Posts Tagged ‘history’

Stealing from the fantastic past

The fantasy novel A Blight of Mages by Karen MillerDid you know that Henry VIII, famously infamous Tudor king of England, was the first English monarch to build a public toilet block? Well, he was. And if you’re wondering why he built it, that’s because he couldn’t stop his male courtiers from pissing inside his palace.

Hard to believe, isn’t it? Henry was the most magnificent, the most awe-inspiring, the most kingly king England had seen in a very long time. He was charismatic, athletic, intellectual . . . and ruthless. Everyone remembers him for the six wives and the two beheadings. What a lot of people don’t know is that he also had executed – or judicially murdered – more people than any monarch before him, or after. Over two hundred people killed: men, women, young, old, guilty – or simply inconvenient. They died because Henry wanted them dead.

And yet . . . despite his indisputable, terrifying power . . . he couldn’t stop his male courtiers from pissing inside his palace. On the floor, up the walls, in the corners – they were incorrigible, those male courtiers. And Henry couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t stop the massive thieving by his servants, either. His household budget was always ridiculously in the red because he couldn’t stop his underlings from pinching things, double-dipping, fudging accounts, eating more than their fair share, selling food out of the kitchens.

More power than any man or woman in his kingdom . . . and still, Henry was powerless. An extraordinary paradox, isn’t it? Surprising. Intriguing. (more…)

The Enterprise of Art

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch is an artist all but forgotten in the modern age. I’m not claiming this is some great travesty, for his work, while quite good, is not necessarily outstanding, nor was he particularly prolific. In fact, Manuel abandoned painting and etching in the last decade of his life to focus on poetry, play writing, and one of the trickiest arts of all, politics. Had he stuck with one or two disciplines perhaps he might have produced a single work that endured through the ages, as opposed to creating many worthy but unexceptional pieces that have been swept away in the great flood of history, occasionally bobbing to the surface in this coffee table book or that academic tome on plays of the Swiss Renaissance.  Of course, that’s simple conjecture–it’s entirely possible that had Manuel lived an extra thirty years and painted every single day of every single one of them he may never have produced anything more memorable than what we already have of his work. It is possible, uncharitable an observation as it is to make about any artist, that the man was simply not a genius, not a savant, that he was as good an artist as he ever could have been. (more…)

The Enterprise of Alchemy

Alchemy is a knot downright Gordian when it comes to finding an entry point for the young scribe trying to introduce his readers to the subject. One solution is to tackle the problem as Alexander would, but this in turn leaves us with a conundrum every bit as frustrating as the one we began with—instead of a compact but impenetrable knot of information, we now have countless loose, frayed ends that are just as likely to take us nowhere as they are to reveal how the intricately assembled whole came to be.

Perhaps the best approach, then, is to do as I have done and open with an overly convoluted and essentially imperfect metaphor for the problem—the encryption of meaning in complex symbolism that references the historical, the mythological, or the biblical is, after all, an essential part of the European alchemical tradition. How else to accurately pass along your wisdom without it being exploited by the unworthy? (more…)