Sifting through Steiner

Rudolf Steiner

Reading the great Germanic polymath, Rudolf Steiner, is, by any measure, a challenging experience. His formal literary output is prodigious and includes a very healthy array of weighty philosophical tomes, most of them written early in his career, while the collection of transcripts of his lectures – covering the first two decades of the XXth century up to his death in 1925 – is truly vast and spans an astounding spread of topics. His complete works run to some twenty or more volumes. So in terms of sheer quantity, the boast of having “read Steiner” is a feat in itself. Reading even ten percent of Steiner is a task of several years, at least. More to the point, though, the content is especially challenging on several levels. Herr Dr Steiner is perhaps best described as an “esoteric philosopher” - to put it kindly - and much of his thinking is very esoteric indeed. Ordinary, unsuspecting folk are likely to encounter Dr Steiner through his education movement (Steiner or Waldorf Schools) or perhaps through alternative medicine (Anthroposophical Medicine) or organic farming (biodynamic agriculture) or curative homes for handicapped children, or one of many branches of the arts, or sundry cultural initiatives that are extensions of Steiner’s work, but when they first open up a book by Steiner, or more likely wade into some of his lecture transcripts, they are confronted by an intellectual world that is not only unusual or even eccentric but is, frankly, bizarre. Steiner has been, and remains, a very influential figure in modern European culture, but the intellectual foundations of his influence are strange and dense and obscure and, for most, inaccessible.

In the estimation of the present writer, who is unashamedly interested in things that are out of phase, this is something that recommends him. There are surely few thinkers who are quite so out of phase, so at odds with the pedestrian and the standard, the accepted and the prevalent, as Rudolf Steiner. Reading Steiner will certainly twist one’s world-view out of a settled complacency and remove one from the dry, comforting world of familiar ideas. His capacity to step out of the structures of modern, materialist, scientistic thought and to see the world through a very different paradigm is one of his great accomplishments, and something that betokens his genius. It is for this that the present writer has ventured into Steiner’s works at regular intervals over a period of some thirty or so years. Let it be clear: Steiner is certainly worth reading. There is really no one quite like him. He is an outstanding figure. One does not throw around the epithet “genius” too often, but there can be no question that Steiner was a genius, a man of quite extraordinary intellect, a figure of rare brilliance.

For all of that, however, he is a mixed bag. On the one hand his work is based on the very sound foundations of high German philosophy and a deep, penetrating acquaintance with the natural sciences. He made a significant contribution to epistemology in his doctoral thesis, later published as ‘The Philosophy of Freedom’. He was deeply conversant with Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Schelling – the whole crew. He met Nietzche in person. As a young man – recognized for his brilliance – he was appointed as editor of the natural scientific works of Goethe. Independent of these studies, he shows remarkably original insights into an impressive range of fields in both the sciences and the arts: medicine, architecture, dance, music, sculpture, astronomy, painting, pedagogy. One can read volumes of Steiner without once encountering anything derivative.

On the other hand, much – but not all – of Steiner is infected with a highly eccentric strain of theosophical thinking even murkier and more unwholesome than that of Madam Blavatsky. This, moreover, rests not upon the foundations of Dr Steiner’s unquestionable intellectual gifts but upon loose and reckless claims of seership and “clairvoyance” and “the investigations of spiritual science”. Wedded to Steiner’s considerable and unique corpus of scientific and philosophical insight is a vast theosophical construction – dubbed ‘Anthroposophy’ – complete with Atlanteans, epochs, ages, reincarnation and complex hierarchies of spiritual beings. Further, in contrast to Blatavskean theosophy, this construction has had grafted onto it a strangely gnostic Christianity, a veritable casserole of old heresies and a host of new ones which, again, have as their sole authority Steiner’s claim to be a seer with direct access to the spiritual realms. The entire ensemble is decidedly fantastic, to say the least. This is not to say that, even then, his genius does not sometimes shine through. As baroque concoctions of gnostic Christo-theosophy go, Anthroposophy is intriguing and unusually cogent, but it is, all the same, a relic of an age when the Theosophical Society, theosophical occultism and clairvoyance were intellectual fashions. To contemporary readers this aspect of Steiner now seems unaccountably bizarre. Side by side with his brilliant philosophical and scientific insights one encounters an outlandish theosophical superstructure that goes well beyond the borders of credulity. There is the genius on the one hand, and the theosophical crank on the other. Steiner made a serious miscalculation. On the one hand he was far ahead of his time. He is now seen, rightly, as a visionary pioneer of organic farming, alternative medicine, holistic education, and much else. But he supposed that the theosophy that had become popular and respectable through the Theosophical Society was a path to the future. For a clairvoyant he showed a notable lack of foresight into the coming drift of the age. In fact, theosophy came and went as an intellectual movement and today seems spent and archaic. Steiner married his philosophy and science to it, and today that decision serves him ill.

‘Married’, in fact, is the right word in this context. One must ask, as did some of his contemporaries, how such an astute and brilliant mind as Steiner’s ever became entangled with the spiritizualizing gibberish of theosophy? The present author has pondered this question many times. Steiner’s works are replete with startling insight. There is no greater exponent of the Goethean sciences. One is surprised and delighted again and again by his understanding of nature, his capacity to think ‘outside the square’, as the saying goes. But then, it is all marred by the theosophy – or Anthroposophy – by which he frames it. How did this happen? How did such a sublime body of thought become so enmeshed in a web of theosophical nonsense? To read Steiner one must confront this problem. The gems are mired in a mountain of dross. How did this happen? What went wrong?

The answer is that he was swept along by two fashions of his day. One was the theory of evolution, which he embraced enthusiastically and of which he then gave an extended spiritual interpretation. Many other people of his day did the same, but perhaps none so thoroughly and comprehensively as Steiner. In much of his writings, and even more so in his lecture transcripts, everything is seen through the lens of evolution. It is evolution this and evolution that. The other fashion, as already noted, was theosophy, but it is important to note that his embrace of this took a particularly personal form. His second wife, Maria von Sivers, was a keen theosophist, and a key member of the German Theosophical Society. When he met her not only did he find a new companion – and one who actively assisted his work in many fields – but he also found a ready-made audience for his ideas. By his own account, his inclinations towards the spiritual were longstanding and deep. He claims that his clairvoyant powers were ripe at an early age. But, frustratingly, it was a dimension of himself about which he had to keep silent for fear of ridicule and misunderstanding. As it was, Goethe’s scientific theories were ridiculed by hard-nosed materialists. Steiner found it difficult to find an intellectual forum in which he could discuss them and be taken seriously. Maria von Sivers solved this difficulty for him. She inducted him into the Theosophical Society and there he found a receptive audience. For theosophy it was a coup. He was surely the most significant intellectual to ever join that organization. He did so in his search for an audience and – what must not be overlooked - for the love of a woman. 

The Theosophical Society, indeed, was full of intelligent, or if not intelligent then wealthy and important women. Much of its success in the sociological context of the late Victorian era and early XXth century was in that it provided a forum for women to engage with the discussion and digestion of the flood of new ideas exposed by the broader (but male-dominated) Orientalist movement. It was at an early encounter at one of Steiner’s public lectures that the then Frauline von Sivers asked him a question about the possibility of developing a fully esoteric understanding of Christianity. Steiner took to this task and eventually married the woman who had suggested it to him. With Maria von Sivers, he also married theosophy and all that it entailed, and thereafter the nature and tenor of his work changed dramatically. He openly declared his seership, quickly rose to be leader of the German Theosophical Society and gathered a following of sympathetic devotees. At length, he, Frau Steiner and his followers, split from the Theosophical Society proper – the catalyst being the Krishnamurti affair – and formed their own esoteric school, the overtly Christian Anthroposophical Society with its headquarters in Dornach in Switzerland. 

Dr Rudolf and Frau Maria Steiner 

In order to read Herr Dr Steiner today one must be aware of this background. In his early works one encounters the philosophical Steiner, then deeply embedded in the German philosophical tradition. One also encounters the Steiner who was the young genius who edited the natural scientific section of the Goethe archives. Both of these strands – philosophical and natural scientific – continue to be developed throughout his later work. He remained an unsurpassed master of German phenomenology and Goethean science. But beyond a certain date – the early years of the XXth century – it is important to realize that he is writing for and speaking to a different audience, and his outlook is now intermingled with his own idiosyncretic (and increasingly Christocentric) version of theosophy. Thereafter, he attempts a fusion, a grand amalgam, of these various influences – Schopenhauer meets Goethe meets Blavatsky meets the gnostic Jesus. 

Dr Steiner with a model of his first Goetheanum.

The first Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner's masterpiece. The wooden building was destroyed by arson by German nationalists. 

In fairness we should note that while it is often difficult to disentangle this remarkable all-encompassing assemblage, the idea of freedom prevails throughout, and his work in various fields of the sciences and the arts is, in theory at least, independent of Anthroposophy. He was not a polemicist. He seems to have appreciated that some people might want the Goethe without the theosophical frame. He offers his ideas no-strings-attached. One does not need to be an Anthroposophist dedicated to nurturing the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to see the good sense in many of his ideas about teaching and pedagogy. Nor does one need to be anticipating the reappearance of the Christ-Being in the etheric realm to take advantage of biodynamic agriculture. In the best instances, Steiner kept his Anthroposophy and his Goethe somewhat separate. The agriculture course he gave to farmers, and his astronomy course, are examples. Both masterpieces of Goethean science, they are relatively free of clap-trap. In other cases, though, readers need to carefully separate the inter-mingled strands in order to disinfect his works of the material directed at an audience with a theosophical world-view. One needs to remove Frau Steiner, that is to say. To be frank, women of the Theosophical era often led very able men astray. Even today, perfectly sensible men can be intellectually hobbled by New Age women appealing to the supposed feminine virtue of intuition against the allegedly hardened masculinity of reason. In order to read Steiner it is necessary to divorce him from Maria von Sivers and imagine where he may have taken his genius if he had not married a theosophist. This, and some compensations for the over-played spiritual Darwinism. It is not always easy.  It requires judicious reading. One might need to mentally edit out every second paragraph. It is what makes reading Steiner such a challenge. 

STEINER'S BLACKBOARD DRAWINGS

In almost all cases, though, it is a challenge worth undertaking. Let us reiterate: Rudolf Steiner was a man of exceptional talents who has made a remarkable contribution to modern European culture. He planted valuable seeds. He was not a hack or a charlatan. It is a great pity - arguably one of the intellectual tragedies of the modern era - that he became entangled with the pseudo-spirituality of theosophy. He is a much diminished figure for this. But then, what else could he have done? Such a man, so out of phase but with so much to offer, needs to find a receptive audience somewhere if he is not to waste away in lonely obscurity. And who can blame a man for hitching his wagon to a supportive woman? And, in any case, it is surprising how often it is rewarding to persist with even the most bizarre of Steiner's utterances, to suspend disbelief, and follow his line of insight to its conclusion. The present writer can remember many occasions where his response to reading Steiner was to marvel at what an unexpected and downright weird yet strangely fresh and compelling point of view Steiner presented. Even the bizarre in Steiner makes its mark. 

Much of his scientific work is an extended extrapolation of traditional cosmology seen through the illuminating lens of modern science and deserves particular attention. At the core of it is his conception of the 'threefold man' which has its roots in Plato and other ancient and venerable traditions but which Herr Dr Steiner explores deep into the physical constitution of the human body. Indeed, this is the most impressive aspect of Steiner: while Jung and countless others proposed a bridge between modern science and spirituality in psychology - on the basis of a confusion of psyche and pneuma - Steiner found it rather in biology. This is a great accomplishment in itself, and this alone makes Steiner worth reading. The Steiner perspective is inherently alchemical in this respect. The physical sciences, the study of matter and life, is the place of the spirit. But readers must expect to have to sift Steiner's words as they go. It can be frustrating. Why does he pollute his genius with this rot? one keeps asking. The important thing is not to be put off by the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff. The wheat, when you locate it, is exceptionally high grade. 

One further point of appreciation. We live, according to Steiner, in what he calls a "consciousness soul age" and our spiritual constitution is quite different today than how it was in the past. This follows from his account of the 'evolution of consciousness'. Accordingly, yesterday's solutions will no longer suffice for tomorrow. This is rather over-cooked in much of Steiner, but the present writer has come to appreciate the wisdom of this general proposition much more than in the past. This is especially so in response to the raging popularity of what we might call 'neo-shamanism' and more generally 'neo-primitivism' in alternative spirituality circles today. See a previous post on this issue, 'The Primitive is not the Primordial', here. The spectacle of modern people taking up the primitive mode as a 'path' is a symptom of troubling times. Steiner, at least, knew that much. We cannot go back to a lost past. Modern man is made of very different stuff to the Stone Age shaman. The 'consciousness soul' of modern man - an entirely new arrangement of inside and outside - is a mode in itself, and a legitimate spirituality must find meaning in it. In this present age many paths which served people well in the past are closed or dead ends or else are full of specters and demons. We can only marched forwards, come what may. We cannot evade the consequences of the 'consciousness soul'. There is no way back. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Xul Solar

Someone once unkindly but not inaccurately described surrealism as "the rotting corpse of Western art." The surrealist fetishism of the lower realms of the human psyche was at the cost of forgetting the higher and more noble reaches of the human state. The dripping clocks and the bloated significance ascribed to the trvial contents of undistinguished dreams was the indulgence of Freudian fadism. The supposed "discovery of the unconscious" overshadowed the loss of the super-conscious. Salvador Dali, after all, was just an over-rated landscape painter. 

It is unfortunate therefore that the Argentine artist Xul Solar is usually counted as a surrealist and that the content of his work is mistaken for an exploration of the motifs of the unconscious. The prominence of Dali imposed a strong surrealist influence upon the Spanish-speaking world, no doubt, and Senor Solar would exhibit his work alongside others who fit more precisely in that category. But in fact he is not a surrealist painter in any proper sense. Stylistically, he is more akin to Kandinsky and Chagall - musicality and playfulness, respectively, are two of the strongest elements in his work - and what is mistaken for surrealist interests in his content is actually a deep and intelligent engagement with esotericism and the occult. The surrealists would sometimes exploit the esoteric and the occult but in this only achieved parody and pastiche. Xul Solar was an esoteric artist, a mystic (although technically speaking this is probably an incorrect label) and a student of the occult imagination in its more traditional sense. It is this that makes him interesting. He is not, like the surrealists proper, just a painter of nightmares. 

His intellectual interests were extensive and he shared many of them with his close friend Jorg Luis Borges. Indeed, he appears in some of Senor Borges' stories and many of the same stories celebrate their shared interests. Largely, we might describe these interests as a fascination with esoteric systems, the most fundamental of such systems being language iteself. Solar was an inventor of imaginary languages. This is reflected in his visual work as well. He develops a visual language of marks and shapes and symbols and lines and colours (without any of the randomness and denial of system that characterizes surrealism.) Where it does not have ignoble motivations the intellectual principle of system is at the root of the occult. Solar was fascinated with language, games, number systems - much to his credit he was a dedicated duodecimalist - and by extension, qabbalah, tarot and above all astrology, the occult language par excellence.  It has often been difficult for the art world to place him correctly: this is because these interests are outside of their usual purview. Fine artists are sometimes dabblers in the occult. Solar is more than that. He is not merely stealing a symbol here and there to impart a spurious aura of mystery: he is an occult artist in the fullest sense. 

His tarot cards are quite charming and are surely one of the better creative renderings of the tarot made in the XXth century. Alongside the traditional symbolism of the arcana, which he renders with a child-like Chargallesque simplicity, he has added elements of his own symbolic developments, qabbalistic and astrological. Here are some samples:

The qabbalistic background to these images is found in his many explicitly qabbalistic drawings and paintings. In Western occultism, as it is normally presented in modern times at least, the Hebrew qabbalah represents a sort of matrix for the varied and sundry symbols of a wide range of esoteric systems. It is a sort of filing system, and of interest for both Solar and Borges for exactly that reason. 

Note in these diagrams how the artist has made the qabbalistic system of ten (spheres) into a system of twelve planes - see the numbering on the sides and note that the numbers extend beyond 1 - 10. Solar was a duodecimalist - an advocate of a base 12 number system. Ordinarily, the qabbalah is a decimal system. Not for Xul Solar. 

As it happens, the present author himself departs from the modern occultists on this point - he would prefer not to match the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the twenty-two trumps of the tarot purely because there are twenty-two of each, for example - but that is another matter. Senor Solar stays within that modern convention, and then uses it as the core structure of his art. In his time in Paris in the 1920s, Solar became acquainted with the mad mage Aleister Crowley and his foul-breathed mistress Leah Hirsig, and for a time they groomed him to become a member of their occult 'Orders'. The qabbalistic matrix is the core of Mr Crowley's system too. Sensibly, though, Solar headed back home to South America and apart from that brief encounter was not unduly influenced by the Crowley cult. Certainly, Borges made much better company and offered a far healthier occult intellectuality. We should be thankful for this. Crowley was a parasite who destroyed many fine minds and considerable talents - Victor Neuberg, for instance - and whether he knew it or not at the time Xul Solar saved both his soul and his art by side-stepping the self-styled 'Beast'. 

The influence of Mr Crowley in the modern Western occult is so pervasive today that it is important to identify and celebrate those not under his sway. Xul Solar is one. Just as he is not properly classified as a "surrealist", neither, fortunately, is he an "occultist" in the Crowleyean sense. This is to say that just as he was not a painter of the dross of his own nightmares as were the surrealists, neither was he a cheap purveyor of the 'Dark Arts' like so many Crowley wanna-bes. His art has integrity, and his interest in esoteric systems - like that of Senor Borges - was genuine and elevated. His adopted name, Xul Solar - his real name being 'Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari' - signals his benevolent disposition. Xul - a homonymn for 'Schulz' in Spanish - is L.U.X. backwards, the Latin for 'Light'. Xul Solar = the light of the Sun. There is nothing dark or menacing or sinister in the occult art of Xul Solar. He is not an explorer of an underworld. He is, rather, an explorer of the elevated imagination. 

Not all of his work is quite to the present author's taste, but there is a sense of joy and wimpsy and a delight in imagined worlds that characterizes his best paintings, that makes him a modern favorite. There is music and mystery. And like Borges, the city-as-labyrinth - as opposed to the over-worked city-as-distopian-hell-hole - is one of his preferred themes. 

Senor Solar was himself a practising astrologer. Often his astrological charts are exhibited alonside his watercolours and sculptures and treated as works of art in themselves. Here is one:

And here, below, is the present author's rendering of Senor Solar's natal chart according to the methods the author prefers, notably the square chart and the insistence on the seven ancient planets. Without resorting to in-depth analysis, the notable feature of the chart is, surely, the conjunction of the two lights, Sun and Moon, in the midheaven. Solar , that is to say, was born towards noon at a New Moon. As we see in his chart, this configuration is culminating.  In this sort of chart the so-called "angles" reveal all. In this case the native is indeed a 'New Moon' type, and we see at a glance why he went by the name of Xul Solar. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Self-loathing at the British Colonial

Self-loathing, along with the accompanying trait ingratitude, is the defining characteristic of the Whig or leftist progressive. In the progressive worldview the heritage and circumstance into which one is born is necessarily a restriction since it is not the product of free will. In this view only that which one chooses is authentic; all else is imposed and therefore, by extension, oppressive. Free choice is the highest value in such an ideology, and so it follows that all that might impede free choice and all that is not freely chosen must be torn down and rejected. We see an extreme example of this in contemporary gender politics. The notion that one is born with a particular gender identity is perceived by progressives as essentially oppressive. It denies one the right to choose whether to be male or female or neither or both. More generally, progressives typically develop an aversion for all those aspects of selfhood and identity into which they were born, leading to a general rejection of heritage and tradition. Heritage and tradition - history -, by definition, are received by inheritance; they are not freely chosen. One does not choose to be a white Anglosaxon middleclass Australian - it is a circumstance and an identity into which one is born (against one's will). For the progressive, typically, freedom consists in rebellion against this imposition. 

This is in contrast to the conservative. In the conservative worldview the inheritance one receives at birth - place, country, ethnicity, language, gender, history - is a providential gift which one should love and for which one ought to be grateful. Freedom and happiness consists not in rejecting this inheritance but in embracing it, exploring it, developing it, expanding it. The conservative, by temperament, accepts and rejoices in his own history and loves and honours the traditions into which he has been born. If the circumstances of his birth are difficult, it is a challenge to be accepted and overcome, but it never leads to self-loathing and ingratitude. The conservative is happy to have been born a man, or a woman, and feels none of the self-disgust and guilt the progressive feels at being born pale-skinned and prosperous and English. He is not ashamed of his forefathers. He is thankful for their sacrifices and labours and grateful that he is the recipient of the traditions they forged. This is an utterly different mindset to progressivism. The conservative embraces the many aspects of self he received from providence. The progressive is in rebellion against the same in the belief that authenticity is only found in what is freely chosen. 

Finally, these two dispositions represent two divergent relations to time. The progressive - as the name implies - prefers the future (in the vain hope that it can be engineered) and despises the past (because it is fixed and irrevocable.) The conservative - as the name implies - seeks to conserve the best of the past and is apprehensive about the future (because it is inherently uncertain and is very likely to be messed up by progressives.) We see these two dispositions clashing everywhere. They are the two political types of the modern era. An excellent account of these dispositions, especially that of the self-loathing leftist, can be found in an e-booklet at Oz Conservative here. 

* * * 

The salubrious and tasteful ambience at British Colonial Co., Brisbane

The self-loathing leftists were at their keyboards again recently  - they constitute the core of the aptly named twitterati - taking aim at a newly opened eating establishment in Brisbane, Australia. In a previous post the present author reported on the bullying and hysterics directed at a fine food restaurant in Seattle named the  Saffron Colonial. See here. The incident in Brisbane is a virtual replay of the same event. Australians rarely set their own social agenda, and the Australian political Left is especially prone to importing and reverse engineering ideas from their English and American fellow travellers. On this occasion, enterprising restaurantuers had the timerity to open a restaurant in Brisbane with a British Empire theme, celebrating the marvellous fusion of otherwise bland British fare with the exotic flavors and textures of food traditions from the various outposts of British colonial expansion. 

At the mere mention of the hated British Empire the perpetually outraged raced to their laptops and shouted their disapproval across social media. That was predictable. So too was the fact that, at this point, the main-stream media (increasingly irrelevant and parasitic on social media) found it newsworthy (as if "leftist twitter outrage" is news!) The hapless restauranteurs, having invested large amounts of money and a wealth of creativity into the venture, found themselves at the centre of a confected "controversy" concerning whether or not their eatery is "racist". This follows a previous incident in which a Brisbane couple opened a Vietnamese-themed restaurant named 'Uncle Ho's' - a cheeky dig at revolutionary darling Ho Chi Min - that so appalled and unhinged the twitterati that the restauranteurs received death threats and had to abandon the project. Yes, we now live in a world where people make death threats if they don't like the name of a cafe!

Since this web journal came to the defence of the beseiged restauranteurs at Saffron Colonial (long may they prosper!), it is only appropriate that we do so for British Colonial in Brisbane as well. The owners have expressed genuine surprise at the twitter stir  their establishment has created, although they are probably thankful for the flood of free nationwide publicity. The fact is that the miserable do-gooders who vent their rage on twitter about the supposed evils of the British Empire are not really the type of clientele who would ordinarily frequent refined eateries like Saffron Colonial or British Colonial anyway. Both restaurants appear to have conducted their market research and have a good knowledge of the restaurant-going public. Nothing in their research told them that offending the post-colonial sensitivies of vegan lesbians with majors in Gender Studies was going to be bad for business. The owners of British Colonial presented a rationale for the decor and design of the restaurant on their Facebook page, as follows:

'The sun never sets on the British Empire' is the oft-repeated quotation used when trying to explain British colonial style. In a nutshell, the style is a result of English citizens travelling the world during the empire's heyday, bringing with them typically heavy wooden furnishings and adapting to hot local climates with lighter local fare. These travellers also bought back exotic pieces from the Caribbean, India, the Far East and African as a way to show off how far they'd travelled. They tried to travel relatively light; campaign furniture (light, foldable and portable) also became part of the look. The results can mean a wild mix of light bamboo or cane furniture, heavier pieces, plaids mixed with animal prints, dark floors next to white walls and paisleys mixed with chintzes.'

Regarding their appeal and menu they say:

We believe that our décor and menu has great synergy with Brisbane’s climate and the expansive palette of our clientele, who are looking for a melting pot of food and beverages to enjoy in a relaxed atmosphere.

They also said, in reference to the haters:

We are very proud of our brand, dining experience and the loyal clientele we have [already] established...

While they have said they are "saddened" by the twitter storm, and they had no intention of offending, there are no signs that they are ready to concede to the online bullies. Their website promises "A refined modern dining experience with the adventure of east meets west in a plantation style club setting." They clearly view the historical encounter of east and west and the consequent synergies that were the British Empire as a fact to be celebrated rather than a travesty to be lamented in self-loathing fits of guilt and ideologies of recrimination. 

Needless to say, this is in Australia - the British colony par excellence. Yet there is, in Australia today, an entire sub-class of Whigs who hate and despise the British foundations of their own country and, by extension, must hate and despise that part of themselves which is necessarily and irrevocably British-Australian. It is a sign of maturity that one comes to terms with the complex and often nuanced and contradictory realities of one's cultural inheritance. Maturity is not something of which the outraged twitterati, pathetic puritans of 'safe spaces', can be accused.

 

* * * 

It should be clear to readers that the present author has a generally enhanced appreciation of the historical legacy of the British Empire. This is an honest response to his many travels in India and Asia and elsewhere. He remembers a conversation he had in Indonesia recently where a Javanese gentleman inquired as to where the author had been prior to arriving in the East Indies. "Malaya," the author replied, and added innocently that Malaya was very nice. "They were lucky," said the Javanese. "They were colonized by the British." Similar attitudes are not difficult to find elsewhere in Asia too. Leaving aside the small but very loud minority of resentful intelligentsia who have been educated in post-colonial angst, the British and their extraordinary Empire - the greatest the world has ever seen - are generally well-regarded. At very least, the British Empire is seen as comparatively benign where it is not admitted that it was an agent for good. The British have no cause to be ashamed of their imperial past. And a modern, prosperous nation like Australia - which began as a penal colony - speaks well of the merits of the entire British colonial enterprise. 

More generally, readers of these pages might also note the author's great fondness for east/west synergies. It is for this reason that he counts himself a neo-orientalist, and does so without the slightest hint of post-colonial guilt. He has no qualms about the Western appropriation of things oriental, nor with the eastern acquisition of the ways and means of the West. No doubt there are episodes of east/west encounter that are regrettable, and some lamentable consequences sometimes, but the positive synergies and hybridizations far exceed the failures. This is true in all aspects of culture. This present blog often features instances of the art and literature that is a product of east/west encounters, especially in a British context. The same, though, might be said of food. Authenticity is over-rated. Often, the British or more widely European versions of the foods of the east are - let us not be shy of saying so! - better than the original. A British curry can be better than any supposedly authentic dish one can find in the seething unsanitary mess that is Madras. What the French do to Vietnamese flavors is often better than anything you can find in French Indo-China. Chinese food in British Hong Kong or Singapore, nurtured to colonial tastes, is certainly better than what you find in the People's Republic today. So why not a restaurant, or many restaurants, that celebrate this brilliant east/west cuisine? 

For fine dining the British Colonial is located at 274 Hawthorne Rd, Hawthorne, Brisbane. Their website is here.

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

John Calvert - Eight Decades of Magic

The debonair John Calvert

Among the performing arts there is none so directly Platonic in spirit as illusionism and stage magic. It is the business of the magician to remind the audience, again and again, that what one sees is not reality, that the evidence of one's senses cannot be trusted. It is a lesson that Plato wants to impress upon his readers through such examples as the stick that bends in water and other such optical illusions. Similarly, the stage illusionist lets us know that the eyes cannot be trusted. It may look as if the woman has been sawn in half, but we know she hasn't. The whole reason this constitutes a form of entertainment is that we delight in the dissonance between what our senses perceive and what our mind tells us must be the case to the contrary. It is a distinctly Platonic delight, and thus stage magic is a distinctly Platonic form of entertainment. Herein lies the present author's fascination with magicians. 

*

* *

*  *  *

"The closer you look, the less you see."

- John Calvert, Devil's Cargo

There have been many great stage magicians, but surely none so dedicated as John Calvert - born Madren Elbern Calvert in New Trenton, Indiana, 1911. A legend of the theatre, a hero of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (yes, there is such an organisation, see here), he died only several years ago (2013) at the age of 102 and spent a remarkable eight decades performing tricks and illusions for audiences far and wide, on top of a life of adventure and Houdini-like escapes that won him a reputation as a real-life Indiana Jones. 

He flew planes, sailed the seven seas and performed dare-devil stunts. He was a man with fast fingers and exceptional physical dexterity. He was, as well, a conman, a rake, an impossibly handsome smooth-talker who excelled in all the arts of sleight of hand. He first started practising magic when he was barely ten years old after seeing the great Howard “Prince of Magic” Thurston perform in Cincinatti and made a profession of it when barely twenty. He was still performing feats of prestidigitation, touring and lecturing eighty years later. He performed his show at the London Palladium, aged 100. 

He also had a career in film. Most notably, he appeared in the role of the dashing freelance sleuth 'The Falcon' in three of the Falcon crime mystery series in the late 1940s, a reprise of the role originally made famous by George Sanders. There is a wonderful scene in Devil's Cargo (1948) when a (supposed) murderer seeks the help of the Falcon by calling at his apartment. The stranger picks up a portrait from the dresser and says to the Falcon, "This is a good likeness of you." "That's not me," says the Falcon. "That's John Calvert, the magician." He then holds up an identical portrait and says to the stranger, "This is me." After this, he dazzles the stranger with some demonstrations of the principle the hand is faster than the eye. It is a very funny moment. We have Calvert playing the Falcon referring to Calvert the magician and both being and not being Calvert at the same time. In many ways it is a moment that defines him. 

His real life adventures were often as remarkable as his stage performances. In 1959 his yacht was shipwrecked just off Arnhem Land in northern Australia. He escaped from the shipwreck accompanied by a chain-smoking, beer-drinking chimpanzee who he claimed was none other than 'Cheetah', Johnny Weissmuller's co-star in the Tarzan films, and a young Philipino singing beauty named Pilita who was clad in a tantalizing swim suit. The Australian media was nonplussed. Cheetah ran rings around the aborigines, Pilita wowed the gentlemen and Calvert, sporting his trademark pencil moustache and his hypnotist routine, swept the ladies off their feet. The media were scandalized by the exploits of this married man and went to the lengths of radio-phoning his wife in the USA. 

But his escape from Australia was even more daring than his escape from the sinking yacht. He convinced a financier in Tasmania to advance nearly £30,000 to make a film about the shipwreck. The film was to be called 'Port of Escape'. Shortly afterwards, though, Mr. Calvert departed from Down Under and no film of that description has ever appeared. The gullible antipodians were left holding the chimp (which died in Perth Zoo in 1968). 

  

John Calvert with Pilita (right) in Australia, 1959. 

In a parallel incident in 1963 a yacht being captained by Mr. Calvert - and named the Golden Falcon - was shipwrecked off the coast of Madras in western India. The handsome dare-devil made it ashore on that occasion accompanied by not one but four beautiful young women in bathing suits and dazzled the hapless Indians in much the same way he had the Australians. In 2005, at the age of 97, he was still sailing and rode out Hurricane Wilma in a yacht off the coast of Florida, on that occasion being rescued by the US coast guard, but still making it to shore unscathed. 

Some of his adventures in the air were equally remarkable. In 1948 he crashed his DC-2 at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank California and walked away without a scratch. 

As a stage magician he was known for his warm rapport with the audience and for pioneering such standard tricks as the 'Casper-the-friendly-ghost floating handkerchief' and the 'lit cigarettes on every finger' illusions. More spectacular were big ticket stunts such as firing a woman from a cannon into a basket above the stage and, his signature trick, cutting off the head of a volunteer from the audience with a buzz saw. This latter stunt often attracted famous guests to his shows such as Cary Grant, Danny Kaye and Gary Cooper. Danny Kaye, in fact, would sometimes appear in this role dressed as Hitler and as a grisly climax to the trick Calvert would place the dismembered Hitler head in a meat grinder and turn it into German weiners! As well as the stock-in-trade card tricks and rabbits from hats, at which he was unsurpassed, Mr. Calvert had, if nothing else, a strong sense of large-scale theatrics.

The thing about such characters as John Calvert is that they are, as the saying goes, 'larger than life', which is to say that, beyond the confines of a single individuality, they embody, as it were, an archetype. In the case of the magician, the archetype is both Platonic and Hermetic - the archetype of the trickster. Calvert was a trickster, writ large. He was able to live a long and full life in that role, entertaining and bringing joy to audiences throughout almost the entire duration of the XXth century. At the age of eight he made an egg disappear before his school mates at 'Show and Tell'. Thereafter he never got over the thrill of confounding an audience with a trick. The magician's joy is the look of discombobulation on the face of the audience as they try to figure out how the trick was done, in what way their senses have been deceived. It is an essentially intellectual art. The very nature of the "trick" is a battle of minds. It is estimated that John Calvert performed over 20,000 live shows, out-smarting audiences, in his 'trickster' role throughout his lifetime, an extraordinary achievement. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Bouguereau Revisited

Blind Homer led by his Guide, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Anyone who was tutored in the history of art before, say, 1990 - as was the present author - would almost certainly have been subjected to the standard narrative regarding the beginnings of modern art. In this narrative a cadre of courageous, forward-looking innovators in France in the latter half of the XIXth century, collectively referred to as the "impressionists" (a loose term, in fact, embracing many disparate artists), stood up to the stuffy, backward-looking, bourgeois art establishment which until then had maintained a virtual monopoly on what could and could not be accepted as "art" through their control of academic schools and the public exhibitions called the "salons". These "impressionists" introduced new techniques, employed a new pallette of colours, painted outdoors (in contravention to the studio tradition) and embraced new subject matter - workers and ordinary people rather than myths and gods. Breaking the constraints of tradition they paved the way for the modern art which was to follow, heroes of the brave new world.

In this narrative, one figure stands out as the arch-villain, the artist who represented everything that was wrong with academic art, who embodied the old and obstructed the arrival of the new - William Adolphe Bouguereau. He was by far the most popular and esteemed painter of his age, acknowledged as the greatest of the salon artists, but was despised and reviled by the "impressionists".  In what became standard art history the name "Bouguereau" became a term of abuse, if he was mentioned at all. His fall from grace was spectacular and says much about the rise of modernism. At his death in 1905 he was famous throughout Europe and America. His paintings were hung in all major galleries and were the pride of public collections. They were eagerly purchased by the wealthy, commanding extraordinary prices. Yet by the 1920s - on the other side of the watershed that was the Great War - his reputation had been completely eclipsed by the modernists. His name no longer appeared in art books - except as the antithesis of "real" art; his paintings were removed from galleries, put into storage, or destroyed, or sold for a pittance. He became a mere footnote in the history of art. The progressive narrative prevailed. The "impressionists" and those who came after them, an endless succession of new styles - post-impressionism, expressionism, cubism, dadism, etcetera - had boldly torn down the art of tradition and were the advocates of "progress" who had made a new art for a new world. After that, several generations of students were taught to loathe and despise Bouguereau and everything for which he stood. 

It was only towards the close of the XXth century, when modernism's angst was finally exhausted, that Monsieur Bouguereau's fortunes began to wax once more. Collectors began to develop new interest in his work, some of his greatest paintings were rescued from storage and dank cellars, and several notable well-curated exhibitions reintroduced him to the public. The greatest traditional painter of the XIXth century had finally reemerged from obscurity. In large measure this was a response to the public's revulsion at the degeneracy of what had come to pass as "art". The "impressionist" adventure had ended with self-proclaimed "artists" smearing their own faeces on a canvas and offering at Southby's for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the characteristics of modern art is the artist's disdain for the public. In the end, the public's disdain for the artist won out and the traditional art of painters such as Bouguereau was back in vogue. From the 1990s onwards his paintings were fetching prices of two or three million dollars at auction, prices rivalling those of the works of the "impressionists". 

Much of the slander to which Monsieur Bouguereau had been subjected was re-examined too. It was not true that he had actively obstructed the "impressionists", and the fact that it was he, almost single-handedly, who opened the Academic schools to women students is completely overlooked. A sober assessment reveals that it was much more the case that the "impressionists" invented scurrilous lies about him and defamed him with viciousness and malice. The greatest lie was that he was nothing more than a commercial painter motivated by money. In fact, he was a deeply dedicated, serious painter who lived for his art. Towards the end of his life he said, "Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come." This is not the Bouguereau who was routinely dismissed as a shallow phony by the likes of Paul Gaugin. Bouguereau's biography is redeeming. He was a tireless teacher of hundreds of students (men and women) and laboured with patience and perserverance for the principles he valued until the day he died. The hostile propaganda to which he has been subject is feeble and without substance. When the slurs of the "impressionists" and the later modernists are recontextualized, Monsieur Bouguereau reemerges as an important artist, a painter of great stature in the Western oil painting tradition who, like Rembrandt, was wrongly maligned for nearly one hundred years. 

For the present writer and all who were indoctrinated with the modernist art narrative a reassessment of Bouguereau necessarily involves a degree of unlearning what they were taught. It requires a new openess to ways of seeing and thinking - and feeling - that they were trained to hate and avoid. One is often not cognisant of the orthodoxies to which one has been subjected and that constrain one's worldview within a particular frame. The modernist frame largely consists of misrepresentations of past eras. It can take a great deal of mental effort to push those frames aside and to reimagine the past free of the constraining narratives. This is what is required if one wants to view the work of Bouguereau with fresh eyes rather than the tired, cynical eyes of the heirs of "impressionism". 

Much the same effort is required if one wants to re-engage with the broad project of European orientalism without the vicious, cynical frame imposed by Edward Said and his Marxist post-colonialist followers. Much of our education, indeed, consists of a systematic denegration of the XIXth century: its politics, its art, its values, its endeavours. Modernity in general is built upon the negation of what came before it. It is a remarkably negative enterprise. The key term "deconstruction" says it all. Modern art "deconstructed" Bouguereau.  Ours is an age of deconstruction. It is by no means easy to think outside of such parameters. It is clear, though, that in the end this "deconstruction" yields nothing but a pile of dust, or in the case of art a canvas smeared in excrement. Similarly, post-colonial deconstructions of "orientalism" finally yield nothing but failed nation states, ideologies of hateful vengeance, armies of terrorist barbarians and hordes of refugees. 

*

* *

* * *

Bouguereau was a prolific artist. Some 820 completed paintings are known. Among them are many fine portraits and works concerning the familiar themes of academic painting in the neoclassical style, along with religious works, but also a surprising number of depictions of common workers contrary to the "impressionist" narrative that supposed that academic painters were indifferent to the labours of ordinary people. Here, for example, is the very fine Young Shepherdess, 1885:

And here is a painting of a young girl fetching water from a spring from the same period:

And another. The Spinner, 1873:

The standard narrative that says that the conventions of academic painting forbade the depiction of the lower classes and their occupations and only permitted portraits of the wealthy with their property is not only an exaggeration, it is simply untrue. Yet another example, The Beggars, 1890:

These depictions are, no doubt, idealised - but that is just to say that Monsieur Bouguereau did not indulge in the cult of ugliness that came to typify modern art. The modern worldview is bleak. It regards any preoccupation with beauty and nobility as "elitist": only the ugly is real. It is truly remarkable that such a destructive and degenerate world-view could ever take hold of a civilization. Bouguereau was unashamedly an artist who pursued beauty in the belief that beauty and truth are synonymous and he has been condemned accordingly. 

What is even more remarkable is that Bouguereau and his fellow neoclassicists have been subject to the deeply corrosive and hypocritical critique of the feminists who see nothing but sexism in his Victorian idealisations of the feminine. Bouguereau is best known for his mythological paintings, and nearly all of them feature the naked female form. It was his rendering of the female form, and flesh, that his contemporaries admired most about his work. In this he was unsurpassed. He is first and foremost a painter of the feminine. Some examples:

Biblys, 1884

The Bather

Pandora

The Oreads

No painter has been so dedicated to the feminine and capturing a female ideal of beauty as Bouguereau. What is remarkable is that, while feminists are vociferous in their condemnations of the artists of this "old style" and its values, we rarely hear a voice raised against the ugliness and excesses of modernism. This confirms that the agenda of such critics is purely negative. Their motives are essentially vandalistic. They are concerned with tearing down the old order. The brutality and barbarism of the new order is invisible to them. There is remarkably little incisive intellectual criticism of the modernist order and, for example, the dehumanization, mechanicization and dismemberment of the female form in the celebrated paintings of Picasso. E. Michael Jones makes this point in his damning study The Degenerate Moderns, where he writes:

“Picasso’s mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice; they presage simultaneously in a visual way the concentration camp, the abortion clinic, and the pornographic film, and may well have helped pave the way for all three.”

Yet the feminists are more concerned with "deconstructing" Bouguereau's ideal of female beauty. Such double-standards and hypocrisy is endemic in Whig intellectuality. There is a deep, irrational hatred of the old. The vandalism of the new gets a free pass, precisely because it is vandalism and in this it finds its value. 

For a major French artist of the XIXth century Monsieur Bouguereau painted surprisingly few paintings on oriental themes. He was not a traveller and he was surprisingly free of the lure of the exotic. This counts against the accusation that he was motivated by the market. There was high demand for depictions of the Orient and oriental subjects in France and Europe generally throughout the period in which he lived and painted. Had he wished Bouguereau could have catered to this demand very profitably. His interests were elsewhere and he pursued those interests regardless of his clientelle. There is, all the same, one series of paintings of an Algerian model that counts as an instance of oriental art. The young woman is shown selling fruit in one - the painting is known as the Merchant of Granada - and the other, with the same model, is known generically as Girl with Pomegranite. See below.

The rehabilitation of Bouguereau need not be uncritical. In his extensive ouevre there are undoubtedly lesser paintings and, on the whole, he is open to the charge of an unbecoming sentimentality beyond what one might expect in his era. There are certainly works by Bouguereau that are not to the present author's tastes - and equally there are modernist works that he prefers for that matter. But there is, all the same, an injustice that needs restitution: Monsieur Bouguereau has suffered an historical wrong. More than that, the modernist narrative that consigned his paintings to the storerooms of art galleries everywhere and removed his name from the text books needs to be challenged and situated in the broader history of cultural vandalism and self-harm that has beset European civilization since the early years of the XXth century and has degenerated into outright farce in our own times. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black