Time, cycles, and impermanence

The deceptive feeling that the state of things when we first encounter them has always been that way. Plus pirates and carnivals!

August-September (and most of October), 2024

I’m off-schedule again. But the knowledge at the back of my mind that I do have a schedule is, I think, helping to encourage me to think about the newsletter and make sure I get it out at some point. I’ve noticed that a lot of the newsletters I subscribe to that don’t have a strict schedule have tended to tail off. It’s easy to make it a last priority, and for some people that makes sense. But this newsletter is something that I find really valuable on a personal level, and that I hope you find enjoyable, so I’m going to try to keep having my every-two-months schedule, more or less. There may be a catch-up newsletter at some point.

The theme that emerged in this newsletter, aptly enough, is time, and the way we might assume a deceptive sense of permanence when we first see something – one that time delights in overthrowing. I open with a new occasional feature, “Musing”, where I’ll share a random thought. It makes this newsletter a little long – blame that on the extra part-month.

Musing

The reason I’m off schedule again is that September was quite a crunch, which I think it true for a lot of people. Former Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren once wrote that Labour Day was the real new year, and I think she was right in a lot of ways. Especially in a northern clime (one that is no longer focused on agriculture), summer is a brief and glorious time that needs to be savoured, with vacations and long weekends. At my previous half-time office job, everyone got half an hour off their workday, or half a Friday off, during the summer (it was at a university, so summer was a bit less hectic). Even outside of students returning to school, the month after Labour Day marks the time when things start up again, people turn their full attention back to work, new projects get started, and so on.

But of course other dates also have a new year logic. In the medieval period in Europe, the new year was marked in the spring, which makes a lot of sense (again, in a northern climate) – when nature is renewing, when everyone is emerging from winter hibernation. The shift from a spring new year to a January one in the sixteenth century is something I have to deal with as a historian of carnival celebrations – carnival in February or March in the early part of the century, before the switch, was at the end of the year, but in retrospect we date it at the beginning of the next year, so I have to specify which dating I’m using when I refer to it. It’s interesting that the day for celebrating labour in Europe – May Day – reflects that old sense of a new year in the spring.

But our current New Year also has its own logic. Like Labour Day, at least in the Christian calendar, it comes after a (more concentrated) period of low work and festivity over the Christmas period. And of course it follows the winter solstice, the time when the days start to get longer and the solar cycle begins again. It’s notable that all of these dates really reflect a northern latitude and climate – another holdover from the colonial period of European domination. But at least in Canada, on a similar latitude to Europe, they still make sense in terms of the climate.

The Sneak Peek

Our next issue of Spacing will be hitting the newsstands soon. It’s themed around the State of the Arts – there’s been a lot of talk about the challenges artists face in Toronto, with the pandemic having imposed a brutal interruption and hit audience numbers, and high rents hitting creators. While troubles at some high-profile institutions have received the most attention (Artscape, TIFF, Hot Docs), we take a closer look at the grassroots level, and find, as well as challenges, an upswell of creative solutions.

While the current environment has indeed brought new difficulties, when you look back to past eras in Toronto, and elsewhere, you also find people bemoaning the state of the arts – and finding ways to overcome the difficulties of the time. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the current challenges seriously – rather, it means the need to make an effort to support the arts is always present.

The Tidbit

“Paul Revere was a silversmith, and, generally, they outnumbered lawyers in Colonial America. But why were any there at all, given that the land had little by way of silver mines?” asks this article about pirates in the New Yorker.

It turns out American 18^th century silversmiths were fences, converting pirated Spanish silver into respectable goods. It brings to light the role of pirates and slightly more official privateers in distributing the wealth of the Spanish Americas to Britain and its colonies. They played an essential in providing monetary liquidity in British America. “The familiar dollar sign, in fact, was originally the American symbol for the peso, the fabled ‘piece of eight.’ In cash-parched colonial America, illicitly acquired Spanish silver was the predominant currency, so it became the sign for money.” In Spain, the riches of the Indies, which mostly flowed to the state, ended up messing up the economy, but those same riches, pirated and shared between state and private investors, provided an invaluable capital boost to Spain’s enemies – Britain, Holland, sometimes France – and their colonies. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they were the drivers of incipient capitalism.

What’s Up

Speaking of carnival and the crunch of September, I was really honoured to be able to speak at a conference at the end of September, “Communities of Print,” in honour of the recently deceased historians Natalie Zemon Davis and James McConica. Natalie Davis’s article “The Reasons of Misrule” was what inspired me to study carnivals in 16^th century France in the first place, and I wrote in my very first newsletter about how exciting it was to be the copyeditor for one of her final books. At the conference, I spoke about how the carnival society of Rouen, the Abbey of the Conards, used the development of the city’s printing industry to enhance their carnival celebrations and their reputation.

Woodcut frontispiece from one of the first print publications of the Abbey of the Conards, 1537.

Quotable

“A commander in chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event – the position from which we always contemplate it. The commander in chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an event that is occurring.” – Tolstoy, War and Peace, book 11, ch. 2

Tolstoy has a lot of opinions about history, which he shares at some length in War and Peace. But this one struck me as something that is definitely a danger when looking at history. If you start studying history at a certain point, it’s easy to assume that the situation you find at the start of your period has been the case for a long time, and is the starting point of subsequent changes. But in fact, that situation in itself might be quite new, and is just another phase in a state of continuing change.

I found this I my own study of carnival in sixteenth-century Rouen. Some scholars kind of assumed the elaborate carnival festivities they found being celebrated in cities in this period had been happening seemingly forever, at least since the early Middle Ages. But they actually seem to have developed in the late Middle Ages, an outgrowth of the increasing size and sophistication of cities. In historical terms, they were relatively recent.

Pic Pick

Toronto has had the same subway trains ever since I moved back to Toronto in the 1990s. At the time, I didn’t realize they were relatively new (they looked much like the previous ones I’d first encountered in the 1980s). Now, they are old, and on one line they’ve already been replaced, but not yet on the one I use most frequently. The new ones are quite different and sleek-looking – clearly a new, modern generation – but what I’m fond of with the old ones is how visibly manufactured they are. You can see the bolts. They are not ashamed to be machinery, and to remind you of that fact.

The Shout-Out

As an undergrad, I was a fan of the 1984 album Forever Young by Alphaville, the German synth-pop band with a name inspired by a Godard movie (which I watched at some point specifically because of the band’s name). The actual title song was not one of my favourites, but my wife Molly, who is not a fan of theirs in general, has a soft spot for it and wrote about it in her newsletter:

• Why can’t we stay young?

She puts it in the context of the cold war – after all, it includes the line “Are they going to drop the bomb or not?”. But the song about the inevitable loss of youth relates to the Cold War in more fundamental ways, too. The former East Germany, Molly suggests, “represents, in nation format, what is true for all of us. We can’t return to the world we grew up in; it doesn’t exist anymore.”

But to me, the ultimate cold war song on the album is one that never became a hit, but is my favourite, the less-known “Summer in Berlin.” It’s about “when you're longing for a summer by the Wall” and captures the strangeness of a divided Berlin that hosted a remote Western enclave within East Germany. I also learned, Googling it, that it includes a reference to the June 17, 1953 uprising against the communist government in East Germany, and as a consequence was banned there.

But the song also, to me, captures the sense of summer in the city, the mix of possibility and oppression that comes from the sun beating down on concrete.

Feel how your heart beats like a heavy machine
The sound of the traffic is like a silent dream
The dust in the park, the exhaust from the cars
Ascends in that heated afternoon, you touch a sweaty body

I love the sense of yearning it conveys for something imperfect yet exhilarating – a feeling that would come to fruition just a few years later, when that wall itself, that was there throughout my youth and seemed so permanent, like something that had always been there, suddenly collapsed and Germany embarked on a roller-coaster ride of reunification.

The day feels so tired
From the lead in the air and the fire in the skies
Life seemed to be a fault of grace, but it's okay
It gave you a kiss in the middle of the crossroads

The video is disappointingly not very urban.