…from her melodious lay

If you take the time to read the diary entries of Christopher Columbus after he found land in the “New World“, you notice a distinct lack of awe. There is no language describing in detail the land itself. This is a continent that no European had ever step foot on before, and Columbus spends almost the entire length of his journals, telling posterity that he expects to find gold any time soon. He speaks of all the marketable goods this new World could offer. The first group of people who meets, are the Taino’s. He describes them as:

They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal..Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people ..They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.

This admiration for the Tainos does not foreshadow the devastation that the arrival of the Spanish would cause to the Taino people, who by 17th Century, were all but wiped out. After noting their friendly natures, Columbus regained his European nature, and wrote to the Spanish government:

The Tainos could all be subjected and made to do all that one might wish.

Suddenly, the people became a commodity.
Columbus’ diaries show that the mode of thought that Europeans had in the 15th Century was aimed exclusively at commerce. Columbus obsession with finding gold was entirely because his financiers would demand it back home. The lack of description of the landscape is echoed in the lack of descriptive language in their vocabulary. Gonzalo Fernández, the Spanish historian proves this decisive lack of language, and leads me onto the point of this blog, perfectly:

Of all the things I have seen, this is the one thing that has most left me without hope of being able to describe it in words. It needs to be painted by the hand of a Berruguete, or some other excellent painter like him, or by Leonardo de Vinci, or Andrea Mentegna, famous painters whom I knew in Italy

To understand my favourite era’s in art – the Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelites – we have to understand the context of the time period in which they were created. The vast majority of people were supremely materialistic and beauty was largely ignored unless it had some sort of commercial value in the 14th, 15th and 16th Century. The way Columbus spoke of the Taino people in Hispaniola was not malicious for the time period. Through 21st century specs, Columbus’ words regarding the subjugation of an entire group of people seem heartless, especially given that he had already noted just how gentle those people were. But through 15th Century European specs, they were common.

Renaissance and later Baroque artists managed to convey a World both lost to antiquity, and contemporary but free from the constrains of a deeply materialistic World that they inhabited. That is their genius. The beauty of the World is somehow missed when it is overshadowed by the need for “things”. We ignore objects that the artists amplify. The natural World is just “there“, it becomes both a commodity and entirely ignored because there are apparently more important things to focus our attention on. If we get very little pleasure from seeing a tree because we’re so used to it, but we note the beauty of Giorgione’s (or Titian’s… no one is sure which one of the two painted it) pastoral scene in which the trees have an almost dreamlike quality, for no apparent reason, we have heightened our sense of reality. That is what art is supposed to do.

I cannot put my finger on what it is I love so much about Renaissance art. But I suspect it is because the artist takes an everyday object and makes me take note of that object in a painting, despite the fact that I wouldn’t normally take note of that object in reality. It heightens my sense of reality. If we jump forward to another favourite time period in art, of mine, to 1829, and to the Pre-Raphaelite Sir John Everett Millais (which is odd, given that the Pre-Raphaelites really hated Renaissance concepts), and more specifically, to his work “Ophelia” (one of my all time favourite paintings), this heightened sense of awareness becomes apparent:

We sense calm, we sense perhaps spring, we sense the contrast between the strong colours of nature, and the grey, lifeless colours of Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia. Her face does not stand out among the very allegorical choice of flowers. Pansies were also known as hearts-ease, meaning peace in feeling. The poppy has always signified death. Daisies signified innocence. The plants and flowers Millais included were not at the scene in which he painted, he added them himself for a reason. The poppy doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s description either. Ophelia’s expression contrasts with the madness of the character Shakespeare created. She looks at peace. The flowers she holds signify the peacefulness of her death, despite the madness of her life. Her hair looks peaceful, it is not all over her face. She is not face down in the darkness of the water, she is holding flowers. The Victorians had a little bit of an odd obsession with the “language of flowers“. Her face is white and her clothes flow into the river at the end of the painting neatly. There is no madness to her death. That is why Millais’ Ophelia heightens my sense of a reality I am blissfully unaware of in my every day life.

In his book “The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance”, Berenson sums this up perfectly, by stating that:

… the chief business of the figure painter, as an artist, is to stimulate the tactile imagination

- That is to say, the artist is there to point out the World that we are unaware of, and say “look, this is it, enjoy it!!” Art is a reminder of what is real.

The 15th and 16th Centuries needed the Renaissance painters to convey a World that was beyond the imagination of the every day person looking for material gain. Columbus is the epitome of that obsession for material gain. When faced with a brand new World, his only thought was material wealth. Conversely, without that obsession with material wealth, art is pointless.

From Columbus to Reagan

When Christopher Columbus landed on the other side of the Atlantic, in 1492, he encountered a culture of the native population which the West would soon utterly destroy. We came to believe those populations were beneath us, and so we were doing them a favour by Westernising their lands and wiping them out. The Tainos (The natives) were not at all barbaric, or backward, or primitive, as the Europeans first thought. They invented the Canoe, the hammock, their homes were far more spacious and luxurious than the tiny European homes back home. In fact, it could be argued, that given the horrendous religious turmoil that embodied Europe over the next century; the Tainos were far more advanced socially. Columbus commented “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal”. And yet, we still felt the need to impose our will on those people. It then follows quite neatly, that the lands Columbus is famed for discovering (Latin America) would, in less than five hundred years, be the victim of quite horrific oppression from the Nation that celebrates Columbus day; The USA.

The word “Democracy” is quite a contentious one, when used in the Western sense. It is a by-word for Capitalism.
America was a blank slate in 1776. Direct, deliberative democracy could have been imposed, in a true people’s revolution. But, the “Revolutionaries” weren’t as revolutionary as one might first believe. Much like the Monarchy they wished to free themselves from, the revolutionaries still believed that only a specific class of person was capable of governing. They didn’t believe the general public should have much say in this new “democracy“. It explains the electoral college system. Alexander Hamilton declared the people were a “great beast” desperate to be tamed. One gets the sense that they believed those who were not of the propertied class did not have a right to have a complete say over the way their lives were ruled. James Madison goes one step further and says of Democracy, if elections were “open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure” echoing the beliefs of Cicero, and Cassius, in the old Roman Republic. It is arguably, why Julius Caesar was murdered…… for giving the people more of a democratic say. Therefore, the object of democracy over the past two thousand years, has been to give added protection to the wealthy few. The protect the minority, from the majority, and therefore has created a system where the minority, control the World.

It then becomes obvious, that when George Bush managed to steal the 2000 election, winning less votes than Al Gore, but winning more of the “elite” vote, the public just didn’t care. They didn’t rebel. They didn’t question the legitimacy of their “democracy“. Of course not. And the reason they didn’t care, was because the public are fully aware that an election in the U.S.A, or England, is simply voting in a different business man.

Over here in England, the 2010 election will be run on “spending cuts“. Cuts to public spending. Cuts, quite drastically, that do not need to happen so sharply. The question of curbing business excesses, or fairer trade agreements, or closing tax loopholes for the rich will not come up, purely because those important issues negatively affect the politicians, who happen to be of that particular elite class. And so spending cuts that negatively affect the poor, is going to be the main topic of discussion, because the poor do not have any say whatsoever in the way the Country is run, they have no power, so they can be manipulated.

The Ancient Greeks noted that true democracy was a Welfare State, using public funds to ensure the basic necessities to life for every citizen, not just the elite few. Modern Democracy is far different because it assumes that if the poor start gaining wealth through a better education system, or a stronger Welfare state that allows them the chance to advance, that the poor will start to influence democracy to suit their own needs, which in turn threatens the elites, which is exactly what Madison feared when he said “the property of landed proprietors would be insecure” if the poorer classes had more of a say.

It is in this line of thought, that allows modern politicians (particularly Conservatives and Republicans) to argue for “less government“. This is me, is quite the paradox. By handing power over, from the State, from elected officials accountable to the public, into the hands of the Private market, they are by definition eroding democracy. These private powers then suddenly have the wealth and the power to influence public policy, which in itself, is not democratic, because….. and this wont shock you……. that public policy has become more and more geared toward the interests of big business.

And then when they seem to have control over our Governments, they spread, across the World, whilst the government call it “spreading freedom and democracy“. Yet, in places like Brazil, in 1964, America didn’t seem to have a problem supplying funds and training, in helping to actually overthrow the democratically elected President Goulart (who was supremely popular with the public), helping to install a new right winged regime that quickly put an end to Democracy, wiped out thousands of people, including singers, painters and anyone who showed any form of left wing mindset. The same pattern of overthrowing democratic regimes and placing harsh, violent, corrupt,yet pro-American dictators in place can be seen across the history of the 20th Century. Nicaragua, Iran, Guatemala and Chile to name a few. Reagan, within eight years, didn’t seem to bothered about the Right Winged bloodbath taking place in Central America. In fact, he was shipping millions of dollars in military aid to the offending governments. 20,000 dead (according to Amnesty Int.) in Nicaragua alone.

UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification, “the American training of the officer corps in counter-insurgency techniques was a key factor in the genocide…Entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerillas protection.” Similarly, Reagan provided funds and training to Right winged terrorists in Colombia, which in turn gave Colombia the worst human rights record in the region. And yet, far from being labelled a war criminal, Reagan is hailed as a Conservative hero. By funding the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, he apparently created “freedom“. That “freedom” is a little wishful, given that whilst the U.S supported the right winged government of Somoza in Nicaragua, the Country had a two thirds malnutrition rate for children under five, whilst nine out of ten homes had unsafe drinking water, with the UN estimating that 60% of the population, under right winged rule, lived in dire poverty. If anything, it proves to me, that Reagan, and in fact, every President in the history of America has never been concerned with human rights, or horrendous suffering, and been more concerned with it’s own economic superiority. When you have to kill, and create an environment where genocide is taking place, one cannot seriously claim to have created “freedom” or “democracy“.

At the same time as evil dictators were being placed in charge of Latin American Countries by America; Britain’s equally as shameful Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher said “We support the United States’ aim to promote peaceful change, democracy and economic development”. One wonders what that “economic development” actually entailed given that after Reagan interfered with Guatemala, (according to the Inter-American development bank) by 1990 the per-capita income had fallen to below it’s 1971 levels. Is that economic development? No. Reagan should have spent his final years in prison.

Whilst James Madison quite openly admitted he didn’t want the poorer population to have much of a say in the democratic process; Ronald Reagan simply helped to destroy any poor people who might want a say in the democratic process. By freeing up the Country to the elites, he then labeled it “freedom” and “democracy“. It’s a strange old, American-owned World. From Columbus, to Obama, nothing much has changed. Democracy has not, and will never exist, without the public turning it’s attention away from it’s ridiculous obsession with consumerism, and onto what actually matters; the unjustifiable nature, of who controls the World.

Querencia

The Spanish have a beautiful word; Querencia, meaning a place that gives the feeling of complete comfort and safety. The scent, the feel, the atmosphere, the sense, everything about a certain place in your life, that offers complete inner Bhāvanā tranquillity. And whilst that certainly is fine by me, because there are only a couple of places I find myself ominously overcome by such feelings of utter tranquillity; Querencia can be quite the paradox, if one has a – what I like to call – Columbus complex

Not too much is known about the life of Christopher Columbus. Not too much is known about his infamous voyage across the Atlantic in Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción. We have few “Diario de a bordo” entries from 1492, but nothing much else. We do not even know for sure when or where Columbus was born. The general consensus is that he was born in Genoa. However, there are no documents that prove it, nor are any of his surviving letters to family members written in the language of the Genoese, or any form of Italian for that matter. We don’t even know why he sailed to the Canaries (although they were a possession of Castile, it still happened to be almost 800 miles off course) before his first Voyage to the Americas. And to end with, he died in relative obscurity. He was indeed, a man of complete mystery. He appears to have lived, for the ocean. He was almost addicted to chaos, and that conventionally “unnatural” order to Christopher Columbus life, that crazed nature, the unknown, the mystery, the chaos, appears to have been Columbus’ tranquil retreat; his Querencia.

Similarly, the King of Humanism during the Renaissance, a brilliant Philosopher and writer, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, seems to have lived a life that most (at that time) would have considered unnatural, different, and with a sort of love for thinking dangerously outside the box, which appears to have been his own inner Querencia. Giovanni, around 1486 wrote 900 Theses on Humanism, that quite simply sent shockwaves across Christendom. He wrote an educated text, named “Oration on the Dignity of Man” that, which accompanied the 900 theses. To summarise quite horrendously, the text suggested man was almost God-like, that destiny was controlled by man, and man had the right to whatever he so wished to be. It suggested that God created man, to be completely free from any restriction, to have no true nature within themselves, and that when man gives up learning, he becomes quite pointless (Mirandola would have despised Big Brother, and probably exploded with rage at the sight of our society failing miserably on Jeremy Kyle’s stage). They were Humanist texts in a largely violently religious, anti-humanist setting, but became the key documents of Renaissance humanism. His mission, was to get scholars from all over the known World, to come to Rome and debate the issues he raised. A man of great intellect, and a man on a different level to the rest of us. He was labelled as a heretic, by Pope Innocent VIII and arrested after fleeing to France. He was beaten, flogged and tortured, but refused to give up his theories and writings. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s inquisitive mind, was his own Querencia.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine complained to me that I only seem to choose to be around people that I feel safe around, that only people I consider “intelligent” do I give any time to these days. And although I initially disagreed with that sentiment, thinking about it now, it would appear to be true. A night at a pub talking about football and fighting and how much one can drink without being sick, is not something I find interesting, nor is it something I’m going to waste my time on any time in future. I don’t care about sport, I don’t care about drugs, I don’t care about drinking all that much. I quite like peace. I’m also drawn to intelligent conversation (whether I’m involved in the conversation, or not), because it challenges me, and forces me to learn more. I echo the thoughts of Mirandola when I say that without learning, I’d feel like a pointless good little slave to society. A universe that has an apparent air of vanity and greed, is a universe that doesn’t actually exist. We created that mythical monster, it did not exist before. We seem to be the generation that does whatever we’re told, because men in suits tell us it’s what we “should” do, so we do, unquestioningly, like perfect little robots following a path that is set in stone, yet all the time, we’re told it’s “freedom“. The World isn’t based on freedom, it never has been, it’s a new form of oppression, and one which is unrivalled in history. If we’re lucky, the majority of us are “free” enough to become a supervisor for a chain of supermarkets. The 7am alarm, is our life. Millions of people who have somehow been brainwashed quite disturbingly into believing that sitting behind a desk in a crap office of the same faces as you see in the mirror every morning, speaking the same boring office lingo day after day, is their “calling in life“. A waste of an hour, is being told to spend an hour learning how to work a checkout counter. HOW EXCITING! The acquiescence to materialism, and the “discipline” apparently needed to provide a successful life for yourself, are little more than a bit of a con. Not least, the rejection of the spiritual being and who we truly are.

Who actually are we then, other than a bunch of non-individuals, who spend our lives working, enriching those at the top, just to get drunk on a Saturday night, only to look back in 50 years and ponder our regrets and our fleeting inadequacies? Surely there’s more! Perhaps there isn’t. Perhaps our eternal search for more will never end, because our innate desire for happiness is at total odds with the relentless chaotic and unordered universe that we inhabit. But perhaps, the only way to feel worthwhile in life, is to deviate from the river down a little side stream, that those still on the river, eventually look back at, and admire.

If we live in a truly “anything goes” universe, we can create our own “point“. But then, you must go against the grain, to truly be yourself, uninfluenced by consumerism, which is a struggle to say the very least, because when we try to search for more, grabbing on to our slowly dying sense of individuality, it is struck out of our hands by those very same men in suits saying “you don’t need a sense of individuality and worth, when you can have this lovely new car!!!! Come and work for me! Minimum wage is the way forward!!” – The complete opposite of my Querencia.

The most interesting and rebellious of minds, are those of artists. They are the embodiment of disenchantment. They scream displeasure and anguish. They are not content, nor will they ever be content with the clear pretentiousness of the way the materialist World works. The great modern Artist on the 20th Century, Amedeo Modigliani, whilst in Paris, had turned quite mad by his own inner demons, and taken to a life of a vagabond, from a life of great wealth and intellect. He destroyed all the pomposity of his workshop, and wore cheap battered clothes. He justifies his “madness” (or what society had termed as madness, whereas, I find him to be quite normal) and ripping apart any remnant of his former rich life as “Childish baubles, done when I was a dirty bourgeois“. He knew that having tuberculosis gave him a death sentence that the rest of us struggle to understand. This, along with his clear disharmony with the way the World worked, created one of the most tragic, yet rebellious and brilliant creative minds the World has ever known. Art, creativity, an outlet for the inability to accept the brutishness of what I’m told is the “real World“; Modigliani’s Querencia. His life, was his art.

The magnificent eloquence of philosopher Albert Camus, puts into words, my own personal perspective on life, which happens to be, my very own Querencia;
“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

Perhaps my own blissful Querencia, is a sort of “Columbus Complex“, it is an inner Querencia, not a Worldly place as such. It is that disorganised, ever questioning, deceitful, forceful, rejecting, dissatisfied and tired gap in my mind, that can apparently never be filled. Without it, I’d be a little minion to societies “absolutes“, and that thought actually frightens me.