The Great Fire

Break, blow, burn and make me new

- John Donne, Holy Sonnet: Batter my heart

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
-  Matthew 3:11-12 (ESV)

I was standing on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, that great domed wonder, looking down upon the city when I met an old man whose name I forget – he was the security guard. He was also looking out onto he city, and he asked me where I was from. “Singapore”, I said, and he smiled.

“Sir Stamford Raffles, 1819,” he said, “Independence in 1965…” He proceeded to rattle off an impressive concise history of my country. I was surprised, and gratified – most people have vaguely heard of the place, but I was glad that this man, at least, had taken care to know about my far-flung bit of what used to be the British Empire. I mean, I suppose the whole reason I had made the pilgrimage to St. Paul’s was to see the legendary cathedral which John Donne ministered in, the place where Donne gave his sermons, where he wore his red vestments as Dean of St Paul’s, and administered the sacraments, was kind of because I had done my GCSE ‘A’ levels on his poetry and fallen in love with it. And I had been taught my ‘A’ level subjects by British men in a program that groomed young Singaporeans to go to Oxbridge on government scholarships. Which, in turn, is all traceable, in a way, to that fateful day that some Scotsman stepped foot on my little island, drew up a treaty and planted a flag. History is funny like that.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking out at the city spread out like a map before us. “Can you tell me what’s your favourite cathedral, other than this one? Maybe one that most people wouldn’t know about?” He pointed a few of them out, which I duly took note of to visit later. “You like cathedrals, then?” “I think they’re very beautiful.” “Sir Christopher Wren built quite a few – in fact, a whole lot of them, you know.” “Yes – he built this one, didn’t he?” “Yes, after the Great Fire of London.”

“1666,” I said, remembering the hysterical Puritan father in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, who stood in the flames of the city and laughed with a certain vindicated glee, for he had thought it would be the year of the end of the world. “Yes, indeed – the year of the devil, as they say.” “It was the year of the plague, wasn’t it?” “Yes, 1665, the year of the plague. Then 1666, the great fire.”

And I remembered what I’d read about the bubonic plague – the despair, the corpses lining the streets, how mysterious it was, how prevalent, how inescapable. It must have seemed like the end of the world, I thought. It really must have seemed like it. I imagined wooden carts on the streets below me, wheeling little hills of corpses out into the further reaches of the city, and shuddered. They didn’t know it was the fleas on the rats, I thought. They had no explanation. They fled one city, and they simply brought the horror with them. People wouldn’t receive them. The doors were barred against them. They were locked inside their own houses, a red X marked on their doors, condemned to live or die – and who knows if it was better to live than die, amongst all that rotting human flesh? It must have seemed inescapable, incurable, it must have seemed like some divine judgment – judgment on a city that did not care for its poor, that left them wallowing in dirt and filth, that abandoned them to disease with its muddied water, its stinking streets.

And then the fire. Two thirds of London was brought to the ground by the great fire. The thing is, only the fire could rid the city of the plague. Plague and fire – like divine or infernal twins, razing the city to the ground. And everything that is shoddily built, everything cobbled together of wood is consumed, is razed to the ground. But only the fire could rid the city of its great disease – the fire purifies, knocking down everything that was not built to withstand it. And the fire disinfects – it eats up the bodies, rids them of their plague. And it raged and raged, and the city went up in flames. But in due time this also fades to embers, and fear gives way to mourning. What was burned down is cleared away; those who had died are mourned. Those who survive are amazed – having stood through plague and fire, they slowly decide it is their task to rebuild. The city must rise again, like some enormous phoenix, renewing itself out of the ashes. Despite the despair, out of the dust, here is something new – a new chance to build a new vision of a city, a city that will have better fire safety, a city that has better sanitation, that will house its poor better.

And among the builders was Sir Christopher Wren, charged with planning the architecture for the new churches that would be raised. As King’s Surveyor of Works in 1669, he was personally responsible for the building of 51 churches, many of which still stand today – among them St. Paul’s Cathedral, that beautiful dome I perched on, surveying the great city I have always loved, long before I had ever seen it.

“The Germans didn’t touch it during the blitz,” said my new friend. “Even though they tried. It was a kind of miracle,” he said. “A great big dome like that. Of course it was a target. It was bombed twice, but each time it missed, or was defused.”

“And it’s your job to protect it,” I said.

“Well, mine and His,” he said, and smiled again.

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

China’s Navy

Generally, when a large, powerful country starts sending a fleet of explorers to unknown places or places that have not been in contact for a very, very long time, the natives better watch out, c.f. Spanish, Portuguese, Brits, Dutch, French, Germans (1) [sic]. American naval presence is at a height now, too. There are, of course, various ways of consolidating power among your farflung nations: “soft” power (cultural, economic, diplomacy), “hard” power (conquest, administration, formal colonialism), “old skool” (tribute, threat of military decimation, puppet governments).

Statue of Zheng He in Malacca, from Wikipedia

Well, the Chinese did it 600 years ago, at the height of the Ming Dynasty, through Admiral Zheng He, whose 7 naval expeditions took him at least to the Cape of Good Hope, as well as Southeast Asia. The final two journeys’ destinations were recorded then destroyed by the Ming emperor (intriguing – I wonder why that information was dangerous…), leading to rampant speculation by amateur navymen-turned historians that they possibly “discovered” America before the Europeans. They certainly had the technology, though. The question is whether they did, which thanks to the burned records, is hard to prove one way or another.

ship rounding the Cape of Good Hope from “India”, image from Wikipedia

“About the year of Our Lord 1420 a ship, what is called an Indian junk [Zoncho de India], on a crossing of the Sea of India towards the Isle of Men and Women, was driven by a storm beyond the Cape of Diab, through the Green Isles, out into the Sea of Darkness on their way west and southwest. Nothing but air and water was seen for forty days and by their reckoning they ran 2,000 miles and fortune deserted them. When the stress of the weather had subsided they made the return to the said Cavo de Diab in seventy days and drawing near to the shore to supply their wants the sailors saw the egg of a bird called roc, the egg being as big as a seven gallon cask, and the size of the bird is such that from the point of one wing to another was sixty paces and it can quite easily lift an elephant or any other large animal. It does great damage to the inhabitants and is very fast in its flight”. – Fra Mauro World Map (1450), Italian

We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare…
—Erected by Zheng He, Changle, Fujian, 1432. Louise Levathes

17th century Chinese woodblock print possibly of Zheng He’s fleet, image from Wikipedia

(1) Originally read: (Germans were even landlocked!)
NB. The Germans are NOT landlocked. Sorry.

Forgottonia

I was scrounging around Left Bank Books, St Louis, Missouri, and picked up the delightful volume “Lost States: True Stories of Txlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made it” by Michael J Trinklein, and thought I would copy a passage relevant to my current location.

An accurate name for the land Illionis Forgot.

Illionis is pretty much all corn. Once you venture outside Chicago, the state becomes one giant field dedicated to the creation of tasty high-fructose corn syrup. To serve the corn farmers, small and medium-sized towns have grown up all across the Land of Lincoln – cities like Peoria, Decator, and Springfield.

What’s curious is that interstate highways connect nearly every one of the villages. Compare a map of Illionis to a map, say, of Iowa or Missouri, and you almost have to augh: Illinois has so many more miles of freeway compared to its neighbours.

Here’s how it happened: A big city like Chicago has a lot of people, and that means a lot of money and a lot of representation in Congress. But you can build just so many highways in the Windy city. So the “downstate” residents reap the benefits of living in a populous state…

Having said all that, one section of the state has been left out: the counties in the western bulge. Largely cut off by the Illinois River, this area didn’t get any fancy freeways in the 1960s and 1970s.

In protest, a group of residents decided to form their own state, Forgottonia. They appointed a governor and tried to attract attention. But what they really wanted was an interstate – specifically, Interstate 72, which would provide a shortcut between Chicago and Kansas City. Legilsation that would have authorized the construction of I-72 was defeated in Congress in 1968 and then again in 1972. Parts were eventually built decades later, but even today I-72 extends only to the Illionis-Missouri border….

Such is the sad story of Forgottonia. It never had a real shot at statehood – and it’s still pretty much forgotten. But they do have corn. Lots and lots of corn. So long as America keeps drinking sixty-four-ounce fountain drinks, Forgottonia’s people will survive. In fact, about the only thing that could hurt orgottonia would be medical reports suggesting high-fructose corn syrup isn’t healthy.

Oh.

Remember Me, Remember Me, Remember Me

Adieu, Adieu! Hamlet, Remember me!

- Ghost of Denmark

The psychiatrist Barry Reisberg first observed twenty years ago (that) the decline of an Alzheimer’s patient mirrors in reverse the neurological development of a child. The earliest capacities a child develops – raising the head (at one to three months), smiling (two to four months), sitting up unassisted (six to ten months) – are the last capacities an Alzheimer’s patient loses. Brain development in a growing child is consolidated through a process called myelinization, wherein the axonal connections among neurons are gradually strengthened by sheathings of the fatty substance myelin. Apparently, since the last regions of the child’s brain to mature remain the least myelinated, they’re the regions most vulnerable to the insult of Alzheimer’s. The hippocampus, which processes short-term memories into long-term, is very slow to myelinize. This is why we’re unable to form permanent episodic memories before the age of three or four, and why the hippocampus is where the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s first appear. Hence the ghostly apparition of the middle-stage patient who continues to be able to walk and feed herself even as she remembers nothing from hour to hour. The inner child isn’t inner anymore. Neurologically speaking, we’re looking at a one-year-old.

- from How to be Alone, Essays by Jonathan Franzen.

I’ve never been particularly good with my memory of external events. I think this shows in my dreams – I am not so attached to the external form of things as attached to my internal emotional state when large events happen to me. Of course, like everyone else, my memory is a weird pastiche of things which I remember first hand, embellished by stories narrated by my mother, (less but sometimes) my father, my aunt, my friends. And I am always stunned when an account of an event from another source clashes completely with my own – this has happened a few times, and I’ve always felt a kind of serious cognitive dissonance whenever it happens. I am so certain that my version must be right, and theirs wrong – fortunately for me, I have been addicted to writing ever since I discovered how, and so at least I have a logbook, as such, of events to “prove” that events really happened to me the way that they did, at least from inside my head. I am so thankful for the technology of writing – so, so thankful – because I can easily converse with my 10 year-old-self, my 14-year-old-self, even my 7-year-old self. And as I write this now, I write for my 30-year-old self, my 40-year-old-self, even my 80-year-old-self – I am in continuous conversation with myself. There are certain selves I really dislike, my 14-year-old self being one of them. I’ve been trying to learn compassion for those people, seeing as they were actually me. But it always startles me to realize that all this – all this, which seems to appear so solid, like a cinematic reel that I assume I could hold in my hands – is really a sort of cognitive phantom, a genie we unbottle to toy with for a while, which we cannot be certain we will ever be able to retrieve.

Franzen reminded me of the stuff I learned in my introductory psychology class – that memories are merely temporary constellations (the graphic in my textbook actually showed little red stars being united by red lines across the hemispheres of the brain), reinforced each time we conjure them, but subtly altered each time also by our brain chemistry at that moment on that day. Nothing is pure, nothing is original. Everything, like film itself – is burned away even as we watch it. There is no such thing as perfect archiving, perfect recall. All that is an illusion in the first place.

I understand the inherent hysteria that the inner historian in us feels when told something like this. But on the other hand, I wonder why we fear forgetting so much. Sometimes I fear remembering too much. It is blessed to forget – it makes it easier to forgive. The repressed memories of evil (which Freud inadvisedly, at times, dredged up) can surely be as harmful as the forgotten good ones. We see this phenomenon in history – we refuse to look at the dark periods of our own people, preferring to narrate a story of triumph and entitlement. In Australia there is an odd phenomenon of “black armband history” in which most of the history is narrated negatively, and the revisionists, instead of springing the occasional expose on the crimes of ancestors, try valiantly to paint a better picture of the nation (the ones who were not convicts, racists, jailers, etc.), only to be stomped upon by the liberals who yell that the wrongs are not yet redressed, so it’s premature to celebrate.

image from Wikipedia

I don’t know if this is right or wrong. But I do know that Britain has a curious preference to narrate itself as an underdog, even though it was a vast empire. And that Israel has the most hangdog national history of any people I can think of. America is very much triumphalist – hubristic, even, in its desire to be a nation before God, blameless and upright. France narrates itself as Reasonable, when in fact it swung from one kind of tyranny to another all the way until Napoleon imploded the empire. I think in any case it is best to, if one really wants to “know thyself”, as the apocryphal Greek sage(s) say, it is wise to go back and stare at the things you remember but wish you did not – the dark (or the light) side which was neglected when you started to narrate yourself wholly – to disillusion yourself to the things which you wish you had not done, to stare that beast in the eye and to understand it, and unite it with the godlike being who also dwells in the same breast. And then perhaps we can call ourselves Homo Sapiens – Man – “Knowing Man”, Wise Woman, Wise Man.

Chicago History Museum

Thanks Ben and Christine for taking me to the Chicago History Museum! I had a blast

This is Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, the first permanent settler in Chicago. Of African descent, he married a Native American called Catherine. (1745 – 1818). He looks white in this picture but there is another pic of him that looks darker.

This is Me-Te-A, a Potawatimi chief who, together with Ottawa chief Blackbird, fought on the side of the British against the Americans in the War of 1812 for control over the fur trade. The fur trade ended around about 1690 due to overtrapping.The print I copied was printed by LT Prowon’s Lithographic Establishment, Estb. in No. 94, Walnut Street.

This is a nameless Anarchist who rioted in Chicago in 1886. A bunch of anarchists were hanged for sedition and terrorism. Print by Thure de Thulstrup, for Harper’s Weekly, May 15 1886. I think his hand gesture is like Lenin’s.

This is Abraham Lincoln, one of my two favourite American presidents. This bronze head was in the Lincoln Park part of the museum.

I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.

Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,

his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the

newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser,

his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.

“Bronze”by Carl Sanburg (1878 – 1967) during WWI, Chicago Poems.

-

I have a couple more sketches. But here’s this for now.

Hiroshima

John Hersey’s Hiroshima begins:

“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”

(from the Writer’s Alumnac)

2004:

The Apocalypse Museum

We unearthed the Earth and found a dead museum,
stonestruck, the dead, as though catastrophe
had wiped them out, had claimed the hollow heads,
the bleeding eyes, now dried, paleoanthropic.
Some mated, hands to hearts and eye to eye,
eyes gazing up into the gravel sky.
Small units sat and stacked themselves in flats
around a table lost, without their necks.
Neck to neck the screaming shuttles came
the flaming wonder fossiled on their face.
In granite corridors we found the poor
their lashes bit with frost. Soldiers swaddled
in warm uniforms. They paved the floor.

They had, it seems, first invented metal
They wear it round their heads and round their arms
in shapes, and some embed it in their hearts.

In the museum we found the empty art.
The pillars held the posts of massacre.
Dust preserved the ancient manuscripts
and marble, a mausoleum for the heart.