishop Michael Putney of Townsville spoke of Australia as one of the most secularised countries in the world today. More than 22 per cent of the Catholic population in Australia were born overseas and Mass attendance now hovers at just around 14 per cent. Despite those less than encouraging statistics, however, Bishop Putney noted that following World Youth Day last July, "some Australians and New Zealanders have a sense that the promise of a new evangelisation may finally be under way despite the apparent impermeability of the secular culture". But the challenge is to discover new ways to communicate the message; to date, the bishop said that "no one method or even a shared understanding of what is required in practical terms has emerged".
Canada and the United States, of course, are not exempt from such challenges and opportunities as I have experienced first-hand in my work with the media. This was especially evident around the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, the conclave and election of Pope Benedict XVI, and the Holy Father's visit to the United States in April. In covering those various events as a Vatican "on air expert" for ABC News, many of my colleagues were to one degree or another outside the Church. Thus, it was my responsibility to assist ABC news anchors and correspondents in shaping their stories or simply to help them with a basic vocabulary for communicating the Catholic faith to their respective audiences.
The challenge was especially daunting during John Paul II's funeral and the conclave. On the one hand, it was an extraordinary catechetical or even evangelical platform as I sat there with the anchors and without a script during the live coverage for hours on end. But on the other hand, it was a careful balancing act to determine the best strategy for articulating the Church's faith to eight million viewers, many of whom were not Catholic or Christian, some of whom were agnostic or atheist, not to mention those who declare themselves as "former Roman Catholics"- now the largest religious body in the United States. The challenge was to communicate faith and the image of the Church in as hopeful and positive a way as possible - the Church as a sacrament but also as a bridge connecting diverse peoples and cultures.
The greatest challenge was to communicate that message effectively in a culture that has become increasingly secularised and post-Christian. However one reads the tea leaves, whether in North America, Oceania or Western Europe, that secularism affects Christians of all denominations as we attempt to bear witness to the paschal mystery of Christ. Indeed, the future of the Church's mission in those secularised parts of the world will be determined by its capacity to discern new pastoral strategies for communicating the message.
I would suggest several ways that might help communicate faith in this post-Christian age. First, if we take the example of Christ himself as a starting point, we need to look beyond the confines of the parish or diocese. Back in the 1980s the New York Jesuits opened an office on Wall Street to minister to the needs of brokers and traders, financial investment managers and corporate executives. Spiritual direction was offered and retreats were organized along with seminars on business ethics and how Christian moral principles should influence decision-making within a global economy. That Jesuit venture was, unfortunately, short-lived, but it offers a good example, I believe, about the ways in which the Church can more effectively communicate its message within the secular world. (Indeed, given the current global financial roller coaster triggered by the US markets, I suspect that the Jesuit staff on Wall Street would be working around the clock today if the office were still there.) The Church's corporate response to global warming and the environmental threat created by climate change; its centres for those living with HIV/Aids; its assistance to refugees and displaced persons in finding lodging and employment all offer further examples and important opportunities for ecumenical collaboration, as well.
Another important example of intersection between faith and secular culture is found in the ecumenical organisation Bread for the World, founded in 1972 to lobby the US Government and influence policies that address the causes of world hunger. It is not insignificant that the organisation's president, David Beckmann, is both an ordained Lutheran pastor and an alumnus of the London School of Economics. Prior to assuming the presidency of Bread for the World, Beckmann played a leading role within the World Bank where he served for 15 years. Projects like these, I believe, offer cause for hope as we consider the future of the Christian message within a society which is increasingly secularised and, again, post-Christian.
Prior to his election as Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger co-authored a book in 2004 with the professor of philosophy and atheist Marcello Pera, then President of the Italian Senate. They managed respectfully to disagree on their fundamental differences regarding faith and religion, and to focus their energies on what they were able to do in common. As both Ratzinger and Pera were especially concerned about the current crisis in values rocking Western Europe, and the "moral relativism" that is damaging the fabric of European society, they wrote their book as a joint response to the crisis. As a professor himself, Pope Benedict has noted in his writings that secularists are often very dedicated individuals who live generous lives, are passionate in their search of beauty and truth, and care deeply about justice, even as they do not feel the need to claim a religious identity. My hunch is that too often within the Church we can be eager to draw clear lines of demarcation between those on the inside and those on the outside. But the Gospel of Christ impels us to continually seek opportunities for bridge-building and collaboration as evidenced in the Ratzinger-Pera text.
Secondly, we need to learn the new language of dialogue - a reinterpretation of the sacramentality of the Word in light of the ever-changing social and religious landscape. But if we are to learn this new language which is born in contemplation, then it will also mean dying to past structures and religious systems, as Bishop Claude Champagne of Halifax, Nova Scotia noted several years ago in an address he gave to the Canadian Episcopal Conference. A missionary Church, he remarked, must not nourish nostalgia for the past but must be willing to die to a certain identity so that something new can emerge. Over the past few years, for example, the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has spoken consistently of the ways in which Belgium has indeed become a post-Christian country. Despite that, the cardinal remains the most respected figure in post-Christian Belgian society, precisely because he has learned that new language of dialogue. When he speaks, he does so with credibility, and people listen whether they are believers or not.
Thirdly, in this post-Christian world of ours, the communication of faith may well be done more effectively through deeds rather than words - the witness and example that we give by our actions in the service of the human family and the entire planet. While Mongolian society can hardly be called post-Christian since the first Catholics only arrived there in 1992, the young Church of Mongolia has done an extraordinary job of communicating the Christian message largely through the works of mercy which it has initiated. The former Communist government's initial resistance to a Catholic presence in Mongolia was rapidly transformed when it observed the Church's work in health care, education and employment training, and its response to social problems such as alcoholism, depression and unwanted pregnancy. Plans are now under way for the opening of a Jesuit secondary school in Ulaanbaatar. This will further support the Church's efforts in forming future leaders of that country which boasts a literacy rate of 93 per cent. As church membership in Mongolia continues to grow, the numerous catechumens and candidates attest to the fact that what attracted them was largely the Church's witness through its social outreach.
As we seek to navigate these troubled waters, there are no quick solutions and no easy answers. But it is important that we do not cease to ask the fundamental questions in the hope that more and more, our eyes might be opened to what God is doing in the world - even despite the current challenges or perhaps because of them. And it is equally important that the witness of our own lives engenders hope in others, so that a more effective communication of faith might actually become a catalyst for social reconstruction in postmodern and post-Christian twenty-first century society.
Some years ago I served on an ecumenical chaplaincy team during an international athletic championship in Gothenburg, Sweden - a gathering of 2,700 Olympic athletes who competed there over a period of several weeks. One morning as I approached the coffee machine, I encountered a young Italian who immediately struck up a conversation when he noticed that my credentials read: "Chaplain - Italy." He greeted me in Italian and then continued: "Chaplain ... hmm. Would that mean that you're a priest?" "That's right. I'm a priest," I replied. "Interesting," he said. "I need to tell you that I never go to church." To which I responded, "And I need to tell you that I'm actually here to get a cup of coffee and not to get a progress report on your spiritual life." He shook my hand and with a big laugh insisted that I meet his brother - an Olympic athlete and atheist - and their two friends. They were all positive in their outlook on life and hopeful about the future, but not one had even a tenuous relationship with the Church; none had received the Sacrament of Confirmation even though they were all in their late twenties. When I was eventually invited to visit the family home on Italy's Adriatic coast, I asked the parents if they might direct me to the nearest church for Sunday Mass. "Ah, that's right," they replied. "You're a priest; you have to go to Mass on Sunday."
Several years later, on one Advent Sunday at the Oratory of St Francis Xavier "del Caravita" in Rome where I serve on the pastoral staff, the theme of exile ran through the readings that day, as well as the Advent hope of liberation and returning home. After Mass a visitor approached me and said: "Hi, I'm Paul. I'm in exile." He went on to tell me that it was his first time at Mass in more than 15 years. In fact, he had been away so long that he had forgotten that forgiveness was even possible.
These incidents are no longer exceptional. No wonder, then, that we increasingly speak nowadays of post-Christianity. Indeed, an internet Google search of the term yielded 314,000 results when I last checked. The term, often linked to postmodernism, describes the contemporary cultural attitude of parts of the developed world where Christianity is no longer the dominant religion, where cultural values are becoming more secular, and the world view is no longer shaped by Christian ideals and principles. Of course, the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) spoke powerfully about the role of the Church and its missionary activity within the modern world, of the important relationship between faith and culture, and even of agnosticism and atheism. But the bishops gathered at that council could not have envisaged the cultural and religious transformation within central and northern Europe, North America and Oceania in the postmodern and increasingly post-Christian twenty-first century, and the inherent challenges that this brings to communicating faith. Amsterdam, for example, is one of the most multi-religious cities in Europe and there are now more people frequenting the mosque on Fridays then there are at church on Sundays.
The Church in Australia and New Zealand has encountered similar challenges. In representing Oceania during the Synod on the Word, currently being held in Rome, Bishop Michael Putney of Townsville spoke of Australia as one of the most secularised countries in the world today. More than 22 per cent of the Catholic population in Australia were born overseas and Mass attendance now hovers at just around 14 per cent. Despite those less than encouraging statistics, however, Bishop Putney noted that following World Youth Day last July, "some Australians and New Zealanders have a sense that the promise of a new evangelisation may finally be under way despite the apparent impermeability of the secular culture". But the challenge is to discover new ways to communicate the message; to date, the bishop said that "no one method or even a shared understanding of what is required in practical terms has emerged".
Canada and the United States, of course, are not exempt from such challenges and opportunities as I have experienced first-hand in my work with the media. This was especially evident around the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II, the conclave and election of Pope Benedict XVI, and the Holy Father's visit to the United States in April. In covering those various events as a Vatican "on air expert" for ABC News, many of my colleagues were to one degree or another outside the Church. Thus, it was my responsibility to assist ABC news anchors and correspondents in shaping their stories or simply to help them with a basic vocabulary for communicating the Catholic faith to their respective audiences.
The challenge was especially daunting during John Paul II's funeral and the conclave. On the one hand, it was an extraordinary catechetical or even evangelical platform as I sat there with the anchors and without a script during the live coverage for hours on end. But on the other hand, it was a careful balancing act to determine the best strategy for articulating the Church's faith to eight million viewers, many of whom were not Catholic or Christian, some of whom were agnostic or atheist, not to mention those who declare themselves as "former Roman Catholics"- now the largest religious body in the United States. The challenge was to communicate faith and the image of the Church in as hopeful and positive a way as possible - the Church as a sacrament but also as a bridge connecting diverse peoples and cultures.
The greatest challenge was to communicate that message effectively in a culture that has become increasingly secularised and post-Christian. However one reads the tea leaves, whether in North America, Oceania or Western Europe, that secularism affects Christians of all denominations as we attempt to bear witness to the paschal mystery of Christ. Indeed, the future of the Church's mission in those secularised parts of the world will be determined by its capacity to discern new pastoral strategies for communicating the message.
I would suggest several ways that might help communicate faith in this post-Christian age. First, if we take the example of Christ himself as a starting point, we need to look beyond the confines of the parish or diocese. Back in the 1980s the New York Jesuits opened an office on Wall Street to minister to the needs of brokers and traders, financial investment managers and corporate executives. Spiritual direction was offered and retreats were organized along with seminars on business ethics and how Christian moral principles should influence decision-making within a global economy. That Jesuit venture was, unfortunately, short-lived, but it offers a good example, I believe, about the ways in which the Church can more effectively communicate its message within the secular world. (Indeed, given the current global financial roller coaster triggered by the US markets, I suspect that the Jesuit staff on Wall Street would be working around the clock today if the office were still there.) The Church's corporate response to global warming and the environmental threat created by climate change; its centres for those living with HIV/Aids; its assistance to refugees and displaced persons in finding lodging and employment all offer further examples and important opportunities for ecumenical collaboration, as well.
Another important example of intersection between faith and secular culture is found in the ecumenical organisation Bread for the World, founded in 1972 to lobby the US Government and influence policies that address the causes of world hunger. It is not insignificant that the organisation's president, David Beckmann, is both an ordained Lutheran pastor and an alumnus of the London School of Economics. Prior to assuming the presidency of Bread for the World, Beckmann played a leading role within the World Bank where he served for 15 years. Projects like these, I believe, offer cause for hope as we consider the future of the Christian message within a society which is increasingly secularised and, again, post-Christian.
Prior to his election as Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger co-authored a book in 2004 with the professor of philosophy and atheist Marcello Pera, then President of the Italian Senate. They managed respectfully to disagree on their fundamental differences regarding faith and religion, and to focus their energies on what they were able to do in common. As both Ratzinger and Pera were especially concerned about the current crisis in values rocking Western Europe, and the "moral relativism" that is damaging the fabric of European society, they wrote their book as a joint response to the crisis. As a professor himself, Pope Benedict has noted in his writings that secularists are often very dedicated individuals who live generous lives, are passionate in their search of beauty and truth, and care deeply about justice, even as they do not feel the need to claim a religious identity. My hunch is that too often within the Church we can be eager to draw clear lines of demarcation between those on the inside and those on the outside. But the Gospel of Christ impels us to continually seek opportunities for bridge-building and collaboration as evidenced in the Ratzinger-Pera text.
Secondly, we need to learn the new language of dialogue - a reinterpretation of the sacramentality of the Word in light of the ever-changing social and religious landscape. But if we are to learn this new language which is born in contemplation, then it will also mean dying to past structures and religious systems, as Bishop Claude Champagne of Halifax, Nova Scotia noted several years ago in an address he gave to the Canadian Episcopal Conference. A missionary Church, he remarked, must not nourish nostalgia for the past but must be willing to die to a certain identity so that something new can emerge. Over the past few years, for example, the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has spoken consistently of the ways in which Belgium has indeed become a post-Christian country. Despite that, the cardinal remains the most respected figure in post-Christian Belgian society, precisely because he has learned that new language of dialogue. When he speaks, he does so with credibility, and people listen whether they are believers or not.
Thirdly, in this post-Christian world of ours, the communication of faith may well be done more effectively through deeds rather than words - the witness and example that we give by our actions in the service of the human family and the entire planet. While Mongolian society can hardly be called post-Christian since the first Catholics only arrived there in 1992, the young Church of Mongolia has done an extraordinary job of communicating the Christian message largely through the works of mercy which it has initiated. The former Communist government's initial resistance to a Catholic presence in Mongolia was rapidly transformed when it observed the Church's work in health care, education and employment training, and its response to social problems such as alcoholism, depression and unwanted pregnancy. Plans are now under way for the opening of a Jesuit secondary school in Ulaanbaatar. This will further support the Church's efforts in forming future leaders of that country which boasts a literacy rate of 93 per cent. As church membership in Mongolia continues to grow, the numerous catechumens and candidates attest to the fact that what attracted them was largely the Church's witness through its social outreach.
As we seek to navigate these troubled waters, there are no quick solutions and no easy answers. But it is important that we do not cease to ask the fundamental questions in the hope that more and more, our eyes might be opened to what God is doing in the world - even despite the current challenges or perhaps because of them. And it is equally important that the witness of our own lives engenders hope in others, so that a more effective communication of faith might actually become a catalyst for social reconstruction in postmodern and post-Christian twenty-first century society.
23.10.08
To Philosophise is to Learn to Die
"To philosophize is to learn to die": seven words, and an epoch in Western thought. According to Plato in the Phaedo, one of the inextinguishable monuments that he erected to his martyred teacher, Socrates believed that philosophy was a way of "practicing dying." Cicero, who set himself the task of making philosophy speak Latin, translated "practice" not with meditatio but commentatio -- meaning "careful preparation," from which we get our own "commentary" or "study." Study, he implies, takes us outside ourselves, beyond our bodily needs, and thus helps us to transcend our physical finitude.
Yet there is also, in Cicero's momentous linguistic decision, the implication that what one studies, as well as that one studies, prepares us while alive to meet our eventual fate. Philosophy can teach endurance, forbearance, and perspective amid both joy and catastrophe. Those who live in fear of death also live in fear of pain, in fear of danger, in fear of the new; but those who accept the reality of death are freed from all these fetters.
This was stoicism as a liberation theology for the single soul, emancipating people to live here and now. And out of freedom came heroism. Told that the Thirty Tyrants ruling Athens had condemned him to death, Socrates shot back: "And nature, them." This was also the defiant attitude of all those virtuous Romans who were the subject of European history painting from the Renaissance through the Pre-Raphaelites -- figures such as Regulus, who preferred slavery in Carthage to urging a shameful peace on his compatriots, or Mucius Scevola, who demonstrated the fearsomeness of the Romans by thrusting his right hand into burning coals. "It is sweet and right," went the old song, "to die for one's homeland." From this, in turn, derived the notion of the "good death": that dying with dignity and restraint, or in a good cause, proved that all the time spent living up until that moment was time well spent.
The cult of the good death outlived the Romans and became part of the classical overtones in Christian civilization. By the time Monteverdi turned the story of Seneca and Nero into opera in 1643, these ideas had become so commonplace that this Stoic philosophy could be made hummable:
Friends, the hour has come
in which I am to practice that virtue
which I have praised so much.
Death is but brief agony;
a wandering sigh leaves the heart,
where for many years
it has, so to speak, lived as a guest,
and, like a wanderer, it flies to Olympus,
the true dwelling of happiness.
Monteverdi had overlapped in Venice only briefly with Galileo; and while the astronomer had not been made to die for his ideas, he had suffered a brutal public humiliation. His fate hung heavy over all European thinkers in the years that followed. And we know that at least one of them, Fabri de Peiresc, likened it to the martyrdom of Socrates. Having written once to the pope's nephew, a friend of his, pleading for Galileo's release, in a second and more frustrated letter Peiresc shook his finger at Cardinal Francesco Barberini, warning that failure to reverse the verdict "would run the great risk of being interpreted and perhaps compared one day to the persecution of the person and wisdom of Socrates in his country, so condemned by other nations and by posterity itself. "
Only three and a half decades earlier, on February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno had been executed for his ideas, burned at the stake in the center of Rome, his tongue spiked to prevent him from speaking or crying out. In her provocative biography, a marvelous feat of scholarship, Ingrid D. Rowland brings before us today the pieces of an extraordinary sixteenth-century life. She begins, in fact, with that death, and with the memorial to it, the famous statue of the murdered thinker, on the Campo dei Fiori.
Most of the time, the brooding figure on his plinth is lost amid the diurnal market stalls and nocturnal revels that make this Roman Covent Garden such a crossroads. But on one day a year, Rowland reminds us, things on the Campo dei Fiori are different. The mayor of Rome comes and lays a wreath in the name of his city, and then various groups of ideologues come and turn the sculpture into a soapbox. The place has been consecrated to freedom of thought and speech for a long time. Already in the nineteenth century, when the sculpture was commissioned by the students of Rome and dedicated to a new patron saint, it was seen as a blow against papal domination of secular, modern, and (it was hoped) enlightened interests. (At first, Bruno's back was turned to the Vatican, but this was too much even for those who despised clericalism. Now his hooded eyes glower in the direction of his persecutors.)
The pedestal proclaims: "To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned." But like the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard, this is a statue of at least three lies. First, the statue is placed in the center of the square, not on the spot where "the pyre burned." Second, the real Bruno lacked the stature of this hulking bronze. Third, in the final decades of his life he did not wear the Dominican habit in which he has been dressed for posterity. And, though burned as an "obstinate" heretic, he tried three times to return to the Catholic confession, only to be rebuffed by the church, and he twice recanted his philosophical views (before recanting his recantation). In all its ironies, the statue is an apt introduction to the enigma of its subject.
In the century since his very public elevation, Bruno has become a central figure in the twentieth-century revision of Jacob Burckhardt's classic work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt had emphasized the role of the individual, emerging through the politics and art of the fifteenth century, while downplaying the importance of philosophy and keeping carefully to a model of creativity as rational -- producing a cultural history whose lineaments were very different from those discerned in ancient Greece by his younger friend and colleague Friedrich Nietzsche. A generation later, Aby Warburg, by temperament more open to the power of emotion and by training a perceptive synthesizer (his seminar in Hamburg in 1927 was in fact devoted to Burckhardt and Nietzsche), chose to turn his -- and our -- attention to the psychic dimensions of the Italian Renaissance. Warburg found abundant passion and extreme stress. He understood that this might have more to do with Plato, who was finally made Latin-speaking by Lorenzo the Magnificent's in-house philosopher Marsilio Ficino, than with Aristotle, who had dominated school and university curricula since the thirteenth century. But the recovery of the Platonic Renaissance was the task of a later generation, one anchored in Warburg's own library, which escaped the auto-da-fe on Bebelplatz in Berlin in May 1933 and arrived in London in December of that fateful year. There the brilliant scholars D.P. Walker and Frances Yates proceeded to decode not only the impact of Plato, but also the power of the hermetic forces that Plato's legitimation helped unleash. And Bruno was for them Exhibit A.
Rowland's Bruno is different. She follows the recent tendency to take Bruno seriously as a philosopher, but gives special emphasis to the role of Plato and Neoplatonism. She also has a real ear for his poetry, and for the way early modern learned that poetry could be no less serious or didactic than a treatise. Trained as a classicist, Rowland, like her subject, has moved through a variety of academic communities, in the United States and in Italy, as well as across different disciplines. She is one of the rare academics known to a wide general audience through her essays, in these pages as well as in The New York Review of Books , which have helped to shape our current view of early modern Italian culture. Rowland's long years closeted with Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), a towering and fearfully recondite intellectual of the next generation in Rome, have helped her to refine her uncommon ability to tease out meaning from even the most rebarbative texts.
II.
Filippo Bruno -- Giordano was the name he took in Orders -- was born in 1548 in Nola, a city in the Neapolitan campagna northeast of Vesuvius, to a father who served in the occupying Spanish military and could thus fancy himself a gentleman. The boy must have been talented, because at fourteen he gained a spot as a novice in the grand convent of San Domenico Maggiore, where the children of Naples's greatest families were sent for finishing.
We know that as early as the age of seventeen Bruno was doing things that aroused the suspicion of his clerical superiors (who recorded them, providing some of the evidence on which his future accusation would be based). He cleansed his cell of images. He attacked a colleague for reading an obscure tract on the Virgin Mary. He even began to doubt the divinity of Jesus (though the evidence for this came later). Although Bruno jumped through every academic hoop that was presented to him -- he seems from his youth to have had a stupendous memory in a culture that prized memory above almost everything but wealth -- he also had a talent for picking fights and making enemies. Seeking, perhaps, a change of scenery in Rome, at the Dominican college of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he had the nerve to use Augustine's words to defend the plausibility of the third-century Alexandrian heretic Arius's position on the humanity of Jesus. Technically, Bruno was correct, and was only demonstrating a logical point. Practically, he was asking for trouble: this was too controversial a topic, in a theological environment poisoned by paranoia over Protestantism, to have been accidentally plucked from midair by so potent a controversialist.
This was the last straw. The authorities searched the convent in Naples and found -- in a latrine, no less -- a marked-up copy of Erasmus, a writer deemed dangerous enough to have made the church's first list of banned books. Recalled to face his superiors, Bruno fled -- first to Genoa, then to Venice, and finally across the Alps. Over the course of eleven years he wandered to Geneva, Lyon, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, and Venice again. Betrayed to the Inquisition by a disappointed patron in 1592, he was soon shipped back to Rome once and for all.
Along his road to Calvary, like many a lonely man of faith, Bruno wrote and wrote. There are Bruno's workaday texts -- workaday only in that they were produced either to secure him work or to justify work already gained. These writings were on artificial memory, Bruno's forte. Already in antiquity memory systems were a stock-in-trade of all those with important public functions. Cicero's treatise on oratory, for example, suggests both the encyclopedic range of knowledge needed by public speakers and the specific ways to remember all that stuff. Bruno's memory theaters and memory machines marked a real maturation of this practice, and also linked it directly to the more practical needs of late Renaissance rulers and courts. This was, after all, the first cold war, when Catholic and Protestant rulers faced off across the iron curtain that divided Europe after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Potentates grasped for small advantages, and the organization of information -- for this is what memory offers -- in an age of rapidly exploding information was no little prize. Both Henri III, King of France, and Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, were willing to take a chance on the strange little Italian with an ambiguous confessional orientation.
But Bruno had other philosophical and even theosophical interests, and they crowded out his utilitarian wares. In the end -- and the end often came after only a few months -- he was too obscure, and his productions too theoretical, to hold the attention of the practically minded. And where this mattered even less, in the classroom, Bruno ran into other obstacles. Obtaining professorships in Toulouse, Paris, and Wittenberg, and lecturing in Oxford and Zurich, Bruno was too convinced of his own cleverness and too quick to demonstrate it. Having won the admiration of a colleague at Toulouse, the philosopher Francesco Sanchez, the latter pressed into his hands a copy of his just-published book, with a dedication to Bruno "in friendship and esteem." Bruno scrawled across the title page: "Remarkable that this ass professes himself a doctor." And on the first page of the text: "Remarkable that he presumes to teach." Not so surprising, then, that this refugee never found a home.
Where previous generations have focused on Bruno and memory, or on Bruno and esoteric magical traditions, Rowland gives us a Bruno who drank deeply from Plato's springs. From them he emerged a poet and a writer, in both Latin and Italian, of sometimes astounding virtuosity. Bruno comes alive for us in Rowland's translations as an Italian with a Shakespearean sense of the ebullience and the fecundity of language. One cannot read her Elizabethan-sounding translation of Bruno's five-act Ash Wednesday Supper, set as it was in London around 1585, and not smile with recognition; or her translation of his Candlemaker, a reflection on the Naples of his youth written twenty years later, without feeling that one has encountered a real literary talent -- his, and hers.
Faced with the difficulty of Bruno's published works and the absence of much else from his pen, Rowland often has to chase her prey through the books and letters of contemporaries and the archives of his protectors and persecutors. So, for instance, seeking some foundation for his later theological views, she has dug deeply in the theological works produced in the Neapolitan intellectual world inherited by the young Bruno. Wondering what the older Bruno might have meant, she tracked down each and every surviving copy of a poem, and found that the hundred surviving copies all differ from one another, and that each has corrections in Bruno's own hand. Bearing this heavy burden of learning with ease, Rowland is a sure-footed guide on a ground with few tracks. This is intellectual biography at its best.
And Rowland's intellectual biography of Bruno brings alive a sixteenth-century culture that electrified Europe. Who cannot feel, across the centuries, the thrill in Bruno's question, in Ash Wednesday Supper, "Do we stand in the shadows, or rather they? Do we, in conclusion, who begin to renew the ancient philosophy, stand in the morning to put an end to the night, or in the evening to put an end to the day?" This is nothing less than the dawning in European consciousness of the sense of the new. (It was exactly the same question posed by Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, wondering whether the half-sun on George Washington's chair back was rising or setting.) Bruno is a modern confronting the ancients with a gesture of recognition across a chasm of fifteen centuries. From the Florence of Brunelleschi to the Frankfurt of Leo Strauss, "ancients and moderns" has been perhaps the most crucial framework developed in Europe for theorizing time's changes. And "time" held the key to Bruno's fate.
III.
In the light of the ecclesiastical condemnation of Copernicanism and the later trial of Galileo, it is tempting to see time telescoped and Bruno the defrocked Dominican as the astronomer's John the Baptist, heralding the coming of a new age, and killed for it. This was the inspiration for those Roman students of the last century. But as the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg made clear some years ago, in a magisterial book called The Genesis of the Copernican World, Bruno was no martyr for Copernicanism.
So why, then, was he killed? In this case, that is another way of asking, What was his big idea? Rowland's answer is clear and correct: his big idea was infinity. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, full of many Copernican systems, many worlds. Whence he came by this notion is a puzzle. He could have read about the idea of infinity in the work of the indisputably orthodox Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), or in the indisputably heterodox kabbalistic writings of Gilles of Viterbo (1465-1532). Then again, he could have cobbled the concept together out of folk experience and folly, as did his contemporary, the miller Menocchio, so magnificently portrayed by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Menocchio, too, would meet his fate at the Inquisition's hand.
We do not know quite when or where, but at some point between his departure from the Neapolitan convent in 1576 and his arrival in Paris in 1582 and his first publication, Bruno passed through Copernicanism on the way to the last stop on his philosophical journey. "Never shall you see the face of immense and starry Olympus/Come to an end," he writes,
rather space fills what it continues
conceiving
Stars without number, indeed, whole
worlds of these wandering bodies
Nor can you think that of these a
single one is less fertile
Than earth, for all are compacted of
the identical elements.
Of such does measureless space shine
by the splendor of starlight.
The snap judgment that a philosopher of the infinite is a Copernican, and that a Copernican system expanded many times over describes an "infinite universe," seems right. The problem is that it focuses only on the spatial dimension of infinity. There is also the temporal dimension. And it is here that we find the answer to our riddles.
In his Candlemaker (1582), set in the Naples of his youth, Bruno puts a philosophical monologue into the mouth of the courtesan Vittoria. Rowland's emphasis is on its role in articulating "the comedy's overall meaning: 'The world is fine as it is,' il mondo sta bene come sta." In her reading, this jibes with a conversation in the Heroic Frenzies (1585) between two characters from his childhood in Nola. And their discussion of the good life turns on a recognition of its variability, and thus on the importance of being able to withstand the perils of both adversity and success -- the classical sustine et abstine of the Stoics.
As we might expect, however, the Neapolitan hooker was no Stoic. Before she got around to concluding that she lived in the best of all possible worlds, she offered a philosophy of living. "It's important to line things up in time," she declares. "Whoever waits for time is wasting time. If I wait for time, time won't wait for me. We need to take advantage of their situation when they still think they need us. Grab the prey when it's chasing you, don't wait until it runs away." This is none other than Machiavelli's advice to the Prince on how to master Dame Fortune by seizing the occasion -- and her -- by force if necessary.
But time, in the shape of chronology, as Rowland herself points out elsewhere, was on many people's minds in the last decades of the sixteenth century. It was in 1583, right between publication of The Candlemaker and The Heroic Frenzies, that Joseph Scaliger in Leiden ushered in a century of chronological research with On the Correcting of Time. Scaliger's erudite tome was ultimately to incite a frontal assault on the identity of biblical and cultural history. Bruno's challenge was more arcane and even more direct. Believing that the world was infinitely old, as well as infinite in scope, he proposed in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584) that the universe holds cultures and memories that have come and gone and will come and go again. Less a defense of Copernicanism than an extrapolation from Copernicus's revolution to a still more revolutionary cosmos in which our solar system was but one among many, Bruno's promise, according to Rowland, was that this grand shift in perspective "will be good for everyone's mental and spiritual health. "
Rowland argues that for Bruno "the infinite stretches of time and space bred, at least ideally, an infinite tolerance for the various ways that people have sought God and wisdom." Bruno's self-proclaimed "Nolan" philosophy "meant accepting the world as it was, which in turn implied accepting a much larger definition of life in which the earth, stars, and planets were also living things, infused with divinity." This was not a mechanical universe precisely because it was filled with God's love. Rowland wants very much for Bruno's "discovery" of infinity to have had for him an explicit ethical dimension, and to have been something like a genuine acceptance of the plurality of life choices and pathways. Unfortunately, there is really no indication that Bruno himself cared to draw out these ethical implications, nor that he himself ever lived such acceptance.
According to Rowland, it is in The Heroic Frenzies where Bruno goes beyond; and in her discussion of it she does too, proclaiming that "the Nolan and humanity are on the threshold of something new." But the passage she then cites to support this claim is a fine example of what people -- not just the English who laughed him from the podium in Oxford in 1583, but modern readers as well -- might find merely frenzied, heroic or not.
But here contemplate the harmony and consonance of all the spheres, intelligences, muses, and instruments together, where heaven, the movement of the worlds, the works of nature, the discourses of intellect, the mind's contemplation, the decrees of divine Providence, all celebrate with one accord the lofty and magnificent oscillation that equals the lower waters with the higher, exchanges night for day, and day for night, so that divinity is in all things, so that everything is capable of everything, and the infinite goodness communicates itself without end according to the full capacity of all things.
One may contemplate Bruno, admire Bruno, and even delight in Bruno without being able to make complete sense of Bruno.
A "colleague" of Bruno's, who also flew through the many heavens of the night seeking to encompass all power, beauty, and knowledge, was the literary Doctor Faustus: the first Faustbuch was published in 1587 and was set in Wittenberg, where Bruno was then on the faculty. But there is more than resemblance and proximity to go on. For the second version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, from 1616, includes a scene in which a "Bruno" is led in chains to the pope to be "straight condemned of heresy--/--And on a pile of faggots burnt to death." While the context implies a twelfth-century German anti-pope whom the Lutheran Faustus rescues, his crime could not have been heresy, and audiences would surely have thought first about the famous late philosopher. In any event, there was no anti-pope named Bruno. Might this composite portrait mark instead a clumsy attempt to mask one Bruno's identity -- still a subject of controversy -- with another who possessed no real identity at all? This scene did not appear either in Marlowe's main source, the English Faust Book of 1592, nor in the 1604 printing of a 1601 edition of the play. It must therefore have been added subsequently -- after the news of Giordano Bruno's execution spread.
Rowland tells us that he died a heretic. But what exactly was his heresy? Believing in infinite worlds was not heretical. But the consequences of this belief could be heretical. Bruno asks, in one of the prose explanations that accompanied his poem "On the immense and the numberless" (ca. 1590), "Where is place, space, vacuum, time, body? In the universe. Where is the universe? In every place, space, time, body. Is there anything outside the universe? No. Why? Because there is no place nor space nor motion nor body." We are getting closer to Bruno's offense. In the poem itself, Bruno shifted his emphasis from space to time, with decisive consequences.
Past time or present, whichever you
happen to choose, or the future:
All are a single present, before God
an unending oneness.
Hence contradictory things can never
persist at the same time....
Everything, when it is, because it is,
must exist, then.
If the heresy is hard to hear in Bruno's Italian, it is made clearer in T.S. Eliot's English:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
And there is no escaping this conclusion in the poem "Giordano Bruno in Prison," written by Eliot's mother, Charlotte. In this monologue, the hero proclaims
Source of all life, whose presence
infinite
Dwells infinite in space, beneath
Thy feet
Worlds spring like flowers that open
to the light....
In the beginning seest thou the end,
and in the end a mere beginning still.
And then "Bruno" took the step that turned infinity into heresy: rejecting the divinity of Jesus -- the same doubt the historical Bruno first discovered in himself at age eighteen. "This man was God, then, can we truly say, Yet this divinity is man always [emphasis added]. "
Erasmus had outraged the orthodox by having a cheeky participant in "The Godly Feast," one of the charming Colloquies first published in 1522, proclaim in response to a brief summary of Socrates's wise words, "Saint Socrates, pray for us." Erasmus had actually imagined a doctrinally more minimal Christianity that bracketed as "things indifferent" many of the debates that had caused Christians such agony. Luther brushed Erasmus aside, like some kind of Kerensky to his real revolution, but the Roman church took his measure. They knew a threat when they read one, and so they censored, pulped, and banned his books wherever the long arm of the Holy Office reached. And it could reach even into the Neapolitan sewer system when necessary.
Yet Erasmus's challenge was superficial compared to Bruno's. For if time itself is "unredeemable," there can be no Creation, no Incarnation, and of course no Redemption. Doubting the Son, one ended up doubting the Father. This is what enabled Bruno's interrogators to draw together his youthful doubts about the divinity of the Son and his later philosophical speculations. Hauled before the Inquisition in Venice in 1592 and interrogated in Rome for seven more years, it was Bruno the Unitarian theorist -- or Bruno and the specter of Unitarianism -- that terrified. With Lutheranism and Calvinism on the march north of the Alps and the Italian Fausto Sozzini winning converts among Catholics in Hungary, Transylvania, and Poland to a unitarianism that his enemies called "Socinianism," Bruno may have seemed less a "lone gunman" to his inquisitors than he does to us.
Not long after his execution, though in another time, another place, and another language, another philosopher was condemned for envisioning the universe as an infinite extension of identical atoms, with God present in each of them. This was Spinoza. Long before the Roman students petitioned for Bruno's monument, another group of no longer young men made their own. They came to Bruno through Spinoza. When Friedrich Jacobi revealed that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had declared that "there is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza," he unleashed a firestorm in Germany. But when, in the second edition of his Spinoza Letters in 1789, he traced Spinoza back to Bruno, and printed translated excerpts from On the Cause, the Principle, and the One, he gave his generation their genealogy. Soon afterward, in 1802, Schelling published Bruno, Or on the Natural and Divine Principle of Things. Goethe dissented: "Jordanus Brunus. I see more clearly his complete unserviceability, indeed harmfulness, for our times." Yet even he, when trying to make sense of infinity, called it "A Study Based on Spinoza." Like Spinoza, Bruno has become one of those thinkers who is either central to one's narrative of the history of thought or completely absent from it.
IV.
Seneca's students were not yet philosophers, and so they did not understand that they ought to learn to die. They urged their teacher to live:
Do not die, Seneca, no.
For my part I would not wish to die.
This life is after all so sweet,
this sky so very clear,
all bitterness, all poison,
is in the end only a little evil.
We started with Montaigne and the title of his essay, "To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die." But the Essays, especially the later ones, launched also the long campaign of reconquest that transformed stern classical virtue into softer modern morals. "If we have not known how to live," Montaigne writes, "it is not right to teach us how to die.... If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way." And living well meant just that: "Even in virtue our ultimate aim -- no matter what they say -- is pleasure." When Montaigne turned from the world outside to the self within, he found, remarkably, the same extraordinary range, complexity, and diversity -- almost, we might say, the infinite: "I who make no other profession but getting to know myself find in me such boundless depths and variety that my apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know how much there remains to learn. "
This discovery of his inner infinitude was therapy for Montaigne. Sharing it with his readers was intended as therapy for them. Interestingly, one of the inspirations that he drew upon for the skepticism that freed him from convention and therefore also from anxiety was none other than Francesco Sanchez, whose That Nothing Is Known he may have read in manuscript. This is the same text that had elicited Bruno's pitiless mockery. Could there be a sharper division between philosophy as learning to live and philosophy as learning to die? Between the infinite as a form of skepticism leading to self-knowledge and the infinite as a form of certainty leading to mean-spiritedness?
Nor in the vast heaven of Bruno's literary corpus do we find -- or at least Rowland does not give it to us -- the kind of clear commitment to the infinitude of the human spirit that those Roman students imagined must have led to Bruno's martyrdom. We do not find it Bruno, but we do find it a generation later in another friar of San Domenico Maggiore, and another victim of the Inquisition, Tomaso Campanella. After feigning madness through forty hours of torture, he was locked away as a madman for twenty-four more years. Eventually forced into a French exile, he reflected there on his condition.
Man lives in a double world: according to the mind he is contained by no physical space and by no walls, but at the same time he is in heaven and on earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind's thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. But indeed according to the body he exists not, except in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains to the extent that he is not able to be in or to go to the place attained by his intellect and will, nor to occupy more space than defined by the shape of his body; while with the mind he occupies a thousand worlds.
Campanella recognized that to philosophize is to learn to live, not die. There is something about our long fascination with Bruno that seems to signify a lingering attachment to that older notion of death as the validation of life. Would that we could instead have a Bruno to live by! A Bruno whose language and imagination spoke to us, with no spiked tongue and no fiery-faced defiance. We need this now more than ever.
Peter N. Miller is a frequent contributor to the New Republic.
Yet there is also, in Cicero's momentous linguistic decision, the implication that what one studies, as well as that one studies, prepares us while alive to meet our eventual fate. Philosophy can teach endurance, forbearance, and perspective amid both joy and catastrophe. Those who live in fear of death also live in fear of pain, in fear of danger, in fear of the new; but those who accept the reality of death are freed from all these fetters.
This was stoicism as a liberation theology for the single soul, emancipating people to live here and now. And out of freedom came heroism. Told that the Thirty Tyrants ruling Athens had condemned him to death, Socrates shot back: "And nature, them." This was also the defiant attitude of all those virtuous Romans who were the subject of European history painting from the Renaissance through the Pre-Raphaelites -- figures such as Regulus, who preferred slavery in Carthage to urging a shameful peace on his compatriots, or Mucius Scevola, who demonstrated the fearsomeness of the Romans by thrusting his right hand into burning coals. "It is sweet and right," went the old song, "to die for one's homeland." From this, in turn, derived the notion of the "good death": that dying with dignity and restraint, or in a good cause, proved that all the time spent living up until that moment was time well spent.
The cult of the good death outlived the Romans and became part of the classical overtones in Christian civilization. By the time Monteverdi turned the story of Seneca and Nero into opera in 1643, these ideas had become so commonplace that this Stoic philosophy could be made hummable:
Friends, the hour has come
in which I am to practice that virtue
which I have praised so much.
Death is but brief agony;
a wandering sigh leaves the heart,
where for many years
it has, so to speak, lived as a guest,
and, like a wanderer, it flies to Olympus,
the true dwelling of happiness.
Monteverdi had overlapped in Venice only briefly with Galileo; and while the astronomer had not been made to die for his ideas, he had suffered a brutal public humiliation. His fate hung heavy over all European thinkers in the years that followed. And we know that at least one of them, Fabri de Peiresc, likened it to the martyrdom of Socrates. Having written once to the pope's nephew, a friend of his, pleading for Galileo's release, in a second and more frustrated letter Peiresc shook his finger at Cardinal Francesco Barberini, warning that failure to reverse the verdict "would run the great risk of being interpreted and perhaps compared one day to the persecution of the person and wisdom of Socrates in his country, so condemned by other nations and by posterity itself. "
Only three and a half decades earlier, on February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno had been executed for his ideas, burned at the stake in the center of Rome, his tongue spiked to prevent him from speaking or crying out. In her provocative biography, a marvelous feat of scholarship, Ingrid D. Rowland brings before us today the pieces of an extraordinary sixteenth-century life. She begins, in fact, with that death, and with the memorial to it, the famous statue of the murdered thinker, on the Campo dei Fiori.
Most of the time, the brooding figure on his plinth is lost amid the diurnal market stalls and nocturnal revels that make this Roman Covent Garden such a crossroads. But on one day a year, Rowland reminds us, things on the Campo dei Fiori are different. The mayor of Rome comes and lays a wreath in the name of his city, and then various groups of ideologues come and turn the sculpture into a soapbox. The place has been consecrated to freedom of thought and speech for a long time. Already in the nineteenth century, when the sculpture was commissioned by the students of Rome and dedicated to a new patron saint, it was seen as a blow against papal domination of secular, modern, and (it was hoped) enlightened interests. (At first, Bruno's back was turned to the Vatican, but this was too much even for those who despised clericalism. Now his hooded eyes glower in the direction of his persecutors.)
The pedestal proclaims: "To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned." But like the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard, this is a statue of at least three lies. First, the statue is placed in the center of the square, not on the spot where "the pyre burned." Second, the real Bruno lacked the stature of this hulking bronze. Third, in the final decades of his life he did not wear the Dominican habit in which he has been dressed for posterity. And, though burned as an "obstinate" heretic, he tried three times to return to the Catholic confession, only to be rebuffed by the church, and he twice recanted his philosophical views (before recanting his recantation). In all its ironies, the statue is an apt introduction to the enigma of its subject.
In the century since his very public elevation, Bruno has become a central figure in the twentieth-century revision of Jacob Burckhardt's classic work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt had emphasized the role of the individual, emerging through the politics and art of the fifteenth century, while downplaying the importance of philosophy and keeping carefully to a model of creativity as rational -- producing a cultural history whose lineaments were very different from those discerned in ancient Greece by his younger friend and colleague Friedrich Nietzsche. A generation later, Aby Warburg, by temperament more open to the power of emotion and by training a perceptive synthesizer (his seminar in Hamburg in 1927 was in fact devoted to Burckhardt and Nietzsche), chose to turn his -- and our -- attention to the psychic dimensions of the Italian Renaissance. Warburg found abundant passion and extreme stress. He understood that this might have more to do with Plato, who was finally made Latin-speaking by Lorenzo the Magnificent's in-house philosopher Marsilio Ficino, than with Aristotle, who had dominated school and university curricula since the thirteenth century. But the recovery of the Platonic Renaissance was the task of a later generation, one anchored in Warburg's own library, which escaped the auto-da-fe on Bebelplatz in Berlin in May 1933 and arrived in London in December of that fateful year. There the brilliant scholars D.P. Walker and Frances Yates proceeded to decode not only the impact of Plato, but also the power of the hermetic forces that Plato's legitimation helped unleash. And Bruno was for them Exhibit A.
Rowland's Bruno is different. She follows the recent tendency to take Bruno seriously as a philosopher, but gives special emphasis to the role of Plato and Neoplatonism. She also has a real ear for his poetry, and for the way early modern learned that poetry could be no less serious or didactic than a treatise. Trained as a classicist, Rowland, like her subject, has moved through a variety of academic communities, in the United States and in Italy, as well as across different disciplines. She is one of the rare academics known to a wide general audience through her essays, in these pages as well as in The New York Review of Books , which have helped to shape our current view of early modern Italian culture. Rowland's long years closeted with Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), a towering and fearfully recondite intellectual of the next generation in Rome, have helped her to refine her uncommon ability to tease out meaning from even the most rebarbative texts.
II.
Filippo Bruno -- Giordano was the name he took in Orders -- was born in 1548 in Nola, a city in the Neapolitan campagna northeast of Vesuvius, to a father who served in the occupying Spanish military and could thus fancy himself a gentleman. The boy must have been talented, because at fourteen he gained a spot as a novice in the grand convent of San Domenico Maggiore, where the children of Naples's greatest families were sent for finishing.
We know that as early as the age of seventeen Bruno was doing things that aroused the suspicion of his clerical superiors (who recorded them, providing some of the evidence on which his future accusation would be based). He cleansed his cell of images. He attacked a colleague for reading an obscure tract on the Virgin Mary. He even began to doubt the divinity of Jesus (though the evidence for this came later). Although Bruno jumped through every academic hoop that was presented to him -- he seems from his youth to have had a stupendous memory in a culture that prized memory above almost everything but wealth -- he also had a talent for picking fights and making enemies. Seeking, perhaps, a change of scenery in Rome, at the Dominican college of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he had the nerve to use Augustine's words to defend the plausibility of the third-century Alexandrian heretic Arius's position on the humanity of Jesus. Technically, Bruno was correct, and was only demonstrating a logical point. Practically, he was asking for trouble: this was too controversial a topic, in a theological environment poisoned by paranoia over Protestantism, to have been accidentally plucked from midair by so potent a controversialist.
This was the last straw. The authorities searched the convent in Naples and found -- in a latrine, no less -- a marked-up copy of Erasmus, a writer deemed dangerous enough to have made the church's first list of banned books. Recalled to face his superiors, Bruno fled -- first to Genoa, then to Venice, and finally across the Alps. Over the course of eleven years he wandered to Geneva, Lyon, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, and Venice again. Betrayed to the Inquisition by a disappointed patron in 1592, he was soon shipped back to Rome once and for all.
Along his road to Calvary, like many a lonely man of faith, Bruno wrote and wrote. There are Bruno's workaday texts -- workaday only in that they were produced either to secure him work or to justify work already gained. These writings were on artificial memory, Bruno's forte. Already in antiquity memory systems were a stock-in-trade of all those with important public functions. Cicero's treatise on oratory, for example, suggests both the encyclopedic range of knowledge needed by public speakers and the specific ways to remember all that stuff. Bruno's memory theaters and memory machines marked a real maturation of this practice, and also linked it directly to the more practical needs of late Renaissance rulers and courts. This was, after all, the first cold war, when Catholic and Protestant rulers faced off across the iron curtain that divided Europe after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Potentates grasped for small advantages, and the organization of information -- for this is what memory offers -- in an age of rapidly exploding information was no little prize. Both Henri III, King of France, and Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, were willing to take a chance on the strange little Italian with an ambiguous confessional orientation.
But Bruno had other philosophical and even theosophical interests, and they crowded out his utilitarian wares. In the end -- and the end often came after only a few months -- he was too obscure, and his productions too theoretical, to hold the attention of the practically minded. And where this mattered even less, in the classroom, Bruno ran into other obstacles. Obtaining professorships in Toulouse, Paris, and Wittenberg, and lecturing in Oxford and Zurich, Bruno was too convinced of his own cleverness and too quick to demonstrate it. Having won the admiration of a colleague at Toulouse, the philosopher Francesco Sanchez, the latter pressed into his hands a copy of his just-published book, with a dedication to Bruno "in friendship and esteem." Bruno scrawled across the title page: "Remarkable that this ass professes himself a doctor." And on the first page of the text: "Remarkable that he presumes to teach." Not so surprising, then, that this refugee never found a home.
Where previous generations have focused on Bruno and memory, or on Bruno and esoteric magical traditions, Rowland gives us a Bruno who drank deeply from Plato's springs. From them he emerged a poet and a writer, in both Latin and Italian, of sometimes astounding virtuosity. Bruno comes alive for us in Rowland's translations as an Italian with a Shakespearean sense of the ebullience and the fecundity of language. One cannot read her Elizabethan-sounding translation of Bruno's five-act Ash Wednesday Supper, set as it was in London around 1585, and not smile with recognition; or her translation of his Candlemaker, a reflection on the Naples of his youth written twenty years later, without feeling that one has encountered a real literary talent -- his, and hers.
Faced with the difficulty of Bruno's published works and the absence of much else from his pen, Rowland often has to chase her prey through the books and letters of contemporaries and the archives of his protectors and persecutors. So, for instance, seeking some foundation for his later theological views, she has dug deeply in the theological works produced in the Neapolitan intellectual world inherited by the young Bruno. Wondering what the older Bruno might have meant, she tracked down each and every surviving copy of a poem, and found that the hundred surviving copies all differ from one another, and that each has corrections in Bruno's own hand. Bearing this heavy burden of learning with ease, Rowland is a sure-footed guide on a ground with few tracks. This is intellectual biography at its best.
And Rowland's intellectual biography of Bruno brings alive a sixteenth-century culture that electrified Europe. Who cannot feel, across the centuries, the thrill in Bruno's question, in Ash Wednesday Supper, "Do we stand in the shadows, or rather they? Do we, in conclusion, who begin to renew the ancient philosophy, stand in the morning to put an end to the night, or in the evening to put an end to the day?" This is nothing less than the dawning in European consciousness of the sense of the new. (It was exactly the same question posed by Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, wondering whether the half-sun on George Washington's chair back was rising or setting.) Bruno is a modern confronting the ancients with a gesture of recognition across a chasm of fifteen centuries. From the Florence of Brunelleschi to the Frankfurt of Leo Strauss, "ancients and moderns" has been perhaps the most crucial framework developed in Europe for theorizing time's changes. And "time" held the key to Bruno's fate.
III.
In the light of the ecclesiastical condemnation of Copernicanism and the later trial of Galileo, it is tempting to see time telescoped and Bruno the defrocked Dominican as the astronomer's John the Baptist, heralding the coming of a new age, and killed for it. This was the inspiration for those Roman students of the last century. But as the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg made clear some years ago, in a magisterial book called The Genesis of the Copernican World, Bruno was no martyr for Copernicanism.
So why, then, was he killed? In this case, that is another way of asking, What was his big idea? Rowland's answer is clear and correct: his big idea was infinity. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, full of many Copernican systems, many worlds. Whence he came by this notion is a puzzle. He could have read about the idea of infinity in the work of the indisputably orthodox Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), or in the indisputably heterodox kabbalistic writings of Gilles of Viterbo (1465-1532). Then again, he could have cobbled the concept together out of folk experience and folly, as did his contemporary, the miller Menocchio, so magnificently portrayed by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976). Menocchio, too, would meet his fate at the Inquisition's hand.
We do not know quite when or where, but at some point between his departure from the Neapolitan convent in 1576 and his arrival in Paris in 1582 and his first publication, Bruno passed through Copernicanism on the way to the last stop on his philosophical journey. "Never shall you see the face of immense and starry Olympus/Come to an end," he writes,
rather space fills what it continues
conceiving
Stars without number, indeed, whole
worlds of these wandering bodies
Nor can you think that of these a
single one is less fertile
Than earth, for all are compacted of
the identical elements.
Of such does measureless space shine
by the splendor of starlight.
The snap judgment that a philosopher of the infinite is a Copernican, and that a Copernican system expanded many times over describes an "infinite universe," seems right. The problem is that it focuses only on the spatial dimension of infinity. There is also the temporal dimension. And it is here that we find the answer to our riddles.
In his Candlemaker (1582), set in the Naples of his youth, Bruno puts a philosophical monologue into the mouth of the courtesan Vittoria. Rowland's emphasis is on its role in articulating "the comedy's overall meaning: 'The world is fine as it is,' il mondo sta bene come sta." In her reading, this jibes with a conversation in the Heroic Frenzies (1585) between two characters from his childhood in Nola. And their discussion of the good life turns on a recognition of its variability, and thus on the importance of being able to withstand the perils of both adversity and success -- the classical sustine et abstine of the Stoics.
As we might expect, however, the Neapolitan hooker was no Stoic. Before she got around to concluding that she lived in the best of all possible worlds, she offered a philosophy of living. "It's important to line things up in time," she declares. "Whoever waits for time is wasting time. If I wait for time, time won't wait for me. We need to take advantage of their situation when they still think they need us. Grab the prey when it's chasing you, don't wait until it runs away." This is none other than Machiavelli's advice to the Prince on how to master Dame Fortune by seizing the occasion -- and her -- by force if necessary.
But time, in the shape of chronology, as Rowland herself points out elsewhere, was on many people's minds in the last decades of the sixteenth century. It was in 1583, right between publication of The Candlemaker and The Heroic Frenzies, that Joseph Scaliger in Leiden ushered in a century of chronological research with On the Correcting of Time. Scaliger's erudite tome was ultimately to incite a frontal assault on the identity of biblical and cultural history. Bruno's challenge was more arcane and even more direct. Believing that the world was infinitely old, as well as infinite in scope, he proposed in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584) that the universe holds cultures and memories that have come and gone and will come and go again. Less a defense of Copernicanism than an extrapolation from Copernicus's revolution to a still more revolutionary cosmos in which our solar system was but one among many, Bruno's promise, according to Rowland, was that this grand shift in perspective "will be good for everyone's mental and spiritual health. "
Rowland argues that for Bruno "the infinite stretches of time and space bred, at least ideally, an infinite tolerance for the various ways that people have sought God and wisdom." Bruno's self-proclaimed "Nolan" philosophy "meant accepting the world as it was, which in turn implied accepting a much larger definition of life in which the earth, stars, and planets were also living things, infused with divinity." This was not a mechanical universe precisely because it was filled with God's love. Rowland wants very much for Bruno's "discovery" of infinity to have had for him an explicit ethical dimension, and to have been something like a genuine acceptance of the plurality of life choices and pathways. Unfortunately, there is really no indication that Bruno himself cared to draw out these ethical implications, nor that he himself ever lived such acceptance.
According to Rowland, it is in The Heroic Frenzies where Bruno goes beyond; and in her discussion of it she does too, proclaiming that "the Nolan and humanity are on the threshold of something new." But the passage she then cites to support this claim is a fine example of what people -- not just the English who laughed him from the podium in Oxford in 1583, but modern readers as well -- might find merely frenzied, heroic or not.
But here contemplate the harmony and consonance of all the spheres, intelligences, muses, and instruments together, where heaven, the movement of the worlds, the works of nature, the discourses of intellect, the mind's contemplation, the decrees of divine Providence, all celebrate with one accord the lofty and magnificent oscillation that equals the lower waters with the higher, exchanges night for day, and day for night, so that divinity is in all things, so that everything is capable of everything, and the infinite goodness communicates itself without end according to the full capacity of all things.
One may contemplate Bruno, admire Bruno, and even delight in Bruno without being able to make complete sense of Bruno.
A "colleague" of Bruno's, who also flew through the many heavens of the night seeking to encompass all power, beauty, and knowledge, was the literary Doctor Faustus: the first Faustbuch was published in 1587 and was set in Wittenberg, where Bruno was then on the faculty. But there is more than resemblance and proximity to go on. For the second version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, from 1616, includes a scene in which a "Bruno" is led in chains to the pope to be "straight condemned of heresy--/--And on a pile of faggots burnt to death." While the context implies a twelfth-century German anti-pope whom the Lutheran Faustus rescues, his crime could not have been heresy, and audiences would surely have thought first about the famous late philosopher. In any event, there was no anti-pope named Bruno. Might this composite portrait mark instead a clumsy attempt to mask one Bruno's identity -- still a subject of controversy -- with another who possessed no real identity at all? This scene did not appear either in Marlowe's main source, the English Faust Book of 1592, nor in the 1604 printing of a 1601 edition of the play. It must therefore have been added subsequently -- after the news of Giordano Bruno's execution spread.
Rowland tells us that he died a heretic. But what exactly was his heresy? Believing in infinite worlds was not heretical. But the consequences of this belief could be heretical. Bruno asks, in one of the prose explanations that accompanied his poem "On the immense and the numberless" (ca. 1590), "Where is place, space, vacuum, time, body? In the universe. Where is the universe? In every place, space, time, body. Is there anything outside the universe? No. Why? Because there is no place nor space nor motion nor body." We are getting closer to Bruno's offense. In the poem itself, Bruno shifted his emphasis from space to time, with decisive consequences.
Past time or present, whichever you
happen to choose, or the future:
All are a single present, before God
an unending oneness.
Hence contradictory things can never
persist at the same time....
Everything, when it is, because it is,
must exist, then.
If the heresy is hard to hear in Bruno's Italian, it is made clearer in T.S. Eliot's English:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
And there is no escaping this conclusion in the poem "Giordano Bruno in Prison," written by Eliot's mother, Charlotte. In this monologue, the hero proclaims
Source of all life, whose presence
infinite
Dwells infinite in space, beneath
Thy feet
Worlds spring like flowers that open
to the light....
In the beginning seest thou the end,
and in the end a mere beginning still.
And then "Bruno" took the step that turned infinity into heresy: rejecting the divinity of Jesus -- the same doubt the historical Bruno first discovered in himself at age eighteen. "This man was God, then, can we truly say, Yet this divinity is man always [emphasis added]. "
Erasmus had outraged the orthodox by having a cheeky participant in "The Godly Feast," one of the charming Colloquies first published in 1522, proclaim in response to a brief summary of Socrates's wise words, "Saint Socrates, pray for us." Erasmus had actually imagined a doctrinally more minimal Christianity that bracketed as "things indifferent" many of the debates that had caused Christians such agony. Luther brushed Erasmus aside, like some kind of Kerensky to his real revolution, but the Roman church took his measure. They knew a threat when they read one, and so they censored, pulped, and banned his books wherever the long arm of the Holy Office reached. And it could reach even into the Neapolitan sewer system when necessary.
Yet Erasmus's challenge was superficial compared to Bruno's. For if time itself is "unredeemable," there can be no Creation, no Incarnation, and of course no Redemption. Doubting the Son, one ended up doubting the Father. This is what enabled Bruno's interrogators to draw together his youthful doubts about the divinity of the Son and his later philosophical speculations. Hauled before the Inquisition in Venice in 1592 and interrogated in Rome for seven more years, it was Bruno the Unitarian theorist -- or Bruno and the specter of Unitarianism -- that terrified. With Lutheranism and Calvinism on the march north of the Alps and the Italian Fausto Sozzini winning converts among Catholics in Hungary, Transylvania, and Poland to a unitarianism that his enemies called "Socinianism," Bruno may have seemed less a "lone gunman" to his inquisitors than he does to us.
Not long after his execution, though in another time, another place, and another language, another philosopher was condemned for envisioning the universe as an infinite extension of identical atoms, with God present in each of them. This was Spinoza. Long before the Roman students petitioned for Bruno's monument, another group of no longer young men made their own. They came to Bruno through Spinoza. When Friedrich Jacobi revealed that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had declared that "there is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza," he unleashed a firestorm in Germany. But when, in the second edition of his Spinoza Letters in 1789, he traced Spinoza back to Bruno, and printed translated excerpts from On the Cause, the Principle, and the One, he gave his generation their genealogy. Soon afterward, in 1802, Schelling published Bruno, Or on the Natural and Divine Principle of Things. Goethe dissented: "Jordanus Brunus. I see more clearly his complete unserviceability, indeed harmfulness, for our times." Yet even he, when trying to make sense of infinity, called it "A Study Based on Spinoza." Like Spinoza, Bruno has become one of those thinkers who is either central to one's narrative of the history of thought or completely absent from it.
IV.
Seneca's students were not yet philosophers, and so they did not understand that they ought to learn to die. They urged their teacher to live:
Do not die, Seneca, no.
For my part I would not wish to die.
This life is after all so sweet,
this sky so very clear,
all bitterness, all poison,
is in the end only a little evil.
We started with Montaigne and the title of his essay, "To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die." But the Essays, especially the later ones, launched also the long campaign of reconquest that transformed stern classical virtue into softer modern morals. "If we have not known how to live," Montaigne writes, "it is not right to teach us how to die.... If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way." And living well meant just that: "Even in virtue our ultimate aim -- no matter what they say -- is pleasure." When Montaigne turned from the world outside to the self within, he found, remarkably, the same extraordinary range, complexity, and diversity -- almost, we might say, the infinite: "I who make no other profession but getting to know myself find in me such boundless depths and variety that my apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know how much there remains to learn. "
This discovery of his inner infinitude was therapy for Montaigne. Sharing it with his readers was intended as therapy for them. Interestingly, one of the inspirations that he drew upon for the skepticism that freed him from convention and therefore also from anxiety was none other than Francesco Sanchez, whose That Nothing Is Known he may have read in manuscript. This is the same text that had elicited Bruno's pitiless mockery. Could there be a sharper division between philosophy as learning to live and philosophy as learning to die? Between the infinite as a form of skepticism leading to self-knowledge and the infinite as a form of certainty leading to mean-spiritedness?
Nor in the vast heaven of Bruno's literary corpus do we find -- or at least Rowland does not give it to us -- the kind of clear commitment to the infinitude of the human spirit that those Roman students imagined must have led to Bruno's martyrdom. We do not find it Bruno, but we do find it a generation later in another friar of San Domenico Maggiore, and another victim of the Inquisition, Tomaso Campanella. After feigning madness through forty hours of torture, he was locked away as a madman for twenty-four more years. Eventually forced into a French exile, he reflected there on his condition.
Man lives in a double world: according to the mind he is contained by no physical space and by no walls, but at the same time he is in heaven and on earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind's thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. But indeed according to the body he exists not, except in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains to the extent that he is not able to be in or to go to the place attained by his intellect and will, nor to occupy more space than defined by the shape of his body; while with the mind he occupies a thousand worlds.
Campanella recognized that to philosophize is to learn to live, not die. There is something about our long fascination with Bruno that seems to signify a lingering attachment to that older notion of death as the validation of life. Would that we could instead have a Bruno to live by! A Bruno whose language and imagination spoke to us, with no spiked tongue and no fiery-faced defiance. We need this now more than ever.
Peter N. Miller is a frequent contributor to the New Republic.
ROTHKO (Tate & Four Seasons)
Lost in Rothko
Julian Bell applauds a unique gathering of paintings at Tate Modern, and their persuasive, peculiar magic
While Dan Rice slapped brushloads of rabbitskin glue onto the cotton duck canvas, further loads would slop down, warm and pungent, on his head and shoulders. Mark Rothko teetered on a ladder above, heavy as a bear and notoriously cackhanded, rushing his handiwork so that the two of them could cover the entire stretch of fabric before the size cooled. Moving on to another canvas almost nine feet high, the workers might swap places, with Rice getting to rain down on Rothko. The residues that ran off them as they showered afterwards would have been tinted maroon: as a personal variant on standard procedure, Rothko liked to feed pigments into the pan on the hot plate, as his sheets of glue dissolved. That way, the stretched canvas would have a character – a complexion, at least – from the very outset, even before the two of them applied similarly coloured resinous primers to support the upper layers of brushwork. A complexion, a disposition, a bias; this object that Rice had hammered together for him, out of wood and coarse cloth bought at an awnings supplier on the Bowery, would bristle with an inbuilt material resistance.
Rice, a young painter from New York’s Cedar Tavern crowd, was hired by Rothko in the autumn of 1958: his employer, now in his mid-fifties, had risen to renown over the preceding decade as the city’s subtlest and most imperious colourist. Rice’s recollection of hard, messy studio slog provides one firm handle on the now near-legendary project he was brought in to help with, the Seagram murals – the thirty canvases that Rothko produced over eleven months, after he was commissioned to supply paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. For an alternative handle, enter the third room of the new exhibition at Tate Modern, Rothko: The late series.
You walk into a long, pillared hall, lit as dimly as an underground car park for all its high ceiling. Fifteen large canvases surround you. All stretch above eye level, though most are broader than they are tall. Reddish canvases against the dun walls – overall, a low, muted ruddiness – and on each of their expanses, some form of ragged upright rectangle has been brushed in. The light deprivation, the vertical repetitions and the room’s immensity are all temple- or cavern-like cues that direct the viewer towards stillness – if not exactly to solitude. For the experience of Rothko’s Seagram project that this exhibition offers its visitors is likely to be a communal one. If you come to this room, you come quite probably in the expectation that you might feel a certain frisson – and the room has been conscientiously designed to help induce such a sensation; you are among fellow viewers all similarly intent; all factors converge to make it likely that you will be at least partly satisfied. Also, that the spiritual rewards you draw from this public occasion will be broad and blurry, rather than acute: more like those that stay with you after some big outdoor performance than those that come from music heard alone.
The flicker of passers-by and of spotlights reflected on the canvases’ glossier passages forms a resistance that just has to be factored in: it is vain to wish for other conditions; this is the nearest you will ever come to the entirety of the work in question. The show in fact offers more canvases at a single view than Rothko himself could have seen lined up inside the old basketball court on the Bowery where he plotted how to take on the Four Seasons restaurant – before, at last, pulling out of the commission. Only seven of his big paintings could have fitted into the designated dining room, but from the autumn of 1958 to the summer of 1959 he pushed on, developing further runs of so-called sketches and murals that kept overlapping, and a definitive selection never emerged from among their number. Here, one painting which ended up in Washington and five which went to Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum join the nine that Londoners will already know – the items that Rothko himself negotiated to place with the Tate, shortly before his death in 1970. Fifteen excursions from a base of red-maroon: whereas the permanent holdings lean towards blacks and wan mauves, the newly shipped-in canvases brandish quantities of bright orange, and the result is an ensemble with a spiritual complexion all of its own.
For spirit – or one might say soulfulness, the sensation of being a certain mind within a certain body – is the stuff that we are seemingly being thrust towards, via a process of exclusions. This suite of paintings has shed all but a minimum of line, of chiaroscuro and of allusion to objects: instead, its modulations of oranges, crimsons, maroons and blacks floor us with a subliminal thump in the chest. That is what is left of colour on this side of my eyelids, when I close them. This gallery’s interior proposes to be my own interior, as it remains after all my looking and chattering has been done with. That default mode of the soul is formless and fathomless; yet it is restless, also. It stays irritably disposed to seek for images, for a grip on the world without. So, at any rate, I register the compelling invention around which the Seagram paintings revolve, the rough-edged rectangular frame that hovers within the field of the canvas. This device holds everything in suspense – not only the pictorial possibilities of drawing, of fixing contrasts and of image-making, but also the philosophical possibility of opening out onto any not-me whatever.
Grouped around Tate Modern’s Room Three, the massed ranks of these muzzy upright frames, two-barred or three-barred, come together as a solemn, hieratic monument that will mutely absorb almost any description that spectators propose for it, much as an ancient stone circle might. I would characterize the emotional palette as running from snarling oranges to haunted mauves (via many a queasy, equivocal half-tone). You might differ on the particular adjectives: but I expect we would agree that the range of feelings these paintings induce us to enter involve much foreboding and some anger. That being accepted, what remains intriguing is the sheer immediate persuasiveness with which the pictures effect the induction. Rothko’s peculiar magic as a painter was that his bear’s paws could weave gossamer: blunt though his brush often seems, he was exquisite at opening up and variegating the interplay between pigment, binder and canvas. For the benefit of the curious, the Tate exhibition provides technical analyses of his repertory of tricks for holding colours in suspension. (They apparently involved great quantities of eggs.) And those take us back to the recollections of Dan Rice.
Two definite handles, then, on the Seagram paintings: the studio assistant’s physical experience of helping to make them, back in the late 1950s, and the gallery-goer’s psychological experience, half a century later, of entering the present public event. But between the two: so much word-spinning, so much blather. Set in motion, above all, by the artist himself, who was casting around for fresh artistic challenges when the design team from the Seagram organization happened to approach him, offering him an entire room of their new showcase skyscraper to fill with his art. Rothko seemingly tried to kid himself that no one had mentioned the room in question was meant to be the swankiest eating venue in Manhattan. He nonetheless made sure to insert a get-out clause in his contract for this commission – which he duly reached for, when he came to feel that the job had become not so much a challenging opportunity to extend his range as a banal demand to supply wall-fillers. (By 1959 he could easily afford to be so cavalier.) He chose to wrap this creative self-deceit in a smokescreen of rants against fat-cat diners and of self-suggested comparisons with Michelangelo – just as, more generally, he strove to lodge his art within the conceptual framework of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.
Any belief structure that motivated one of the grandees of modernist painting is likely to be historically interesting, but by the same token, its logic may well have turned elusive. It is unlikely that Rothko’s thought patterns in the 1950s, when he dubbed his art “tragic”, will really be transparent to us today as we stare into the red gloom of his abstractions – still less, his complex class feelings, as an upwardly mobile Jewish immigrant to the United States who had left Russia in 1913, at the age of nine. By this point, if we look to the artist’s own rhetoric to guide us through his paintings we risk smothering a first-hand emotional experience with a second-hand sentimental one. Witness Simon Schama, redoubling the bombast as he paraphrases the aspirations of the Seagram suite in The Power of Art (2006):
Their crowding effect, like a frieze, would indeed wrap around the diners . . . . Mastication would slow down and silverware would lie idle as the swallowers were swallowed by the pure power of art . . . . The load they were bearing was the tragic weight of human history. On that earlier trip to Florence in 1950 Rothko had also seen Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, with its blind stone windows. Now he felt his own dark rectangles, that took instead of gave light, would sober up the intoxicated glamorists who lived just for the moment, for that exquisitely pricey meal. After paying the bill, there would be no summoning the limo, no swanning off into Park Avenue.
Yet the way in which the agenda of the Seagram venture was turned on its head does shine a light on the ambiguities of Rothko’s last twelve years of work, as collected in this exhibition. Were those “murals” right for the skyscraper on Park Avenue, or only for the scruffy studio on the Bowery? Was their context meant to be “public” – as the painter began to write, in a manuscript note on the project – or “private”, as he immediately corrected himself, scoring out the alternative? (What then would he have made of the present display?) “Rothko was antinomic to the core of his being”, writes David Anfam, the leading scholar on the artist, in a catalogue essay, well aware that his subject had a habit of taking issue with every single comment ever offered on his art. Witness his own tripwire riposte to would-be sentimental interpreters: “I don’t express myself in painting. I express my not-self”. During the course of the 1960s, that riddling remark, made in 1953, gradually revealed its meanings.
Near the exhibition’s entrance you are given a solitary glimpse of the type of work that had made Rothko’s reputation from 1949 onwards: the big wall-sized canvas, on which fuzzy blocks of colour have been stacked so as slowly to pulse against one another. Was this format, which had so strikingly expanded the scope of American abstraction, starting, after a decade or so, to look rather too compliant? Were viewers becoming simply too ready to immerse their spirits in it, as if in a comfortable bath? This mode of painting might have no place for represented objects, but was it then to become a wallow in immateriality? Must there not remain some tension still to grapple with? What is left of subjectivity, if there is no objectivity to oppose to it? By some such logic, it would seem, those consumer-friendly colour stacks got turned on their side in the “murals” and recast as constraining frames; then in the canvases of the early 1960s, those cushioned block-edges went hard and sharp. And above all, colour – the component of Rothko’s art that had chiefly captivated his public – was served notice to quit. In its place, the picture’s own object-quality, its inherent material resistance, would be defiantly foregrounded.
It was a difficult and honourable turn of direction, and the exhibition which explores it is an admirable project too, by no means a facile crowd-pleaser. Yet as the curators note, Rothko was, in his own singular way, finding a way of running with the tide. He loathed the new contenders who were starting to eclipse his reputation as the 1950s ended, but he eyed them up closely also. An artist who had moved towards minimal icons and maximal rhetorics back in the 1940s, inspired by the example of Clyfford Still, began to turn increasingly dry and laconic not long after Jasper Johns and Frank Stella started exhibiting. The same sullen voiceover that applies to those artists’ early work could be applied to Rothko’s late: “Here’s some paint. What else, in a painting, did you expect?”. When it comes to a particularly rebarbative upright canvas of 1964 – a hard brown square on dense red – the caption might almost read: “I can do Newmans too, after my fashion, just as good as Barney”. (Still, Rothko and Newman, the vatic frontmen of uptown Abstract Expressionism circa 1950, had long since acrimoniously parted: of the three, Newman’s critical ratings remained the highest.) By contrast, a wary regard for the left-field absolutist of New York art Ad Reinhardt generated the most seductive canvases in this exhibition. In five mid-1960s eight-footers, the hallmark black-on-black of Reinhardt’s punchy, punctilious little boards of masonite expands to deliver a mesmerizing, positively luscious challenge to the eyes. Beyond colour is revealed to be a fertile zone.
Inevitably, Rothko’s most extended venture into blackness, the suite of canvases he painted for a specially designed chapel in Houston between 1965 and 1967, lies out of this exhibition’s reach (as does the hapless suite done shortly before for a dining room in Harvard, paintings whose colours proved fugitive). Some terse little pencil notes for Houston are displayed, along with some savourable, heavily saturated gouaches for Seagram. And thus what we chiefly see of the artist’s final years in Rothko: The late series is not his ongoing, ambitious “mural” projects, but rather two groups of paintings about which he scarcely said anything at all – eight brown-and-grey pieces on tall sheets of paper, and seven broad black-and-grey canvases.
They form a tricky coda to his career. Particularly the paintings on paper: the glazing, whether by design or accident, kills any textural life that might be had from their brusque, summary brushwork. The sheet has been horizontally divided and brown has been slammed in above and grey below. The truculence – “It’s paint. What else?” – seems downright strident, because the paint in question is no longer sustained by a rich, mysterious mix of binders: it is straight acrylic, the medium of choice for Hard-Edge and Pop, the anaesthetizing, anti-aesthetic vehicle for a younger generation’s insouciance. For all his declared contempt for his juniors, Rothko was adjusting to the alien new conditions of art, to the point of dismissing his own artistic expertise entirely. There was no longer any “in” or any “out” to the painting, there was hardly so much as a format.
The minimal divisions into above and below continue in the canvases of black and grey. These too are in acrylic, but here and there, they have at least a gestural vivacity. In one canvas, done shortly before Rothko’s suicide in February 1970, the finger-scribbles in the field of grey actually approach the calligraphic. It’s not a lot, but in this context of radical renunciation it seems like drama.
Above those frisky scribbles stands the black, dense and inert. “It is simply too easy to see black as a funerary colour”, claims Briony Fer in a subtle and challenging catalogue essay. True, if we are talking about those eight-foot black-on-black canvases done six years before, objects of singular beauty that refuse to yield up ready meanings to the interpreter. But here, I only wish her arguments could convince me. These final paintings of Rothko’s look to me all too like metaphors for the great and obvious fact that retrospectively hangs over them – muffled, grunted metaphors, to be sure; but that, I would conjecture, is because Rothko was aware that such a transparent symbolism (“This is my endgame”) represented a lapse into bad faith on the part of an abstractionist whose work had always thrived on ambiguity. For all that, they are by no means paintings that induce gloom, as might fairly be said of the far more imposing Seagram works. They are distant; odd; on the edge of null. They refuse to be possessed by the viewer, and perhaps that is just what Rothko was after, at the end of his journey into the cold north of modernist materiality. Surely, though, it was a journey downhill?
ROTHKO
The late series
Tate Modern, until February 1
Achim Borchadt-Hume, editor
ROTHKO
256pp. Tate Publishing. £35 (paperback, £24.99).
978 1 85437 788 3
Julian Bell is a painter and the author of Mirror of the World: A new history of art, which was published last year.
Running with Scissors
It's the birthday of Augusten Burroughs, (books by this author) born Christopher Robison in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1965). He's the author of the best-selling memoir Running with Scissors, based on his teenage years. He said, "When I was 13, my crazy mother gave me away to her lunatic psychiatrist, who adopted me. I then lived a life of squalor, pedophiles, no school and free pills."
While he was growing up, his parents fought all the time. His mother ate cigarette butt-and-peanut butter sandwiches and had all sorts of psychiatric disorders. She used to beat his alcoholic father, who was a math and philosophy professor. He said that his parents argued so much that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was the "closest thing he had to a home movie."
He kept a record of all these experiences. His parents gave him a tape recorder as a gift, and when he was nine, he started talking into it. And he began keeping a journal as a teenager.
His parents went to therapy but still split up. And when he was 13, his mom sent him to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Rodolph Turcotte. The doctor's wife ate dog food while watching television. Dr. Turcotte believed that God was trying to communicate with him through his feces. When Augusten needed an excuse not to go to school, the doctor arranged a fake suicide attempt.
Burroughs finally ran away and settled in San Francisco. He got a high-paying job at an ad agency, but he was addicted to crack cocaine and drinking heavily. Before he got to the office in the morning, he would spray cologne on his tongue to hide the smell of whiskey. His coworkers convinced him to enter rehab. After 30 days, Burroughs emerged sober, and within a couple of weeks, he had written his first novel, Sellevision (2000). The book was moderately successful, and he was encouraged to write about his childhood experiences. He said, "I thought my childhood was a disgusting mess so I never thought anyone would be interested in reading about it, even with a gallows humor." But his memoir, Running with Scissors, became a publishing phenomenon, staying on the New York Times Bestseller List for four consecutive years. It was made into a feature film in 2006.
He said, "The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
While he was growing up, his parents fought all the time. His mother ate cigarette butt-and-peanut butter sandwiches and had all sorts of psychiatric disorders. She used to beat his alcoholic father, who was a math and philosophy professor. He said that his parents argued so much that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was the "closest thing he had to a home movie."
He kept a record of all these experiences. His parents gave him a tape recorder as a gift, and when he was nine, he started talking into it. And he began keeping a journal as a teenager.
His parents went to therapy but still split up. And when he was 13, his mom sent him to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Rodolph Turcotte. The doctor's wife ate dog food while watching television. Dr. Turcotte believed that God was trying to communicate with him through his feces. When Augusten needed an excuse not to go to school, the doctor arranged a fake suicide attempt.
Burroughs finally ran away and settled in San Francisco. He got a high-paying job at an ad agency, but he was addicted to crack cocaine and drinking heavily. Before he got to the office in the morning, he would spray cologne on his tongue to hide the smell of whiskey. His coworkers convinced him to enter rehab. After 30 days, Burroughs emerged sober, and within a couple of weeks, he had written his first novel, Sellevision (2000). The book was moderately successful, and he was encouraged to write about his childhood experiences. He said, "I thought my childhood was a disgusting mess so I never thought anyone would be interested in reading about it, even with a gallows humor." But his memoir, Running with Scissors, became a publishing phenomenon, staying on the New York Times Bestseller List for four consecutive years. It was made into a feature film in 2006.
He said, "The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
22.10.08
Mr. Grantham
AS THE global financial system fights desperately for survival, few people are more justified in saying “I told you so” than Jeremy Grantham, a Cassandra of the investment community since long before Nouriel Roubini became Doctor Doom.
Back in 2000, The Economist reported Mr Grantham’s comments at an event to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of “The Great Gatsby”. The wealthy characters in the novel were “completely shallow,” he said—precisely the sort of “ineffable lightweights” who would have been unable to resist the temptation to join a crowd rushing into a stock market, and would accordingly have paid the price in the 1929 crash. As the article concluded, “He fears that a similar fate awaits today’s investors.”
Mr Grantham’s scepticism cost him plenty of business during the bullish years, as foolish investors preferred to share Gatsby’s belief in “the green light, the orgiastic future”. Yet, as The Economist reported this August, the mostly bearish ten-year forecasts issued in 1998 by Mr Grantham’s firm, GMO, “proved almost entirely correct”.
So Mr Grantham, a Brit based in New England, knows what he is talking about, which makes his latest GMO letter, “Reaping the Whirlwind”, a must-read. He predicts further house-price falls in America and Britain, a sharp reduction in corporate profits everywhere, and that the Chinese government will “stumble” faced with the “spectacularly complicated task of maintaining the highest economic growth rate in history”. Still, he admits to turning bullish on American shares, like another great investor, Warren Buffett, who last week wrote an op-ed in the New York Times advising people to buy them now. “If you wait for the robins,” Mr Buffett counselled, “spring will be over.”
Mr Grantham admits he will probably fall foul of the Curse of the Value Investor, which is buying too soon. Yet he is convinced that “by October 10th global equities were cheap on an absolute basis and cheaper than at any time in 20 years.”
The most entertaining part of the letter is entitled Where Was Our Leadership? Mr Grantham asks, “Why did our leaders encourage the deregulation, encourage the leveraging and risk-taking, and completely miss or dismiss the growing signs of trouble and what we described as the ‘near certainties’ of bubbles breaking?” Why, indeed?
He offers two theories. The first he calls Career Risk and Bubbles Breaking. The bosses of banks continued piling on leverage and taking ever greater risks because they felt they would be fired if they did not. “It’s what I call the Goldman Sachs Effect: Goldman increased its leverage and its profit margins shot into the stratosphere. Eager to keep up, other banks, with less talent and energy than Goldman, copied them with ultimately disastrous consequences. And woe betide the CEO who missed the game and looked like an old fuddy-duddy. The Board would simply kick him out, in the name of protecting the stockholders’ future profits, and hire in more of a gunslinger from, say, Credit Suisse.”
The second theory reinforces the first, by combining the pressure for ever greater success with the selection of bosses ill-equipped to handle it. Mr Grantham believes that chief executives are “picked for their left-brain skills—focus, hard work, decisiveness, persuasiveness, political skills, and, if you are lucky, analytical skills and charisma.” Great American executives are not picked for patience, he points out, plausibly enough. “Indeed, if they could even spell the word they would be fired. They are not paid to put their feet up or waste time thinking about history and the long-term future; they are paid to be decisive and to act now.”
Only the rare person unconcerned with climbing the ladder, such as Mr Grantham, spoke out about the looming dangers. (Turning bearish before the crowd certainly can involve serious career risk—recall the late Tony Dye, who in March 2000 was fired as a chief investment officer at Phillips & Drew because he had moved out of what he rightly believed were overvalued equities and thus prompted many of the firm’s clients to quit.)
According to Mr Grantham, such people “have the patience of Job. They are also all right-brained: more intuitive, more given to developing odd theories, wallowing in historical data, and taking their time. They are almost universally interested—even obsessed—with outlier events, and unique, new, and different combinations of factors. These ruminations take up a good chunk of their time. Do such thoughts take more than a few seconds of time for the great CEOs who, to the man, missed everything that was new and different? Unfortunately for all of us, it was the new and different this time that just happened to be vital.”
Ironically, those now in charge of the giants of the financial system are suffering from excessive risk aversion, scared of lending even to the bluest of chips. Now, says Mr Grantham, left-brained bosses—not the sort of cautious bureaucrat likely to appeal to the governments now overseeing the financial system—are just what is needed. “The typical CEO is precisely equipped to deal with emergencies and digging out. Thus, Paulson was just the man to miss the point, but equally just the man—or at least a typically good one—to deal with a complicated crisis under stress.”
As Mr Grantham (or, to be precise, his wife) observes, the right- and left-brained should have come together on boards of banks, to keep fear and greed appropriately balanced. Yet, Sarbanes-Oxley and countless other initiatives intended to improve corporate governance seemed to have been largely ignored in the boardrooms of Wall Street, the City of London and Zurich. Let’s give the last word to Mr Grantham, who deserves his moment of schadenfreude: “What a shame that we have typically subverted this balance into a CEO fan club of old friends and mutual backscratchers.”
Back in 2000, The Economist reported Mr Grantham’s comments at an event to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of “The Great Gatsby”. The wealthy characters in the novel were “completely shallow,” he said—precisely the sort of “ineffable lightweights” who would have been unable to resist the temptation to join a crowd rushing into a stock market, and would accordingly have paid the price in the 1929 crash. As the article concluded, “He fears that a similar fate awaits today’s investors.”
Mr Grantham’s scepticism cost him plenty of business during the bullish years, as foolish investors preferred to share Gatsby’s belief in “the green light, the orgiastic future”. Yet, as The Economist reported this August, the mostly bearish ten-year forecasts issued in 1998 by Mr Grantham’s firm, GMO, “proved almost entirely correct”.
So Mr Grantham, a Brit based in New England, knows what he is talking about, which makes his latest GMO letter, “Reaping the Whirlwind”, a must-read. He predicts further house-price falls in America and Britain, a sharp reduction in corporate profits everywhere, and that the Chinese government will “stumble” faced with the “spectacularly complicated task of maintaining the highest economic growth rate in history”. Still, he admits to turning bullish on American shares, like another great investor, Warren Buffett, who last week wrote an op-ed in the New York Times advising people to buy them now. “If you wait for the robins,” Mr Buffett counselled, “spring will be over.”
Mr Grantham admits he will probably fall foul of the Curse of the Value Investor, which is buying too soon. Yet he is convinced that “by October 10th global equities were cheap on an absolute basis and cheaper than at any time in 20 years.”
The most entertaining part of the letter is entitled Where Was Our Leadership? Mr Grantham asks, “Why did our leaders encourage the deregulation, encourage the leveraging and risk-taking, and completely miss or dismiss the growing signs of trouble and what we described as the ‘near certainties’ of bubbles breaking?” Why, indeed?
He offers two theories. The first he calls Career Risk and Bubbles Breaking. The bosses of banks continued piling on leverage and taking ever greater risks because they felt they would be fired if they did not. “It’s what I call the Goldman Sachs Effect: Goldman increased its leverage and its profit margins shot into the stratosphere. Eager to keep up, other banks, with less talent and energy than Goldman, copied them with ultimately disastrous consequences. And woe betide the CEO who missed the game and looked like an old fuddy-duddy. The Board would simply kick him out, in the name of protecting the stockholders’ future profits, and hire in more of a gunslinger from, say, Credit Suisse.”
The second theory reinforces the first, by combining the pressure for ever greater success with the selection of bosses ill-equipped to handle it. Mr Grantham believes that chief executives are “picked for their left-brain skills—focus, hard work, decisiveness, persuasiveness, political skills, and, if you are lucky, analytical skills and charisma.” Great American executives are not picked for patience, he points out, plausibly enough. “Indeed, if they could even spell the word they would be fired. They are not paid to put their feet up or waste time thinking about history and the long-term future; they are paid to be decisive and to act now.”
Only the rare person unconcerned with climbing the ladder, such as Mr Grantham, spoke out about the looming dangers. (Turning bearish before the crowd certainly can involve serious career risk—recall the late Tony Dye, who in March 2000 was fired as a chief investment officer at Phillips & Drew because he had moved out of what he rightly believed were overvalued equities and thus prompted many of the firm’s clients to quit.)
According to Mr Grantham, such people “have the patience of Job. They are also all right-brained: more intuitive, more given to developing odd theories, wallowing in historical data, and taking their time. They are almost universally interested—even obsessed—with outlier events, and unique, new, and different combinations of factors. These ruminations take up a good chunk of their time. Do such thoughts take more than a few seconds of time for the great CEOs who, to the man, missed everything that was new and different? Unfortunately for all of us, it was the new and different this time that just happened to be vital.”
Ironically, those now in charge of the giants of the financial system are suffering from excessive risk aversion, scared of lending even to the bluest of chips. Now, says Mr Grantham, left-brained bosses—not the sort of cautious bureaucrat likely to appeal to the governments now overseeing the financial system—are just what is needed. “The typical CEO is precisely equipped to deal with emergencies and digging out. Thus, Paulson was just the man to miss the point, but equally just the man—or at least a typically good one—to deal with a complicated crisis under stress.”
As Mr Grantham (or, to be precise, his wife) observes, the right- and left-brained should have come together on boards of banks, to keep fear and greed appropriately balanced. Yet, Sarbanes-Oxley and countless other initiatives intended to improve corporate governance seemed to have been largely ignored in the boardrooms of Wall Street, the City of London and Zurich. Let’s give the last word to Mr Grantham, who deserves his moment of schadenfreude: “What a shame that we have typically subverted this balance into a CEO fan club of old friends and mutual backscratchers.”
Clive James on Pat Kavanaugh
Already a star agent in the days before there were any others, Pat Kavanagh had the glamour to reduce most men and not a few women to slavery.
She was beautiful, clever and loved to laugh, but she could also have a blunt way with a fool. Since most writers are fools, especially about money, a new client was likely to find his dreams being set straight quite early in the relationship. I can't speak for her other clients - she never spoke about them either - but in general I would be surprised if there were any who were spared a close encounter with brute reality when she first explained to them why it would be unwise to start living like Donald Trump on the assumption that the next advance would be as big as the last one.
Such bluntness could be daunting but it was also reassuring because the client guessed, correctly, that his new mentor wouldn't be pussyfooting with the publishers either.
Pat could make publishers shake in their handmade shoes. On the appointed day to have lunch with her they always dressed with extra care.
Some of the awe she inspired at all levels of the business may have come from the fact that she had a self-assured hauteur and yet was hard to place.
She didn't come from any recognisable British social stratum. She was a South African who had sent herself into exile. Like the Australian expatriates of the same generation, she counted as having come from nowhere.
People who had come from nowhere could score an effect if they looked as if they knew something. Pat looked like that. She didn't even have to say anything. At the parties and book launches that endlessly punctuate the literary life, one babbles to stay alive. Pat never babbled. Her gift for waiting until she had something to say was enough to scare the daylights out of those of us who were busy saying anything at all without waiting for a moment.
Julian Barnes, who doesn't babble either, was at a loss for words when he first met her at a party in the old AD Peters office. Wisely he sent her a letter saying so, and from then on he was the lucky man. But not even Julian's looming presence could subtract from her individual status. She was always at the centre of a roomful of admiring glances. On a grand occasion, she had a way of looking unimpressed that could set the assembled company to wondering if they quite measured up. Actually her inscrutability may have had more to do with shyness, but there was no telling for sure even when you knew her.
Perhaps you had done something wrong. I once turned up for a book launch in a flared-trouser all-denim suit that was very wrong indeed, and couldn't help thinking that my appearance might have had something to do with the way she looked into her glass of white wine as if a fly had died in it. But she forgave us all, as long as we kept writing. Pat's client list, always bung full for decade after decade, was a persuasive indicator that she was on the side of the creator.
But to be on the side of the creator effectively, an agent must know the business. Pat did. I can well remember her first explanation to me of why it was better, on a book of memoirs, to have a rising rate on later royalties (the "escalator" clause) than to inflate the advance, especially if I also wanted the publisher to put out off-trail stuff such as collections of essays and poetry. "The secret," she said, "is to be a long-term asset."
Every literary career is different but the same principles apply. The first principle is to have principles. The writer should not expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a piece of junk that will never get the advance back.
Pat saw all this nonsense coming a long way off and she could be very funny about it (she was never more delightful than when pouring on the scorn), but she profoundly disapproved. Everyone in the business knew how honest she was and it must have made some of them uncomfortable.
When PFD, of which she had been a stalwart, was taken over, it was an awkward situation for many of us because the literary world in London is quite small and everyone knows everyone. But Pat's clients went with her en masse to the new outfit, United Agents, and I doubt if even one of them hesitated any more than I did.
I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable. This week many voices will be heard saying the same thing. Being literary voices, they will all say it differently, but there will be common themes: respect, admiration, love, and a racking grief at so cruel a blow, which had an awful quickness for its only mercy.
She was beautiful, clever and loved to laugh, but she could also have a blunt way with a fool. Since most writers are fools, especially about money, a new client was likely to find his dreams being set straight quite early in the relationship. I can't speak for her other clients - she never spoke about them either - but in general I would be surprised if there were any who were spared a close encounter with brute reality when she first explained to them why it would be unwise to start living like Donald Trump on the assumption that the next advance would be as big as the last one.
Such bluntness could be daunting but it was also reassuring because the client guessed, correctly, that his new mentor wouldn't be pussyfooting with the publishers either.
Pat could make publishers shake in their handmade shoes. On the appointed day to have lunch with her they always dressed with extra care.
Some of the awe she inspired at all levels of the business may have come from the fact that she had a self-assured hauteur and yet was hard to place.
She didn't come from any recognisable British social stratum. She was a South African who had sent herself into exile. Like the Australian expatriates of the same generation, she counted as having come from nowhere.
People who had come from nowhere could score an effect if they looked as if they knew something. Pat looked like that. She didn't even have to say anything. At the parties and book launches that endlessly punctuate the literary life, one babbles to stay alive. Pat never babbled. Her gift for waiting until she had something to say was enough to scare the daylights out of those of us who were busy saying anything at all without waiting for a moment.
Julian Barnes, who doesn't babble either, was at a loss for words when he first met her at a party in the old AD Peters office. Wisely he sent her a letter saying so, and from then on he was the lucky man. But not even Julian's looming presence could subtract from her individual status. She was always at the centre of a roomful of admiring glances. On a grand occasion, she had a way of looking unimpressed that could set the assembled company to wondering if they quite measured up. Actually her inscrutability may have had more to do with shyness, but there was no telling for sure even when you knew her.
Perhaps you had done something wrong. I once turned up for a book launch in a flared-trouser all-denim suit that was very wrong indeed, and couldn't help thinking that my appearance might have had something to do with the way she looked into her glass of white wine as if a fly had died in it. But she forgave us all, as long as we kept writing. Pat's client list, always bung full for decade after decade, was a persuasive indicator that she was on the side of the creator.
But to be on the side of the creator effectively, an agent must know the business. Pat did. I can well remember her first explanation to me of why it was better, on a book of memoirs, to have a rising rate on later royalties (the "escalator" clause) than to inflate the advance, especially if I also wanted the publisher to put out off-trail stuff such as collections of essays and poetry. "The secret," she said, "is to be a long-term asset."
Every literary career is different but the same principles apply. The first principle is to have principles. The writer should not expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a piece of junk that will never get the advance back.
Pat saw all this nonsense coming a long way off and she could be very funny about it (she was never more delightful than when pouring on the scorn), but she profoundly disapproved. Everyone in the business knew how honest she was and it must have made some of them uncomfortable.
When PFD, of which she had been a stalwart, was taken over, it was an awkward situation for many of us because the literary world in London is quite small and everyone knows everyone. But Pat's clients went with her en masse to the new outfit, United Agents, and I doubt if even one of them hesitated any more than I did.
I would have gone with her even if I had known that she was soon to grow fatally ill. Every minute of knowing her was valuable. This week many voices will be heard saying the same thing. Being literary voices, they will all say it differently, but there will be common themes: respect, admiration, love, and a racking grief at so cruel a blow, which had an awful quickness for its only mercy.
W, Garrison & Abeline
Spent a weekend in Abilene, Texas, a town that voted 75 percent for the Current Occupant in 2004, and nothing bad happened to me at all, they were as friendly as could be. Any time I sat down, they put food in front of me, and all in all they were witty and well-spoken and good to be around. So it would've been rude to ask them, "Why did you vote to reelect that dope?" But I thought it.
Not that I haven't done dumb things myself. I have. And intend to keep on doing some of them. But the Current Occupant has slept through his own presidency. He has no idea what went wrong. He knows less about governance than a cat knows about a can opener. He cut taxes during a costly war and made serious debtors of our grandchildren and he has ignored the future as if it doesn't exist. He is now about as popular as wet socks and deservedly so. And here were the people who spawned him and we got along pretty well.
Of course it helped that I only stayed two days.
These Republicans are hardy people not given to endless self-examination of the sort that we liberal elitists practice (Why did I agree to come to Abilene? Why did I allow that woman to force that prime rib on me and the au gratin potatoes and the pecan pie? Should I have talked to her about torture?), and they stick with a position once taken and don't admire people who waver and hedge their bets and cover their butts. Abilene, Texas, would appear rather bleak to most people, a big khaki-colored desert with some oil wells and windmills and shopping malls and not much happening after dark, but people here are fiercely loyal to the place, and their loyalty is a great civic asset.
In a cohesive community like Abilene, so much business can be done on trust. A truck pulls up to the gate and the rancher herds 20 steers off to be slaughtered. He doesn't count them or weigh them. Pure trust. A handshake and a wave. A week or two later, he gets a check from the buyer, whoever that may be. No IDs are checked, no bonds posted, no 10-page contract signed and notarized. You simply are part of a culture that trusts a person unless he proves untrustworthy. This can be quite astonishing if you're from the city, but it's fundamental to a place like Abilene.
Probably Abileneans wouldn't really need a national government or a Constitution or a judicial system, they could do OK on their own as semi-nomadic Bedouins, defending themselves, keeping order, managing their herds, enduring primitive healthcare, educating their kids, making the best of their earthly sojourn, and looking to the next life as the real deal. They are a hardier strain and for them the urban America that most of us live in is laden with non-necessities. Public transportation, for example. In Abilene, people would be happy to give you a ride if you needed one. Why wait for a bus?
My fellow liberal elitists are more dependent on other people. I am, that's for sure. I need other people to fix my car, raise my vegetables, build bookshelves, launder my shirts and clean my house, and since I need those people, I should take some passing interest in the schools their children attend and the sort of medical care available. I don't believe in indentured servitude, and so I want to live in a society in which the women who launder and fold my shirts get a fair deal. I don't want my breakfast sausage to come from a packing plant like the one in Iowa that employed undocumented Mexicans and treated them like medieval serfs. So I'm a Democrat. It's the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year.
But it's good to be among the opposition and know them as fine upstanding people. At the dinner where I was forced to eat the prime rib, we all sat around afterward and sang "I'll Fly Away" and "God Bless America" and "How Great Thou Art" and "Home on the Range" and a dozen other songs we all knew, and it was a lovely evening a couple weeks before a big election. We still do know some of the same songs, we Americans. Deep down, we are loyal to each other. And the truth is marching on.
Not that I haven't done dumb things myself. I have. And intend to keep on doing some of them. But the Current Occupant has slept through his own presidency. He has no idea what went wrong. He knows less about governance than a cat knows about a can opener. He cut taxes during a costly war and made serious debtors of our grandchildren and he has ignored the future as if it doesn't exist. He is now about as popular as wet socks and deservedly so. And here were the people who spawned him and we got along pretty well.
Of course it helped that I only stayed two days.
These Republicans are hardy people not given to endless self-examination of the sort that we liberal elitists practice (Why did I agree to come to Abilene? Why did I allow that woman to force that prime rib on me and the au gratin potatoes and the pecan pie? Should I have talked to her about torture?), and they stick with a position once taken and don't admire people who waver and hedge their bets and cover their butts. Abilene, Texas, would appear rather bleak to most people, a big khaki-colored desert with some oil wells and windmills and shopping malls and not much happening after dark, but people here are fiercely loyal to the place, and their loyalty is a great civic asset.
In a cohesive community like Abilene, so much business can be done on trust. A truck pulls up to the gate and the rancher herds 20 steers off to be slaughtered. He doesn't count them or weigh them. Pure trust. A handshake and a wave. A week or two later, he gets a check from the buyer, whoever that may be. No IDs are checked, no bonds posted, no 10-page contract signed and notarized. You simply are part of a culture that trusts a person unless he proves untrustworthy. This can be quite astonishing if you're from the city, but it's fundamental to a place like Abilene.
Probably Abileneans wouldn't really need a national government or a Constitution or a judicial system, they could do OK on their own as semi-nomadic Bedouins, defending themselves, keeping order, managing their herds, enduring primitive healthcare, educating their kids, making the best of their earthly sojourn, and looking to the next life as the real deal. They are a hardier strain and for them the urban America that most of us live in is laden with non-necessities. Public transportation, for example. In Abilene, people would be happy to give you a ride if you needed one. Why wait for a bus?
My fellow liberal elitists are more dependent on other people. I am, that's for sure. I need other people to fix my car, raise my vegetables, build bookshelves, launder my shirts and clean my house, and since I need those people, I should take some passing interest in the schools their children attend and the sort of medical care available. I don't believe in indentured servitude, and so I want to live in a society in which the women who launder and fold my shirts get a fair deal. I don't want my breakfast sausage to come from a packing plant like the one in Iowa that employed undocumented Mexicans and treated them like medieval serfs. So I'm a Democrat. It's the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year.
But it's good to be among the opposition and know them as fine upstanding people. At the dinner where I was forced to eat the prime rib, we all sat around afterward and sang "I'll Fly Away" and "God Bless America" and "How Great Thou Art" and "Home on the Range" and a dozen other songs we all knew, and it was a lovely evening a couple weeks before a big election. We still do know some of the same songs, we Americans. Deep down, we are loyal to each other. And the truth is marching on.
Get it Right
The Anatomy of the Financial Crisis and Why We Must Get It Right
Everyone is haunted by the fear our financial crisis might unwind into something like the Great Depression. The world of finance is undergoing a hundred-year storm. It has inflicted the greatest destruction of wealth in our history. It swept away giant blue-chip financial firms, in a few months, even in a few days of fear, panic, and mistrust, that had made it through the Great Depression. It's turned out worse than the most pessimistic of us imagined.
Most critically, the financial world is seized by a collapse of confidence. The uncertainty over the value of the securities they hold has led to an enormous risk aversion. Customers, creditors, and shareholders of the major financial firms wonder whether they might survive. Once confidence collapses, there is no telling when the selling will stop. It all brings to mind the story of the economist who walked past a hundred dollar bill and didn't pick it up. When asked why, he responded, "It can't be a hundred dollar bill for, if it were, somebody else would have picked it up by now."
All of this has produced an unprecedented credit squeeze in which banks are refusing to lend to other banks, much less to businesses and individuals. This squeeze has had a particular impact on the newly unregulated emergent shadow banking system made up of mortgage lenders, investment banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity funds, money market funds, structured investment vehicles and conduits. Many of these names we have never heard of before but cumulatively, they now provide a majority of America's financing. They are not banks but they act and seem like banks. They borrow short and invest long, mostly in illiquid securities; they have more debt in relation to equity than banks but have lacked, until recently, both deposit insurance and the support of the Federal Reserve as the "lender of last resort." They do not have deposits but have relied on roll-over, short-term funding obtained through borrowing in the money markets that has left these firms vulnerable to disruptions in the money markets. To the extent that they have bundled these investments into securities that were sold to the markets, they were are also vulnerable to mark to market losses when these markets, or their securities, start falling.
This quickly wiped out the banks' capital base and ended their roll-over funding. The functioning of the credit markets was brought to a virtual halt. Even worse, there is a quiet run on hedge funds and private equity funds ongoing that threatens to bring the shadow banking system to its knees. Now the question is whether this will produce an economic contraction on Main Street comparable to the Great Depression.
The inescapable bad news is that a serious recession is inevitable given the damage to the financial sector, as well as in the degree to which business and the general public has been traumatized by collapsing stock prices and the daily headlines. But this does not mean we are bound to have a spiraling recessionary dynamic comparable to the thirties. The unprecedented debt American families and businesses have assumed will continue to constrain the easing of the credit crunch. But we have avoided some of the mistakes of 1929.
Take monetary policy. This time the Treasury and the Federal Reserve moved quickly and positively. They understood that when banks lose money they have to shrink their balance sheets and since bank assets are its loans, this would mean a drastic reduction in credit and worsening business conditions. The Fed has sought to ease the credit crunch by injecting over $1.5 trillion into the financial system and, most recently, added another $250 billion directly into the banks to re-liquefy them, plus increasing deposit insurance, extending it to money market funds, aggressively lowering interest rates and, importantly, doing that in concert with the other major economic powers.
In the early 1930s, the Fed refused credit to bankers and forced more and more of them to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity. Some 10,000 commercial banks, or 40%, failed between 1929 and 1933 compared to only 20 this time. Many people back then stopped using checks and conducted transactions in cash. The money supply declined by more than a third, creating a major contraction of credit.
The contrast in fiscal policy is equally dramatic. A generation of economists inspired by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s taught us that the government should not try to run a balanced budget in a crisis of demand, as both Hoover and Roosevelt did. This time the government is running a $500 billion deficit to stimulate demand, and next year it will exceed $1 trillion. Orthodox adherence to the gold standard in the thirties didn't help, compared to a free floating US dollar today that has declined by 16% on a trade weighted basis. Another critical fiscal difference is that the federal government today has more sway. It makes up 21% of GDP compared to just 3% in 1929. On top of this a large component of GDP is devoted to health and education that is substantially decoupled from the problems of the private sector, not to mention that the Social Security program adopted in 1935 today provides unemployment benefits. All these contribute to maintaining the real economy.
Finally, we haven't repeated the great blunder of Hoover's 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It raised duties on some 20,000 foreign goods, causing many other countries to retaliate, reducing world trade by two-thirds. Now growing exports have been a major plus for our economy - something the protectionists in the Democratic Party need to remember.
Since virtually none of the necessary programs to counter the decline were implemented between 1929 and 1933. By the time FDR took over, the economic entrenchment had begun to feed on itself and turned a serious recession into the decade of the Great Depression. The reaction this time was virtually instantaneous.
All to the good, but there's also an "all to the bad" element in our present predicament. Americans are incredibly indebted. Household debt rose from about 50% of a $3 trillion GDP in 1980 to over 100% of a $13 trillion GDP today. The debts of the financial world, which amounted to 21% of GDP in 1980, soared to 120% of GDP by 2007. The financial world's unprecedented accumulation of debt in relation to equity sometimes with over $30 of debt for every $1 of equity means that small variations in their asset values, which once produced profits, have now brought them huge losses.
Much of this debt takes the form of securities and derivatives that remain on their balance sheets. In fact, another systemic risk and one that cannot be measured is based on the opacity and complexity of these exotic securities, mainly credit default swaps and derivatives that remain mainly on unknown financial balance sheets in amounts that exceed $50 trillion. The financial risk and exposure to loss is misunderstood and underestimated even by the credit agencies so the ensuing financial damage could be of a magnitude that could threaten the financial system.
AIG is a classic example of the inability to estimate the exposure. Management first estimated they would need $40 billion to get past their financial crisis; the government increased this to $85 billion; and within thirty days the cost had soared to $121 billion. Lehman is another example. When it went bankrupt, they had to unwind the credit insurance on Lehman, at a cost that has just been revealed to exceed $360 billion, an amount unrecognized by the Treasury when Lehman went under. These kinds of staggering losses could be multiplied many times over by defaults in cascading derivatives.
Then there is the housing bust. The current crisis in housing has an important history. When the Fed tried to respond to the dot.com bust in the year 2000 and 2001, that is when the Internet bubble burst, littering the country with bankruptcies and layoffs -- not to speak of investor losses of more than $1 trillion -- the Fed rapidly increased the money supply to offset these losses and slashed short-term interest rates to 1%, the lowest in 45 years. The result was the greatest housing boom this country had ever encountered. From 2002 to 2006 housing values appreciated at the astonishing rate of 16% per year compared to only 3% for the 55 years between 1945 and the year 2000. We finally came to the point where it was impossible for the typical American family to buy an average priced house using a conventional 30-year mortgage.
The response to this was an explosion of new mortgage products that enticed home buyers into supporting escalating housing prices while reducing their financial requirements. The need for the traditional 20% down payment was eliminated. Then we had interest only loans, low- or no-doc "liar loans," piggyback home-equity loans, as the mortgage and banking industries made it possible for anyone, even without a credit score, to purchase a home. These mortgages were packaged into complex financial products and sold on to other investors, many of whom had no idea what they were buying or the associated risks.
Then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices have dropped roughly 20% and the decline is continuing. Plummeting house prices mean more foreclosures, more homes on the glutted marketplace and a further house-price slump. There are 12 million homes today with negative equity where the mortgage exceeds the home's value and it may rise to 15 million over the next few months. As many as half of them have mortgages that now exceed the value of the homes by over 20%. If half these people drop the keys in a box and walk away, the losses will be in the trillions and may well destroy the equity in our banking system. That is why it is critical to find ways to keep foreclosures to a minimum. The entire attempt to re-liquefy the financial system could be undermined by this collapse in housing prices.
These are substantial threats and for all the measures (belatedly taken) distrust remains. American policymakers have seemed to be responding at an ad hoc, unfocused fashion, not fully taking into account the looming insolvency issues and the frightening complexity of the bundles of exotic securities. It is fair to acknowledge that they've been dealing with a crisis on a scale not seen before, and one that unfolded with terrifying speed. But the fact remains that by the time they acted, measures that might have re-stabilized the markets were ineffective. Robert Brusca of FAO Economics, captured it well when he said, "There is sense that if policymakers were surfers, they would have missed every wave."
Lehman's bankruptcy is a case study in government ineptitude. It was the $785 million of losses on Lehman's securities that pushed the value of the assets of a major money market firm below their $1 per share paid value, described as "breaking the buck." This caused $400 billion to be taken out of money market funds in a matter of days, while the rest of the funds were frozen in anticipation of further withdrawals. Banks were relying heavily on these funds for their commercial paper and the result was a spiral of illiquidity. The Lehman decision prompted the following from the French Minister of Finance, "Horrendous!" an assessment echoed by many others.
It remains puzzling that our Treasury officials did not foresee that the Lehman failure would not be just another failure, but a catastrophic failure undermining faith in the system. After Lehman, all remaining trust vanished in the financial world. Money market and interbank lending froze virtually completely. The spread on credit default swaps rose to levels that caused fear and speculation.
This mistake was followed by the Treasury scheme to buy toxic mortgage-backed securities. It was a flawed approach from day one. If the government bought them at a price above market and thus provided a huge bailout of Wall Street, it would have caused a political upheaval for it would have been seen to rescue them from the consequences of their misjudgment and greed. But if the government bought at current market prices financial firms would take enormous write-offs. In turn that would dramatically damage their balance sheets and force them to freeze their lending, the exact opposite of the purpose of this program.
Alas, the necessary defeat in Congress of Bailout Mark 1 was followed by Bailout Mark 2, purchased from politicians at the cost of a wholly unjustified $120 billion in additional pork barrel tax benefits.
The wiser approach, now adopted by the Treasury, but long advocated by economists and privately favored by Fed Chief Bernanke, according to the New York Times, has been for the government to invest in preferred stock in banks. This stock, convertible into common stocks if the companies later do well, is a much better deal for the taxpayer and assigns the sifting of the toxic assets to the system that created them.
What next?
Here are some proposals:
1. We must have a quick and efficient way to sustain more banks with capital injections, not just the major banks, using appropriate information gathered by bank supervisors.
2. We need to expand the definition of banks to extend appropriate regulatory regimes to the shadow banking system.
3. We will have to oblige the newly defined banking system to build up equity capital when their lending is expanding, for financial busts too often follow credit booms.
4. We must establish a standard for risk management and risk assessment covering mortgages, derivatives, debt, and even equity and especially on new financial instruments.
5. The Fed will have to continue to guarantee interbank borrowing by banks eligible for recapitalization to reactivate the interbank lending market and reduce abnormally high rates of interest on loans that float above the LIBOR interbank rate.
6. If there is to be a fiscal stimulus program, it should be primarily in infrastructure and not on tax cuts: these tend to be saved and not spent (and Obama's are more of a new entitlement program to people who don't pay any tax at all)
The danger is that politicians, who have little understanding of the financial world, may draw the wrong conclusions from Wall Street follies and make the wrong decisions, as they try to revive our financial system.
We must get this right. The new administration must draft the best of our national talent into shaping and administering these new policies. Otherwise the recession will not be U-shaped and relatively short. It will be L-shaped and extend for many unnecessary years.
Everyone is haunted by the fear our financial crisis might unwind into something like the Great Depression. The world of finance is undergoing a hundred-year storm. It has inflicted the greatest destruction of wealth in our history. It swept away giant blue-chip financial firms, in a few months, even in a few days of fear, panic, and mistrust, that had made it through the Great Depression. It's turned out worse than the most pessimistic of us imagined.
Most critically, the financial world is seized by a collapse of confidence. The uncertainty over the value of the securities they hold has led to an enormous risk aversion. Customers, creditors, and shareholders of the major financial firms wonder whether they might survive. Once confidence collapses, there is no telling when the selling will stop. It all brings to mind the story of the economist who walked past a hundred dollar bill and didn't pick it up. When asked why, he responded, "It can't be a hundred dollar bill for, if it were, somebody else would have picked it up by now."
All of this has produced an unprecedented credit squeeze in which banks are refusing to lend to other banks, much less to businesses and individuals. This squeeze has had a particular impact on the newly unregulated emergent shadow banking system made up of mortgage lenders, investment banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity funds, money market funds, structured investment vehicles and conduits. Many of these names we have never heard of before but cumulatively, they now provide a majority of America's financing. They are not banks but they act and seem like banks. They borrow short and invest long, mostly in illiquid securities; they have more debt in relation to equity than banks but have lacked, until recently, both deposit insurance and the support of the Federal Reserve as the "lender of last resort." They do not have deposits but have relied on roll-over, short-term funding obtained through borrowing in the money markets that has left these firms vulnerable to disruptions in the money markets. To the extent that they have bundled these investments into securities that were sold to the markets, they were are also vulnerable to mark to market losses when these markets, or their securities, start falling.
This quickly wiped out the banks' capital base and ended their roll-over funding. The functioning of the credit markets was brought to a virtual halt. Even worse, there is a quiet run on hedge funds and private equity funds ongoing that threatens to bring the shadow banking system to its knees. Now the question is whether this will produce an economic contraction on Main Street comparable to the Great Depression.
The inescapable bad news is that a serious recession is inevitable given the damage to the financial sector, as well as in the degree to which business and the general public has been traumatized by collapsing stock prices and the daily headlines. But this does not mean we are bound to have a spiraling recessionary dynamic comparable to the thirties. The unprecedented debt American families and businesses have assumed will continue to constrain the easing of the credit crunch. But we have avoided some of the mistakes of 1929.
Take monetary policy. This time the Treasury and the Federal Reserve moved quickly and positively. They understood that when banks lose money they have to shrink their balance sheets and since bank assets are its loans, this would mean a drastic reduction in credit and worsening business conditions. The Fed has sought to ease the credit crunch by injecting over $1.5 trillion into the financial system and, most recently, added another $250 billion directly into the banks to re-liquefy them, plus increasing deposit insurance, extending it to money market funds, aggressively lowering interest rates and, importantly, doing that in concert with the other major economic powers.
In the early 1930s, the Fed refused credit to bankers and forced more and more of them to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity. Some 10,000 commercial banks, or 40%, failed between 1929 and 1933 compared to only 20 this time. Many people back then stopped using checks and conducted transactions in cash. The money supply declined by more than a third, creating a major contraction of credit.
The contrast in fiscal policy is equally dramatic. A generation of economists inspired by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s taught us that the government should not try to run a balanced budget in a crisis of demand, as both Hoover and Roosevelt did. This time the government is running a $500 billion deficit to stimulate demand, and next year it will exceed $1 trillion. Orthodox adherence to the gold standard in the thirties didn't help, compared to a free floating US dollar today that has declined by 16% on a trade weighted basis. Another critical fiscal difference is that the federal government today has more sway. It makes up 21% of GDP compared to just 3% in 1929. On top of this a large component of GDP is devoted to health and education that is substantially decoupled from the problems of the private sector, not to mention that the Social Security program adopted in 1935 today provides unemployment benefits. All these contribute to maintaining the real economy.
Finally, we haven't repeated the great blunder of Hoover's 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It raised duties on some 20,000 foreign goods, causing many other countries to retaliate, reducing world trade by two-thirds. Now growing exports have been a major plus for our economy - something the protectionists in the Democratic Party need to remember.
Since virtually none of the necessary programs to counter the decline were implemented between 1929 and 1933. By the time FDR took over, the economic entrenchment had begun to feed on itself and turned a serious recession into the decade of the Great Depression. The reaction this time was virtually instantaneous.
All to the good, but there's also an "all to the bad" element in our present predicament. Americans are incredibly indebted. Household debt rose from about 50% of a $3 trillion GDP in 1980 to over 100% of a $13 trillion GDP today. The debts of the financial world, which amounted to 21% of GDP in 1980, soared to 120% of GDP by 2007. The financial world's unprecedented accumulation of debt in relation to equity sometimes with over $30 of debt for every $1 of equity means that small variations in their asset values, which once produced profits, have now brought them huge losses.
Much of this debt takes the form of securities and derivatives that remain on their balance sheets. In fact, another systemic risk and one that cannot be measured is based on the opacity and complexity of these exotic securities, mainly credit default swaps and derivatives that remain mainly on unknown financial balance sheets in amounts that exceed $50 trillion. The financial risk and exposure to loss is misunderstood and underestimated even by the credit agencies so the ensuing financial damage could be of a magnitude that could threaten the financial system.
AIG is a classic example of the inability to estimate the exposure. Management first estimated they would need $40 billion to get past their financial crisis; the government increased this to $85 billion; and within thirty days the cost had soared to $121 billion. Lehman is another example. When it went bankrupt, they had to unwind the credit insurance on Lehman, at a cost that has just been revealed to exceed $360 billion, an amount unrecognized by the Treasury when Lehman went under. These kinds of staggering losses could be multiplied many times over by defaults in cascading derivatives.
Then there is the housing bust. The current crisis in housing has an important history. When the Fed tried to respond to the dot.com bust in the year 2000 and 2001, that is when the Internet bubble burst, littering the country with bankruptcies and layoffs -- not to speak of investor losses of more than $1 trillion -- the Fed rapidly increased the money supply to offset these losses and slashed short-term interest rates to 1%, the lowest in 45 years. The result was the greatest housing boom this country had ever encountered. From 2002 to 2006 housing values appreciated at the astonishing rate of 16% per year compared to only 3% for the 55 years between 1945 and the year 2000. We finally came to the point where it was impossible for the typical American family to buy an average priced house using a conventional 30-year mortgage.
The response to this was an explosion of new mortgage products that enticed home buyers into supporting escalating housing prices while reducing their financial requirements. The need for the traditional 20% down payment was eliminated. Then we had interest only loans, low- or no-doc "liar loans," piggyback home-equity loans, as the mortgage and banking industries made it possible for anyone, even without a credit score, to purchase a home. These mortgages were packaged into complex financial products and sold on to other investors, many of whom had no idea what they were buying or the associated risks.
Then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices have dropped roughly 20% and the decline is continuing. Plummeting house prices mean more foreclosures, more homes on the glutted marketplace and a further house-price slump. There are 12 million homes today with negative equity where the mortgage exceeds the home's value and it may rise to 15 million over the next few months. As many as half of them have mortgages that now exceed the value of the homes by over 20%. If half these people drop the keys in a box and walk away, the losses will be in the trillions and may well destroy the equity in our banking system. That is why it is critical to find ways to keep foreclosures to a minimum. The entire attempt to re-liquefy the financial system could be undermined by this collapse in housing prices.
These are substantial threats and for all the measures (belatedly taken) distrust remains. American policymakers have seemed to be responding at an ad hoc, unfocused fashion, not fully taking into account the looming insolvency issues and the frightening complexity of the bundles of exotic securities. It is fair to acknowledge that they've been dealing with a crisis on a scale not seen before, and one that unfolded with terrifying speed. But the fact remains that by the time they acted, measures that might have re-stabilized the markets were ineffective. Robert Brusca of FAO Economics, captured it well when he said, "There is sense that if policymakers were surfers, they would have missed every wave."
Lehman's bankruptcy is a case study in government ineptitude. It was the $785 million of losses on Lehman's securities that pushed the value of the assets of a major money market firm below their $1 per share paid value, described as "breaking the buck." This caused $400 billion to be taken out of money market funds in a matter of days, while the rest of the funds were frozen in anticipation of further withdrawals. Banks were relying heavily on these funds for their commercial paper and the result was a spiral of illiquidity. The Lehman decision prompted the following from the French Minister of Finance, "Horrendous!" an assessment echoed by many others.
It remains puzzling that our Treasury officials did not foresee that the Lehman failure would not be just another failure, but a catastrophic failure undermining faith in the system. After Lehman, all remaining trust vanished in the financial world. Money market and interbank lending froze virtually completely. The spread on credit default swaps rose to levels that caused fear and speculation.
This mistake was followed by the Treasury scheme to buy toxic mortgage-backed securities. It was a flawed approach from day one. If the government bought them at a price above market and thus provided a huge bailout of Wall Street, it would have caused a political upheaval for it would have been seen to rescue them from the consequences of their misjudgment and greed. But if the government bought at current market prices financial firms would take enormous write-offs. In turn that would dramatically damage their balance sheets and force them to freeze their lending, the exact opposite of the purpose of this program.
Alas, the necessary defeat in Congress of Bailout Mark 1 was followed by Bailout Mark 2, purchased from politicians at the cost of a wholly unjustified $120 billion in additional pork barrel tax benefits.
The wiser approach, now adopted by the Treasury, but long advocated by economists and privately favored by Fed Chief Bernanke, according to the New York Times, has been for the government to invest in preferred stock in banks. This stock, convertible into common stocks if the companies later do well, is a much better deal for the taxpayer and assigns the sifting of the toxic assets to the system that created them.
What next?
Here are some proposals:
1. We must have a quick and efficient way to sustain more banks with capital injections, not just the major banks, using appropriate information gathered by bank supervisors.
2. We need to expand the definition of banks to extend appropriate regulatory regimes to the shadow banking system.
3. We will have to oblige the newly defined banking system to build up equity capital when their lending is expanding, for financial busts too often follow credit booms.
4. We must establish a standard for risk management and risk assessment covering mortgages, derivatives, debt, and even equity and especially on new financial instruments.
5. The Fed will have to continue to guarantee interbank borrowing by banks eligible for recapitalization to reactivate the interbank lending market and reduce abnormally high rates of interest on loans that float above the LIBOR interbank rate.
6. If there is to be a fiscal stimulus program, it should be primarily in infrastructure and not on tax cuts: these tend to be saved and not spent (and Obama's are more of a new entitlement program to people who don't pay any tax at all)
The danger is that politicians, who have little understanding of the financial world, may draw the wrong conclusions from Wall Street follies and make the wrong decisions, as they try to revive our financial system.
We must get this right. The new administration must draft the best of our national talent into shaping and administering these new policies. Otherwise the recession will not be U-shaped and relatively short. It will be L-shaped and extend for many unnecessary years.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)