I hope American readers had a great Thanksgiving celebration yesterday; over here, it was a regular workday, of course, like any other. It’s not part of British tradition to go “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house” for a turkey dinner. Nor do they shout “Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!”—okay, Americans don’t either, except in the over-the-river-and-through-the-woods song, but pumpkin pie is almost unknown here. Happily for me, that’s changing. It’s getting easier to find Libby’s canned pumpkin nowadays, although it’s only available seasonally, and you have to find a store with a section of American imports, but when I first moved to Britain, I couldn’t get pumpkin at all. And what’s Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? I think that’s more important than the turkey.
A wild turkey does his courtship display on the grounds of Ash Canyon B and B, which my friend Mary Jo Ballator manages as a wildlife and bird sanctuary. This species is the Gould Turkey, which is common in the Huachuca Mountains of SE Arizona. Photo courtesy of Ash Canyon B&B — http://AshCanyonBAndB.com
My November column for the Guildford Dragon NEWS was about Thanksgiving and turkeys, as it happens, and featured one British person who does seem to ‘get’ Thanksgiving: Surrey turkey farmer Derek Joy. His big market is Christmas, because that’s when the British traditionally eat turkey, but he told me he sells a lot more Thanksgiving turkeys than you might suppose—about a third as many as he sells for Christmas.
I’m learning, in writing columns for the Dragon NEWS, how different it is to write for a primarily British audience rather than a primarily American one. I recycled an anecdote from last Thanksgiving’s blog post for the opening of that NEWS column, and had to make some interesting changes. For American readers, I just reported a conversation between two “British TV personalities” about what Thanksgiving dinner is; for British readers I can say who the “personalities” were, which brings in all the overtones and implications of those personalities’, er…personalities. British readers can be amused that it was Carol Vorderman who came out with wrong information, because she’s a game-show host and a sort of professional know-it-all (UK: know-all), whereas American readers would just say “Who?” And British readers wouldn’t bat an eye to hear that Vorderman said that Americans eat chipolatas for Thanksgiving. For all they know, it’s true; for Americans, that’s the punchline. She thinks we serve turkey and chipolatas? What the heck is a chipolata?
Another handsome turkey (or is it the same one? I can’t tell) poses for the benefit of potential mates. Photo courtesy of Ash Canyon B and B — http://ashcanyonbandb.com
Most British people don’t really seem to understand Thanksgiving—and of course there’s no reason for them to keep up with the festivals of other countries—so I was surprised to learn from Derek Joy that British interest in Thanksgiving is growing (the Dragon NEWS column has a bit more info). So far, celebrating Thanksgiving hasn’t caught on in Britain to the point that it sparks the kind of pushback there is against trick-or-treating, which is seen by a number of people here as a nasty habit being imposed on Britain by American imperialists bent on cultural domination. Er, no. Americans do not care one bit whether British kids go trick-or-treating.
I suppose if enough British people ever become interested in Thanksgiving, that could start to rankle, too. As of the last census, there were about 160,000 American-born people living in the UK, out of a total population of over 62,000,000. So I think we’re safe for a while yet.
Of course, if there is a secret plan to take over UK culture, one American-imposed holiday at a time, Mr Joy might be part of the advance party, and those cans of Libby’s pumpkin might be the thin end of the dastardly Thanksgiving wedge.
It’s Remembrance Day here, and at the end of a day full of ceremony and solemnity, I’m pleased to report that London Poppy Day (see previous post) brought in £802,000 (that’s $1,275,000)for needy veterans and soldiers and their dependents. That’s even more impressive when you consider that last year’s total was £450,000. As the British say, “Well done, you!”
The Queen touring a poppy factory.
Some poppies are made by hand, in factories set up to employ disabled veterans and their dependents. Click here to follow a link to a YouTube video of the Queen visiting a poppy factory, and making her own poppy to wear.
(I’m supposed to be writing about Blake and Parry and “Jerusalem”, but blogging is a kind of journalism, so I’ve got to consider current events, too—and they don’t stay current for long. Besides, as Arlo Guthrie says, “You cain’t always do what ya s’posed to do”. I’ll get back to “Jerusalem” soon, but in the meantime…)
A member of 23 Engineers collects donations and distributes poppies at Waterloo Station in London on Nov 1. He’s a communication specialist, as my father was in WWII; when I described what my father did in the Pacific, this soldier said it’s much the same task today.
Every year in late October Britons start wearing little paper poppies in buttonholes or pinned to lapels, until by about November 3rd, almost everyone you meet—and certainly everybody you see presenting a programme or reading the news on network television—will have a little red paper flower on show. And they—no, we—will be wearing them through November 11th, Remembrance Day, aka Armistice Day, aka Poppy Day.
You get your poppy, and a pin to hold it on, from someone collecting donations on behalf of the Royal British Legion. The money goes to help veterans and serving military personnel or their dependents who are in need; the poppy is meant to remember the fallen in all of the wars, chosen because of the poem, well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, that begins
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row…
(You’ll also find the first line given as “In Flanders fields the poppies blow”. The Wikipedia page for the poem gives the word as blow right next to an image of the handwritten poem that clearly has the line ending in grow. Since the handwritten copy is from the poet—Canadian military physician Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae—and has his signature, I’m going to assume the word should be grow.)
Members of the King’s Royal Hussars, a cavalry regiment, gearing up to go collect donations and give out poppies at Waterloo Station. Yes, we still have cavalry units; they deal with tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. I’m extremely sorry that these pictures are such low quality; you can’t tell that they wear distinctive red trousers (they call them crimson; Americans would call them maroon). Because of their red finery, they’re nicknamed the Cherrypickers.
I happened to pass through Waterloo Station in London yesterday, and saw more than the usual number of veterans and soldiers out collecting money and handing out poppies. By their uniforms, they were from all different regiments, too. There had to be something out of the ordinary going on, so I asked around, and found myself speaking to Jeremy Stephenson, one of the founders of London Poppy Day.
Seven years ago, he and a few friends collected donations outside one London Underground station and raised £500 for that year’s Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal. The project has grown a bit: this year Mayor Boris Johnson zoomed up the Thames in a Royal Navy RIB (rigid inflatable boat) to kick off London Poppy Day, carrying a plastic poppy several times bigger than his head as he boarded HMS Severn ; military bands played at locations all around London; Military Wives, the surprise hit of a recent reality television programme for choirs, performed; and a real Spitfire aircraft visited Covent Garden. And over 2000 volunteers from the British Army, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and several City firms (you can think of the City as similar to Wall Street) collecting at over 60 railway and Underground stations aimed to raise £1,000,000—in twelve hours.
A member of the London Irish Rifles collecting donations at Waterloo Station. He declined to let me photograph his face, but he did take my pound coin and give me a poppy. I watched while a couple with two small kids came up, and the kids were each given a coin to throw into the bucket and helped to put on their poppies–another generation taking up the tradition. What are the chances we can stop sending kids to war before those two are old enough to go?
I stopped to speak to a couple of the soldiers collecting. I’m in awe of people willing to put themselves in so much danger on behalf of someone else, though I don’t understand, actually, why we’re still asking people to do that; it’s 2012, and I should have thought we’d be clever enough by now to figure out a way to avoid having to send young people off to shoot at each other.
But the day we work out a better way for all of us to share the same planet is going to be a long time coming, and until then we have to deal with war and its aftermath; this isn’t news, I know, but it’s one thing to see photos of soldiers in Iraq, watch video interviews from army camps in Afghanistan, or cheer for Paralympic athletes who lost limbs while in uniform, and it’s something else again to speak face to face with someone who has been there; who feels that he’s lucky to have come back; who admits that he’s lost friends; who agrees with me, when I say that the job must be terrifying, that it is terrifying; but who’s still a soldier. It is in fact staggering that people do this at all, and especially when you can see how young they are; I talked to a veteran who, at age 25, commanded men who turned 18 on active duty in Kosovo.
Mr Trevaskis, who comes to my front door every year collecting for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal.
And that’s why I always get a poppy and wear it. I’ve read opinion pieces explaining why the writers choose not to wear poppies (which shows you how common it is to wear one; not wearing a poppy is an aberration that requires an explanation): this one believes that the government should take care of veterans and dependents and not leave them to rely on charity, and that one feels that the poppies that once signaled “Never again” have changed meaning over the years, since the warfare we say we don’t want somehow never seems to stop. But these aren’t theoretical soldiers who shouldn’t have to fight, they’re real human beings who have fought and who I’m sure want to see an end to war more fervently than the rest of us. And yes, the government shouldn’t leave veterans and dependents out in the cold, but when it comes to needy people and charity– well, saying “someone else should do it” doesn’t get you much of anywhere.
Young people still put themselves in danger for others, hoping to do good, making huge sacrifices; I respect them, and thank them, and wear a poppy.
The Olympics may seem like ancient history to the fast-moving blogosphere, but I’m still mining the opening ceremony for elements of British life that Americans and other foreigners might not have understood. After all, the designers set out explicitly to display Britishness, and they didn’t make many concessions to people unfamiliar with Britain.
In that ceremony—after the countdown, and after Bradley Wiggins rang the enormous Olympic bell—11-year-old Humphrey Keeper sang these words from a poem by William Blake:
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
(Rules of punctuation weren’t as firmly set in Blake’s time, so those aren’t typos you see there, I’m just presenting the lines the way Blake wrote them.)
The William Blake poem that furnished the lyrics for the hymn “Jerusalem”
To anybody here in the UK, this hymn, generally called “Jerusalem”, immediately ticks the box (US: checks the box) marked Patriotic Song, though most foreigners must have been puzzled. Jerusalem? And, um, something Satanic?
The first stanza is straightforward, if odd: the poet seems to ask whether it’s true that Jesus visited England, and in fact many different legends here say he did. This isn’t like the Mormon story of Jesus appearing in the US after the resurrection; these legends suggest that in the gap the Bible leaves between Jesus, age 12, and Jesus, age 30, he dropped in on us.
Blake’s engraving “Christ as the Redeemer of Man”
Other people say he traveled through India, Tibet, Persia, Greece, Egypt—clearly he got around rather more than the average Judaean teenager—but in England alone you can take your pick from several options: Joseph of Arimathea (the man who donated Jesus’ tomb) was Jesus’ uncle/great-uncle and was a sailor/a shipwright/a tin refining worker/a tin merchant, who visited Cornwall/Somerset for his business/on the request of St Paul/because Jesus wanted him to deliver the Holy Grail/to become the first bishop of these islands. He brought young Jesus along on the trip once/twice as a cabin boy/as a ship’s carpenter/to enroll him in a school run by the Druids, who at the time offered the best education to be had. His mother Mary came, too/didn’t come/came, died, and is buried on these shores, but in any case, Jesus came and settled here a while/was shipwrecked here/was stranded here for the winter, until the weather was favorable to sail back. (And those aren’t even all the known variations. It isn’t only nature that abhors a vacuum; a lot of people must have felt a need to fill in those missing years.)
“Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion” by Blake
Unfortunately, after I had a great time researching all that, I found that Blake probably wasn’t writing about a visit from Jesus at all. Once the idea of such a visit comes up, it seems almost impossible to think Blake could be talking about anything else, but folklorists have found no other trace of the stories before about 1890, which is almost 100 years after Blake wrote the poem. That doesn’t mean that the stories originated with Blake, either; scholars have found no other evidence, in the thousands of pages Blake wrote, showing that he believed any such thing, though they’ve found similar passages in which it’s clear that Blake was thinking about Jerusalem, not Jesus.
The frontispiece to Blake’s poem “Milton”, from which the lines for the song were taken; Blake did write a poem called Jerusalem, but the words for the song didn’t come from that poem, because that would be far too easy…
For my purposes it doesn’t matter; I write about British life, and I’d bet my house that the average Britons on the street, if they have opinions about the lyrics at all, believe Blake referred to those same old stories. The stories themselves are part of British history anyway; early 20th-century folklorists recorded plenty of tales of the form “Of course everybody knows Jesus visited our town”, particularly in tin-mining communities, where they also found a folksong, “Joseph was a tin man”, and where tin workers used to call out “Joseph was in the tin trade” as a good luck charm at one dangerous step in the refining process. It’s a good bet that at least a few people in Britain today still believe that Jesus walked “upon England’s mountains green”.
In any case, Blake’s poem moves right along from the feet and countenance (whatever they refer to) to the building of Jerusalem, apparently in England—a strange idea, but one for which there’s a lot more data out there.
Emanuel Swedenborg. For a visionary who claimed to speak with angels and demons, he looks remarkably ordinary, even boring.
Blake, for all his personal mythology, was a Christian, though a Nonconformist (one who rejects the Church of England; it’s a term still in use). And, at least for a while, he followed the teachings of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who said that anybody can understand the Bible in the obvious, earthly way, but only he, Swedenborg, could read it in a special, spiritual way and interpret it for everybody else.
That’s because the second coming had already occurred, in the form of a revelation to Swedenborg personally, which resulted in Swedenborg’s freedom to come and go from heaven and hell as he pleased, and to converse with angels, with demons, and with spirits from other celestial bodies: the moon, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus, and planets beyond our solar system. His list didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto, which hadn’t been discovered yet, which seems a bit of a giveaway about Swedenborg’s celestial knowledge. (Although I’m skeptical, to say the least, I don’t mean to offend any of the 10,000 members of Swedenborgian congregations in the US, the UK, the Netherlands and South Africa who are actively worshiping along these lines.)
A bust of Swedenborg in Stockholm. Before he became a mystic, he was a scientist, mathematician, engineer and inventor.
Blake, with others, signed a declaration saying he believed all that to be true and called for the establishment of the New Jerusalem Church, but he didn’t have to be a Swedenborgian to talk about the New Jerusalem; the term comes from the book of Revelation, which is full of mystical stuff and therefore right up Blake’s alley (UK: right up Blake’s street). Mysticism was in the air back then; Blake knew people who claimed they could raise the dead, and not only did these people say they had conversations with God and Jesus, one artist he knew claimed the Virgin Mary had posed for his painting, which must have given him an edge over all Madonna-painting artists before or since.
The preface to “Milton”, showing the poem that provided the lyrics for “Jerusalem” as they appeared on the page, under a prose paragraph calling Homer, Ovid, Plato and Cicero “Perverted”–Blake didn’t pull his punches–and calling the Bible “Sublime”.
Blake, following Swedenborg, didn’t take Revelations literally, but thought of the New Jerusalem as symbolic of a new church movement that would sweep away the old, and clearly from the poem (that is, from the second verse, which I haven’t mentioned yet, sorry) Blake believed we would have to put in the effort to construct it ourselves, among the “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution.
But, having made it through the first stanza, with Jesus’ visit to England, and most of the second, with the new Jerusalem, I’ll have to leave the subject until the next post—along with the question of how this song came to be associated with patriotism in the first place. To tide you over, here’s a clip of the crowd at the last night of the Proms singing “Jerusalem”; I’ll have to tell you about the Proms another time, but for now you only need to know that it’s a series of concerts, conventional until the last night when, er, audience participation breaks out in a big way. Believe it or not, this clip from 2011 doesn’t show nearly as much flag-waving as clips of some other years, but I like this one because you can see close-ups of people singing. Okay, a few are looking down at their programmes to be sure of the words, but most of them are just singing along because almost everybody here knows this song, with its obscure words, the same way most Americans know “America, the Beautiful” (which is a lot easier to understand).
The video shows the interior of the Albert Hall, where the orchestra is, and Hyde Park, where big screens display events to the thousands who didn’t get tickets. Unfortunately the video isn’t always in sync with the sound; the young men with beer cans seem to be almost a phrase behind, but you can tell they know all the words and are singing their hearts out. Near the end of the video, back inside the hall, you can see a young lady in an Islamic-style headscarf waving a Union jack and singing what is fundamentally a Christian song about Jerusalem—which is, to my eye, rather a nice way to characterize modern multicultural Britain. I wonder what Blake would think of it.
Looking across a vineyard toward the main building at Denbies in the summer; you could almost be in the Napa Valley (but it’s a little *too* green). Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Please excuse me for delaying the promised post on the William Blake/Sir Hubert Parry song “Jerusalem” by posting this announcement instead: As of last week, I’m writing a column for the Guildford Dragon NEWS, Guildford’s independent online news(not-actually-on)paper.
Vine leaves changing colour at Denbies.
I’ll be looking in those columns at the same sorts of things I write about here, except that I’ll focus on people, places and events in the Borough of Guildford, with Guildfordians as the target readers.
The publisher has seen fit to call the column “The Eagle Eye” (not my choice; feel free to suggest something better!), and we may soon have a logo, drawn to resemble a pub sign. The Guildford Dragon is interested in pubs—but who isn’t? I’ll probably write a certain amount about local pubs, though at the rate they’re closing I’d better hurry. (There are none left in the village where I live, three having closed since we moved here–not that I’m implying causality there, you understand.)
More vineyards at Denbies. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The first column went up last week, though readers here might recognize most of that offering as one I made earlier (as the chefs on telly/TV say); it’s a reprise of my article on the civic procession for the service for the mayor after last May’s Mayor Making. (Bet you can’t say that three times fast.)
After this, there should be a new Eagle Eye column appearing in the third week of every month.
More Fal–er, Autumn colour at Denbies
Now, the one rule of blogging is Don’t Be Boring, so in an effort to give you something more interesting for your time spent here today, I’ve added some photos of Denbies, a winery in the eastern part of Surrey. Vineyards in Britain? Absolutely! The first ones were planted by the Romans. Look for a post on the Denbies winery, probably in the new year.
Main building at Denbies Wine Estate. The light-coloured tower is above the main entrance, but the wing in the foreground, painted black, houses the Surrey Performing Arts Library, which was the reason for my trip.
The winery building houses, for reasons unclear to me, the Surrey Performing Arts Library, a branch of the public library, and I was there to do research on the composer of “Jerusalem”. With the vine leaves turning colour on a sunny autumn (Brits don’t call it “fall”) day, it was glorious; you see, I hope, the sacrifices I make to research these posts.
Sorry that there hasn’t been a post here for a couple of weeks; sometimes real-world deadlines intrude. I hope to get back on schedule soon.
A peek through the main gate of the British Library in London, where you can just make out the colossal statue of Newton, hunched over, measuring with a compass, or as the British would say, with compasses.
Although I’ve never posted about the British Library in London, it’s one of my favorite places over here. Heck, it’s one of my favorite places on the planet—and while that’s mainly because of the books, manuscripts, maps, and more that they keep inside, there’s also the sculpture outside to consider.
The first thing you see if you enter through the main gate is a statue of Isaac Newton, by artist Edouardo Paolozzi. With a name like that, of course he must be…Scottish. He came from the north side of Edinburgh, but perhaps, given that his parents were Italian, he felt at home in the pedestrian court enclosed by the wings of the British Library, as it’s officially called the piazza.
Paolozzi’s Newton
Paolozzi’s bronze version of Newton is almost 4 metres tall—that’s about 13 feet, and that’s to the top of the curve of its back. If that hunched-over giant stood up, it would tower over the rest of us. That’s common enough for public statues, but perhaps especially appropriate for Newton, who said that if he saw farther than others had seen, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants—those scientists and mathematicians who went before—and Einstein presumably stood on the metaphorical shoulders of the giant Newton in his turn.
Blake’s Newton
But the giant Newton in the Library’s piazza isn’t standing at all, nor is it looking out at the world, because Paolozzi based his design on William Blake’s painting of Newton. While Blake would have appreciated the monumental size of the statue, I’m guessing that’s about the only thing he’d approve about the piece. He wouldn’t have found Newton a fit subject for a national institution dedicated to human thought, life, art, philosophy, and more. The Blake engraving that inspired Paolozzi is actually titled Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason.
Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Leading Leviathan
I say he’d approve of the scale of the bronze Newton because Blake lamented, back in the earliest 19th century, that huge civic artworks had fallen out of fashion, because he liked the idea of getting to paint 100-foot-high versions of his works The Spiritual Form of Pitt and The Spiritual Form of Nelson. That would be something like an American artist today saying it’s too bad the country has lost its taste for what Blake called “paintings on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation” and proposing 100-foot-high interpretations of The Spiritual Form of Obama and The Spiritual Form of General Petraeus. Even in 1805, I think that was probably seriously weird.
Blake was a poet, a painter, a visionary, an illustrator, a prophet, an engraver, and possibly a madman. He began seeing visions at age 9 and saw them all his life, so you can see how, since he thought these were glimpses of something eternal, divine, and true, he’d think that using reason might but a damper on things.
A page from Blake’s America: A Prophecy, typical in that he printed the page from his own engraving, and colored the illustrations by hand.
Blake eventually worked out an entire mythology involving a pantheon of figures you might call demigods, as an illustration of his ideas of the divine and eternal, and of mankind’s place within the grand scheme of things. He presented his creations in epic poems as well as in artwork, usually in illuminated books which he engraved and then, helped by his wife, painted on the colors by hand.
In this mythology, mankind’s long-ago fall from grace was a fall out of eternity and into time and space, which fractured Albion—the Cosmic man and, while we’re at it, the personification of England—into four parts. Now, here it really gets messy, because everything is overloaded, carrying more than one meaning. But we only need to look at one of the four: Urizen.
The title page of The Book of Urizen. Behind him there’s a tree which has bent over and re-rooted, to grow again. If you read the previous post, you might recognize that as something you’ve heard of before…
Urizen is a creator god (except that he isn’t) and maps in some ways to the Biblical Jehovan (except that he doesn’t; I told you Blake was seriously weird). Urizen is man’s reason, without the stabilizing balance of the three other qualities Blake found essential—emotion, imagination, and instinct—and is an oppressor, an enslaver, of humanity. His name is a pun on horizon, indicating that his vision is limited, and on your reason.
Urizen as The Ancient of Days
Blake’s painting of Newton casts him as Urizen (compare the illustrations), and shows him measuring and calculating, having turned his back on the beauty and variety of nature as shown in colors on what looks to me like lichen-encrusted rock. Blake despised Newton’s approach; 100 years or so after Newton, when rest of the world venerated Newton in large part for his experiments with light and vision, Blake said Newton brought us night rather than light, and that Newton’s single vision didn’t compare to Blake’s own fourfold vision. Newton might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but Blake suggested that Newton saw so little from his perch that he might as well have been asleep. He lumped Newton, materialist philosopher John Locke, and Francis “Father of Empiricism” Bacon together as what has been called an infernal trinity. They were to Blake ‘the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan’s Doctrine’, though Newton was not an atheist at all, but quite the contrary; he thought the precision and mechanics of the universe was evidence of the Creator.
In this view of the sculpture, the bolts/pivots for the joints show up a bit better–look at his shoulder, and at his ankle
Paolozzi took Blake’s view of Newton as advocating a mechanistic universe and ran with it, making his Newton out of metal and making the features of his body segmented, idealized, and symmetrical; removing the colors, the lichens and the rock entirely; seating his figure on some kind of rectilinear constructed box; and even showing the bolts that hold the body together, the pivots of the joints, making sure we can see the linear divisions between the pieces of the head, suggesting Newton’s head was made of precisely manufactured units. Paolozzi might as well have said “Yeah, Newton gave us a measured, understandable, reasonable, quantifiable view of the world—and isn’t it great?”
In any case, Paolozzi’s Newton provides the perfect segue from the previous posts on Newton to the next posts, which will involve Blake—because it was Blake who wrote the lines of the hymn “Jerusalem” that one little choirboy sang near the beginning of the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and I figured there must have been lots of Americans who, if they understood what the song was about at all, didn’t understand why the English apparently chose a piece about Jerusalem as a patriotic song. It’s just one more basic fact of British life in the collection of elements of Britishness set out in that ceremony, and one I plan to tell you about next time.
A special welcome to new subscribers who came here after seeing the previous post on Freshly Pressed, WordPress’s showcase of selected blog posts. I was grateful that they included my apple-y article, and wonder whether, if that has been freshly pressed, we’ll get apple juice, and eventually cider…
The title card from the section of the Paralympics opening ceremony called “Gravity”
Turns out that the Paralympic opening ceremony was titled “Enlightenment”. Who knew? The section called “Gravity” used a title card (see illustration) , but the name of the production as a whole was never shown or announced. (One of the presenters said something about enlightenment being a theme of the evening and of Professor Hawking’s life; that was about it.)
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, the Enlightenment brains behind the Declaration of Independence
So what I saw (see previous post) as a tribute to the scientific revolution was really a tribute to enlightenment in many forms, including the capital-E Enlightenment of which Newton was a part—an intellectual revolution in which people turned to reasoning and science to determine how society should work. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson produced the Declaration of Independence as part of the politics of that Enlightenment, although today sometimes it seems we’re living, to go by current US politics at least, in the Endarkenment.
Sir Isaac Newton
Newton dedicated himself to truth, as a good Enlightenment scientist would, quoting in his notebook a sentiment that goes back to Aristotle that loosely translates as “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend”, meaning he would choose truth over whatever an authority told him. (A loose translation is good enough, not least because Newton wrote it in Latin when Aristotle’s original was in Greek—go figure.)
I would be doing Newton a poor service, then, if I didn’t correct mistakes when they come to light. So, many thanks to WordPress blogger 3arn0wl who suggested that the tree I said was a descendant of Isaac Newton’s original was in fact the original tree itself, still growing after more than 400 years, which turns out to be true, or at least, almost certainly true.
Pity the other trees in the Woolsthorpe Manor orchard. Newton might even have seen apples fall from this tree from time to time, but not on the one crucial occasion.
I spoke with Ann Moynihan, National Trust Support Officer for Woolsthorpe Manor, to get the true story, and found her a gold mine of information. The celebrated tree, the most famous apple tree since the Garden of Eden, was identified by about 1779 as the one from which Newton said he saw the apple fall; that’s less than 65 years after he died. So while we don’t have firm proof, it’s very likely to be the right tree; dendrochronology (tree ring measurements) show that the tree is over 400 years old; and we’re not likely to get any closer to the truth than that. It’s possible that by 1779(ish) folklore could have pushed in already and marked the wrong tree as the hallowed one, but why, as William of Ockham might have said, complicate the story?
Ten years ago, Newton’s apple tree and 49 others were designated Great British Trees in honor of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
The tree being so famous, when it blew over in a storm in 1810 the press got the story and ran with it, lamenting the death of the tree in quantities of ink—but the tree wasn’t dead. People rushed to make a profit on boxes and even chairs made of the dead branches, but the remnants of the tree sent up new shoots; there was life in the old fruit yet.
In fact, Ann suggested that the tree regenerated a la Dr Who. (I’ll have to explain for those who haven’t encountered Dr Who, but with apologies to Ann, because a joke is never funny if you have to explain it; in short, Dr Who is a character in a science fiction television show who, whenever the actor playing the character quits but producers want to keep the show going, is said to have “regenerated”, and come back to life looking like the new actor who will take the character on.)
Key fobs made from branches pruned from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, on sale in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor.
Ann wasn’t familiar with the story I heard from the staff member in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor, about the tree having been tested against the DNA of a piece of wood signed by Newton himself, but said that the Royal Society has a piece of wood from the same tree—and here, Americans and other non-British readers might want a word about the RS, which is proud to claim Newton as a former member.
The London premises of the Royal Society
Officially, it’s the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; the American equivalent would be the US National Academy of Sciences, but the RS is 200 years older than the USNAS. It’s a nonprofit body of eminent scientists who support excellence in science, giving grants for research and education projects and advising the government on scientific issues. The RS has recently made a picture database available on the internet; you can try looking up “Newton apple tree” (see Featured Links), or better yet, read the RS’s blog about the pictures of Newton’s apple tree in their collection (click here).
And in its collections of amazing items from the history of science, the Royal Society has a piece of the original apple tree, a piece that’s been up in the space shuttle. The RS lent the 4-inch chunk to British astronaut Piers Sellers who took it up in 2010, along with a picture of Sir Isaac Newton, for what was meant to be the final voyage of the Atlantis shuttle. (The Atlantis got a reprieve and kept flying, eventually carrying out the last shuttle mission when the program closed down in 2011.)
Piers Sellers, Anglo-American astronaut, took a fragment of wood from Newton’s apple tree on a space shuttle flight.
If you aren’t a space shuttle astronaut or a Fellow of the Royal Society, and you can’t get to Lincolnshire to visit the tree yourself, you still might be closer to the tree that you might suppose; shoots from Newton’s tree have been sent all over the world, grafted onto different rootstock, and produced genetically identical trees. In Britain, the tree grows in Cambridge at Trinity College and in the University’s Botanic Garden; elsewhere in the UK they have the ‘same’ tree at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Oxford, the Institute of Physics in York, and—though I haven’t confirmed this one—Kew Gardens in Kew, in London. With pointers from Ann and some serious Googling, I’ve found more instances of Newton’s tree in the US (MIT), Korea (the Korean Research Institute for Standards and Science, in Daejeon), Australia (Monash University), and China (at Nanjing University and at TianJin University).
A descendant of Newton’s apple tree growing in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, although the photographer, rather unusually, seems to have been more interested in the trunk than in the leaves
I feel very much more enlightened now, on the subject of Newton’s tree, which is presumably not one of the enlightenments the producers of the Paralympic opening ceremony had in mind, but that’s okay; I took their point about seeing disabled people in a new light as well. After watching Olympic athletes show how far you can push the human body to do amazing things, I thought I must have seen the absolute limit of achievement in sports, but the Paralympics showed me how wrong I was; like the best in any field of endeavor from sports to science, the Paralympians push the boundaries even farther.
Photos of Woolsthorpe Manor orchard are mine, the “Gravity” title card is a screen shot from the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics, and all other photos are from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.
