People’s creativity in seeing the world with a sense of humour is a beautiful thing. One form that creativity takes is memes – images with superimposed texts. Antique portraits – paintings from artists of the 18th and 19th centuries – have regained popularity through their use in what I refer to as vintage memes.
Here are a few that somehow hit a funny bone in me; I hope you enjoy them, too!
Filed under Humanity Highlights, Humor, Images, Just for Fun
All of us can relate to having some form of ruts in our lives: Favourite meals, restaurants, seats in places we visit often, clothes we prefer, products we buy, food brands or makeup brands (if you wear it); all, patterns of movement or place or things. Recently, I heard of an app that made me curious to try it out; when I did, it was an eye-opener about how many things I use that I’ve taken for granted that their claims are accurate – I know that’s naïve, but part of that naivety is that greatest of marketing tools, willful ignorance.
Case in point: Speaking to the women out there, you probably have favourite makeup products or brands that you’re used to. But what if you found out that half of their ingredients build up in your system, damaging your liver, your thyroid, and the environment? That’s exactly what I have learned lately, and it’s shaken me awake: the app I cannot recommend highly enough is called Yuka. If I had known years ago what I know now, perhaps I would still have a thyroid; tumours put an end to that several years ago – but I can prevent further damage to my body by being aware of what’s in a product and buying safe alternatives.
The app works like this: You scan a product’s barcode – anything from food items to makeup to body products such as shampoos and hand creams; the app then ranks the products on a set list of 100 points and tells you whether it’s excellent, good, poor or bad; it then lists the ingredients and gives you the option to read more about each one, ranking the ingredients (colour-coded) as hazardous, moderate risk, low risk, or risk-free. If the products rank as poor or bad, below them will be a list of alternative products, with their rankings and ingredients for further information. The recommendations are unbiased as they are not supported by any company. The app also keeps a record of products I’ve already scanned; if I’m at the store, and scan products I don’t buy because of their rating, I can then delete one or several items from the list to keep it streamlined to my products/foods.
There are things that this app is NOT: It is not a substitute for medical or nutritional advice; it is not the be-all and end-all for telling you what to buy. But what it IS: A good guide to weighing the benefits vs. the disadvantages of using one product over another. Some of my products may clock in as “poor” – but when I consider why that rating is given, I may decide to continue its use until something better becomes available in my area.
For me, I’ve found that one ingredient pops up in most makeup and hair products: Phenoxyethanol; it is listed as a potential endocrine disruptor, potential allergen, and irritant. In the EU its use in cosmetics is regulated – but not in the USA or in Canada. In itself it may be within regulatory limits in a product; but accumulatively (several products, from shower gel to lip balm to foundation) it exceeds the limit and becomes a health concern. Knowing this has helped me find new, healthier products. Even within a product range, the ingredients may vary; for example, one lip balm may be good, but another colour of the same brand differs to produce the colour or gloss and ends up being listed as bad. Honestly, I won’t buy a product now without knowing it’s healthy. It’s not that I can’t and won’t think for myself and let an app tell me what to do, but I can use it to weigh a decision.
This past week, I wanted to find a lip gloss to replace the one I’d been using which was marked as “hazardous”; but the store I was in didn’t have customer wi-fi, so I bought a small Vaseline, thinking, “This has been around for ages, so it must be simple and safe”. Wrong. When I got home, I scanned it: Petrolatum is the mineral oil used, which has a moderate risk with a big BUT: this oil may contain problematic residues, such as MOAHs (genotoxic carcinogens which promote cancers and damage DNA) and MOSHs (these accumulate in the body, particularly lymph nodes and the liver). These oils should be avoided, especially in products that may be ingested… such as lip balms (and these two residues were present in half of all tested lip balms!) So now, that little jar is in my craft room to be used as a lubricant for my tools.
We all need to take steps to protect ourselves; big companies are not putting customers first, but customers’ wallets. If we don’t shake ourselves awake and work against our own willful ignorance, we shouldn’t be surprised when health issues pop up; but who would associate lip balms and blush and hand creams or canned foods and pre-made packaged food with those bigger issues? We need to start looking into it for our own sakes.
I’ve written before about Donald Norman and his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”; he emphasizes the need for products to have user-centred designs. The term “Norman Door” comes from the typical example he uses about doors – an everyday item that can often lead to confusion for the user simply by putting pull handles on a push door.
I was thinking about it this week, wondering what the opposite term should be, as I was opening a container of whipping cream. The tetra package for whipping cream is a prime example of a poorly designed item for me: It inevitably oozes out while I try to rip it open along the perforated line. If they made the perforation easier to tear or put a scissor symbol making it clear that that would be the preferred method from the outset… but no. Other items that come to mind are the flip-tops of products, such as hand creams or shampoos, that nearly require a knife to open. What happens? You simply stop buying that product, which might be perfectly fine, because of the poorly designed packaging.
Tell me your ideas for a good term for bad designs – something catchy and catch-all (Norman Doors refers to doors only, but so far it’s worked in a pinch). In the meantime, here are a few examples of non-user-centred designs.
Filed under How It's Made, Humanity Highlights, Humor, Musings
Most English-speaking people have heard the term whitewashing: Literally, it means to paint a surface with a diluted white paint to lighten the surface and conceal blemishes. Figuratively, it means to downplay the negative aspects by emphasizing the positive ones of a person, event, or situation.
Greenwashing is a term related to environmental issues: It is the deliberate dissemination of a false or misleading impression of environmentally friendly practices used to conceal or obscure damaging practices.
Blackwashing is the use of public campaigns and advertising funded by the coal industry to draw attention away from environmentally unsustainable practices or to justify exclusion from carbon taxes.
Bluewashing is to tout a business or organization’s commitment to social responsibility while using this perception for public relations and economic gain; to present a humanitarian front while obscuring actual practices.
Redwashing is the practice of a state, organization, political party, politician or company presenting itself as progressive and concerned about social equality and justice, in order to use this perception for public relations or economic gain.
There are other colours of X-washing, but they all stem from greed: In marketing, these tactics are a way to charge customers more, because the higher price leads people to think, in connection with the misleading information or imagery, that the extra money spent is going to a good cause, e.g. schools for the workers’ children or working children, when in fact it’s likely going toward a CEO’s yacht.
On holiday recently, we’d forgotten to bring towels from home into the motorhome, so we went into a houseware store; I thought the towels would be a bit more expensive than another store I usually buy our towels from, but it was a whopping 50.- per towel more! On each towel was a tag; here’s the translation (the company name withheld):
“Cotton (name)® Made in green, inspiring confidence. Tested for polluting ingredients and sustainably produced according to (name)® guidelines. The label “made in green” gives you the assurance that this textile product has been made by pollutant-free materials in environmentally friendly factories in protected and socially acceptable work environments.”
Nowhere is it mentioned where this product was made; their testing agency, for accountability, is them. Inspires confidence? On what grounds? Price? Notice that they don’t claim to have passed those tests or what they were testing exactly, nor do they state what their guidelines were supposed to be.
These schemes prey on first-world people’s sense of guilt, or of wanting to pay a bit extra to help those less privileged. Yet their concept of “environmentally friendly factories in protected and socially acceptable work environments” might have nothing to do with your or my concepts – would the company’s execs be willing to work in those factories? I doubt it. This is also an example of bluewashing.
An E-Talk was given to show the marketing tactics in connection with the foods we eat. The disclosures made in the short talk are enough to leave the audience in stunned silence. I challenge you to watch the video (less than 7 minutes long) here. Marketing’s most effective, secret weapon is you. They bank on willful ignorance (the avoidance of making undesirable decisions or taking actions that accurate information might prompt).
All of these wash-tactics boil down to hogwash. So the next time you find yourself looking at the claims of a label, or seeing the sunny kitchen in a perfect home with perfect families on a commercial, take a moment to challenge what you’re reading or seeing, and use your purchasing power wisely. Research; see if the company is on any blacklist by organisations that actually care (WEF, Greenpeace, or any from a long list of NGOs). Search the topic online – there are a lot of informative articles out there with practical tips for making informed decisions. Here’s a website for checking a brand’s ratings: https://directory.goodonyou.eco/. If you find that a company is making bogus claims, stop buying their products; make the effort to blow the whistle on them – social media can be a positive tool in that aspect.
This brings us back to that secret weapon of marketers, our willful ignorance: The tragic factor in all of these tactics is that, like water, humans usually choose the path of least resistance… least effort… least active involvement, least time required; and so willful ignorance prevails. However, since we’re making an average of 35,000 decisions a day anyway, (automatic, habitual, emotional, stress-related, worry-related, or environment-related) let’s neutralise that ignorance one wise, informed choice at a time.
A few months ago, I began something that has added a layer of creativity and organisation to my life which, to be honest, is fairly creative and organised as it is. But this little addition adds a nice colour: Fieldnotes.
The original concept of taking fieldnotes comes from the scientific disciplines: An archaeologist in the field, taking notes on where, what and when something was uncovered; a geologist, botanist, ornithologist, or entomologist taking notes on observations, perhaps drawing an illustration of a specimen or a map of the landscape.
Fieldnotes can include writing, diagrams, drawings, or visual clues within an entry such as arrows or other visual connectors. They differ from a daily journal in that the fieldnotes are concise… rambling or expanding on a thought belongs elsewhere, but not in a “quick-draw” situation (pun intended).
Creative thinkers have jumped on the idea for reasons other than scientific observation: As a writer, fieldnotes help me capture snippets of ideas, dialogue, or an observation when out in public (I love to people-watch), or something I read – sometimes the comments on YouTube videos are a great capsule of humour! I also use fieldnotes to keep track of tasks on a busy day – lists of to-dos, to-writes, and so on. When I have a creative project, I take notes on the steps taken – such as making giant flowers that no one else has ever made; how to scale up a smaller version of a crepe paper flower is not always straightforward, and if I have several to make, it helps to have those detailed notes of the prototype phase for the next time around.
Taking fieldnotes might help get your creative juices flowing. If you’d like to start this practice, here are a few tips:
I also have my own shorthand for many things; Sometimes I use what I call pigeon Asian (I use this when I don’t want anyone else to read it); it’s something I learned when living in Hawaii. It looks like Kanji (the logographic writing of Japan), but it’s not – that’s all I’ll explain! I also use logographs, such as the ancient Anglo-Saxon rune of daeg, which includes the concept of day, dawn, intuition or breakthrough; I use this to designate those times when I’m writing: Rather than writing, “Today, I wrote/worked on the manuscript for...” I just write that symbol plus the name of the manuscript and details. I have a whole series of such shorthand symbols that I use daily.
While there are note-taking apps available (and I use one, called “Keep My Notes”, on my phone for things like shopping lists or feedback notes for singing students or bands that I take during performances and review with them later), sometimes it’s helpful to get away from digital screens. Sometimes I’ll write whole scenes away from the computer – I don’t use my fieldnotes for that, though it will probably be used to outline a scene that comes to mind until I get to another notebook. Something about writing long-hand sparks a level of creativity that might not come while working at a computer; hand-eye coordination should never be underestimated in creative endeavours. Once a scene has developed enough away from the screen to be integrated into my current manuscript, it then takes on another reiteration as I type it in, tweaking and changing… it’s what I call a “ripening process” as a wine metaphor for the creative maturing process a scene goes through by this method. It gets my head into a new space figuratively, literally, and literarily!
In an age when we are constantly bombarded with visuals wherever we go, sometimes it’s healthy to go back to good ol’ pen and paper. On those days so busy that I can’t remember what I’ve actually done, it’s helpful to look back at my fieldnotes as I write out my thoughts in my daily journal.
Do you write? Do you ever make lists for shopping, chores, people to contact, or things to do? If so, how have you kept track of such things so far? If it’s a system that works for you, brilliant! But if you find yourself wanting to switch things up or wanting to improve your use of time, would you consider taking fieldnotes? Please comment below!
Recently, my mother sent me a link on Facebook and asked me to write an article about it; it’s definitely an interesting topic – so thanks, Mom!
In architectural terms, a folly is a building that is either constructed as decoration which suggests another purpose or is a practical garden building that transcends its purpose with extravagant features. An example of the former term would be buildings that were designed from the outset to look like ancient ruins, such as Wimpole’s Folly in Cambridgeshire, England; an example of the latter would be buildings like the Dunmore Pineapple in Stirlingshire, Scotland (I’ve been to this site a few times and was once able to go inside the pineapple). Designed to look like a giant pineapple, it was actually a working hothouse; that’s perhaps another story to tell. As for today’s topic, the folly of King Alfred would fall into the former definition.
Born in 849 AD, Alfred the Great was King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886, and then King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899. He lived in a time when Viking invasions and warring tribes were common. Both of his parents died when he was young, and his three older brothers reigned before he eventually came to the throne. The battles, invasions and wars are too numerous to mention; to be a king meant to be at war. At the age of 21, he was already the King of the Wessex and a battle veteran. In early 878, the Danes struck like lightening, taking Chippenham (on the map below, you’ll see that it was in the heart of Alfred’s territories); inhabitants surrendered or fled, and it reduced Alfred and his men to hit and run means of getting provisions; they withdrew into the tidal marshes of Somerset (the area on the other side of the River Severn, just below Wales on the map below). Alfred reevaluated his strategy and learned from his enemy: He and his men began a guerilla war against the Danes, and by May, he’d defeated them in the Battle of Edington. Knowing that he would never be able to drive out such a powerful enemy, he made a treaty with them, establishing borders and what became known as the Danelaw territory; King Guthrum of the Danes converted to Christianity, with Alfred as his godfather and soon son-in-law as he sealed the treaty by marrying one of Guthrum’s daughters, Aethelflaed.
The Great comes from the fact that he united many of the disparate tribes; he recognized the deterioration in learning caused by years of disrupting wars and the Viking’s destruction of the monasteries, which were centres of learning and literacy. He recognized the fact that without widespread literacy, a king cannot rule – a people who were not united by a written language would be more vulnerable; but united through a common tongue, they would have a sense of loyalty and continuity in turbulent times. They would be able to adhere to laws, reach legal decisions, and be called to arms more readily if they could read a common language. He set out to make the English proud of being English and thus be prepared to fight for it.
By stopping the Viking advance against all odds, and consolidating his territories, he set the stage for future kings. His accomplishments in Wessex became the seed that eventually gave fruition to a united Anglo-Saxon England, which is why he alone among all kings or queens of England bears the sobriquet Great.
King Alfred’s Tower was built between 1769 and 1772. To put those dates into perspective, here are a few events from the year that construction began: 13-year-old Mozart, under his father’s control, was just finishing his third concert tour of Italy; James Watt improved his design for a steam engine that would spark the Industrial Revolution; King Charles III of Spain sent missionaries to California, founding San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Monterey; Daniel Boone set out to explore what would become Kentucky; and finally, in August of that year, Napoleon Bonapart was born in Corsica.
The tower itself was built near the site of Egbert’s Stone, which is said to mark the mustering site for the troops of the Battle of Edington; the tower was intended to commemorate the end of the Seven Years’ War and the ascension of King George III to the throne of England. It was designed in the Palladian style (a European architectural style) by the architect Henry Flitcroft, at the commission of Banker Henry Hoare. While the reasons for commissioning the tower might be altruistic of Hoare, its site and magnificence might have had something to do with the fact that the tower was an eye-catcher for those touring the parks at his private estate, Stourhead.
Standing at over 40 metres high (131 feet) and a circumference of 51 metres (167 feet), it is completely hollow; it is a triangular structure with a round “tower” at each corner, though only one of them has a use – a spiral staircase of 205 steps, with no landing places along the dizzying ascent or descent. The only safety is a rope “railing” anchored occasionally along the central pillar of the staircase; passing others up or down can be a tight squeeze, and it is not a climb for the faint-hearted. Once reaching the top, you’ll find a crenelated parapet that surrounds a viewing platform offering a great view of the surrounding region; the centre of the platform is surrounded by a guard rail as it is a gaping hole straight down to the ground level; it’s covered with a mesh netting to prevent birds from using the tower as a dovecote.
In 1944, the tower was damaged when a Canadian single-engine plane crashed into it in the fog, killing all five aboard. In the 1980s, it finally underwent repairs and restoration; the statue of King Alfred above the main entrance was also repaired at that time, restoring a missing right forearm. A stone tablet (also in need of restoration) between the door and statue reads:
ALFRED THE GREAT
AD 879 on this Summit
Erected his Standard
Against Danish Invaders
To him We owe The Origin of Juries
The Establishment of a Militia
The Creation of a Naval Force
ALFRED The Light of a Benighted Age
Was a Philosopher and a Christian
The Father of his People
The Founder of the English
MONARCHY and LIBERTY
Maybe this is something you’ve never stopped to think about, but everything we use on a daily basis was, at some point, invented, discovered or developed by someone. Before shoes, people walked barefoot, or wrapped leather around their feet in colder climates; before plastic, well, the world was far better off. But no matter where they lived in the world, or what their climate was like, people found ways to entertain themselves, or to have fun social interaction with board games, or with simple stones, sticks and rocks.
Even prehistoric people developed games to pass the time: The Mesopotamians had the Royal Game of Ur; in Egypt and across the Middle East, they played a game referred to as Fifty-eight Holes. A game that goes back thousands of years, with many different simultaneous versions across the world, is Mancala / Sungka / Congkak, played with hollowed dips (which could be made in dirt, wood, or stone) which players fill sequentially with stones or shells or nuts (whatever was readily available in their region of the world). As reading and writing became more widespread, word games and written riddles became popular.
In 1913, the journalist Arthur Wynne, working for the New York World newspaper, submitted the world’s first Crossword Puzzle (image below), which appeared in the Sunday paper on 21 December. An immigrant from England, Wynne based his idea on the magic square (in recreational mathematics, this is a square arrangement of numbers in which the sum of numbers in each row, column and both main diagonals is the same). In this concept, a given set of words would need to be arranged so that they form a square; but in Wynne’s version, the words had to be discovered first. The first puzzle contained 31 terms, with the word “fun” already filled in as an example.
In the beginning, crosswords (originally called Word-Cross Puzzles) were in a diamond shape; within a few years, the crossword craze had taken off, and eventually, the shape morphed into a square grid with blank or black cells where voids occur.
Today, crosswords have more competition: word search puzzles, scrabble, anagrams, ciphers, and various forms of Sudoku are the strongest contenders for puzzlers’ free time.
What is your favourite word puzzle type? Please comment below!
The topic of this article has been on my mind for the past two weeks; last week flew by so fast I barely had time to blink, let alone order my thoughts into coherent sentences. The topic was sparked by coming across an article online about what is known as the “Milan Conference” or “The Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf” (though it was, in fact, the first), held in Milan, Italy in 1880.
To give you a bit of my personal background, I learned BSL (The Glaswegian dialect) and translated for the deaf when I lived in Scotland. Being as close to that community as I was, I’d shockingly never heard about the Milan Conference until a fortnight ago.
When I first moved to Switzerland, I wanted to continue working with the deaf and began taking Swiss German sign classes. I immediately began hitting brick walls: The crux of the matter was spelled out – they didn’t want hearing people in their world. It made little sense to me back then, and it was frustrating. Also at that time, my husband wasn’t yet hearing impaired – which would have made a difference in their attitude toward me, as people with family members affected by hearing loss were more acceptable to them. In light of the Milan Conference, their reticence makes perfect sense. I never was able to break that barrier, and I’ve lost much of the sign language I once used fluently.
The conference was an international gathering of (hearing – with only ONE exception) educators of the deaf and mute. The imperialist arrogance of the discriminating resolutions passed profoundly wounded and damaged the deaf community for nearly 100 years.
To sum up the conference’s resolutions briefly, the majority decided that sign language was disadvantageous to integrating the deaf into the hearing world, and they banned – yes, banned – sign language from the education of the deaf in favour of “oralism” – forcing the deaf to read lips to make them assimilate to the hearing world’s culture. Deaf teachers lost their jobs, and an overall decline of deaf professionals resulted – they were no longer allowed the tools to communicate in their own language, and communication professions such as artists, lawyers and writers fell silent. Here in Switzerland, there was a two-fold impact: Deaf children were forced to sit on their hands and learn to lip-read from High German-speaking teachers; but when they went home on holidays, they couldn’t lip-read their own family’s dialects of Swiss German, and so they were isolated from society both in school and at home. The anger and resentment to the hearing world still runs deep.
Most disturbing for me is the fact that Alexander Graham Bell, whose own mother and wife were deaf and who worked with the deaf throughout his life – including helping bring Helen Keller out of her silent world as a blind and deaf girl – was one of the strongest proponents for oralism at the conference. The most famous picture of Bell and Keller is one in which Keller is finger-spelling on Bell’s hand. It is a form of sign language. Yet he advocated to eradicate it.
The resolutions of 1880 held their ground until they were overturned in 2013 when an official apology was issued to the deaf community. Eleven years ago. Let that sink in. Inroads were made to teach sign in pockets here and there; in America, most schools for the deaf only began teaching sign language again in the 1960s; in the UK it was around a decade later. Generations suffered under the restriction. [For those who have been deaf their whole lives – what’s known as pre-lingually deaf – it means that sign language is their first language, while spoken English is their second; this can lead to difficulties in understanding complex or abstract messages in English. Imagine being denied your own native language…] Only in 2003, the British government recognised BSL as a minority language – but so far, Scotland is the only country in the UK that has given BSL legal recognition. The shift in understanding and recognition had already been set in motion by the time I’d moved to the UK, which is perhaps why the Milan Conference was no longer a topic when I was involved in the deaf community.
The ban is the main reason there are so many regional dialects today: Even though sign language was officially banned, the deaf still needed to communicate among themselves, and so signs evolved “under the table” within each pocket of deaf students. There was no exchange of information; for example, “bread” took on the shape of the local speciality, so in the French part it looks like a long baguette, while in the Zurich region, it looks more like a half-sphere. There are 5 major Swiss-German dialects; in Scotland, there were at least 7.
Please click here to watch a ~13-minute video by Storied about the history of sign language and the Milan Conference. If you’d like to learn more about the timeline of sign language in Britain, please click here to visit University College London’s website, and to learn more about BSL in Scotland, click here to read the Scottish Parliament’s article.
ASL, American Sign Language, also has a forgotten predecessor that was largely written out of history: The Plains Indian Sign Language, also known as “hand talk”. For an interesting video about that history, click here.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief insight into a long and tangled topic, and that it encourages you to look into it more.
Just as a parting trivia: Everyone recognizes the sign for phone; but did you know that it became a euphemism in some deaf communities for the restroom/loo? Back when restaurants had their public phones near the “small closets”, the Deaf would sign “phone” as a polite, covert way of saying they were going to the restroom/loo.
Below are the British Sign Language and the American Sign Language alphabets; I’d encourage you to learn one or the other and stretch those grey cells a wee bit!
Recently I came across an article on the phenomena of “The Hum” – a low-frequency sound heard by people across the globe. The hums are often given their location’s place name, such as the Taos Hum of New Mexico, the Auckland Hum or the Windsor Hum. While these sounds are clearly heard, no one seems to agree on the source of the sound: It could be produced by electrical equipment, an unfamiliar animal sound (such as the toadfish), the Jet Stream shearing powerline posts, volcanic eruptions, lightning static, ocean wave vibrations, or internal biological auditory signals.
If you stop and listen, there are sounds everywhere. But The Hum is not tinnitus, which has a much higher sound frequency. I’ve had tinnitus for years; when it’s quiet, I can hear up to eight tones of ringing in my ears. It’s something that affects around 15% of the population, but the only time it really becomes an issue is if it triggers a fight-or-flight response in a person – I’ve heard that the more you focus on the ringing, the more you hear it (the more it bothers you). In almost half of the people who have tinnitus, it can lead to phases of anxiety or depression, likely linked to that psychological fear response. Some people don’t even realize they have tinnitus – they automatically, subconsciously distract themselves with sound (music or television being common tactics). The causes of tinnitus vary, but in my case, I know exactly when it started: I was flying from London to Glasgow, and I had a head cold. The flight was just at that altitude where your ears almost pop, and it was excruciating. I can still hear fleas sneeze and “tell you if they’re male or female”, but the ringing is always present – I just ignore it for the most part. I hear so well that I sleep with earplugs each night – otherwise, I can hear electricity in the walls, and a battery charger at the far end of our home sounds like a car alarm to me!
Have you heard The Hum? Do you have tinnitus, and if so, does it bother you in any way or are you able to ignore it?
If you’d like to learn a bit more about The Hum, and what it could be or what it could mean, please click here for a 12-minute BBC report on the issue.
Throughout history, people have always been fascinated by thinking beyond their own known world; before widespread writing and reading, ancient cultures thought about their own mortality (which, in some ages, wasn’t that far off) and the afterlife. Various cultures prepared for the afterlife in their own ways: The Egyptians removed organs and embalmed the rest, making sure to send on the heart & co. in separate jars (except the brain – who’d need that in the next world?), then sent them on their way with an army of servants (killed for the occasion); the Vikings buried their most honoured dead within a ship with their favourite animals and servants (ditto). Other cultures built pyres to send their loved ones up in smoke.
When writing came along, at first it was used to capture the past and the natural world, ala Pliny the Elder; poems, sagas, verbal tales and folklore began to be recorded; we have such writings still with us today: The Greek Epic Cycle, the Orkneyinga Sagas, the Heimskringla, the Poetic Edda.
The first novel came along only 1,000 years ago: The Japanese epic The Tale of Genji was written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu; novels were, for several centuries more, considered on the bottom rung of the literary hierarchy ladder, far behind “serious works” like history. Ironically, Mark Twain referred to history as “fluid prejudice”; it was nearly always recorded by powerful (white) men – hardly ever by a commoner, a member of an ethnic minority, or a woman. The interpretation of events was firmly in the hands of the conquerors. Because of that fact, for instance, we know more about Rome’s version of ancient Britons (Picts, Celts) than we do from their own artefacts; most Celtic and Pictish art is found outside of the UK – many carried off by the Vikings, but that’s another tale. Hollywood has helped perpetuate some of those ancient Roman notions (think of a blue-faced Mel Gibson in Braveheart).
In fact, we don’t even know what the Picts called themselves – the term derives from the Latin Picti, first seen in the writings of Eumenius in AD 297. It can be interpreted (dangerous words) as “to paint” – but there is no evidence that any people groups in northern Britannia painted themselves. Picts is simply a generic term for any people living north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus who fought the Roman Empire’s advancements into their territories. Again, the ink of history flowed from a Roman stylus.
Even Jane Austen herself didn’t begin publishing her novels under her own name. She was a single young woman – for shame that she would dare stain the male-hallowed ground of literature. The saga of how she got published speaks to her tenacity and the support of her family. But she got the last laugh, becoming famous within her (short) lifetime, and she is far better known today than any of the stuffy old men who wrote “proper” books of her day.
The insatiable fascination with other perspectives than our own explains why novels are so popular today. They take us into another time, place and situation, leading us through a story that, if written well, we can relate to and perhaps learn something from. In 1726, Jonathan Swift gave us Gulliver’s Travels. Though he originally wrote it as political satire, to “vex the world rather than divert it”, we know it still today. The fascination with someone being a giant in one land and a miniature in the next grabs our imagination; he travels to floating kingdoms, to an island of immortals, a la Death Becomes Her, and a land of talking horses.
In the age of internet, visual arts have expanded as far as the global imagination can span: Not only paintings or drawings, but even crafts take us into another perspective. I recently saw a series of images in which people have taken the humble walnut shell and turned them into tiny worlds with bookshelves, ladders, lamps, beds and creatures. Book nooks are popular, too: A tiny village, street, or room within the space of a book on a shelf. Science fiction art takes us off-planet.
Films are visual perspectives that take us into other worlds, times and places: When George Lucas showed us a “commonplace” bar scene on Tatooine in the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, he blew our minds and kicked off a new era of visual storytelling. Avatar took us to another planet and another perception of reality, all the while being an allegorical tale of ecological care vs. abuse. Somewhere along the way, sometime in your life, I’ll bet you’ve been fascinated by a different perspective, whether presented to you through a book, a documentary, a sermon, a play, a film or a conversation. What did you learn from that encounter? How did it change you, or help shape your perspective? And what is your favourite “escape”: Films, books, visual arts, or music? Please comment below!
Filed under Articles, History Undusted, Humanity Highlights, Images, Psychology Undusted
Stephanie Huesler 