Singularly Worth Trying

I have taken my kids to Europe a few times.  I always try to explain the middle ages.  The Roman Empire is easier to explain.  The Industrial Revolution is easier to explain.  You can stand in the Uffizi Gallery and illustrate the Renaissance:  “Here is a Giotto.  See how the halos are flat?  See how the people are stacked on top of each other?”  And turn and walk into the next room and say” OK.  Look at this Leonardo, “The Assumption.”  The painting has depth.  The Medieval painters couldn’t do this.  Suddenly they’d deciphered this and with a flourish, consumed and constructed with the learnings of Rome, the learnings of the Arab world.  

The Middle Ages are more opaque but singularly worth trying to understand.  They are centuries of soil turning that allow Europe to oddly unite civizationally under Roman Christianity, while remaining fractured and politically competitive. This, the fulcrum perhaps, of its incandescent, cancerous momentum, to ‘save’ consume and organize all. 

Is there a better film about the Middle Ages than “The Seventh Seal?”  I walled off work on Saturday.  “and, stay out!”  And tried to play ‘Settlers of Catan’ with the younger one and watch a movie with the older one.  We’d been on a black and white movies kick and I tossed out a few for her to consider but my artifice was transparent.  I really only wanted to watch one of them.  And after dinner, (which is risky for me, but I managed.) we set out to see Sweden in 1348 or so.

 

Quickly, my daughter recognized the Monty Python and Woody Allen as films she’d seen that had borrowed from the Bergman classic: the burning of the witch, the personification of the Grim Reaper.  The characters are not so far from ourselves.  The comedic troupe leader and his visions, the naivety of the cuckolded blacksmith.  Max von Sydow’s remarkable struggle with meaning and his Odyssey-like quest to return to Penelope before he dies. 

If death were one out of three people.  If death were plague-like and inexplicable and cruel.  If disease were able to take out every third person you knew:  Those who remained would most certainly have a different relationship with death.  Death personified?  Indeed.  You can find him in the eye if you look close enough.  The Moyen Age only had so much to lose with the onslaught of disease.  And productivity returned after a revolutionary epoch in to two generations.  But would that be true today?  If there were a plague like that; the political institutions we know, the nation states we know would be unlikely to survive as currently understood.  Expedient, demagogic, solutions that promise stability after so much misery would be all but necessary.  The assumptions have so much to do with who controls innovation and technical capacity to spring back. And the step back in time might be hundreds of crucial years, or perhaps much longer.  How long would it take to restore the arc of science to what we’ve currently accumulated, codified?  Something raw and crass would no doubt fill the time we lived without, beneath the shadow of the past.