Granite Fizz

Of interest to NH locals.  Dennis Sasseville, who has commented here for years and literally wrote the book on Moxie has written his second book on bottled spring waters and flavored tonics in NH, Granite Fizz. (I think he also had a book years ago about ISO 14001, but I doubt that is of general interest now). He is a geologist with a dozen hobbies and eventually develops an expertise in each.  We can't talk him into retiring, but he is at least part time now. He is well-traveled - too well, as far as he is concerned as much of it was for business and not that enjoyable - but is concentrated on New England and the Maritimes, having lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Newfoundland, and mostly, New Hampshire.

You will notice he used the word "tonic" for a soft drink, which is still just barely used in north coastal New England, as we have discussed before. That's how you know you're getting the real authentic deal from an author, when they notice details like that. I think he started on this with his interest in bottles, though springs would catch the eye of a geologist as well.

I'm Not Crying

 ...you're crying

Neandertal Flower Burial

 So maybe that flower pollen was random after all. We keep learning new things about ancient relatives, so it's good to be alert for reevaluating our opinions.

It is also good to be skeptical of cool stuff especially.

Romanticism vs Modernism vs Postmodernism

(So who were the relativists in religion, really, hmm? Answer below) 

This is not a good summary so much as just fun things to talk about and think about.

TS Eliot was considered one of the first and best exemplars of Modernism. "The Waste Land" is usually the first work cited as the anti-Romantic shot across the bow.  April is the cruelest month, breeding... (because it brings the lie of renewal, and beauty) indeed. Modernism celebrated the new works of mankind: science, cities, technology, and the philosophies of destruction of the traditional. Many of them singled out Chesterton in specific for condemnation. Eliot was a rather ironic choice for this, because while the initial line of the poem expresses the opposite idea of Whan that Aprille with its shoures soot (When April with its showers sweet), it is meant as a direct echo of Chaucer's initial line. Eliot was a classicist, not much in favor of the destruction of previous culture, rather forced into the pigeonhole of Modernism. His views also changed over the years, most notably after his conversion to Christianity (before CS Lewis) after viewing the Pieta in the Vatican, because he saw his own suffering mirrored in Christ and identified with Him with immediate tears. Conversion came in about a year.

Am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, pointing out the the Modernists were not really all that, um, modernist as individuals, and the words can mean many things?  Yes, yes, I am, and doing it on purpose. The same is true of the Romantics and the Postmodernists. We make categories in order to break them, as I have said before. You should learn in school that the Enlightenment saw itself as challenging the ideas of the monarchy and the church, especially the Catholic Church; that the Romantics saw themselves as challenging the ideas of the Enlightenment; their focus was the "horrors" of the Industrial Revolution, but that was only the practical arm of the philosophical Enlightenment: that the Modernists saw themselves as challenging the ideas of the Romantics; and the Postmodernists as challenging the ideas of the Modernists. You should nail that down, and get that all clear in your head so that you could get an A on a quiz about the subject. Then you should start chipping away at it to get your real education. Eliot is not the only example of all this, but he is an excellent one, for he himself said that when people quoted him, they should include the year in which he said it, because twenty years later he might not have agreed with it.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (from "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" TS Eliot c 1910)

The Romanticism Eliot and the other Modernists were rejecting celebrated medieval culture, and longstanding traditions of the people. It loved nature, the emotions and spontaneity, and felt the artist should be unrestrained to be original. It had a Christianity, but it was sentimental, stressing feelings and impressions.
 

CS Lewis hated Eliot's entire approach to poetry. Lewis (and Tolkien, and Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers) was an unabashed Romantic and composed a poem in direct answer.

I am so coarse the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening, any evening, would suggest
A patient etherised upon a table.
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looks far more
Like the departure from a crowded, yet a silent shore.
Of a ship whose freight is everything. Leaving behind
gracefully, finally, without farewell, marooned mankind.
(CS Lewis "Spartanactus"* c. 1925)

Eliot is interesting in a dozen ways. Charles Williams brought him and Lewis together for lunch in the 1930s and they did not like each other at all. The met again in the 1950s, when both were part of rewriting the Psalter for the Anglican prayer book, and were immediate friends. They argued about the poetic choices, and were both on the opposite side that one might expect if one had not read about them. Lewis favored modernising choices for understanding rather than retaining the older forms. Eliot wanted to preserve as much of the previous wording as possible. But both could fight without hatred at that point. Listen to how he ends Prufrock

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. 

These are not the words of a man who is rejecting romanticism so much as one who is disillusioned because he cannot experience it.  He does not declare that mermaids do not exist, but feels regret that they will not sing to him. 

And check out his serious Christian work later, like The Journey of the Magi or The Four Quartets.

The Modernists rejected folk culture because they rejected folks. If a writer or an artist was popular they felt they could not be any good. The believed in capital-C Culture, which only the elites could understand. They loved 

The remaining Romantics of their time, at least the Christians, did not fear the popular and less-fashionable genres. They wrote fantasy and fairy-story, science fiction, detective fiction,       When you have a (Christian culture that goes back 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 or 4000 years, or even to the beginning of time you feel less need to show your literary bona fides by being up-to-the-minute on the latest obscurantist and impenetrable works in the fashionable journals. When you read criticism of these writers it comes from two directions: the fundamentalists of the church who want to hear their favorite doctrines presented in exactly their approved terms and framings, or the fundamentalists of Culture who disdain anything popular or accessible. 

Modernists say they are beholden to science and rationality, providing the only real education. The postmodernists insist they are not objective either, and their solid foundations are just shifting sands, dependent on elusive meanings. They regard all knowledge and value as socially conditioned, and are quite open about their moral relativism. They will tell you your moral absolutism only serves to perpetuate views you were trained to and maintain your power. For this reason, they draw the ire of conservatives, including Christians. Postmodernist is practically a standalone insult on the discussion sites some of us frequent.

Yet there are Christians who hail the arrival of postmodernism as the best thing to happen to Christianity in in decades or even centuries. This is because the Modernists and the continuing effect of the Enlightenment have held the day since before 1700, and those have systematically excluded Christian faith, relegating it to at best a private hobby. The Postmodernists are seen as an ally, arriving on the scene and saying "Look, there's no need to get all conceited about it, because you're no better." Christianity is back in the discussion, baby! We aren't laughed at at conferences anymore. We can smack around secular power structures with the best of them. We are all on the same footing now.

I think there are excellent points to be made about power structures, and attention to epistemology and elusive meanings are always welcome.  But the embrace of postmodernism as an ally strikes me as naive and narrow.  They were great allies for taking down the powerful who laughed at faith. But that is all. 

Among the secular schools of thought, all of them were relativist when it came to faith, and the supposed closest ally Romanticism might have been the most dangerous, as it weakened the faith from within with its sentimentality. Our idea of heaven as the place where we meet with relatives after death - Will The Circle Be Unbroken and all that - was not common anywhere in the church until after the Civil War in America. 

You can think of postmodernism as the problem if you like.  Just know that many of the few Christians left in the academy look at them as the last ally.  Not sure I agree, but by the process of elimination I noted above, they have a point.
 

*I cannot find this online, and so am taking this text on trust from a person reciting it on a podcast.

Update: A reader reports (see comments) that the poem is entitled "A Confession" but is sometimes called "Spartan Nactus." He includes the rest of the poem, including the last few lines, which are marvelous.
 

We Forget

Reading the post Rave-Off from thirteen years ago it all came back to me again, the things I knew in my job not from brilliance but from dull repetition. I recalled that students and new hires would be rather amazed at what I could predict in advance, what I could conclude from stray comments (from patients, from other agencies, from families) that turned out to be true 48 hours later. 

I would say that we all get like this at jobs we are familiar with, but then I think of others in my department who had also done the job for years. Most could not do this. It doesn't feel like I was all that smart, just paying attention. 

There is another side to this, the complete disbelief you get from people that you are able to do this...when it concerns them. I don't think I read motives and make predictions all that brilliantly.  No one does. Yet somehow I'm the smart kid in the dumb row here and find that the obvious seems to be eluding many others.

But Not Genetics

China has 100x the population, and each of those has 20x the income of South Sudan. China is becoming basketball-mad, which is why the NBA panders to them.  The Sudanese do like basketball, but mostly after they have immigrated here. Back home, subsistence farming and civil war take up a lot of time and energy, y'know?

But try bringing up in conversation that genetics might have something to do with it. Immediate pushback that "Oh well, sure it has some impact, but..." and then nothing real is ever admitted. 

Tomorrow's The Day

 

My bride is coming back from the Alaska State Fair. The Alaska Wymans came down from Nome. Now it is not just the Mom who loves to shop where there are real stores, and not only the 12-year-old, but the six-year-old wants to shop nonstop as well. Nana is less enthused.

The three-year old can't be far behind. She cut her own hair when no one was looking and had to get an emergency rescue haircut as soon as they landed in Anchorage. She now has what we used to call a Dutch Girl haircut, rather like Dora the Explorer, or Edna Mode from "The Incredibles."

                                                                    Nana with Bella

Houston

 

Long Covid: How Big a Problem?

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who goes by the handle HealthNerd on X (Twitter, remember?) jas an article in Slate What the Latest Evidence Actually* Says About Long Covid. The sub-headline is

A new study looks at data from patients two years after their initial infection. It contains some alarming figures—until you dig into them.

Yeah, pretty much. I love it when people look at questions like "Who is in the studied group, and who is in the controls? Are they representative?" or "What sort of result would be a bad one versus a meh?"

So, what does the study actually** show? It shows that there is a large risk of long-term issues for people who have been hospitalized with COVID-19. This is entirely expected. If you get sick enough with any disease to the point where you require hospitalization, you are almost guaranteed some measure of long-term issues. Getting really sick is bad for your health.

The study compares people seeking care at VA facilities - and older, male, generally less-healthy group, with controls. Trying to compare back to the general population we see a small increase in likelihood of a couple of conditions. Real, and good information to have, but not shocking.

*There's that Asperger's word actually from someone who proudly calls himself a nerd, again.

**And there it is again, again.

World 1500m Championship

I like Ingebrigtsen, but he had an improvement trajectory that seemed to stall in the last year or so. The 18 y/o from the Netherlands, Niels Laros, looked very good but was spent at the end. I think I was rooting for him, though I had never heard of him before.

That's fine.  Watch it on YouTube.  In other track news, Matthew Boling has been running the 400m more, moving up from the 100 and 200m events, and it seems to suit him.

Gluten Free Suet Crust

I decided not to go that route. Maybe next time. I was doing both a different version (in two ways) of the onion pie I got from Bird Dog years ago, and a British steak-and potatoes pie divided into two smaller pies. I wondered about lard and GF, and the Englishwoman with the recipe mentioned suet for the crust. I have seldom cooked with lard and never with suet.  The box of King Arthur pie crust mix doesn't mention either, and I can't find someone who has run the experiment.

Whenever things go awry cooking, it is usually because I am making too many changes at once, or trying too many new things.  New things often need to be stared at, which takes time and focus. So I have made the rule never more than one new thing.  I break that continually, of course, but in this case it was going to be five changes already, so I didn't add in a sixth. 

One has to show discipline cooking.

Tolkien Rewrites

Much of the following was inspired by a talk given by David Downing, one of the co-directors of the Wade Center at Wheaton College. It set me thinking.

Tolkien is known for the brilliance of his naming, but Gandalf was originally Bledorthin, Meriadoc was originally Marmaduke, Frodo was originally Bingo, and Aragorn was originally a sarcastic hobbit named Trotter. Tollers renamed his characters a fair bit throughout the writing, and we should be grateful that they got better each time. I'm still not all that impressed with the first names of hobbits in general. They stem from the original creation of the children's story, which I shrugged off on first reading because I was enchanted by something in the story anyway, I knew not what.  In retrospect, I wonder what I saw in it, with its dwarves with associated colors of hoods and musical instruments, being fed rustic 19th C English food, whose king says seriously to Gandalf that his small band should "give a thought to the Necromancer," which no dwarf in LOTR would dream of saying. The individual adventures are disconnected and merely episodic. Trolls with talking purses, a cave-creature who likes Anglo-Saxon riddles, goblins who ride wolves, a bear-man with trained animals. It is a parade of mythological Germanic creatures, and could come in any order. (Until Tolkien has put them in an order of course, for then the adventures connect at least in retrospect.) The riddle game had to be completely rewritten and an explanation wedged the larger story of the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is marvelously inventive at reworking plot elements plausibly once he is stuck with them. In the 1960s he wished he could rewrite the entire first book. 

The problem is that the hobbits were not really part of Middle-earth at first. The author had already subcreated a great deal of what would become the Silmarillion, clearly had some comfort there, as evidenced by the historical and mythological references he drops in seemingly effortlessly. Well, it is effortless at first when there is no one to contradict you, but it gets more complicated when you start to see that you are about to contradict yourself and have to backfill. There is a history of the Shire and of hobbits in general right in the prologue, but it is spotty and has few significant events and no development in 1600 years. They came from somewhere east and get dumped in. Sorry. We learn later that even the Ents have never heard of them, the kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan only barely, and even some wizards, those powerful beings entrusted with the care of various aspects of Middle-Earth have only the dimmest idea who or where the halflings are.

Smith of Wootton Major (conceived of much earlier than it's 60s publication date), Farmer Giles of Ham, and Leaf By Niggle all take place in Faerie, not Middle-Earth, and the Hobbit rather straddles the two worlds at first, despite the homely details. When Tolkien's publishers begged him for a hobbit sequel he quickly despaired. Perhaps Bilbo had run out of treasure, or still had a lust for adventure, and resolved to go to Rivendell in another set of disconnected episodes. Tolkien had some in mind. By the time we read LOTR there is already knowledge of what the Ring really is, and who the Black Riders are, both by history and current importance.  But those were not present at first. It was just more episodes, already half designed.

Farmer Maggott, the Old Forest, Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, barrow-wights. These are drawn from the mild adventures of his children's everyday lives, but made more dangerous. Old Man Willow was a nearby great tree they would hide in. Tom Bombadil was a Dutch doll, and the addition of Goldberry accidental.  The doll went face down in the water by accident, and Tolkien rescued the "frightening" situation that was destabilising Michael by spinning a tale that he was seeking a wife, and found one at the bottom of the river. There was a barrow thirty miles west they would visit on excursions, and the children would make up small tales of their own. The dismembered hand that still crawls toward Frodo was a nightmare of one of the children. 

This is not to belittle the events and adventures but to praise Tolkien's amazing ability to imbue everyday events with high adventure. CS Lewis speaks of the use of fairy stories in enchanting the everyday trees, and meals, and storms around us. We return to our everyday lives and a road that disappears around a bend is suddenly a path to anywhere.

The Black Riders hover at the edges, but their importance was understood by Tolkien only gradually. They break through at Bree, but somehow more as a fear than a real enemy.  Despite Aragorn's explanation that their main power is through fear, it doesn't ring true in terms of what happens later. Even at Weathertop he takes them very seriously - he doesn't suggest that if the hobbits were only less fearful they would find it easier. At the river it takes Glorfindel, not just Aragorn, to hold them off, and the very physical river plus some protective magic - presumably not a river that is affected by fear - does a great deal of the work. The Nazgul have more than just fear on their side.

This is also true of the Ring. The slow dawning on Gandalf of what it must be is a stand-in for Tolkien's own discovery.  When it was just a magic token that made you invisible, it didn't need a backstory. It was just one more marvel in Faerie, only nominally connected to Middle-Earth. And then...who is Gollum? How did the ring come to him? How could the previous owner have let it go? Yet Tollers told Lewis he didn't think there was much more to say about hobbits and didn't think he could get much story out of the journey to Rivendell. Only as the hobbit adventure gradually connected to Middle-Earth as a whole did the whole series of connections cascade upon him. Diana Glyer suggests that the turning point was a conversation with Lewis about how pedestrian it was that he had the four halflings launched to just outside the Shire and Gandlaf was about to ride up and join them. Even though there were "adventures" sketched out, these were not deadly, and the most exciting thing at the moment was that they were going to pop out of the bushes and scare Gandalf.  What fun, eh? Lewis said "Hobbits are only interesting when they are doing non-hobbitish things" and by nightfall Tolkien had decided it must be a Black Rider, not a white one. The reality of Sauron's ring and the Nazgul began to assert themselves into the story.

Except the story already had the episodic adventures noted above. These remained intact, but they started to weave themselves into the dire events in the world. The crawling dismembered hand remained there for effect, but Merry's dream now became about Carn Dum, a very serious battle from 1600 years ago. To Tolkien, Carn Dum was already there; Merry and the hobbits were now woven in to Middle-Earth with one more strand. 

Adventures in Faerie are more like the Wood Between the Worlds in Lewis's The Magician's Nephew. It isn't Narnia. But once you are in Middle-Earth then Sauron is always in the background. The history of Numenor still affects events around you.

Book One is transitional. It is not quite so far from the serious events to the South and East as The Hobbit, and it does not have children's book language. (Tolkien's children had gradually grown older and the tone of the book goes with them.) Readers notice immediately that they are in far deeper waters. There are no dwarves singing about breaking plates here. Frodo wants an adventure like Bilbo's but sees that none is available any longer. Bree is a breakpoint, and this is not surprising. Tolkien got the hobbits as far as Bree and had no idea how to go further.  The book lay fallow for months, with sarcastic Trotter left throwing apples at lesser enemies. He is not quite adult, however skillful he is. 

Trotter rubs off on Aragorn. The future king loses his regal temper once - at Barliman Butterbur, to whom he is insulting and sarcastic. He is a little pouty about being lonely and wanting to be accepted for himself. He looms over Sam and says he could kill him if he wished when young Gamgee doubts him.  All these are very human and we understand them.  Yet they are not kingly. The Aragorn who addresses the captains of the West in The Return of the King would not speak like this at all. It would be hard to attribute this to character development, as the son of Arathorn is a hundred years old and has been to Mordor, been in several battles, and has been awaiting his chance to be king for decades. To be that different a few months later does not add up.  No, the explanation is that Tolkien did not quite know who he was at first, and still saw him as mostly a ranger, even if the Chief or the Dunedain.

We see the kingly Aragorn almost immediately after Bree. It was originally he who threw the apple at Bill ferny, but Tolkien saw that it was more appropriate coming from Sam even before they had left. The transition is almost complete.

Irony

 

Henderson on Hoffer

As I am a subscriber, I may be able to see this while others can't or only in part.  But Rob Henderson's newsletter has a good summary and general commentary on Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. Mass movements are founded more on hatred and envy than on shared belief, and the people who are the strongest adherents are those who already have a good deal and want more, not those who are more oppressed. 

A core aspect of Hoffer's argument is that the root of frustration lies not just in external circumstances or “the system,” but fundamentally in the burdens of being an individual. Outsourcing decisions about your life to the movement comes as a relief. While practical organizations (e.g., an employer) cater to self-interest and offer opportunities for self-advancement, a mass movement appeals to those who wish to escape or camouflage an unsatisfactory self. Mass movements hold the implicit promise of fulfilling the desire for self-renunciation.

When people feel their lives are meaningless, they seek meaning by telling others what to do with their lives, a key feature of many mass movements. One sentence in the book summarizes the idea: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

I should add that the most successful movements are the ones that can never actually deliver on their promises and keep people frustrated and angry.

Let me know if the link only goes to a summary and I will write a few more paragraphs about it.

Allegory

Dorothy Sayers, writing to CS Lewis in 1955

I am deriving quite a lot of entertainment from the Times Literary Supplement Review correspondence about Tolkien‘s book ( The Fellowship of the Ring only). It’s such a joke that whenever anybody does write a formal allegory it is dismissed as the lowest form of life. Artificial. Didactic, and all the rest of it. But if people are faced with an imaginative romance about a magic ring they can’t rest till they’ve reduced it to allegorical terms and labeled and pigeonholed everything what it stands for. The ring must not only confer power, it must be power, and a specific power at that. It has now been identified as atomic power, political power, and bureaucratic power. (I like the picture of Galadriel tempted by the prospect of becoming an unlimited bureaucrat, and one wonders what will be in our next thrilling installment.)

It is well-known that Tolkien "cordially disliked allegory" and felt Lewis had veered too close to that in his Narnia Chronicles and lessened their literary value. I would have agreed when I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that Lewis's Aslan, at least, was an over-obvious Jesus in that book. (By the second book I thought that had toned down, and by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader it was noticeable only when one looked for it). Lewis noted elsewhere, not in direct argument with Tollers but apropos the sentiment, that out of seventy reviewers of Out of the Silent Planet, only two of them noticed any Christian themes in the book. Those who grow up with Lewis as children, or those who come to him later without literary expectations do not see him as a purely Biblical, earth bound Christ, intrusive into the plot. Amazing as it seems to me, only those trained to look for Christ-figures seem to see it overdone in Aslan.

David Downing, one of the directors of the Wade Center at Wheaton, which is devoted to the works of Tolkien, Lewis, and five others* had a female student who asked why LWW was considered a Christian book. She didn't see it. "Well, Aslan dies for another person. Then he rises again and this saves both him and the other characters. Doesn't that remind you of anyone?" She looked concerned for a moment, and then her face broke into a great smile. "Oh!" she said "Gandalf!" Which is accurate, in a way.

So you can write a non-allegorical adventure and people will insist on making an allegory of it, one that fits their current day concerns. Or you can write an adventure that actually is somewhat allegorical, and people will miss it altogether. I recently read online a young man who resented all these Christians trying to force a claim that " The Lord of the Rings" was a Christian book when it clearly wasn't. Why couldn't people just accept that it was a secular adventure without intrusively shoving their personal religious views into it? Commenters were quick to supply quotes from Tolkien himself in correspondence and interviews that LOTR was a Christian, even Catholic book. For him who has eyes, let him see. People want to keep their adventures and their literature domesticated and connected to their own smaller world.

^GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, and Owen Barfield.

A Song About Baseball

 Bob Bennett is an artist who finds Christian lessons in unexpected places.

On Base Streak

I knew the answer, though  I didn't recall what year it was.  If you are a fan of OBP, you will be properly impressed, but mostly you are only going to be interested in this if you are a Ted Williams fan. My mother adored him. The estimate is he would have hit 650+ homeruns if he had not been off doing unimportant stuff like being a fighter pilot in WWII and Korea. (There are plenty of guys over at Unz who will tell you those wars were wrong and unimportant, BTW.)

 

Even more overlooked than Ted, I'm afraid, was Stan Musial, who had a remarkable season the year before this, just missing the Triple Crown. To be famous, you pretty much had to be in New York, and generations of baseball writers seem to have grown up there. Boston was a distant second for attention in print. No one was third, fourth, or fifth. Those were considered flyover country.

Eels

Have any of you had eels? Jellied eels are still a food associated with the East End in London, and smoked eel still shows up. Interestingly, the people who actually like eel as a food tend to dislike this, saying that the flavor is ruined by this preparation for long-term storage. I wouldn't know myself. They are also cold smoked to be kept around for stews and pies. I recall eel pie being mentioned in older literature, but eels are mostly mentioned as well, just eels. They were fried or roasted with some herbs and you ate them. This made them accessible to the poor, but they were not regarded as a poor person's food as they have been for the last century or two.  Everyone ate them. King Henry I, who had been warned repeatedly by his physician that because eels always gave him indigestion and were thus likely dangerous to him, decided he just plain liked them too mauch not to eat lots of them and famously died of eating "a surfeit of eels." They may have actually been lampreys, because the word translates either way, but we are going to be pro-eel for today and give them credit for the regicide.

There were other untimely eel-related deaths among the royalty and nobility, but none so direct as this.

There are eels in North America, in China and Japan, and they are - or were - eaten there in quantity.  But Europe was where eels were part of the culture, and nowhere more than in England. Over a thousand years the english ate more eels than any other fish, saltwater or freshwater. I got this from the Surprised Eel Historian who notes that it is the historian that is surprised, not the eels.  He wonders how he got into this line of work after starting out as a respectable historian.  For the quick eel news, his threadreader is here. Half a million eels a year paid in rent. (Or were they? There may be a translation and reference problem here.) They were used for debts, especially for rent money to landlords. The difficulty is that rents were often due on the same holidays throughout the year, so a large landholder might have thousands of eels arrive in the last few days. You can't keep them alive in water as they deplete the oxygen, but there is some method of putting them in wet moss for shipping.

You flayed them alive, though in London the eel-sellers would do this for you, thank God.

They were shipped everywhere. The English, the eel-eating champions by general acclaim throughout Europe, imported lots of them from the Dutch beginning around 1400, because even though they produced many more eels than anyone else, they just couldn't get enough.  Though this declined, this continued until the 1930s. Though they were declared unclean in Leviticus, they were preferred for Lent, as they seemed to reproduce asexually, and were therefore considered less spiritually dangerous. They actually reproduce by coming to sexual maturity just before migrating to the Sargasso Sea at the end of their lives. This is called their silver stage. Like us, I guess. The eels you see are technically juveniles, even though they can be years old and grow up to 20 feet long. An idea that makes me nervous, frankly.

Eels in Art and Literature, Briefly

Aristotle mentions them, but Aristotle mentions everything, so it nearly doesn't count. Freud had a sexual interpretation of them, and ditto.

The first English mention is by the Venerable Bede (c. 700), who tells us that England is well known for its eels and salmon. He claims that the town of Ely is so named because they have so many eels there. This is the sort of just-so etymology that usually turns out to be laughable, but in this case it is true.

There are eels in the Bayeux Tapestry; many along the borders as part of the decoration, but one symbolising England itself, which King William is grabbing by the tail. This is the wrong way to catch an eel, as one must grab it by the head, and this visually predicted that William would lose England. If it seems odd that an eel would be so readily associated with England, as a bear would represent Russia or an Eagle the USA, it is likely a product of the extreme fondness for them.

Shakespeare mentions eels more than any other fish.

In more modern times they are the stuff of nightmares, as in the shrieking eels in The Princess Bride and the moray eels of "The Little Mermaid." We shall not speak of them further. There is The Book of Eels, that is described by its publisher as about more than just eels, but a reflection on human life as a whole. Well, that's fascinating, but we do that ourselves without eels.

Agency in Other Times

I listened to Dan Jones, the legit medieval historian who has started writing historic fiction (Essex Dogs) being interviewed about the difference in that type of writing. The first thing he mentioned was that people of all other eras and places did not have the agency we take for granted in out culture.  Their lives were constrained in a hundred ways that they could hardly articulate because it was just the way life was, and we can scarcely understand because we do not live in such a world. He finds that hard enough to capture when writing actual history, but is even more intense when writing fiction.  You want a character to do something, then remember that "Oh no, he can't.  And it would hardly occur to him." But the choices that they do have are as real as ours, and often have consequences greater than our small decisions. The whole society lives on the margin and is vulnerable more than we are, and hired men-at-arms even more so. 

The novel is first person from the POV of two soldiers in the Essex Dogs, a band of ten landing in Normandy and heading toward the Battle of Crecy. He illustrates their limited scope and perspective by describing even the battle scenes entirely in terms of the experience of the single individuals, with no overview of strategy and troop movement and arrows drawn on maps that we are used to.  Only later do fragments of that come in. 

It doesn't sound like my sort of thing - it might be Grim's or David Foster's - but I thought that single reminder important in all consideration of history and even international relations now. I do forget their lack of agency, and often. We rail at the loss of our freedoms and are right to, because they are indeed rare, not automatic. We sometimes talk that we resent their being taken away because we think they should just be a given.  Perhaps they should, but that doesn't mean they are thereby common and assumed. 

Tangential note about Walking.  Both Jones and Patrick Wyman who interviewed him spoke about the importance of walking to gathe thoughts and put them in some order.  Ann Althouse linked to a monk who walks thousands of steps as meditation (counting the steps is important to him.  I sometimes do that.)

But now that there is apparently something else wrong with my foot and it is not healing (Charcot's Disease based around a microfracture has been suggested.  If so it is longstanding - like years.), what will I do for thinking?  I won't think too far ahead and solve problems not yet in evidence, yet I think I will have to at least retain some strolling over shorter distances - and figure out something else for exercise. But the idea of giving up walks...

 

Environment and Development

I have often beat the drum that it is genetic, not environmental influences that matter. An interesting article came my way via Rob Henderson (who finds remarkable articles) that pushes back against this.  Why Your Mother Affects Your Intelligence hits an angle I should have seen but didn't, that the fact that environmental effects gradually wash away while the genetic effects show more and more prominence does not mean that those earlier years, when the environment did matter, are of no account.The years from 0-10 or 11-20 count just as much in a life lived as the years from 50-60 when careers are peaking and the earthly accounting of it all is beginning to come in. We measure income, years of education, and accomplishments and declare that Genetics Finally Prevailed.  

That is narrow-minded. Admittedly, when it is a measurement in the shorter term, such as the study that Lyman Stone tweeted out, that even recorded maltreatment of children did not result in increased traumatic response, except in certain conditions, we find it easier to discount or dismiss the childhood abuse.  After all, it doesn't seem to "matter" later. Yet it certainly mattered then. 

I read to my two oldest children when they were small because I thought it would be good for them academically. (Okay, I thought it would be good for them emotionally, culturally, and socially as well, but work with me here. Reading aloud is often pushed mostly on its effects on intelligence and schooling.) I now know that doesn't hold up. But y'know, I'd do it again anyway, just because it's enjoyable.  It's a good thing for families to do together in the moment, even if the effects wash away. Happiness when you are nine counts as much as happiness when you are forty-nine. Maybe more.

Also, Happy People Have Children. We may rise above a terrible environment and succeed in our forties and beyond but pro-natalists might be alert to the fact that girls who lost their mothers have fewer children or none. (Boys seem less affected.) The Swedish study of eventual outcomes that is often referenced may show that the longest term effects of losing a parent may wash out, but the initial effects are enormous, and only gradually recede. Mortality is greater, so you uh, don't get to show your equal outcome at age 60, and there is more depression, anxiety, etc. Years of misery count. I noted myself that we have this fascination with how a story ends, likely based on our living in a mind-world of stories.  If someone had eighty fruitful and happy years but the last two were lonely and they died alone, we think that a sad story.  Yet if they had eighty years of misery but found happiness in the end we call that a good life. That seems to overvalue the emotional kick we get from narrative completion.

How did our ancestors make it through? The lives even the wealthy lived until quite recently still make me shudder and very grateful I was born in the second half of the 1900s.