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.
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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.
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4 comments:
I tend to think that modern historians have shunned (or, not allowed at the table) the 19th c. sense of history as "a bunch of cool/weird stuffs", and that, in many ways, that's a denial of what many historians do history for -- to locate, situate, and classify the cool/weird stuffs, so that they can be located again later, so that they can be shown to be truly cool/weird (even in context!), or so that the coolness/weirdness can be even fuller.
Re ruins: This made me think of this post (Conrad goes on a bit; you'll want section 3, do a find for "Goethe").
Re Jerusalem syndrome: Even more fun is Paris syndrome! My friend Nadia was working on these place-specific syndromes at some point...
1) My fifth chapter basically hinges on the fact that "preservation" (and being a curator) meant something different to sixteenth-century antiquarians than it does to us. Glad somebody else is thinking about this stuff.
2) I was reading *somewhere* a long time back about people going around finding Roman mosaics and things in England, digging through the underbrush in wooded areas and such. There was some twist about mosaics that turned out to be later imitations but had been sort of covered over or something. Augh, I wish I could remember the point of this story I'm thinking of.
3) Also, the background music for this NPR story just became "Jerusalem." Cue the creepy music.
My friend works at Soane's! It's an amazing place and I would second your recommendation that people visit. Have you ever been to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford? If not then you really should go as it's like stepping into the past. Another gallery which has a similar aesthetic is the Wallace Collection although you do feel that someone has tried to knock the random object approach of the original collectors into a bit of order there, which is something of a shame, I feel.
I was going to suggest the Pitt Rivers as being similar, too! I understand they've just renovated it, but it's still jam-packed - and stuff is sorted by type, not by period or region, which is cool. Also, they have shrunken heads, totem poles, and a witch in a bottle.
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