Wildest Regions

When I found Goethe I didn't know there was a Humboldt – his mention in Elective Affinities escaped me – so I paired G with Attenborough, had the two meet and converse in my head on nature; and now I realise, some time later, Goethe found a like-minded soul in Humboldt. The age difference no obstacle, one sparked the other, whether together or apart. They regularly corresponded and Humboldt sent Goethe his publications, plunging both into the wildest regions.

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And now I too have plunged into them – these wildest regions – and crossed, like Humboldt, all disciplines and barriers. I have caught Richard Holmes' bug: fallen completely for certain periods of time and all its notable characters, of which there are many. My reading net cast ever wider, to read of men – and it usually is men – who shaped minds, and whose minds were shaped by other men's minds.
Alexander von Humboldt shaped many: fellow science enthusiasts, thinkers, writers, poets, artists, musicians, politicians, leaders of countries and revolutionary parties. He gathered to himself people – the established, the up-and-coming – determining or helping them advance their careers. For, throughout his life, Humboldt preferred to collaborate rather than protect his own line of thought or work. (Professional science, I think, has lost some of this generous, collaborative approach; each science staying within its distinct discipline, and stalling, therefore, its own progress.) And yet he fails to enter into our head or vocabulary as Darwin does. We learn of him through Darwin, through Lyell, through Emerson, through Thoreau, through Poe, through Goethe, through Jefferson, through Bolívar, when Humboldt's hugely influential figure should instead lead us to these men.
One great mind, it seems, is replaced by another succeeding it, perhaps by its protégé, until in a more distant day it is revived.

Picture credit: Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Goethe in Jena (source: Wikipedia).

Adapted from journal, January 2022.

See The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science by Andrea Wulf. 

Melancholy: A Definition

The lot of the artist, the fate of the gifted. A great mind crippled by doubts... by guilt... by failed attempts... by too much success... by earthbound thoughts... which prevent a reaching upwards. The stars seem too far, the moon too foreboding.
The melancholiac's world is made up of different shades of melancholy. Black, naturally, but also for some sunny yellow. The bright, the dark, the pastel; all can seem to torment the melancholic mind, and with them bring terrors and demons.
Melancholy: a condition typical of artists expressed in depressing realism, nothing softened; all hard words or hard lines, speaking on or depicting the futility of humankind.

Picture credit: Melancholia, 1519, Albrecht Durer (source: WikiArt).

Written January 2022.

After Scott

Sir Walter Scott, writing in his little study, – committing to each manuscript page of Napoleon a huge number of words – 'wrapped in a quilted morning-gown of light purple silk', his forehead contracted (possibly) above heavy white eyebrows and his silvery locks flowing loose, the moment J.J. Audubon is introduced.
Is Scott aware he is observed; that this picture of himself is being imprinted upon another's mind, and will, after their meeting has occurred, be preserved? Is it possible Scott knew the effect he would strike on morning callers...? The writer at work, attired as was his custom but which would appear unusual to those new to his acquaintance.
If I were observed now I would appear not too dissimilar to Scott: writing in a light imperfect hand in a notebook – the poorly formed words sprawling over the lined surface of each page – wrapped in a morning-gown of heavy brown polyester cloth, my hair unbrushed and loosely tied, pausing every now and again to rest my head on my right hand and muse, whilst the biro in the left remains poised over its last mark.

Picture credit: Sir Walter Scott and his Deerhound, 1830, by Sir John Watson Gordon (source: Wikipedia).

See Audubon's Elephant by Duff Hart-Davis. 

From journal, January 2022.

An Exotic Bird

AUDUBON: John James 1785-1851, (originally Jean-Jacques Rabin; his father a French merchant, his mother a French chambermaid), a well-knit man of forty-one, a self-taught naturalist and artist; an exotic bird of passage arriving first to these shores – on board a cotton ship – in 1826, and touring them (and subsequent trips) with his leather-bound double-elephant portfolio, which weighed some 100lbs and contained his life-size bird paintings.
A handsome man by most accounts, though strangely bird obsessed and sometimes most curiously dressed: John James in 'his hunter's garb, complete with wolfskin coat and double-barrelled shotgun', in his pursuit of birds to shoot and draw... and maybe eat: an abundance of partridges; a rare fat hermit thrush; twenty-six delicate starlings, not baked in a pie but picked clean, for supper, rounded off with a maggoty cheese. The violence depicted in his pictures – bird attacking bird, ripping prey apart – shocking British readers; though reading of his reconstruction methods it's unclear whether this sight was nature-seen or artist-created. As to his own violence it is hoped he had the good sense to withhold the more 'savage' details when in drawing-room society, and stick instead to safer subject matters: America, the woods, and owl hooting, though the ladies I'm sure could have done without his imitative hoots and Red Indian war cries.
English ladies, however well brought up or glamorous, had curious ideas; were much surprised he had not been devoured by wolves, tigers, bears. One was shocked by this method of eating a buttered ear of corn; another, a raw (uncooked) tomato, which it seemed had never been done before, at least not under her watchful gaze. And then there was the small scale of the English countryside, which when compared to the more borderless, open and wilder territories of America made him feel restricted, and yet here his enormously gigantic work found an audience. Here, in spite of difficulties, The Birds of America was launched

Picture credit: John James Audubon, 1826, John Syme, The White House Historical Association (source: Wikipedia).

See Audubon's Elephant by Duff Hart-Davis. 

Adapted from journal, January 2022.