I love talking to people who come at my subject from a different angle completely to me; war gamers, collectors, blacksmiths, costumers, replicators. People who use google maps and an algorithm to work out whether the Persian army could have covered x distance in y days. People who run down beaches naked and then wearing armour to see how fast they can go. People who build swords, who run campaigns in scale, who cook pies. I don't understand objects or things, I like stories. But I've never seen anyone explain to me so clearly how an object can /be/ a story, how one can re-tell an object the same way one can re-tell a story. I have a feeling I'm going to be thinking about this video for a while.
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on his obsession with the Maltese Falcon -
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/488
Showing posts with label historiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historiography. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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.
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.
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