Jerusalem syndrome

Today I went to the John Soane Museum in Central London. It's a house designed and built by this famous late 18th/early 19th century architect and collector, stuffed to the gills (or the eaves?) with bits and pieces of antiquity. It's quite extraordinary bit of historiography in spatial form. It made me realize how displays in modern museums serve to space out, categorize and map history in a way that gives the false impression that the past is easy to understand. There's something much more true, somehow, about stolen bits of history piled indiscriminately on top of each other, going up beyond your eyeline, hidden in secret rooms and suddenly leaping out at you from around a corner. The website says that Soane meant his museum for 'amateurs and students'. It seems to me that the most important thing I learned from my undergrad is that the past is extremely impressive, very present and totally incomprehensible. Bring back Victorian curatorship, that's what I say.

It's an amazing place, really worth a visit (and apparently they're going to do some major renovations soon, so get there fast); it's very interesting, architecturally, too, full of invisible skylights you can't quite see, all yellow glass and mirrors. There's also a small exhibition there right now of photographs of Rome taken by a Scottish priest in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, there's a lot of curatorial (is that a word?) comment on those; they explain in detail what each ruin is, when it was destroyed post-photograph, etc. They also provide a lot of cuttings from contemporary historians and guidebook writers describing the ruins as they are photographed; a recurring theme was that the ruins looked far nicer before the Italian government stripped all the flowers and trees off them and left them bare hunks of rock. It's funny, I don't think of ruins as being part of the landscape in that way. One thinks of them just sort of existing outside of nature, as if only humans could take away bits of marble or build over foundations, and only pollution could erode stone. I'd love to see the Roman forum the way this historian described it, all shaded by trees and full of flowers.

*

Today I also learned about Jerusalem Syndrome - did you know that there is a recognized medical phenomenon of people, sometimes with no previous history of mental illness, becoming psychotic on entering Jerusalem? Symptoms of Type 3 (uncompounded by previous mental illness), which tour guides are told to watch out for, include (lifted from Wikipedia):

1. Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
2. Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone. Tourist guides aware of the Jerusalem syndrome and of the significance of such declarations may at this point refer the tourist to an institution for psychiatric evaluation in an attempt to preempt the subsequent stages of the syndrome. If unattended, these stages are usually unavoidable.
3. A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
4. Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, toga-like gown, which is always white.
5. The need to shout psalms or verses from the Bible, or to sing religious hymns or spirituals loudly. Manifestations of this type serve as a warning to hotel personnel and tourist guides, who should then attempt to have the tourist taken for professional treatment. Failing this, the two last stages will develop.
6. A procession or march to one of Jerusalem's holy places.
7. Delivery of a sermon in a holy place. The sermon is usually very confusing and based on a plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.

The article cites the Book of Margery Kempe as evidence that this existed in the past. I think that pathologising in that way is a totally pointless way of shutting down discussion about texts, but it's interesting that this is a recorded phenomenon. It makes one wonder about the physical power of mental associations with places. Apparently it's discussed in relation to Stendahl Syndrome, a mental effect that can happen when people are exposed to immense or overwhelming beauty in art or nature. Multiple recorded cases of dizziness, confusion and hallucinations in Florence in the nineteenth century, apparently.

wasted

Today I crashed and burned in my Latin class while trying to tell my students a very funny joke using the gerund.

"... so you see," I said (after explaining the gerund), "If anyone asks you, 'Cur Latinam linguam studes?', you can say, 'Facio ad ridendumz' which means of course, 'I do it for the lolz.'"

... silence...

"No? The lolz? Anyone? LOL?"

A student, looking bewildered: "Like... laugh out loud?"

Me, running out of steam, "Yes! And, you know, if you do something for the lols, you... it's what the kids say these days! You know what, never mind."

Student: "So you've added the 'z' onto the gerund to..."

Me: "It's a VERY FUNNY JOKE."


Jeez. I should take it on the road, I'm wasted on these guys.

missed connections

Came across this via a friend - Advertising for Love, a blog which regularly posts personals ads from New York papers of the 19th century! Follow the mysterious coded messages of 'Salla Rand and Lilla Rand'! Wish that the lonely widow and respectable matron who advertised a year apart found each other! Laugh at the colonel and his booty calls! Wonder if the 'Romeo' ever found 'any of the young ladies who were on broad way last week' to form a 'matrimonial alliance'! It's great.

like a sex machine

I've been reading about Victorian pornography recently. I've always wanted to know more about Victorian sexual ethics after learning about curators painting penises off Greek pots. Came across (ahem) this post about the history of vibrators: pretty cool. Just as I thought I couldn't justify doing reading that was in no way related to my research, one of my students pointed me to The Reenchantment of the World. From the synopsis:

What we aim to show, in this edited volume, is that modernity produces an entirely new array of strategies, compatible with secular rationality, for re-enchanting a disenchanted world.... Those who desire a universal order (kosmos) may find it, now in intermittent fashion, in secular epiphanies, moments of being in which, for a brief moment, the center appears to hold; those who, on the other hand, require a reason for their existence and effort, find it in the last place they would have looked: science, not merely a destroyer of beliefs but also, as Renan understood, their replacement.... for a hierarchy of significance, there is the genre of detective fiction, in which everyday objects become, once more, potentially salient; for mystery, there is the perennial fact of our bafflement in face of the world, a fact which enlightenment, ironically, serves more and more to confirm. And the hankering for other worlds, once satisfied by visions of paradise, is now satisfied by the creation of “secondary” or “virtual” universes (J.R.R. Tolkien and Star Trek providing respective examples)—universes whose fictitiousness is, at the same time, always acknowledged. Just like their premodern predecessors, these rational forms of enchantment are also catalyzers of community.

So, a movement from the eighteenth century to the present in which genre fiction, imaginative engagement with it, and fan community fills the gap in our hearts left by the loss of religion. I listened to an interview with the editors of the book on Stanford's Entitled Opinions podcast (which promises to be very interesting, despite the portentious tone, and the fact that I'm not sure they could have come up with a title that made me more inspired to smack them in the face), and they talked about Sherlock Holmes fandom, how Conan Doyle was a lapsed Catholic turned spiritualist who believed in fairies. The early fan community, the Baker Street Irregulars, and their essays about Holmes, arguments over canon, etc. "Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional character whom people talked about as if he was real." And how Moriarty was an allegory for the devil.

They came *so close* to saying that Holmes was an allegory for Christ - and then, are the fan essays about him, the obsessive biographing and arguments over canon all really like the same communities, the same communal practices for Christ? I've been thinking, experimentally, about medieval receptions of the gospels as fan texts for a while now, and I think if I were to write a giant history of the fan which would, in part, be the history of the religious, and had wondered about Holmes fandom as a moment where religious faith in Christ and the imaginative fleshing-out of a character on the page are confused, or blurred, or are revealed to be the same. Did you know that many of the Baker Street Irregulars were Bible critics?

So, I am not finished reading about Victorians. Maybe I'll move on to a slightly less sexually explicit form of love. (Although Holmes and Watson were totally doing it.)