Notes on Everything, Vol. 6

Cluster bombs, cinema's slipstream and Japanese wind-telephones.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

I visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid last week, home to The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). It’s a trip - see above.

The Prado’s note on Garden calls it Bosch’s “most complex and enigmatic creation” but suggests it is, in the end, an exercise in pessimistic moralism. Maybe. According to many religions, we live in a brief interregnum between eternal realities, suspended between fall and restoration. But infinities don’t make any sense - they skip off the surface of the mind. They are limitless and therefore alien to us, who are ruled by limits.

Garden reflects this, I think. Bosch’s Paradise is staid formalism, a postcard of proper doctrine and right behavior with barely a hint of inventiveness. There is little delight here, little that sticks in the mind. Hell is mesmerizing, as always. Cruelty’s good for the imagination - fear carries further. All sorts of sins are served up for punishment by Bosch’s nightmares. The avaricious, for example, “are devoured and immediately expelled from the anus of a theriomorphic creature with a bird’s head…seated on a type of child’s lavatory stool.” It is a whirlwind of terror and dream-image.

Still, life gets the centerfold. Our world is the core of the triptych and the largest part of the painting. It is basically one huge orgy, a scene of wild deviance and ecstasy. Like all good religious art, Garden is a moral warning with a doubled meaning - sin, Bosch suggests, brings both death and a great deal of fun. You walk away from Garden uneasy, but you can’t shake the impression that the world is vivid, alive, good, and worthy of all its delights.

Bosch was an early progenitor of Surrealism, a movement obsessed with the distance between us and everything else. Things are not “real” - they are not directly observable or immediately experienced. They are always mediated. Our vision is always blurry, our ideas go haywire, and our dreams seem to understand things we do not. There is a shroud between us and the real, something akin to a permanent separation.

But we are alive, and life is always interesting.

Death in the round

Last Friday, the Biden Administration announced it was sending thousands of cluster munitions to Ukraine. The bombs have now arrived in the country, headed for the front around Bakhmut.

Cluster munitions are depraved things. The weapons are designed to break apart mid-flight, scattering huge quantities of explosive “bomblets” over wide areas. But the bomblets regularly fail to detonate. They spend years lying where they fall, killing and maiming people long after a conflict ends. They are particularly dangerous to children, who often mistake them for toys. Since World War II, cluster bombs have killed an estimated 56,500 to 86,500 civilians globally. Their half-life is so uniquely awful that over 120 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans them outright.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the Convention. Neither is Russia or Ukraine, who have used cluster munitions during the war. Still, U.S. law imposes severe restrictions on their export (restrictions Biden waived by executive order to greenlight the Ukraine transfer). Jen Psaki, Biden’s former Press Secretary, has suggested their use constitutes a war crime. Just last year, America’s ambassador to the UN said they had “no place on the battlefield.”

Those are yesterday’s reasons. Ukraine, barred from NATO and immersed in a grinding counter-offensive, is burning through ammo at an astounding rate. Plenty of people are defending the Administration’s choice, citing tactical benefits and mitigating circumstances - New York Times columnist David French, who is wrong about nearly everything of consequence, tweeted a whole series of them. A sampling: Cluster bombs are lethally effective in trench warfare. Ukraine needs the ammunition. Ukraine is using the bombs on its own territory, not scattering foreign fields with unexploded ordinance. Ukrainian citizens will suffer the consequences, so Ukraine has every incentive to clean things up once the war ends. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor, said Ukraine had provided “written assurances” that they will use U.S. cluster bombs "in a very careful way.”

But cluster bombs cannot be used carefully. They are weapons designed to cause indiscriminate harm, and they function as designed. America carpeted Southeast Asia with cluster munitions during the Vietnam War, dropping over 270 million on Laos alone (a neutral country). An estimated 80 million didn’t explode. Five decades on, only 1% of that unexploded ordinance has been cleared. Hidden bombs have killed 20,000 Laotians (including many children) since the war ended. Munitions experts say clean-up could take another century. In Kosovo, cleaning may finish in 2024, nearly 25 years after hostilities ceased.

The U.S. talks a lot about a “rules-based international order”, where countries play by independent edicts on something like an equal footing, constrained by a moral superstructure operating outside the confines of state interests. It is a fantasia, a masquerade. In the international sphere, rules only work if they’re applied consistently and fairly - “otherwise, they become tools of power and imperialism.” As I’ve noted before, the U.S. is a key architect of modern human rights law but routinely subverts its precepts. We act as if none of this has any consequence, but it does. It is effective nihilism, the will to power subordinating all else.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions promised a future where people are something more than the playthings of empire, where routinized child mutilation isn’t simply “collateral damage” for long-dead wars. That future, it seems, will never happen.

“Am I enjoying this? Am I enjoying this now? How about now? Am I still really enjoying this, really?”

In January’s issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke considers French film critic Serge Daney, a voice of New Wave cinema who died young at 48. Daney’s work has only just appeared in translation. In an extended elegy for what we view and how we view it, Gerke wonders about cinema’s place in today’s world:

Because a very high percentage of cinema is now received outside of the temple of the movie theater — not in a “cinema,” as the very trappings of the word timestamp the landscape — in half-light, daylight, or even phone-light. It comes to us deformed, caricatured, and much more personal for being less beautiful, less tied to a medium that still — in a movie theater — casts its images digitally and sometimes in actual film 20 feet wide by 12 high.

Gerke worries that social media feeds a neurotic response to art, an endless stocktaking whereby we watch ourselves watching something, wondering all the time whether it’s worth it, whether we are actually enjoying it at all. We cannot “suture ourselves into cinema” - the distance is too great, the terrain too alien. “A more Daneyian response”, Gerke suggests:

would be beginning to feel, not discriminate — a trace of emotion loops in from far off, and it doesn’t matter if the couch is uncomfortable or that we need a drink of water. We are there…

Movies can be a gateway to the slipstream of presence. In our era of degraded (stolen) focus, Daney’s legacy suggests they are an essential contemplative tool.

Ron’s place

Ron Gitten, a Liverpool native and lifelong eccentric, spent 33 years transforming his rented Birkenhead flat into a classical villa, unbeknownst to nearly everyone (including his landlord). Horus and Osiris, Egyptian deities, stalk the central corridor. Euripides and Sophocles patrol the walls. There’s a Roman altar in the kitchen, and a series of magnificent fireplaces scattered throughout - one a lion’s head, the other a hand-sculpted Minotaur.

A Longreads profile describes Ron’s place as a sterling example of “outsider art” or “art brut”, a tradition populated by “artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law).” Jarvis Cocker, the British musician, called the flat “a personal universe”, adding that “everybody decorates their house in some way, Ron has just gone that extra mile.” Whatever it is, Ron’s flat is a glimpse of the wild and lovely things that can make up a life, otherwise hidden from view.

Phoning the dead

From David Bentley Hart:

The Japanese phrase kaze no denwa (風の電話) means “wind-telephone” and refers to a phone booth, ideally but not necessarily installed in a garden, with no connections to any physical telephone lines. Its purpose is communication with the dead. That is not to say that it is a medium of interlocution with the deceased; the idea is not that one should use it to receive messages from the other side. Rather, one merely uses it to talk to someone who has departed this life, expecting no reply. The first such booth was built in 2010 by a landscaper and gardener named Sasaki Itaru for his own garden in Ōtsuchi on Honshu as a way of dealing with the loss of a cousin to whom he had been extremely close all his life. He intended the booth for only his own use, but the following year brought the great earthquake and tsunami in Tōhuku, and Sasaki-san opened his wind telephone to the public, as an aid for the bereaved. It has received many thousands of visitors since then, and other such booths have appeared not only in other parts of Japan, but in various countries all around the world. My only thoughts are “How wonderful,” “How Japanese,” and, needless to say, “It works, of course.”