The Romance of Zenobia's Palmyra

While I was looking for Georg Niemann's images of Split ca. 1907 I happened across a reference to Robert Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tadmor, in the desert (London, 1753), and it actually made me sit up and clap my hands, because Palmyra is one of my favorite places, and to find such a plethora of wonderful images is like getting the best kind of birthday presents.


I went to Palmyra in the early 1990's, before Americans were persona non grata in the Middle East (yes, that recently. We were actually welcome a lot of places back then). I went on a 5-week trip with my good friend Gwyan, who was working in London with me doing graphics at the time, to Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel. It was a fabulous trip, and one of the best places was the long-lost desert city of Palmyra, destroyed as an example by a Roman emperor.

We went from by bus from Hamma before going on to Damascus. I remember seeing a many-pointered sign-post on the way of which one of the pointers (pointing off into sandy flatness) said, "Baghdad 413 km" (or something), and feeling completely surreal. When we got there, we were blown away: across the desert, scattered around like toothpicks after a storm, were hundreds of beautiful sandstone columns, statues, carved cornices, and so on - carved from a beautiful orangey stone, like the desert itself. Some of it still stood (or stood again), some of it lay flat, and some was piled up randomly like pick-up sticks.


Nearby was a podunk little town of cement-block housing and boiling-hot, straight, lonely streets crammed up against high earthen walls. Within these walls lay the delicate heaven of the oasis itself: acre after acre of green trees and bushes, surrounded by ditches and pools of water, soaking into the fine desert soil. Where the wall grew lower we would linger, staring at the bounty and the lushness, and wish we could go inside.

The town was full of bored Arabs and on the outskirts, and in the ruins themselves, one could see Beduin folk hanging out, making tea or riding their camels or horses in lovely dark blue robes, the horses or camels arrayed in hand-woven saddlecloths with long tasseled bits. It was almost shockingly romantic.


Several of the buildings in the town housed trinket stores and sold things such as Beduin cloth, souvenirs, postcards of the Godforsaken main street, and any number of other things. I had always wanted a Beduin camel-blanket and found one in a little store run by a young man who looked as if he were about fifteen. After seeing the ruins we went in and bargained with him in a desultory way, drinking cups of sweet tea and discussing the price in a very slow and roundabout flirtation between buyer and seller. After awhile, he heard we were glassblowers and offered to show us his secret room. But more about that below.

Palmyra itself began as an oasis town:

"...[it] was made part of the Roman province of Syria during the reign of Tiberius (14–37). It steadily grew in importance as a trade route linking Persia, India, China, and the Roman empire. In 129, Hadrian visited the city and was so enthralled by it that he proclaimed it a free city and renamed it Palmyra Hadriana." [wiki]

The city is cited in a number of texts (under the name of Tadmor) as having been built by King Solomon, and with Roman conquest grew to be an extremely prosperous and elegant city, with a key part to play in the importation of desirables from the East to the Roman empire.

"Beginning in 212, Palmyra's trade diminished as the Sassanids occupied the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Septimius Odaenathus, a Prince of Palmyra, was appointed by Valerian as the governor of the province of Syria. After Valerian was captured by the Sassanids and died in captivity in Bishapur, Odaenathus campaigned as far as Ctesiphon (near modern-day Baghdad) for revenge, invading the city twice. When Odaenathus was assassinated by his nephew Maconius, his wife Septimia Zenobia took power, ruling Palmyra on the behalf of her son, Vabalathus. Zenobia rebelled against Roman authority with the help of Cassius Dionysius Longinus and took over Bosra and lands as far to the west as Egypt, establishing the short-lived Palmyrene Empire. Next, she attempted to take Antioch to the north. In 272, the Roman Emperor Aurelian finally retaliated and captured her and brought her back to Rome." [wiki]


Zenobia, known as "the Warrior Queen", expanded her empire and took over Egypt at the age of twenty-nine with her mounted desert-tribe soldiers and a great deal of skill, but was doomed to lose it within a very few years:

"In her short lived empire, Zenobia took the vital trade routes in these areas from the Romans. Roman Emperor Aurelian, who was at that time campaigning with his forces in the Gallic Empire, probably did recognise the authority of Zenobia and Vaballathus. However this relationship began to degenerate when Aurelian began a military campaign to reunite the Roman Empire in 272-273. Aurelian and his forces left the Gallic Empire and arrived in Syria. The forces of Aurelian and Zenobia met and fought near Antioch. After a crushing defeat, the remaining Palmyrenes briefly fled into Antioch and into Emesa.
Zenobia was unable to remove her treasury at Emesa before Aurelian successfully entered and besieged Emesa. Zenobia and her son escaped from Emesa on camel back with help from the Sassanids, but they were captured on the Euphrates River by Aurelian’s horsemen. Zenobia’s short lived Egyptian kingdom and the Palmyrene Empire had ended. The remaining Palmyrenes who refused to surrender were captured by Aurelian and were executed on Aurelian’s orders."


Except for Zenobia: she was taken back to Rome and paraded through the streets in golden chains. Aurelian was so impressed with her beauty, dignity, intelligence and general queenly bearing, however, that he pardoned her quickly and gave her a villa in Tibur (now Tivoli) where she lived in luxury, becoming a respected socialite, prominent philosopher and wife of a Roman governor and senator - and bearing the ancestors of many prominent Roman citizens.

I think this is one of the most interesting stories I know about this time period. And the ruins themselves live up to it, that's the best part. The rug dealer's secret room, however, did not.

It was a tiny room with florescent lighting. All along one wall were shelves and shelves of ancient Roman artifacts - small ones, such as coins and dusty, devitrified little bottles and shards of Roman pottery. "Glass," he told us, gesturing, "Roman glass."

Not my fake: this is what it's supposed to look like!

We looked at the glass with the practiced eye of glass people, and shook our heads, smiling. "This isn't old," we said. "Come on, admit it!" We said this with smiles and the sort of gentle nod-and-wink conspiratorial air of people who had been drinking tea with another person for two days. "No, no, really," he protested, his hands held out palms up, "Roman glass!"

We began to point out all the ways the glass didn't really look like truly aged glass. The oily sheen, we said, that was supposed to be age, wasn't on the surface of the glass, it was somewhere...inside it. We weren't sure how, but it seemed awfully like Mylar stuffed down inside.

He began to grin - he just couldn't help it. He was only fifteen, after all. Picking up one bottle, he showed it to us: "This one, made of a light bulb, cut off on the bottom. The neck - only plastic! See? Easy to melt so the top looks like it's hand-made."

We peered at the thing closely. Covered with a layer of sprayed-on grit, there was a little window for the Mylar to peek out, and the neck really was plastic! We started laughing, and couldn't stop. It was hilarious! A light bulb! Cut off! He showed us some of his other things, and described how it was done. In the end, we bought the light bulb one from him, along with some other ones that we thought were wonderfully inventive - AND the Beduin camel-blanket - and shook hands with him, thanking him for making our trip so much more interesting.

So who was laughing all the way to the bank? Who cares? I still have the light bulb bottle, and it still makes me smile. More, perhaps, than my beautiful pictures of the fabled city of Palmyra.


(The two modern images of the ruins are from an unknown website with beautiful travel photos)

Stamps!

Found these images of Split via World Cultural Heritage As Seen Through Postage Stamps. Very cool.

Photography, Space, and the Brain: In Appreciation of Drawing

(Continued from last week)

Here we are: some of the great plates from Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia by Robert Adam, a Scottish architect who visited Split during the last forty years of Venetian rule (which ended in 1797). As a consequence, I get to see aspects of the city as it was over two hundred years ago, before some of the more significant growth of the town.

Of course, many of these images feel much more romantic and exciting than they probably really were. Adams came from a Romantic appreciation of ruin, so the elimination of unsightly modern clutter and the artful placement of fallen capitals, etc. is likely. As a result, my modern attempts to recreate his "views" with a camera are significantly lacking by comparison!

Also, please excuse the imperfect Photoshopping; I had neither the time nor the stitching-software which might have made for a more sophisticated look... still, you get the picture - so to speak. I am heartily aware how dull these images make the city look, yet I still find them fascinating: they speak of changing attitudes and how the vision of the age can affect what we record. The modern world is not always beautiful, but we do need to beware of romanticizing the ancients. Doing this project was a real eye-opener [sic] for me in terms of how we look at and record the world. I learned a lot.



One of the first things I learned is that you can't always count on the environment to co-operate. It is probably good that this gate is in restauro, but it doesn't help my cause much. Still, you can see it hasn't changed too significantly, except for the hilarious little windows (into houses on the other side) now have modern windows in them, and people can actually pass through this gate now (in Adam's time it was bricked up). And please note the little piece of column is still lying on the ground there, after all these years! It's much less prepossessing than Adam made it look (though, to be honest, it's probably not really the same one).



The Peristyle has changed hardly at all, except somehow the floor in front of it has been lowered; there are steps just beyond the woman striding through the foreground, and on the opposite side, under the entrance to the domed Vestibulum, someone has made an opening with stairs down to the lower levels of the Palace, the place where, historically, things were unloaded and loaded from ships at the sea-gate. Nowadays, of course, this area in front of the South wall is filled in and the famous Riva, where people like to promenade, lies there. But Adam describes a difference:

"From the Peristylium we ascend by a flight of steps into the Porticus [the gateway area at the top of the steps]... From this there were two doors to two winding stairs, which led to the ground story, in order that the slaves might have access thither, without passing through any of the apartments."

Nowadays, of course, these two little spaces lead nowhere and are merely decorative, with souvenir shops inside. And, of course, modern people simply don't look as interesting as all those people in turbans lounging and looking at textiles (but did they really look like that?). As anyone who's ever taken snapshots of something and discovered a horrible pipe going right across what you were looking at but didn't notice, cameras aren't smart about clutter. So when Adam sat down to draw - and there was that pile of broken pots or the horrible old man with leprosy, the kid peeing against the steps, the graffiti - he simply left them out, and concentrated on the architecture (with of course some Picturesque-ing of the filler subject, to keep it interesting).



Another thing I learned is how different a camera is than drawing with one's own eyes. I know, there's tons of discussion about this in the art world and beyond, but it has never been brought home to me so strongly the limitations of the camera. When I tried to capture the Vestibulum, I discovered to my horror that Adam's beautiful flat projection of this spot took in more than half of the actual surrounding space. Without magically hovering in the air twenty feet away and using my x-ray vision to photograph it (which wouldn't have satisfactorily flattened the space, anyway), I couldn't possibly fit even a small part of it into the lens of my camera.

And here I have to stand back for a moment and ponder.

We go through the world, looking at everything and never fully appreciating how wonderful our sense of sight is. If I include peripheral vision - without turning my head - I can see throughout approximately a 240 degree radius. This means, when confronted with an awe-inspiring view, I can gasp at its vastness; I can appreciate the spacial intensity of a place, from top to bottom and side to side, without working very hard at it. It's true, as the Cubists said, that our way of seeing is actually made up of dozens, if not hundreds, of little glances. But our brain stitches this together so seamlessly together into a wondrous whole.

Artificial Intelligence researchers have spent years and tons of money trying to figure out how to replicate this ability of the brain's, but it simply takes too much processor power to reproduce. What we do unconsciously, without hardly trying, computers simply flail at. And cameras - well, cameras just simply... well, suck. I mean, they are a wonderful instrument, and create art out of thin air. But there are places where they just can't compete with someone sitting and looking. Looking through a camera is, of necessity, like looking through a square hole at something (probably because you're doing just that).

When Adam decided to draw the dome, or the entrance to the Temple of Jupiter (now a church), he didn't worry about "getting it all in the frame." He simply drew what he saw, with his marvelous eyes that Nature had given him. And - as natural as anything - he laid it all out flat, so it made sense. Not like my weird, distorted attempts above.

And to take it a bit farther, I find myself wondering how hard could it be for someone to create a digital camera with a fixed fish-eye lens and pre-programmed hardwiring that would compensate for the fish-eye distortion, allowing us to take pictures much more like what we see...and laying it into a flat format much like what Adam created two hundred years ago? I don't believe it could ever produce as lovely a product as we can create with trained eyes and hands like he did, actually looking around us and putting down what's important about what we see, taking in as much as we need to make the picture work. But it could help us to escape that feeling of looking down a well at the world when we want to capture it with a camera.



Case in point: when I went to take a picture of the entrance to the church, I found that the place I really needed to be standing to take a picture was about eight feet off the edge of a drop-off, standing fifteen feet in the air. How did Adam draw it? Simple, I think: he looked around him, drew what he saw, and then extrapolated, drawing people to scale and making it appear farther away than it really was (thus encompassing it all).


And, unfortunately, they don't allow photography in the church. Perhaps sometime I'll go back and do a sketch, though I hear from others in my family that the interestingly patterned bricklaying in the ceiling is still on view. above all the rich trappings of the church itself.



As you can see, some things have changed a great deal. The Temple of Aesculapius, for example, used to include a building and a great forecourt as part of its status as a temple (see the map at the bottom). However, with Christianity and the pressing need for more dwellings, this temple is now in a tiny back-alley (as you can see below). It is, of course, in restauro - which in the long run is good. I had to crouch in a smelly doorway to take my seven photographs of the poor thing in order to get it all in, and then warp it like crazy in Photoshop to get it all to fit together! (And the graffiti is indeed cut off like that, it's not an artifact of the stitching).





The gate in the western wall of the old Palace seems to be slowly disappearing, swallowed by buildings from the 19th century, mostly.

In any case, the search goes on to try and grasp the details of the changes and convolutions the city has gone through as it ages. I want to see it in my mind, turning and twisting, rising and falling: and use it somehow, provide a rich and changing backdrop for something, because even before the Venetians it was an interesting place. It has always been a refuge, where people came when hordes came over the mountains, or during war-torn years. It has never been unoccupied, and it shows: like the beautiful lines on the face of an old woman who has been everywhere and seen everything, and is still here to remember it for us.

Inside, Outside, Upside Down (And Inside Out)

I'm thrilled to have discovered the Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia by Robert Adam, a Scottish neoclassical architect who is "considered by many to be the greatest architect of the late 18th century" [wiki]. Spalatro, in this case, being a Scottish architect's spelling of Spalato, the Italian (and more importantly, Venetian) name for Split.

I've been slowly becoming obsessed with this city. I wander the streets when I have time, trying to figure it out, making sketches and peering through archways. It's not just that the city is old, that the streets are crooked and narrow (sometimes extraordinarily narrow) and the buildings are an interesting hodgepodge of eras and styles; it's not even that every part of the Old Town is full of Roman bits, arching over streets and providing structure for other, less well-planned building efforts. It's really more about a strange Escher-esque quality. The city feels as if, sometime in the past, parts of its stony, unforgiving insides have been turned inside out.


Disembodied arches sprout from the sides of walls, going nowhere; ancient stoneworks stride through shiny boutiques, contemptuous of their surroundings. In some places, ancient corridors have shed their roofs and become alleyways, complete with balconies and shutters - and turning, without warning, into corridors again, which lead unceremoniously into rooms whose arched Roman windows look out over the waterfront: rooms without roofs, patios with glass windows.


My favorite alleyway dead-ends in a half dome which springs from the walls of two houses, covering the end of the little street with its lost interior. Who knows what living-space the dome used to cover? And below it, a lovely Venetian window, complete with stone tracery, which used to look out on some view of the Temple of Aesculapius, perhaps; but now it is filled in by a modern window-frame which looks through the same window in the opposite direction, out into the alleyway which, perhaps, used to be a corridor.


I marvel at this ability of a town to twist itself around, passing through the eye of a tracery and back again. It seems to me different than any other place I've been, and yet I keep remembering cities - York, Jerusalem, Istanbul - full of the layerings of past and present. They, too, have the richly overembellished rooflines; they, too, have achieved a fanciful arrangement of spaces possible only through centuries of adding structure onto structure onto ruin.

But Split defies them, somehow. There is something about the core of this town which is different from the organic growth-patterns of other ancient cities, and I think I may have finally put my finger on what it is. It stems from the origin of the city as a 9-acre Roman palace, planned and executed with typical Roman efficiency, strength and symmetry.

Only part of the massive Iron Gate peeks out at you from behind a Venetian palace. The rest of the buildings came later still.

It is these, the strong 1700 year old bones built by tidy minds, which poke resolutely through the 300 odd years of high Venetian dash and dazzle, 10 years of Napoleonic facelifting, and 100 years of Austrian absentee-landlording. As you walk, you encounter a mobius strip of sorts, as the city flips around you - but then there they are, those tenacious bones, marking that single few years in history when a Roman emperor built a special place for himself to retire to.

Diocletian, the emperor who retired to this singular palace, was an extraordinary man, lowborn and local (from near Solano, just around the corner of the bay), who rose through the ranks of the Roman legions to be declared Emperor on a hilltop near Antioch. He co-ruled for twenty years (284-305) with his friend and fellow-officer Maximian, securing previously unsecurable borders and restructuring the governing system so that what was a crumbling Empire lasted another hundred years. In 305, after a prolonged illness, he became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate from his position - and moved to his palace to live out the next seven years, gardening and looking out over the sea. He was said to be proud of the cabbages he had planted with his own hands.


(By the way, I recommend the Wikipedia article on Diocletian. Sometimes Wikipedia can be a bit dry, but Diocletian's inimitable personality seems to simply pop through the listing of battles, conflict, and death, much as the bones of his palace continue to pop through the modern walls of everyday Split. The Roman ruling class always reads like a cheesy soap-opera, with people poisoning people and other people sleeping with their sisters; but Diocletian comes across as a really smart, straightforward idealist with plenty of discipline who was... well, charismatic).

So now I'm letting all this stuff run around inside my head, in the hopes that some interesting fiction will come out of it. I leave the back of my head open as I go about the business of living, and hope the spores come and settle - and grow. Is that enough mixing of metaphors? Mushrooms with legs come to mind.


But back to the wonderous book by the blessed Robert Adam: the man came during the Venetian reign, at a time when those lovely bones were still very much out in the open, and - thank you, thank you! - the man did engravings of familiar places all around the city. Not only that, but he did sectionals of the Palace as it must have been, comparison drawings of the ruins all around him and what they must have looked like originally, and a complete floor-plan of the Palace as it was in his own time and as it likely was when it was brand-new (based, in part, on his own studies in Rome, where he read all the ancient architectural writers such as Vitruvius and Pliny the Younger).


Included - get this! -is also a comprehensive description of the uses of all the spaces within the original palace.

Check it out at the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, a resource I won't be forgetting soon.

So, in the interests of capturing a bit of the fascination, I've included a few of his fabulously Picturesque plates below, with my own pictures of the same angle and the same spot. Okay, this turned out to be harder than I thought, so I'm saving it for a whole 'nother blog post, probably in the next day or two, so hang with me, please. Cheers!

How Comics Should Look

Recently, I took it on myself to write to the editors at Fantagraphics, who among other things translate French and Belgian comic books, and ask them why, oh why they haven't translated more of one of my favorite bandes dessinées series, the Spiffy Adventures of McConey, by Lewis Trondheim? The Hoodoodad* and Harum Scarum are great, and I'd like to read the other eight.

The answer, it turns out, is that Americans (and other English speakers, apparently) don't seem to like those big "album" style books. Fantagraphics' Kim Thomson very kindly wrote me back:

"Alas, the two books, especially the second, didn't do at all well for us, and then NBM went ahead and translated two more of the McConey albums in their ODDBALLZ comic book series. (But you'll notice they discontinued the series and never released the McConey work in album format themselves either.)

I think part of the problem with our series was using the French album format which American retailers and most
fans seem to resist. I'm toying with the idea of someday repackaging the McCONEY material in the smaller and
thicker (2 or 3 French albums to one album) format, but alas again, I'm so backed up with my foreign-comics commitments that it doesn't look likely to be soon... Keep your fingers crossed..."

Curiously, when I asked my children whether they preferred the big (French-style) album format for Asterix and Tintin or the smaller format that both series seem to be released in nowadays, their response was a resounding "The big one!" And I remember discovering Tintin long ago, in the Berkeley Co-op (which would tell you how long, if you're in the know) and being fascinated and impressed with the large, beautiful, brightly-colored format. Particularly, I loved the hardcover books, and how with the large format it felt I was opening a magic book to another universe. I was so taken with them that within a year I had all of them, out of my own pocket-money, despite the fact that they were so intensely expensive compared to the cheap American comics at the local store. And unlike the cheap comics on newsprint, the Tintins held up to years of re-reading, looking neither smudged nor murky at the end of it all (though a little soft around the edges).

So why don't grownups like the Big Ones? Do they take up too much shelf space? Too much space on the table next to your bed, or the space next to your bowl of cereal? What, exactly, is there to dislike? Perhaps, and I hope this is not true, people like things that are familiar, and these aren't a familiar size.

For a number of years now, I have gone to France as often as I and my family can afford, and each time we make a pilgrimage to a particular store in St. Michel that sells literally thousands of these kinds of comic books, along with videos, manga, and other things. Imagine going into a shop that rises up on several levels, with at least two of them literally solid with the spines of comic book albums. Every book on the shelves is large format, beautifully printed, and relatively reasonably priced (considering you can get ten or twenty years out of them; the terrible bindings I've been finding on modern American softcover graphic novels only last a few months in the hands of enthusiastic readers before they start giving up their pages like moulting birds). We always choose two or three books to buy. They have to be readable in our lame high-school French, and at least one of them has to be readable to my daughters, because we can only fit a couple in our luggage. But they're worth it.

Sigh.


I've discovered any number of gems this way, over the years, beginning in the 1980's (pre-children, of course) with The Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (above), and by extension, Jacques Tardi (the author), who has created any number of interesting and memorable characters over the years. Several have been translated into English, though not, alas, for any great length of time (Adele Blanc-Sec in English costs, used, up to $45 now and is not all that easy to find).



On the lighter side, I discovered Lewis Trondheim this way, too. Or, rather, I saw his stuff there, and then was able to find some of them at home. I gobbled down any of his stuff I could find in English: the high-school French simply doesn't cut it, though, as his dialogue is witty and full of colloquialisms. Except, of course, for the hilarious Mr. O, and The Fly (La Mouche), neither of whom need any dialogue at all to be funny.


And Melusine, who we all adore, is not likely to be found this side of the Atlantic anytime soon, more's the pity.

So what I want to know is, what's wrong with the album format? I'm not a huge comic person, despite enjoying the above folk, as well as Pogo (who I had a crush on as a child), Los Bros Hernandez, old Donald Duck, Maus, Sandman, and various other newer bits and bobs. I'm not one of the True Believers, who can cite names and dates and so on by heart. But I will always remember that shining moment of discovering the Tintins under the stairs at the Co-op. And I wish, with all my heart, that somewhere, sometime, perhaps when I'm old and creaky, there will be a comic book store -in English! - that rivals Boulinier on Boulevard St Michel.




Links (etc.):

More, and even more, about Lewis Trondheim.


Rowrbazzle

*Don't be discouraged by Amazon; they have a terrible description of the Hoodoodad, making it sound annoying in the extreme.

My Clockpunk iGoogle Theme

I've heard that Google can take weeks to approve something, but I've been working for much of this week on my Clockwork Theme. I'll be submitting it to them tonight. Above is a little sliver of it. Wish me luck, and I'll post when/if it shows up.

Counting Your Way to Safety

When I was a child I used to eat M&Ms in a particular way.

For plain M&Ms, I separated them into colors and then ate them in pairs, one on each side of my mouth. If the number of M&M's of any particular color was not even, then I was presented with a problem. I could divide the offender in half, and eat it that way, or I could save all the "orphans" and eat them in a great handful, succumbing to greediness and a curiously thrilling sense of chaos - as if I was letting go, dipping into a terrifying vortex for a few moments while savoring the veritable explosion of chocolate on my tongue.

Peanut M&Ms were devoured in a different way. First, the candy was sucked off, and the chocolate bitten in half; these halves were sent to separate sides of my mouth to be chewed up. Then the peanut was broken into its two halves (but the little sprout inside taken out) and tucked into my cheek while skin and sprout were chewed and swallowed. Lastly, the peanut.

It would often take me more than an hour to fully savor a regular-sized bag of M&Ms.

I find, now, that this idea of "coming out even" is considered a prime obsessive-compulsive trait. The number of steps from point A to point B; bites of food; pages in a book; and so on, all are carefully counted and the end result made to "come out even", even if it means taking an extra, smaller step at the end to accomplish this. The sufferer is compelled to order their world in this way, to "right" the anomalous odds (so to speak), to keep track of numbers, consciously or subconsciously. The compulsion is just that, an involuntary urge which has nothing to do with choice: a deep, sometimes desperate need to order the universe, usually as an anxiety reaction, which sometimes comes to rule the person's life.

Nothing to do with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but strangely compelling. Thanks to Lost Circuits

For me, it lacked this overriding element. In my case, it was more an asthetic thing, a combination of natural fastidiousness and a deep belief in the magic of symmetry. It was a game I played with myself, an ongoing artwork, a way of setting things in order, creating beauty with my mouth and mind. A meditation of sorts.

Which is, I think, less unusual than we adults probably think. My elder daughter, for example, is constantly creating things which, in an adult, would be considered conceptual art pieces: drawing around shadows on the driveway with chalk and then going back five minutes later with a different colored chalk and doing it again - and again; making a "drawing" of a bumpy road near our house by letting the bumps move her pencil over the paper - for the full six-mile stretch, resulting in an extraordinary drawing of motion and time.


These kinds of activities, this kind of art-making and rule-making, are absolutely everyday things for children. Step on a crack, break your mother's back; step on a line, break your father's spine. Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a needle in your eye. Gruesome, some of them, but based on a well-ordered (if not entirely fact-driven) universe designed specifically to keep dishonesty, monsters, and general chaos at bay. Anyone who has read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn will know that the minds of children hold the seeds of whole cultures of superstition and ritual.

Which leads me to think: perhaps this is really just a universal trait, this desire to order the universe, to create something out of nothing. Those who are educated do it through "acceptable" channels, such as science or research; those who are ignorant - children and the uneducated - do it anyway, through ritual and superstition. We all use what tools we have to hand. Which may, to some extent, explain why it is so hard to change people's view of their world.

Growing up alone in my large, dark house, I made up my own rules for how the Dark side worked. There was no question of denying the ghosts who changed the water temperature of the bath, or the Thing that lived under the bed: it was more a matter of organizing them enough to keep them at bay. So eventually, for example, the Thing was no longer able to grab my ankles if there was anything covering my legs.

At first this meant "if my legs are completely covered"; but in the naturally bureaucratic mind of a child (me), this definition was continually analyzed, questioned, and redefined (in much the same way the early Catholic church was constantly defining itself via debate and endlessly nuanced theological distinctions), until I was safe if anything "touched" my legs. Further questions came up, such as "Are buttocks considered part of the legs?" And eventually the committee in my head decided these things (it was in favor of the buttocks), and I was able to, for example, keep the Thing at bay through the simple expedience of underwear.

And of course, eventually this led to the vanquishing of the Thing by virtue of its defanging - as all dull, rule-oriented bureaucracy will do with wild beasts and interesting dangers, in the end.

The Exception That Proves the Rule: Calvin, questioner and rule-breaker (and creator of the fabulous game Calvinball) was funny precisely because the Calvin Systems and the Adult Systems did not intersect well.

It's certain, however, if you give children any chance at all to create their own taxonomy for the universe, they will do so. For in definition lies security, and so ignorance will make its own rules, self-creating the world: to make rules is to make known the unknown, to fend off the arbitrariness of the Universe.

The obsessive-compulsive disorder's version of this, the need to count, to tidy, wash one's hands until they bleed because by doing something a certain number of times in a certain way you can define it - I think this is merely an extreme extension of our need to overcome the arbitrary. Children often go through an obsessive-compulsive stage, becoming a victim of their own natural ordering process. When the need does not recede with childhood, when it goes on to dominate one's life, interfering with relationships and causing self-damage - at this point, the "disorder" concept begins to come into play. When you find yourself unable to stop coming up with new rituals, or afraid that you are going crazy, or simply unable to get to work within an hour of the normal start time because you have to go back and do something again, and again, until it is right, because that is the only way to find peace - then you are suffering. This is a different thing entirely.


But in regular life, as Frances' friend Albert demonstrates in Bread and Jam for Frances, it's nice when your lunch can come out even. A little bite of this, a little bite of that, some soup, some salted egg: eating, and other things, can be a nicer experience when you put a little thought and structure into it, when it blends perfectly. Mindfulness is not a bad thing, and making up rules to make one's life more interesting can be a good thing. Eating your apple and raisin tart in small bites, and dividing each raisin in half to get at the sweet bit as you go, can be a way to help bring yourself into the present, to pay attention. It means you are tasting, exploring, nodding to each part of what you're eating. Going through life like this can mean you are not gulping down experiences, not rushing yourself, but making a way to see things, feel things, notice things.

But beyond mindfulness, I believe a studied superstition is more interesting than a fully-modernized lifestyle, free of ritual and meaning. To throw salt over my shoulder or knock on wood, though my forebrain knows it does not affect the universe, still makes me feel a sense of connection to an older magic. I like to encourage my children to find creative solutions to their fears. I still believe in the power of twelve inches, twelve hours, twelve pieces: I prefer it to metric in many cases. And I still enjoy the slow ritual of dissecting my peanut M&Ms.