Capitalism: The Real Thing and the Label

My own view on capitalism owes much to the work of Fernand Braudel, the French economic historian, and to his three-volume work, Civilization and Capitalism, particularly the second volume, titled The Wheels of Commerce. The rest is observation of the here and now.

Braudel’s presentation is overwhelmingly persuasive. Capitalism, as he sees it, is a distinct form of economic activity characterized by monopoly (whether clearly visible or not); alliances with political power to maintain control; detached from community, society, and peoples; and focused entirely on getting high returns on money. Therefore capital enters markets capable of being controlled, low in risk, high in returns—and then leaves such markets abruptly when conditions change. Braudel’s emphasis on monopoly, as a defining trait of the capitalist stance, means that capitalism is not entrepreneurial, does not believe in competition, and never mind free markets or the deification of The Market. Capitalists are never specialists.

The broader, more perennial, “always there,” unavoidable economic activity—of which, these days, “small business” is the supposed flag-bearer—is organically linked to community, society, and peoples. It is a necessity. Capital only deals with selected high-yield opportunities—and only while they last.

This form of detached, indifferent monopolistic exploitation of economic exchange, wherever it will work, became visible early in European economic history (Braudel’s subject) with money lending (“usury”) in the twelfth century. The mediaeval economy did not offer much in the way of opportunities; it was too organically structured, based on the interaction of “estates.” The opportunities arose when the first relatively small urban centers began appearing and therefore trade became more intense. Then capital becomes more visible in the form of the great merchants who traded in certain selected goods that fit their needs. Thus after money lending, call it banking, it appears in merchandising and distribution—but, pointedly, not in transportation. Why not? Transportation, as such, was not profitable and highly risky, especially transportation by water. It required high capital investments that had a short life and could be easily and unpredictably lost in a storm.

Capital briefly entered mining late in the fifteenth century—its first foray into actual production of anything at all. Capital left mining after about a 50-year participation. It wasn’t profitable enough. Sure enough, states took over the mines—because mining had become vital to the economies. Next capital selectively entered agriculture ranging from actual ownership of land and management of estates—but this only in a relatively small number of cases. Involvement with agriculture principally took the form of organizing acquisition and then sale and distribution of particularly profitable crops.

Eventually, as the industrial revolution dawned and as technology improved—not least the durability of what have since come to be known as “capital goods,” such as machines, capital entered the production sector as well and has, since, become almost synonymous with it. Its ways of thought have completely saturated, permeated economic thought and behavior—so much so that, these days, it appears to be a “truth from above” that corporations serve their stockholders—rather than the public. That management need not know the product deeply to manage enterprises; lower levels can handle that. That any legal way to save on taxes, thus to avoid contributing to the collective, is a virtue. Note, in this connection, my point above about “alliances with political power” that help the capitalist shape the laws. Therefore comes news today that Google has avoided paying $2 billion in taxes by moving $9.8 billion into a Bermuda shell company. Questioned about this, Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, said: “I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.  It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.” What we see here is “capitalism” as a label—a label of virtue. But its real meaning is detachment from community, society, and peoples. There is now another layer of people, above the ordinary masses. In that layer different rules apply.

Meanwhile—and Braudel largely concentrated on capitalism in the pre-industrial period—we may now be approaching another change. It may be that, as capital abandoned mining, so now it may be finding physical production less than suitable as a place to put its masses of money. There are clear signs of capital’s withdrawal in various places. Capital is still investing in virtual reality—along with using other people’s money to gamble on derivates—themselves quite virtual. And then, when oil runs out and once more capital goods became less durable, and people have less and less money to engage in consumption, we’ll all sink back into the good old Dark Ages. At last only usury will remain as an opportunity. And here’s hope that some strong church will erase that infamy too. For a while. For a while.

Did You Have a Vague Year?

The question can, but need not be, understood in an ironical fashion.  That word, vague, has a properly technical meaning applied to the year. Vague comes from the Latin, vagus, meaning “wandering,” “rambling,” and hence also “less than well defined.” Annus vagus is a wandering year. So what does that phrase mean?

It means a year of 365 days—unadjusted with leap days. When the formal calendar is structured like that, the simplest way to make it orderly is by assuming 12 months of 30 days and then five more days added. The ancient Egyptian calendar was structured like that. The Mayans had three different calendars: The Long Count (for which we have no name), the religious (called Tzol’kin), and the ordinary civil calendar (called Haab’), which was an annus vagus but made up of 18 months of 20 days to which were added five more (those five considered unlucky).

So what happens when one lives one’s life in a succession of vague years? Well, the actual year is then shorter than it really is, as marked by the sun, by 0.2442 days. That translates to 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. Therefore a festival, recurring on a fixed date of the vague calendar, begins nearly six hours earlier every year. If we put such a year in place today, Christmas would occur on November 25 in 2136. And so on. This shift in festivals—when the calendar isn’t accurate—caused humanity to introduce leap days or other adjustments.

The Mayan’s what with having three different calendars, of which the Long Count was very precise for long periods, adjusted to the seasonal shift not by introducing extra days but simply moving the date of the calendar. In the example above, Christmas would be nudged forward in time one day every fourth year to account for the drift—reminiscent of our leap year additions.

But what with this constant drift of the vague calendar backward in time (so that last year’s fixed date is earlier in the new vague year), eventually the calendar, having thus wandered off its moorings, would return to its beginning again. What goes around, comes around. And, of course, it does. So how long does that period take? It takes 1,508 vague years—and presto, Christmas is once more on December 25.

But did the Mayans know that? Did they have a real sense for the duration of the accurate, the tropical year? Evidently they did. At the Palenque archeological site near Chiapas, in Mexico, archeologists noted some inscriptions at an ancient temple, the Temple of the Cross, dates that were 1,508 years of their years apart. John Temple and Eric S. Thompson interpreted those dates as knowledge of the solar year (link). 1,508 times 365 is 550,420 days. And so is 1,507 times 365.2422, the length of the tropical year.

I bring this vital information as part of my series on the End of the World, projected by catastrophists to come on December 21 of this year. Other posts in this series are here and here. Now for the answer to that question. No, you did not have a vague year in 2012, not astronomically speaking. We hew close to the tropical these days. As for how 2012 felt, well that’s another matter.

Morning Red, Evening Dead!

It was but a little after 5 pm, but as we left the swimming exercise the sky was dark but for a far, faint band of fading yellow. A memory came into Brigitte’s mind from far away and long ago. “Morgen rot,” she said. “There is that German saying. But how does it go on?” I knew it too, but neither of us could produce the answer.

I awoke with it this morning—which tells us something about the mysteries of memory, the hard-working, obedient brain cells laboring away, all through the night. “Morgen rot, Abend tot.” Post breakfast I went to discover what I could about it. Turns out that it’s very well known in German and appears on multiple websites that deal with proverbs and folk sayings. One of these is well made; it presents sources and predecessors. Now the origin for this saying, according to this site (link), is Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The Latin is Quem dies veniens videt superbum, hunc dies videt fugiens jacentem. A literal translation is available in The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations: The Illiterati’s Guide to Latin Maxims, Mottoes, Proverbs, and Sayings. To wit: “The man whom the new day sees in his pride is by its close seen prostrate.” A translation that at least touches on the German saying is in Marlowe’s Edward II: “He whom the dawning day has seen exalted in his pride, the departing day has seen downfallen.” Here at least the word “dawn” appears. In German Morgenrot means dawn. All right. Seneca had the general idea, but it was the German folks speech that shortened it. Or was it?

I next encountered a fairly well known nineteenth century poem by the German poet Wilhelm Hauff (1802-1827). I reproduce it below with my own translation. Hauff only lived to be twenty-five—and may have had a premonition of his own life’s brief duration. He died of fever, however, not in battle. In his version, the linkage is much more clear—and it is possibly from this poem that the German saying got its legs:

Reiters Morgenlied	The Rider’s Morning Song
Morgenrot, Morgenrot,	Red of dawn, of dawn the red,
Leuchtest mir zum frühen Tod?	Your light foretells my early death?
Bald wird die Trompete blasen,	Soon the trumpet will be blown,
Dann muß ich mein Leben lassen,	Then my life, it will have flown,
Ich und mancher Kamerad!	Mine and other comrades’ too!
Kaum gedacht, kaum gedacht,	Barely thought, barely thought,
Wird der Lust ein End gemacht!	Yet all the fun will soon be naught!
Gestern noch auf stolzen Rossen,	Day hence on proud horse, fancy-dressed,
Heute durch die Brust geschossen,	Today a bullet through my chest,
Morgen in das kühle Grab!	Another day—cool grave must do!
Ach wie bald, ach wie bald,	Oh how soon, oh how soon,
Schwindet Schönheit und Gestalt!	Pass true form, our beauty’s bloom.
Strahlst du gleich mit deinen Wangen,	If your cheeks are all aglow,
Die wie Milch und Purpur prangen,	Rosy now, and white as snow,
Ach, die Rosen welken all!	Alas, the roses all wilt too.
Darum still, darum still	Therefore still, therefore I,
Füg ich mich, wie Gott es will.	God’s rules mind proclaimed on high.
Nun, so will ich wacker streiten,	So now therefore I’ll staunchly fight,
Und sollt ich den Tod erleiden,	And if death comes and takes my light,
Stirbt ein braver Reitersmann!	Then a brave rider passes here—adieu!

In a way it surprises me that the saying did not get picked up in English. At least a Google search did not produce it. It works with equal force, rhymes the same way. Could two world wars have something to do with that neglect? If so, too bad.

Priorities

A new report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) issued this month. It is titled Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. It deals, in neutral language, with quite horrendous potential changes in the relatively near future, i.e., beginning a decade out (ht Brigitte). Two reports by the International Monetary Fund, publicized by the Christian Science Monitor, predict the quite dramatic global consequences of Peak Oil, not least, under some (to me almost obvious) scenarios, the outright collapse of economies. That story surfaced in November (ht Monique); one of the IMF papers issued in May, the other in October of this year. Links come at the end. Peak Oil refers to the moment when oil production begins to decline. I spoke of the “elephant in the room” on LaMarotte the other day, saying that nobody seems to see it as the cocktail party blabbers on. Well, obviously some people are seeing it.

The NIC is a research element of the United States Intelligence Community and reports to the Director of National Intelligence. The IMF is an organization of 188 countries concerned with promoting global monetary and financial stability. The NIC report, as might be anticipated, attempts to stress the positives; before it reaches the coming disasters, it predicts a vast rise in wealth and self-determination for the world’s surging middle classes. Well, here “locally,” the inverse seems to be happening, but never mind; there’s China. The IMF reports are in model-makers’ Mandarin; no shortage of equations. It takes very careful reading to decipher the meaning, which is that the disappearance of oil, the failure of alternatives to meet demand, the rapid exhaustion of coal, and hitting Peak Nuke if nuclear energy production exhausts uranium reserves, will produce fantastic increases in oil prices quite early—so much so that the Mandarins’ models of economies collapse—because, presumably, the economies they model do.

Food for quiet thought under the brightly burning lamp.

Now, having at least located and skimmed some of these reports last night and this morning, I thought I’d surface to check out the New York Times. In it one important story caught my eye. It concerns a Federal Trade Commission report titled “Many Apps for Children Fall Short on Disclosure.” Apparently these apps quietly collect “sensitive” information from children to be used for some purpose. That purpose is probably to “personalize” advertising targeting. (What’s happening to this language!) Well, anyway. Our first priority should certainly be protecting our privacy. Down the list a ways comes global economic,  political, energy, water, food, and population melt down. Someday, and evidently soon, the NCI and IMF studies project plenty of privacy for the few who will actually survive the Armageddon approaching us in slow motion now.

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NCI report: link. IMF reports: link; further links to the reports are at the top of the news story.

Numerical Precision? Mother Nature Laughs!

Everything is number? Pythagoras supposedly said so although scholarly consensus disagrees. The best proof that Nature is sovereignly indifferent to number is discernible from the enormous difficulties humanity has had with keeping its calendars straight. Leap days, leap years, leap centuries (but only those divisible by 400) have disfigured our tools, and still do, and, in the early Julian calendar, we even had an intercalary month. That word itself is a mongrel, coming from inter (between) and calare (to proclaim or to call out). Things that don’t come around regularly need to be—called out.

Devilishly indifferent nature! The lunar year is 354.37 days—not 354, mind you, an even number, but fractional. The lunar phase is also a tricky 29.53 days (the period between two full moons) but is, observed against the fixed stars (the sidereal lunar month), 27.32 days. Not a whole number in sight. The 365.25 day year holds 12.369 lunar cycles.

But that length of year above is also just a sorry approximation. The solar year (called tropical year) is actually 365.2422 days; the sidereal year†, thus the year measured against the fixed stars, is 365.2564 days (both numbers rounded).  Nothing divides properly into anything. One has to keep adjusting, leaping, intercalating, and so on.

All this because I noticed—purely by happenstance—that the Julian year, in vogue from 45 BC through 1582, when the Gregorian calendar “corrected” it, would today be 13 days out of date with the observable dates of the equinoxes—of which the next comes this December 21. Back in the days of Pope Gregory XIII (that number again), the calendar was out of whack by 10 days. Three more have been added since. Now that number, 13, is a prime, therefore indivisible by anything cleanly, except 1, which makes it devilishly natural.

Is the Gregorian calendar perfect—at least in marking the equinoxes? No. It has a built in error of 1 day every 7,700 years. This suggests that the Gregorian will probably be revised and abandoned not later than the year 78 582 AD, by which time it will also be 10 days out of whack and need revision. So, approaching 2013, I am relaxed. Plenty of time yet before times comes to revise a calendar by dropping ten days to make the vernal equinox come out around about March 20, 21. This year, in the Julian, it would have fallen on March 7.

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†For more on tropical/solar and sidereal times, see this post.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (link), Wales an entrepreneur, Sanger a former philosophy professor who has concentrated on epistemology, a branch of philosophy recently celebrated on this blog. Sanger, however, was only involved in the beginnings and left the project in 2002. Wales, therefore, rightly I think, claims the title of being the founder. So what is Wikipedia?

It is a straightforward, organized body of knowledge on the Internet—without an ad in sight. It is available in 285 language editions—of which the English, German, French, and Dutch editions have more than 1 million articles. Six others (Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese) have more than 700,000 articles. It pleased me to note a year ago September that the Hungarian Wikipedia had 200,000 articles at its launch. The quality of articles is checked and, if missy, revised and, until that happens, annotated to show when statements are dubious. If known. This is a volunteer work.  Behind it, gluing it together is the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation. Wikipedia is now fundraising, an activity that takes place once a year. Has this institution had problems? Yes. Has it been derided? Yes. But it is entirely a labor of love. It pleases me yearly to contribute to it financially.

Now, to be sure, Wikipedia has not yet achieved scholarly recognition—and given its massively complex contributor base, including many scholars doing free work for the public—it may never do so. But who knows. Wikipedia will just turn twelve in 2013. Nevertheless it is becoming a quite reliable source for the knowledgeable: the more you know the more the Internet can help you. Wikipedia is certainly an excellent orienting gateway to any subject. Contributing to such a cause may lift its quality eventually. We don’t expect 12-year-olds to be the finished product. And the price is right.

Polarization?

The subject is Egypt and the occasion was hearing someone in the Media refer to the “polarization” of the population in Egypt. I turned to Brigitte and said: “What polarization? The pea and the pumpkin?” But then I resolved to make the image a little more realistic. Well, the population is 94.7 percent Muslim in Egypt. Some of those people, to be sure, are probably inclined toward secular belief and behavior, i.e. are only nominally Muslim. A better figure is provided by the parliamentary elections. These produced representation which was 30 percent secular and 70 percent Islamist. Not quite the pumpkin and the pea, but still rather disproportional. Presumably the active part of the 30 percent easily fits into Tahrir square.

Average Rationality

If we take a large number of actions and classify them as arbitrary and as rational, and let us say that the rational exceed 50 percent, then we might say that the society in which these actions take place is, on average, rational. Supposing that one-person, one vote is a rational arrangement. Then presumably the members of the Senate are rationally elected—assuming that voter fraud is minor and largely the same percentile in each party. But let us now take the case of cloture in the U.S. Senate. It requires 60 votes to invoke it. All legislation falling below that number fails, even if the majority are for it. Here is a case where rationality is compromised—and looking at the Senate, we can say that, on average, it is rational—but not really.

In today’s senate the Democrats have 51 seats, the Republicans 47. Two independents caucus with the democrats, producing a majority of 53—well short of the required 60 votes for cloture. This then means that every democrat who voted for a senator only counted as 85 percent of a voter (thus 51 / 60). And if we add those who voted for left-leaning independents, Okay, they all counted as 88 percent. That’s a real consolation, isn’t it?

Now the rationale for supermajorities is what, exactly? That in important cases, thus beyond routine, the majority may be deprived of its vote because the case is important? But importance is not something one can measure rationally. It will vary with individuals and is just a feeling. Therefore, at least in one institution of our society, we embrace average rationality. Must we stop there. Nah. Plenty of other regions of our collective life where rationality is totally ignored.

In looking up “cloture” on Online Etymology Dictionary, I came across this interesting quote from the nineteenth century:

In foreign countries the Clôture has been used notoriously to barricade up a majority against the “pestilent”" criticism of a minority, and in this country every “whip” and force is employed by the majority to re-assert its continued supremacy and to keep its ranks intact whenever attacked. How this one-sided struggle to maintain solidarity can be construed into “good for all” is inexplicable in the sense uttered. [“The clôture and the Recent Debate, a Letter to Sir J. Lubbock,” London, 1882]

Evidently cloture has “evolved.” Now it is used, in our Senate, by a minority to get its way—and the will of the people be damned. But when children are taught their Civics (unless all civics has been swallowed by Social Studies, as I expect it has), I bet the teachers do not go into conniption fits of stress trying to explain to their students how you average rationality.

Maddening to Forget Your Origami

One of my Aha! moments in studying sub-cellular biology came when I learned that proteins, which are carefully-sequenced amino acids, rapidly fold into shapes more or less spontaneously. “More or less” because other factors are involved, among them the presence of water, salts, temperature, and so-called chaperons that help with the folding. The chaperones are yet other proteins; they also participate in the unfolding of proteins. What with such external factors present, a protein intended to be useful in cellular life because it has a certain (if sometimes very complex) shape, proteins may unfold or fail to fold properly. Then troubles begin. The same protein that delivers a service may turn toxic when still, or again, a strand.

Yesterday I mentioned a Wall Street Journal story on Mad-Cow disease—but I didn’t read it. Brigitte, who never passes a scientific story without close scrutiny, and recognizing a subject I ought to read about, flagged it for me. I read it this morning and discovered that origami-challenged proteins are at the core not only of Mad-Cow disease but also Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease—and Type II diabetes, for that matter. I am showing a strand (bad) and a fold (good) of the same chain of protein from Wikipedia (link).

Brigitte also tracks my own constantly folding ideas of the cosmic. Thus for motivation she annotated the WSJ illustration, similar to the one that I’m showing, with the words: “Bohm’s Universe?” This reference is to David Bohm, the physicist, who suggested that the visible cosmos is a tiny, unfolded part of the Great Universe, which is deeply implicated. Hence ours is a fallen world, the GU is the real one. As above, so below. In each case unfolding leads to madness.

Errant Epistemology

I esteem episteme, which is the common Greek for knowledge.

I must have heard it, sure enough, when I attended college.

But another problem rises when I encounter and behold

Epistemology—a word I’ve met with times untold

While stirring arcane pools of mud with my rather shortish stick.

It sounds like water dripping over gravel on the double-quick,

An admirable sound it is, but yet I do tend to forget

The meaning of this Greekish modern manufactured sobriquet.

It dates to 1865, coined by a Scot philosopher,

Fond of strange Friedrich Hegel he, by name James Ferrier.

So here’s a word amalgamated from broken bits and shards

Not some gem discovered in the works of dead Hellenic bards.

In English it means “theory of knowledge” pure and simple

Instead I garble up the letters of its starting, stylish dimple

And mistake it for a variant of Etymology.

Not so. It is my bad. Alas our wisdom bristles with -logies.

What does that ending mean? It means “discourse,” blah, blah, mere learned talk.

It is the sounds that issue as the learned hold forth on their walk

About. It occurred that if I wrote my own -logy I might remember

The sense of epistemology when it comes around—the next December.

But do not bet on it.

Don’t Gift Me That

Reification marches on. More on that word may be found on this blog (link), but in that note I failed to mention one meaning of the word. It also means to drain the life out of something, thus to make it seem like a corpse. Today the Wall Street Journal features an article on its Personal page titled “The Science Behind Gifting.” It uses two words that both do this—and then it concentrates on that mo-mo-modern linguistic delight, regifting. The science consists of asking people questions in surveys, which, like “gifting,” comes about as close to rendering Nothingness tangible, audible, and tactile as I am able to imagine. Below that article WSJ gifts me with news of mad-cow disease, to the right with news about heart attacks (actually how to avoid them by dieting). I’d rather catch the one or be felled by the other than learn to manage my gifting. Bah! Humbug!

Youth—Age

The Hydrangea in its glory and (at least temporary) old age. Same being. All that’s changed is time. Picture Picture. I showed the glory last June 25. Now a couple of close-ups:

One of the observations I have made for many years now is that the old are not even seen—which causes me to have to exert special efforts even to comb my hair before I go shopping—and I might get past the sunroom door like that were it not for Brigitte’s eagle eyes; they still see me, alas. But our noble hydrangea even draws the eye in its wintry garb. It drew my eyes this morning as the rain began to dribble sullenly on our back yard.

The Comprehensive View

One of the more interesting ideas in Carl G. Jung’s work is the suggestion that consciousness is a very bright but also a very small sort of light. It is a tiny but very energetic island afloat on a vast ocean of Unconsciousness. And that phenomenon, the Unconscious, comes in a personal and a collective form. Moreover, it holds a deeper wisdom. Or that, at least, was how Jung saw it. He was, as I’ve remarked elsewhere here, a transitional figure between an ending and a dawning age, the Enlightenment and the New Age. Let’s call the second the New Dark Age to signal that, unlike the Enlightenment, it will takes its inspiration from within, not from the world without.

Living in that transition, Jung seemed to have trouble deciding what could and what could not be conscious. Getting down to the practical, the Personal Unconscious just has to be our memories, thus a kind of record. But while records, like books, may contain the products of consciousness, they are not in themselves conscious. And similarly with that Collective Unconscious. The only practical way to imagine that vaster complex is to say that, in some as yet undiscovered way, we participate or have access to the deposit of the memories of all who’ve ever lived. In Jung, however, these formations not only contain a kind of wisdom; they are also active, as if they were persons, the Collective older than the Personal. And in dreams the Unconscious presents information to the little consciousness in symbolical formations, as if awarely guiding us. Not surprisingly, he sometimes treats the Unconscious as if it were God.

To someone like me, born into the early days of the New Dark Age, consciousness is the property of souls, of agents. And rather than talking of it as if it were a kind of mysteriously arising Phenomenon that streams through us, to use William James’ phrasing, it is a power. So how does the Unconscious fit that scheme? It fits nicely if we think of the powerful, bright light not as consciousness but as attention. What we know in the day-to-day and general sense is what we mind. But we experience a good deal more than we mind. Nevertheless, what we ignore is also cumulated in our memory.

This suggests the great importance of cultivating a comprehensive view of reality, be it of the mundane or of the exalted. “Comprehensive” has become a key word in my mind of late because our ordinary state of being, what with media bombardment almost unavoidable, is so dangerously one-sided. We shouldn’t have to wait for dreams to remind us of aspects of reality we should be minding. I develop a here-and-now example of that in a post on LaMarotte today (link)—which, as I was writing it, reminded me of the bigger picture sketched out here.

Kálmán: A Literary Ancestor

Among our ancestors, the earliest known to have published books was my greatuncle Kálmán Darnay (1864-1945). It so happens that he is also the latest to have one of his books (re)published, and I show it above. That book was originally written in 1929, but it was reissued again in 2010. The title is The Good Old Justices Socializing: Historical Jokes Depicting the Times. Brother Baldy received this book as a gift when visiting the Museum of Sümeg (Sümeg being an old family seat) this past summer. That title took me an enormous effort to translate. Of that more below. Remaining with Kálmán, he was an historian and novelist.

Here I provide a listing of his works with a translation or comment on the title:

Sümeg és vidékének őskora. 1899.	Sümeg and environs in ancient times.
Magyarország őskora. 1900.	Hungary’s ancient times.
Somogy vármegye őskora. 1913.	The ancient times of the Somogy castle region.
Gisimár. Kaposvár. 1913.	A history of ancient man in Somló region.
Tagisir. 1921.	A novel of ancient times.
Testőrszerelmek. 1926.	Guardsman’s Love Affairs (novel).
Elkésett csók. 1932.	The Belated Kiss (novel).
A bujdosó gyöngysor. 1928.	The Pearl Necklace in Hiding (novel).
Kaszinózó táblabírák. 1929.	The Good Old Justices Socializing.

The novels were popular and most are still available in print if in the “old book” category. Of the histories Kálmán’s last book is obviously valued. It is filled with very funny stories harking back into history. The title struck me as very odd. The first word translates as “casino-ing,” kaszinó meaning casino. That word in Hungarian also has the connotation of socializing, “clubbing” and so on; it is less narrowly attached to gambling than that word is for us.

It was the second word, táblabírák, which led into odd spaces and times. You won’t find it in ordinary dictionaries, but it has a suggestion of “board of judges.” Kálmán’s use of the word in the title, and elsewhere, however, strongly suggests that it was very familiar to his readers even if never used in any judicial setting. Trying to find something, anything about that word then landed me on a website. It holds the preface to a much more famous book by a much more famous writer, Mór Jókai (1825-1904). The book’s title is A régi jó táblabírák, rendered into English by others as The Good Old Justices.

That book was published in 1856. To understand things, one needs context. The Hungarian Revolution in the nineteenth century took place in 1848. It’s aim was to separate Hungary from the Austrian Empire. It failed. It failed, furthermore, exactly as the later, call it second, Hungarian Revolution failed in 1956. In both cases, Russia put down the rebellion. In 1849 Russia restored the re-conquered Magyars to Austria. In 1956, it restored the Communist hegemony. So, to return to our story, Jókai Mór (to put the sequence into the Hungarian mode, last name first) wrote in the dreary aftermath of a failed revolution. And, in his preface, he makes a point of explaining that word of his, táblabírák, used in his title. He does so by listing a number of situations all ending in a question. The first of these (link for those with Hungarian):

     If a public emergency arises, if acts of God strike the country, if the rivers overflow, if it was a terrible year, if hail, fire, terrifying plagues visit the people, whose heart calls on the people to make sacrifices in response? To whom does the public, lashed by fear, turn for solace?

     To the good old justices.

Four more such pairings follow. At the end Jókai sums it up. He defines “the good old justice” as the person who had charge of the commons, of the local administration, the engineer, the regulator, the legalizer, the judge, the lawyer, doctor, poet, scholar, the book printer, and the book buyer. Jókai, thus, creates a term to mean the culture’s genuine leadership—not at all restricted to the judicial branches but including them. His aim was to return to a kind of earlier time of stability, peace, and justice—and to an order in which the “good old justices” were heard and minded.

Thus our ancestor, Kálmán, echoes a much more famous work, with a definite cultural message—but he was in a more relaxed, expansive, and humorous mood. It was 1929. Little did he know that the times were about to give birth—to the Great Depression. It would come and visit, in due time, great terrors upon the people, also, of little Hungary. And good old justices would, once more, be very much in demand.
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Added later: The illustration shown was painted by a contemporary of Kálmán, Károly Mühlbeck (1869-1943), on commission, and also illustrated the first edition of this book. Mühlbeck was a well-known Hungarian artist, illustrator, and in his latter days a political cartoonist.

Heaven, Arse, and Thread

Let’s round out November with a German saying, Himmel, Arsch, und Zwirn. All depending on how it’s said, it can be a curse (as in “Hell and damnation!”), a reaction to bad news (as in “God Almighty!”), or merely an exclamation of surprise (as in “Oh my God!”). It’s certainly colorful. It also strikes me as a little too long to issue spontaneously. It requires just a nanosecond’s worth of pause before it tumbles out. Not surprisingly, therefore, it has variants that make it even longer by substituting a longer word for Zwirn or thread. The most popular, at least among the scholars who attempt to explain this saying, is Wolkenbruch, cloudburst. And those who make this claim also think the phrase comes from farming dialects. Another is Heaven, Arse, and Chimneysweep! (Himmel, Arsch, und Schornsteinfeger), which hints at an originator with poetic gifts.

I found a great many attempts trying to explain the phrase in various sophisticated ways on German websites. The typical approach is to take each word in turn and then to list every conceivable meaning and connotation that it carries and then weaving something from selected meanings (e.g., heaven is the highest, arse the lowest, thread the finest). Some have discovered that in criminal contexts Zwirn means money (hereabouts we use “bread”); others have it that in old German usage Zwirn carried the meaning of “semen”— and the activity that makes it flow. And so on. Yet others opt, perhaps intuitively, for a single meaning hidden in all three: strength. The strength here is meant to refer to the strength of the emotion that rises and causes that exclamation to be made. That explanation fits both heaven and thread—Zwirn being a particularly strong, twisted filament. The Germans use the word Draht, which has the same rooting as thread, to mean wire, as in metallic. The explanation is difficult to apply to arse—except to say that it must be strong to have us sitting on it all the time. But the intention of this explanation is persuasive to an extent. Big emotion—and a wild grab for big, contrasty words.

Regarding arse, I stumbled on the reason why we use ass instead across the Atlantic. The R got eroded—as it has in cuss for curse, bust for burst, and hoss for horse. Online Etymology Dictionary (endless source of delights) also informs me that the German for our perch, the fish, is Barsch. In Old English we used to call it bærs. Now we call it bass. Oh, the complexity!

*    *    *

After reading this much to Brigitte, she seemed to remember another version. She screwed up her face and said: “Himmel, Kreuz, und…” She could remember no more. But I had another clue—and went to work. It struck me that the combination of “heaven” and “cross” might prove  productive.

Right. It was. I discovered that an older form of this saying—but, to be sure, also associated with disasters—was Himmel, Kreuz, und Wolkenbruch (Heaven, Cross, and Cloudburst) or Himmel, Kreuz, und Donnerbaum (Heaven, Cross, and Thunder Tree). Digging even deeper, I discovered an even older version: Himmel, Kreuz, und Sakrament!†

At this point I knew I had arrived. It happens that in Bavaria Sakrament! was the most common curse word; indeed it seemed to be the only word ever used by our choleric landlord. All the cursing in Bavaria was exclusively blasphemous. The longer version in this case was Herrgott, Kruzifix, und Sakrament (Lord God, Crucifix, and Sacrament). Now I knew the pattern from which the “secular” versions have descended. One Austrian site suggests that in very early Christianity, when something dreadful happened, people thought that the End Times had arrived, that the heavens would now open, the clouds would burst, and Judgement would descend—for which no one was quite ready yet.

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†Robert Laude, Hinterpommersches Wörterbhuch: des Persantengebiets, p. 164 (link).

Neither Nature nor the Cosmos

We were driving home close to dusk the other day from swimming exercise. We’ve lately found an efficient but much more peaceful route by residential streets to the alternate—beating our way down Mack Avenue with endless lights and double lanes. Trees against a pinkish, dimming sky, leafless or nearly so now. Endless trees. Lovely. The recurring thought came. There is nothing fallen about the world. The Fall belongs to mankind, strictly speaking, not to Nature or the Cosmos. It is a human tendency always to project our state onto whatever canvas happens to be handy. It’s not us—it’s the world that has fallen. Curiously, or perhaps not, we also project positives outward. Inspiration comes from somewhere invisibly within, but we project in onto the Muses. And then, since they are out there, we find an outward residence for them—on Mount Helikon in Pieria, in Thessaly.

The Ship of Philosophers

On September 28, 1922, Communist Russia, at Lenin’s behest, sent at least 160 philosophers and intellectuals from Petrograd to Stettin, in Germany, aboard the Oberbürgermeister Haken. Another ship was also involved, the Preussen. Lenin’s active agent in this venture was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, vividly familiar to all who have watched Reilly, Ace of Spies. On board the Oberbürgermeister Haken was Nicolai Berdyaev, the philosopher. Berdyaev had also spent some time in Lubyanka prison. Dzerzhinsky interviewed him there but found Berdyaev firmly centered in his philosophy and not apparently political. Berdyaev’s fate was therefore kinder than Reilly’s. The philosopher lived in Berlin for a while, eventually in Paris; he died there in 1948.

The ship of philosophers produced for Brigitte the association of The Ship of Fools. To set that in perspective, that name first attached to a satirical book of the same title by one Sebastian Brant published in 1494 and illustrated by Albrecht Dürer. The more famous painting of it is by Hieronymus Bosch from the same period (shown). The book parodies the vices and abuses of its times. An interesting association between “church” and “ship” and “fools” had long been present in earlier mediaeval times, what with navis meaning ship as well as the nave of a church, and corruption present in the Church. Hence…

Another passenger on that ship of the philosophers was Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist-historian, a great teacher of mine, albeit only through his writings. And, come to think of it, on our own endless migration from the homeland caused by World War II, one of our stops along the way was also Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland.

My illustration comes from Wikipedia (link) by a round-about-way from Russia. The inscription beneath it says: “The ship with the long name ‘Lord Mayor Haken’ was one of those small passenger ships that, by way of many lines, linked the harbors of the Baltic one with the others. They were smaller than today’s Helgoland ships but were quite stately.” Another source on this subject may be found here.

Ashes! Ashes!

Culture is vast, complex, layered, and ultimately impossible to sum up in categories—much as is the starry sky on a clear night in the country. Science derives from the precise, the particular, but the laws it builds are vanishingly thin. This comes to mind in certain contexts, most recently, in my case, thinking about vox populi.

Things run together. Ashes were on my mind as well, well mixed with dust, this month. That led to a memory linked to some work I’d done years ago now for one of our titles. In that context I ran across a children’s rhyme sometimes linked to the Great Plague and a later companion that links to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Let’s look at the first of these:

Ring-a-round a rosie,

A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down.

That’s the American version. A British version has A-tishoo! A-tishoo! for those ashes, suggesting sneezing. Other slightly different versions exist as well, thanks to the scholars. And let’s transit to them now. Before World War II none of our learned associated this verse with the Great Plague, afterwards the notion arose. To quote the couple Peter and Iona Opie, who first noted this explanation in 1951 (quoted in Wikipedia, link):

The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and “all fall down” was exactly what happened.

This version of events is challenged by other scholar saying that the symptoms do not match very well. Indeed the colors associated with the plague were black and blue; among the symptoms swollen glands dominate and one finds no mention of sneezing. Gangrene on fingers and toes, on lips and on the nose—yes. Seizures—yes. By contrast, among the top four symptoms of influenza are coughing and runny, stuffy nose. Fever is tops and sore throat third. Too bad that those Ashes! Ashes!—or the double-sneeze—predate the year 1918 when influenza came.

Now an early German version of this rhyme, or simply a sound-alike, is this one, with my translation:

Ringelringelreihen,	Ring-a-ring in rows
Wir sind der Kinder dreien,	Of children three with bows
Sitzen unter’m Hollerbusch	We sit under an elder bush
Und machen alle Huschhuschhusch!	And make together hush-hush-hush.

I cite this by way of showing that the form of such a ditty keeps persisting, but its content is subject to change. That is the way the vox populi works. It is poetic, free, and entirely untrammeled by careful observation of endless details—but it captures the most important. That is why culture gets it right in myths and science in detail. More power to both.

Now the real verse the 1918 Influenza left us is a little gem illustrating how the culture can take an alien word, like influenza, and make it something memorably part of the current language. And the details are right as well. One of the ways by which the influenza virus is transmitted is by means of airborne aerosols. A hard sneeze can send those babies flying. And they maybe even enter by the window:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza.

I opened the window

And in flew Enza.

Auris Populi

To whom do pundits address their often frenzied pleas? And what are these, these oft repeated outcries? Having held forth on a subject once, why do they repeat the message, in variant forms, over and over and over again? An answer occurred to me today. The pundits are addressing the Ear of the People hoping that, if understood, Vox Populi will repeat them with the force of Deus. And, of course, there is that striking similarity between the preacher of old and the pundit of new. But does prayer work?

So Where Do You Live?

To tell the truth, not just respond to your reflexive questioning,

I ought to answer with a litany of which the city

Is the first thing on the list, my address next. Or should I start with

Continent and state? And if you wish to reach my voice alone

Herewith the digits of my telephone. But, to be sure, I could

Destroy the small talk that you wish to start to fill the time until

This plane takes off in this—is it really fog?—I could still add a

Few things more, among them, here, this suit I wear and, layered beneath

Its complicated surfaces are underwear and socks under the

Leather of my shoes. And given that these coverings get wrinkled

Up in use, get sweaty, smelly, and so on, multiple copies

Of these habitations reside in drawers, hang in closets, wait

On the floor in polished rows. Where do I live? I live in these, but

There is more—or rather a corrective. My body lives in these,

And I, whoever that “I” really is, lives in the body that

In turn lives in my clothes that live inside the house, at that address

And on this continent. And I, within this most mysterious self—

To reach the end, naught left behind—I, dear sir, live in my mind.