Three Urns

 

1. In the preface to Urne Burial, which was published in 1658, Browne remarks largely on the “sad pitchers” lately disinterred in Norfolk. Presumably pitchers containing the ashes of Romans. Romans, as conquerors of  Britain,were technically enemies, but Browne is never stinting in his humanism, and quotes Horace: We mercifully preserve their bones, and pisse not upon their ashes.”

Pissing is not a mere random word, here, for in the burial urn Browne saw the whole anatomy of man, clothed and unclothed in all of his biological regalia, from birth, digestion and excretion to death and cremation.

The occasion of Browne’s essay is simply stated: “In a Field of old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes.” Browne’s recent biographer, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, had the notion that he would, as it were, walk Browne’s life – go to places which Browne mentions in his works, and see things in those places that Browne might have seen, relics indeed from the 17th century. A sort of psychogeography of a life, in the manner of Iain Sinclair, but without the style.  Mostly, of course, the landscape of Sir Thomas Browne is gone: as are the Walsingham urnes. But Adersey-Williams, undeterred, went to another site that Browne went to years after the Walsingham discovery. As in some the voice-over to some reality tv show contest, A-W gives us the mood music: “The first challenge is to locate the site. Browne describes the field as ‘lying between Buxton and Brampton, but belonging unto Brampton’; that is to say within the parish of Brampton.” And he is off on the treasure hunt.

I am not sure walking Browne’s life really gets us into Browne’s life: as the biographer does not subdue himself to the biographical subject, we begin to suspect that we are going to find out more about the treasure hunting biographer than about the biographer’s subject, with whom he seems oddly out of tune. For instance, at one point he calls the Urne Burial maudlin – which seems to be his description of melancholia. Adersey-Williams is evidently not a blues fan. 

I am, though.

In a passage of  seventeenth century metaphysical splendour, Browne saw the urn as both the habitat of the dead and the figure of birth itself:

“While many have handles, ears, and long necks, but most imitate a circular figure, in a sphericall and round composure; whether from any mystery, best duration or capacity, were but a conjecture. But the common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth,3 and inward vault of our Microcosme.”

This is the kind of prose that will find an odd revival in the American twentieth century. Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Cormac McCarthy all, in their own ways, go back to the syntactical branchings of the seventeenth century masters – partly because there is something very oral about them, closer to speech than the more rational rhetoric ofthe 19th century.

2. The spring of 1819 was a great season for Keats’ poetry. Something in that season worked on Shelley and Byron too, the romantic crewe which drew such condescension from the New Criticism in the 20th century, under Eliot’s distaste for disturbances in a tradition he was making up as a bulwark against social democracy and all its fruits. For the New Critics, evidently Shelley’s great sonnet, England in 1819, showed the immaturity that was sloughed  off by “mature” poets. To me, of course, it shows Shelley had a keen eye for the idiocy of British tradition and politics.

3. Keats was living in Hampstead, in a “semi-detached villa” that he rented with a friend, Charles Armitage Brown. Fanny Brawne and her mother lived in another semi-detached villa in the same subdivision, which gave Keats and Brawne a lot of opportunities to walk and talk and kiss and not tell, I suppose.

4. More importantly for our second urn, the Grecian urn of Keats’ poem, Benjamin Robert Haydon, the impecunious painter, also lived nearby. According to Keats’ biographer, William Rossetti (Rossetti felt he was infinitely more educated and classy than the poet, and makes that known in every sentence of his book), Keats would walk with Haydon in the nearby Kilbourn meadows and “chaunt” his poems, including the Ode to the Grecian Urn.  Haydon, after all, knew something about Greek Urns. What he told Keats in Kilburn meadows would be, as Sir Thomas Browne might put it, an interesting topic for speculation, up there with the songs the Sirens sung: unknowables.

5. In an article entitled The Shield and the Urn: the search for the source of Keat’s Grecian Urn, I.B. Cauthen ponders the suggestion that there was really one urn that inspired Keats. However, he thinks this is unlikely, and that the urn was all in Keats’ fancy, an identi-kit of Grecian urns: “there has been a host of suggestions concerning the original urn. The Townley Vase in the British Museum, the Holland House Vase, the Sosibios Vase, illustrated in a four-volume collection of engravings of art works that Napoleon extorted from Italy, the Borghese Vase in Piranesi's drawings of vases and candela” all have their devotees – yet all were merely contributaries, as it were, to the one unravishable urn that Keats describes in the poem:

6. There exists a drawing of a Grecian urn attributed to Keats – which looks like the Sosibios Vase. It is as possible, even probable, that Haydon took Keats to see the catalogues of antiquities. As important as these models, I think, was the anti-model presented by the bourgeois notion of beauty of Keats friend, or ex-friend, Leigh Hunt. In a letter from 1818 to his his brother George, Keats wrote:

“Hunt does one harm by making fine things pretty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts – many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing. This distorts one’s mind – makes one’s thoughts bizarre – Perplexes one in the standards of Beauty.”

The negative image, the glorious thing made nothing, is negated itself in the Ode. Against Hunt’s knowingness, Keats does not posit an argument, but a series of questions that have a supra-argumentative force:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

7.  Our final urn is a pot. It appears, weirdly, in that prose poem of philosophy, the Spirit of Utopia, by Ernst Bloch – composed during WWI, against which Bloch, to his eternal credit, protested. He had migrated to Switzerland, and looked back at the German intellectuals, and especially his mentor, Simmel, with a puzzled horror.

Simmel is important to Bloch’s pot. Simmel had  established the style that combined the feuilleton and the monograph, a style that finds its way through Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and onward – the voice, as it were, of the Weimar era. Simmel, however, was no Marxist: he supported the German war effort and made no bones about it – like Thomas Mann. This made him an unacknowledgable ancestor, unlike Karl Kraus. Kraus was conservative too, but he hated the war and, as a great hater, aligned it with his other great hatred – the feuilleton. The poisonous posterity, as he saw it, of Heine.

Simmel, as Adorno notes in his essay on Bloch, had written an essay on the handle. Turning to this article, which was published in Philosophical Culture (a very Simmel-esque title) in 1919, we find the characteristics of Simmel’s analytic framework. Simmel begins by distinguishing the space of the painting – figurative painting is meant – from the space of everyday life. A distinct mark of the latter is its tactility. We can touch a painting, but to suppose that a painting is for touching would be a mistake – a teaching mistake, really. We are meant to regard the painting, and in so doing, we see the space that the painting, by its science of perspective, wants us to look at. The space of a painting of a pot, for instance, is never the space in which  the pot is handled.

“As a piece of metal that is tangible, weighable, and incorporated into the ways and means of the surrounding world, a vase is a segment of reality. At the same time, its artistic form leads an existence completely detached and self-contained, for which the material reality of the metal is merely the vehicle. A vessel, however, unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of everyday life. Thus the vessel is in two worlds at one and the same time.” [translation found here https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/simmel.php]

Bloch’s preface to the Spirit of Utopia is almost a direct response to Simmel’s essay – in fact, knowing that this essay existed was my way of seeing what in the blazes Bloch was doing.

Bloch’s jug – Krug in the German -  is, for one thing, definitely earthy. Clay is the matter in question, not Simmel’s metal. That earthiness is intended – the example is not simply an example, a trait that distinguishes “continental” philosophy from “analytic”. Its earthiness, its humbleness, in a sense, aligns Bloch’s jug with the “sad pitchers” dug up in English fields in Browne’s meditation. But even as this jug comes out of the past, a very Germanic past, it presents itself in the present to the writer, or to anyone who comes into its space. Space, here, cannot be stripped of location and time. And, even, of its location in the space of the text – under the more general heading, Self-encounter. Its oddness as the beginning of a philosophical text is made even odder by being the beginning of self-encounter. Instead of going down the path of introspection, we are thrust into the path of exteriority, as though the self we were going to encounter was outside of us.

“It has often been imitated. That is harmless, but there are also more expensive antique exemplars, still holding their sheen, narrownecked, consciously molded, with many flutes, a beautifully curly head on the neck and a shield on the belly, and these throw the simple jug in the shadows. Yet for one who loves it, who sees the superficiality of the expensive jugs, prefers to its brothers the brown, uncouth implement, which almost lacks a neck, with a wild man’s face and a meaningful snail insignia on the swell of its belly, sunlight signs.”

Perhaps in this return to the European peasant, to the “Nordic vulgarisation” of the Italian variant, Bloch is touching on an aesthetic that could and would go either way in the post World War I world. An aesthetic that found less and less room for “what wild ecstasy?”, substituting an irony that knows a little bit too much – that ignores, in its knowing, Keats question marks; or an aesthetic of reactionary nostalgia that forced us all to drink and drink the black milk of morning.