Some
full throated ornithological activity out there this morning. It’s easy to forget just how silent
things are in winter, when all birds save the magpies wisely head south. Its enough to make you want to turn
down your music and let them blow instead. There’s even a two-note, proper cukoo.
The other night I had to walk along for five minutes to redez vous with a friend who was on a
scooter. I don’t know just why,
but I turned to another great Jamaican, for a particularly powerful song to
guide me through the night “Blackish White” by Alton Ellis from 1971. Born in Trench Town, Jamaica in 1938,
he was coined the “Godfather of Rocksteady” though he was a peer of the one
“Mr. Rocksteady” Ken Boothe who we featured the other day. The two of them toured the U.K.
together in 1967. This
nightmare-like reflection on a slavery that he can’t wake from is rendered
oddly, memorably as a “blackish white” descending down upon him. One can almost feel the compression,
between his falsetto and the deep bass of the backing vocals.
Five hundred years from now slavery may well be
different. My older daughter and I
finally finished “A Brave New World” last night, and left the “savage” swinging
from the rafters in his lighthouse.
The only escape from mandated happiness was good, old-fashioned
self-flagellation. That turns into
the “We want the whip” public spectacle.
But John, the Savage, was 鞭长莫及[1]. I wonder if Huxley was referring to the
last time such things happened in England. It made me think of something I’d read years ago of when the
real flagellants first came to England.
After the Black Death, groups of zealots went out taking on the sins of
the world, by whipping themselves publically.
And the web is amazing. In five seconds I found the quote by Sir Robert of Avesbury
who witnessed the ritual two years after the Black Death. I haven’t seen this quote twenty-five
years. If I wanted to find it
otherwise it would have meant hours in a library and even then, determined, I
may have come up short. But memory
is tricky. I seem to remember a
dry bemusement at the site of the “continental” nut-jobs whipping themselves on
English soil, not unlike the way Huxley casts the reaction to savage outsider’s
activities in the England of five hundred years in the future. But in this quote I’ve found Sir Robert
is rather respectful and clinical.
I suppose it was still a bit early for laughing matters when a full 1/3
of Europe’s population had suddenly been felled, inexplicably.
"In that same year of 1349,
about Michaelmas (September, 29) over six hundred men came to London from
Flanders, mostly of Zeeland and Holland origin. Sometimes at St Paul's and
sometimes at other points in the city they made two daily public appearances
wearing cloths from the thighs to the ankles, but otherwise stripped bare. Each
wore a cap marked with a red cross in front and behind.
Each had in his right hand a
scourge with three tails. Each tail had a knot and through the middle of it
there were sometimes sharp nails fixed. They marched naked in a file one behind
the other and whipped themselves with these scourges on their naked and
bleeding bodies.
Four of them would chant in their
native tongue and, another four would chant in response like a litany. Thrice
they would all cast themselves on the ground in this sort of procession,
stretching out their hands like the arms of a cross. The singing would go on
and, the one who was in the rear of those thus prostrate acting first, each of
them in turn would step over the others and give one stroke with his scourge to
the man lying under him.
This went on from the first to
the last until each of them had observed the ritual to the full tale of those
on the ground. Then each put on his customary garments and always wearing their
caps and carrying their whips in their hands they retired to their lodgings. It
is said that every night they performed the same penance."[2]
It is remarkable to imagine the London of that day. St. Paul’s before it was Christopher
Wren’s St. Paul’s, before there was any Westminster or Big Ben or museums, and
a boat with a bunch of Dutch and Danes behaving this way would have been the
talk of the town.
I just made my younger one a PBJ, with some banana slice in
there. I started up a pot of
coffee for the big folks.
Something is wrong with the coffee maker and the normal process of five
minutes takes twenty. My daughter
had somehow changed her user name and couldn’t get back into her computer. I tried one variation and then another
and just as I was resigned visit the Mac store, we cracked the code. Glad, for now, that its today and not
1349 nor 2540 with nothing whitish or blackish descending down on me.
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