Needham's material

The Needham Research Institute (NRI), located on the west side of Cambridge, is a household name for the historians of East Asian Science and Medicine. This is the place where Joseph Needham, the founder of the field, together with his collaborators conducted research for his massive project of writing the first comprehensive work on the history of Chinese science, technology, and medicine. Initially conceived as a single book by Needham, the project rapidly expanded with an engagement of a group of international scholars. The final product, finished in 2004 after Needham's death, is a 25-volume gigantic work Science and Civilisation in China (SCC), which became the foundational work in the field.

When I entered the field of the History of Science in China in 2005, I was aware of Needham's works, not by reading the SCC directly, but by reading the scholarship produced in the so-called post-Needham era. This scholarship, starting from the eighties, reevaluates and critiques Needham's works, especially on his famous question about Chinese science, often referred to as the "Needham question." So what is the Needham question? Here is a quote from his 1943 draft on the SCC project: 

"Why, therefore, did modern science, i.e. our theoretical body of scientific thought, universally applicable to nature and commanding universal assent, develop in west Europe, not in China"

A big red question mark follows. 

Immediately after, Needham speculated the answer:

"answer: social and economic background requires investigation"

This is the core of Needham's historiographical orientation; he intended to find the answer, through the production of the SCC, to this fundamental question: Why did China fail to develop modern science, given all her glorious achievements in the pre-modern era? 

Later scholars, some of whom were collaborators of Needham, started to challenge this grand question. They argued, under the influence of post-modernism, that it is problematic to use modern science as a universal criterion to measure Chinese science. Since the latter operates in a drastically different philosophical and cosmological system, it is better to study it in its own historical and cultural context. This alternative approach, which may be labelled as cultural relativism, is my entry point to the History of Science. 

This is not the place to adjudicate whether Needham was right or his critics, though generally I am more comfortable with the latter group. I plan to write another piece on this issue using Edward Wilson's book Consilience as a jumping board. So readers, if you are interested, wait for some time.

Back to the NRI. After Needham's death in 1995, it has continued to be an important research site, equipped with an excellent library, for scholars in the field. Since I came to the UK, I have visited it three times, participating in its seminars and checking books in the library. Today is the fourth time, and my task is to check some research material Needham gathered over the years for the pharmacology section of the SCC. Although they are not essential for my own work, it would be fun to read Needham's notes and letters, paying my due tribute to this magnificent man. Moreover, I might gain a more nuanced understanding of Needham and his works after reading his archives.  

So what did I find? The first one that caught my attention is a letter Needham wrote in 1968 to Dr. Storen, a toxicologist in Western Germany, about lead poisoning in China. Dr. Storen cited S. Colum Gilfillan's work, which argued that lead poisoning in ancient Rome, through the pipe system, was responsible for the decline of Roman civilisation and the rise of men of genius (this later became a book with a telling title: Rome's Ruin by Lead Poison). The argument, typical at the time, has a strong technological deterministic touch (Marxism was in its full force). Dr. Storen asked Needham whether he found a similar phenomenon in China. In Needham's response, he first confirmed that lead was plentifully used in ancient China and Chinese was aware of its detrimental effect. He then showed his hesitancy to embrace Gilfillan's argument, since he "should be very disinclined to attribute either the 'decay of Rome and other Mediterranean civilisations', or the appearance of men of genius in them, to any one such single factor as chronic lead poisoning." Any historian these days would agree with him. And lastly Needham stated, and this is the fun part, "The idea that 'genius' might have been missing in Chinese culture is for us simply laughable." Whether Needham misunderstood Gilfillan, I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised that Gilfillan's argument had Eurocentric sensitivities, a dominant scholarly orientation at the time. We may say, therefore, that one of the most significant contributions of Needham's project is to put Chinese science on the table for serious scholarly inquiry, not anymore as a culture at worst hopelessly backward and at best exotically enticing. Remember, when Needham started the SCC project, he was working against the tide. Half a century passed, and now we take for granted that the history of Chinese science is a legitimate and important branch of knowledge pursuit. For this, we solute to Needham. [On the other hand, we ought not to over-glorify Needham's achievements since his works are also imbued with political agendas, as any piece of historical writing.  His leftist worldview and his close relation with the Chinese government found testimonies in his works. But this will await another entry to elaborate.]

Now let's move to another piece of Needham's material. This time we find a note he wrote about two alchemical recipes including his calculation of the amounts of chemical components therein. The note itself is not very special; it must be one of the many that Needham used to produce his work on the history of Chinese chemistry and alchemy, one of his favorite subjects. But let's flip the paper over, and see what is on the other side: it is a book review published on the newspaper The Observer in 1959. The review, titled "From Marx to Freud," is on the book Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman Brown. Suddenly I felt that I bumped into an old friend, since I read several chapters of this book a few years ago in my advisor's class. It is obvious that Freud's influence on humanities studies was immense in the fifties: This book is all about using Freud's psychoanalytical approach to study history. I wonder whether Needham ever paid attention to this review when he wrote Chinese alchemical recipes on the other side of the paper. If so, what did he think? [It would be interesting to explore Freud's impact on Needham's works, if there is any.]

A third piece, this time a clip from the magazine Times in 1976, kept in Needham's pharmacology folder. The title of article: Psychology: Poison theory in Salem witch hunt. If you check my previous records in this blog, you will find an entry I wrote in the summer of 2011 about my visit to Salem and a bit of history on the notorious witch hunt. Now the question is: What was the real reason for those young girls who turned mad overnight? It could be simply a joke, staged by these not-so-innocent children so perfectly. But the article proposed a different explanation, grounded on material base: those children ate molded bread that was infected by ergot, a type of fungus. The report, based on a recent research published in the journal Science, summarized the major scientific evident that supported the explanation. So now we have travelled from the fifties, when psychoanalysis was in its prime, to the seventies, when the focus turned to the material base of our mental process. This turn became more definitive from the eighties, when brain science replaced Freud's approach for studying psychology at least in natural science. Having this fascinating article in his folder, Needham was probably thinking whether the same explanation could be applied to Chinese case. The article states revealingly: "A puzzling feature of the Salem trials has been the vividness of the testimony, which is hard to explain if, as is now widely believed, the witnesses' tales were fictional. That could be accounted for if they were in fact describing the symptoms of poisoning." Hallucination, witchcraft, poisoning. Whether this connection is convincing or not, it is certainly arresting. 

If we continue fumbling Needham's folders, another interesting letter emerged. This is a letter written in 1973 to Needham by the historian Donald Wagner, who was in Kyoto at the time. In the letter, Wagner asked some specific questions about a paper that Needham presented in a Daoist Studies conference in the previous year. In particular, he mentioned a plant called Rauwolfia 萝芙木, a medicine used as a tranquilizer and anti-hypertensive. Wagner pondered why this plant medicine was not included in Chinese pharmacopoeia. And here is Wagner's explanation, based on his knowledge that Rauwolfia could cause serious side effects: 

"It seems that one of the great problems in the introduction of modern medicine in many parts of the world is that modern therapies often have unpleasant side-effects like these, while traditional therapies generally do not. It might easily be that the compiler of a pharmacopoeia was careful to exclude cures which he felt were worse than the disease."

     

This comment speaks directly to my research topic, which is the history of Chinese pharmacology and toxicology. Does Chinese medicine have no side effects? I doubt it. All drugs are thirty percent toxic, a Chinese saying claims. Another goes: If a drug does not make the patient feel dizzy [a sign of its potency and toxicity], it cannot cure the severe illness 药不瞑眩 厥疾弗瘳. Medicines and poisons are intertwined in Chinese medical culture, from its early stage. For one example, mercury is included as one of the good medicines in the earliest Chinese pharmacopoeia Shennong bencao jing 神農本草經, even if its toxicity is fully acknowledged. Taking a recent example, Chinese medicines containing aristolochic acid (AA) 馬兜鈴酸 was banned in Europe and the US because some scientific research showed its connection to kidney cancer. This generated a heated debate between practitioners on Chinese medicine and the scientific community, which is yet to be settled. All I want to say is that it is not so easy to separate medicines from poisons. Chinese pharmacological tradition, as modern medicine, not only acknowledges that, but tries to put that concept into best use in practice. How Chinese doctors did this is what I am going to study in the following years.

Leaving the topic of drug/poison behind, now let's go to the last page of the last folder I checked today. It is a folder containing notes or articles on the biographies of Chinese doctors. This last page is simply a file title, that is, Biographies or 傳. But below this title, I found another title -- 祝由, which was later crossed out. Why did Needham place biographies and incantations together? More curiously, why did he cross out the latter, presumably an afterthought? Any person who is interested in Needham's general historiography would be interested in this. One likely explanation is that Needham initially established the category, trying to find some material interesting, but eventually he didn't find any, or to be more exact, anything that fit in his framework. Recently I talked to a professor at Cambridge, who when he was a student fumbled through Needham's material, just as what I did. To his surprise, he did not find anything on Chinese zoology. As he thought more, he found it not so surprising: Chinese accounts of animals are full of strange creatures and mythical figures, which Needham must find hard to correspond to biological species in western science. Better to leave them alone. The same logic can apply to Needham's attitude to incantation, a topic I myself am quite interested in.

Anyway, it is about time to stop this long piece. I believe this is my first experience of reading archival sources. For a student studying the History of Chinese Science, nothing seems more fitful than starting with Needham's material. Certainly it was enjoyable to read them especially when unexpected connections popped up from time to time. As I walked out of the NRI, I saw the burial site of Needham's ashes, together with those of his two wives, under a beautiful tree. The idea is quite oriental, I shall say. That is, to bury ashes under a tree so that the dead starts to live again in this new form of life. Life continues in such perennial transformations. If Needham ever believed the existence of soul, his soul is certainly manifested in this robust and luxuriant tree.                  

        

                        

Dunhuang, London

My liaison to Dunhuang can be traced back to high school era. During the busy period of preparing for the National Exam, I bumped into an article titled “Mogao Caves” 莫高窟by Yu Qiuyu. The beginning of the article stroke me: In 366AD, a monk called Lezun 樂尊went to the area of Dunhuang. When he arrived there, it was getting dark. As the sun was setting down, it shone light onto the mountain that Lezun was facing. The reflection of the sunray from the mountain suddenly presented Lezun a phenomenal image: he saw thousands of golden Buddha emerging in front of him. Taking this as a clear message from Buddha, the monk realized how special this place was and began to construct caves in which he offered service for Buddha. Hence the beginning of the Mogao Caves.     

Whether this story is true or not, nobody can tell. But certainly it has the appeal, for monks following the footprint of Lezun, and for a teenager living at the end of the 20^th century, that is, me. What Lezun witnessed, we might say from our modern perspective, is a religious experience. The image of Buddha in his mind somehow, with the timely aid of external force, transformed into a physical image, a “real” presentation in front of his very eyes. There is something mysteriously beautiful produced from this process, isn’t it? The dessert, the setting sun, the mountain, and most importantly, the light, the combination of them creates a surreal scene. That scene, obviously, is created by the account of Lezun, and further beautified by Yu Qiuyu. Yet that scene, my first association with Dunhuang, has been engraved on my mind ever since.

Perhaps at the same period, or a bit earlier, I encountered the music of Kitaro 喜多郎. His silk-road album, based on the namesake NHK documentary, was quite impressive, and I immediately became a fan of a song called “Mirage” on that album. The rhythm feels vast and grandiose, but at the same time a melancholic sensitivity for something that is forever lost. The music fits Dunhuang perfectly.

I always wanted to go to Dunhuang. I used to tell my friends that it is the number one place in China I want to visit. Because of this, I have been postposing the trip, saving the best for the last. I hope I can wait until a perfect time, at a perfect age in my life, to pay the tribute.  

The pilgrimage still hasn’t happened yet. But something else happened, which made the past four days very special in my life.

Fast winding of time forward, from teenager to adult. Almost twenty years passed. Now I am studying history. Unplanned but possibly a play of fate, I began to work on medieval Chinese history, which inevitably brought me to the Dunhuang manuscripts. Although it is hard to explicate, I can try to rationalize this choice. Maybe deep in my heart I am always longing for something mysterious, strange, or even spiritual that cannot be easily explained by the material world. There is something beautiful in that realm that attracted me throughout my life. Medieval history is full of strange things: miracle tales, ghost stories, unrestrained behaviors, etc. It might be a cliché already: the period from the Six Dynasties to the Tang is as confusing as exciting; it was a world free of controls, producing all kinds of extraordinary things 異相. This attracts me.    

So here I am, in London, the British Library, reading some Dunhuang manuscripts. These are obviously very special documents, preserved in the cave 17 and later scattered all over the world. The collection at the British Library, often referred to as the Stein Collection, mainly contains the Buddhist scriptures. Although they are not directly related to my work, there are from time to time some non-Buddhist materials embedded in these scriptures. Medicine is no exception.

3 October, 2012. A Wednesday. A day to be remembered in my life. This is my first time to read a Dunhuang manuscript, making it my first time to read any manuscript prior to the 10^th century. Yes, these manuscripts are indeed very old (from the 5^th to the 11^th century). Honest speaking, I don’t think the content of these manuscripts are essential for my research. Nevertheless, the very act of taking a look at them, together with touching them and smelling them, is an illuminating experience. In fact, this is a ritualized research for me. I don’t mean that I bowed before opening the scroll. That would make a scene in the library. I mean I somehow “experienced” these texts as objects, which brought me closer to people in history. Look at them! The writings by the monks who lived more than 1000 years ago have been preserved, unedited, to our own time, and to my very hands. When I read these manuscripts, I cannot help imagining the monks who wrote them; the historical distance between me and them suddenly collapsed. Look, the handwriting of this scroll is not so neat. Are you doing it in a rush or are you not very well educated? See, the drawing of that scroll is quite interesting. Why do you draw these animals along with the talismans? How do you use them? Of course there are no answers from the other side of the dialogue. But never before did I feel so close to the people who lived in so early an era. Anyone who reads these manuscripts cannot help imagining his/her relation to these copyists. And imagination is a powerful thing.

Since the library does not allow taking photos, I needed to copy these manuscripts, by hand. It sounds laborious, and it is, but it is a very special experience. It is part of the ritual. Think in this way: Most of the Dunhuang manuscripts are copies of Buddhist scriptures, made by the pious monks. So what I did in the library is essentially the same as what these monks did more than 1000 years ago. I entered history for a moment, and became part of them! Moreover, as I was doing this, I realized how important copying is. It slowed down your mind, giving you more time to digest the meaning of the text. Perhaps the motivation of those monks to copy down the scriptures is not so far off from mine. [In Japan, this is still an active practice. When I was in Kyoto, I found some temples offered opportunities for visitors to copy scriptures.]

So in the past few days, I have been sitting in the library, copying these manuscripts (five altogether), quietly and carefully. It is a sublime experience. Under one hand, I held the millennium-old manuscript (The oldest one I read was written in 545 AD, the time of the Western Wei西魏. That is almost 1500 year-old.). Under my other hand, a pencil was copying down the text, word by word, line by line, on a modern notebook. Just be absorbed in the text. Nothing else. For two manuscripts, it involved drawing the animals and talismans, which was challenging for me. I may not catch the very spirit embedded in these pictures, but I was giving my best try.

Hence the highlight of my London trip, if not of my life. Saying farewell to my friends in medieval Dunhuang here in the UK, I hope I will meet them again in Paris soon. 

The picture below: the British Library, view from outside.

Musée l'Ancien Évêché

For a history student like me, visiting Musee de l'Ancien Eveche in Grenoble seems a natural thing. In the eighties, while the city was constructing its second tram line, it accidentally found some treasure under the Eglise de Notre Dame. It is an ancient site of baptism, or in French, le baptistere (the site where baptism takes place). This archeological find is certainly exciting, but to fully appreciate its significance, it is necessary to know a bit about the history of Grenoble and adjacent regions. Voila, the museum offers a second section that displays a good combination of archeological finds, paintings, and architectural models to demonstrate the regional history from the time when the oldest human skull was identified (11000 BCE) to the end of the Enlightenment (le siècle des lumieres). For me, it is quite informational.

If we skip the early history, and go directly to the Gauls who occupied the region for centuries until 121 BCE when they were conquered by Romans. Voila: a hybrid culture between the indigenous and the exogenous. At the time, the city Grenoble had a different name: Cularo, which was firstly mentioned in 43 BCE in a letter to Cicero. The history of France starts from the collapse of Roman empire and the rise of Clovis who defeated the Germanic group Burgondes, and unified the Francs in the 5th century CE. Nevertheless, Grenoble was not in the territory of Clovis at the time. Wars permeated the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. A noble family called the Dauphins, one of the many feudal forces in medieval Europe, gained ascendency in the 11th century, and ruled the region autonomously. In 1349, because of the political and financial reasons, the Dauphins transferred the power to the French count; the oldest prince of the King became the ruler of the region, though the region still enjoyed significant amount of administrative and judicial autonomy as a prerequisite of this transfer of power. This is why these days when the word Dauphin has a special meaning: it refers to the oldest son of the king or the leader. The autonomous consciousness of Dauphinois, as Grenoblois call themselves, continued in the following centuries. Let's jump to 1788, one year before the French Revolution. The parliament in Grenoble refused to pay the high tax imposed by Louis XVI. And when the king sent a troop to control the situation, the Dauphinois fought back by throwing tiles to the royal army. That is June 7, 1788, a moment that people in Grenoble are still proud of these days. "It is here that the Revolution starts!" they often say. Right now, I am sitting at a cafe that is not far from where the event took place more than 200 years ago. It makes me think about the regional history of Grenoble, which seems to be on the margin of the empire in most of its history. Well, it is in the mountains, so what do you expect? But this also cultivated a spirit that did not easily comply or submit. So it is perhaps not so surprising that it fomented the seed of revolution here. My speculation.

Chartreuse

When I arrived in Grenoble, I had no clue what Chartreuse is about. The first Saturday, Madam Biron brought me to a lovely museum (Musée dauphinois) sitting on the mountainside. We stopped at a place where we could view the whole city. “Chartreuse,” she pointed to the mountains at the distance, “très jolie.” Now I have stayed in Grenoble for almost a month, and have gained some ideas of its basic geography. Grenoble is surrounded by mountains: Chartreuse in the north; Vercor in the southwest; Chamrousse in the east.

Yet Chartreuse is more than just natural beauty. The Grande Chartreuse, a monastery of the Chartreuse Order established in the 11^th century, sits there for more than 900 years. The Order is not well know because the total number of monks and nuns who practice this obscure type of religion does not exceed 400. Most of their monasteries are in Europe, one in the US and two in South Korea. The unique feature of the Chartreuse is its practice of silence throughout the life, a life-long meditation and solitude. The Order became known to the outside world after the German director Philip Groning made a great documentary about the life of the monks in the monastery in 2005 (Into Great Silence). That is my personal connection to the place. I have seen the film before, and I would had never imagined that one day I would be able to visit the site in person.

And it happened!

Three weeks ago, the Boston program organized a group visit to Chartreuse. We did a short hike to a peak from which we could see the monastery from afar. It was a foggy day. The monastery was shrouded in the mist, making it somewhat mysterious. The monastery is not accessible, but there is a museum not far that replicates its structure and offers all kinds of information about the Order to the curious tourists. The group trip included the visit to the museum, though quite rapidly. To make sure I didn’t miss anything, I visited the museum again last weekend, by myself. Again, since my French is rusty, I could only get a gist of what is happening in the monastery. The life of the monks inside is simple and rigorous: meditation, reading, working, praying, etc. Days after days; months after months; years after years. It is hard for a person who lives in the modern world, with all its distractions, to image this kind of life. The determination and perseverance must be uncroyable!

From the museum to the monastery exists a road with the mountains on either side. Walking on this road is simply a joy. Chartreuse is a special place because it weaves natural scenes and human spirituality so beautifully. Not unlike the Chinese conception of fengshui, the location of the monastery becomes part of its religious practice. As if not to disturb the natural rhythm, the Chartreuse monks choose to remain silent, perhaps “remain” is not the right word since silence is also an action for these monks – an action to shut down, an action to purify, an action to contemplate. (The interaction with nature is simply my speculation based on its analogy to certain Chinese religious practice. The religious meaning of silence in the Chartreuse Order awaits a more serious investigation.)

I sat on a small hill outside the monastery looking at this mesmerizing place. For the tourists including myself, Chartreuse is an interesting place precisely because it is so different from what we experience everyday. We all need a break from time to time, and nothing is better than sitting outside a medieval monastery and imagining the life of these monks that seems almost exotic to us.

I don’t know why I am fascinated by a place like Chartreuse. I am not religious, though when I am getting older I might become more spiritual. Again, I think there is a crucial difference between imagining a way of life and actually living that way of life. I may respect or even admire the life of these monks, but I don’t have the power to live that life. Human spirituality is a powerful thing. The more progress we make in this world, the stronger a desire we have to counter that progress, to return to somewhere we feel we belong to, we feel more content. 

Musée Archéologique

Suddenly, I have the urge to write today. By now, I have been in Grenoble for exactly three weeks. I have done so many things here on the daily basis that once I lost the tract of my writing, it became impossible to catch up. And it really takes an effort for me to reinitiate the writing. I need to start from somewhere, like, today.

Now I am sitting sur la Place Notre-Dame, just outside my apartment. Il fait couvert maintenant. I am sitting outside a café at the square. Facing me is the center of the square, with a beautiful fountain commemorating the historical event in 14 June, 1788, when the parliament in Grenoble organized a meeting in which they decided to defy the heavy taxation from Louis XVI (that is 13 months before the prise de Bastille, the proud of the city). Farther in the distance are the mountains. Here in Grenoble it is hard to avoid mountains in the horizon; they surround the city and is part of the city. In fact, this is one of my favorites in Grenoble. Looking at mountains has become a routine meditation for me.

And of course, there is French, both for the language and for the people. I think I am improving, but I want to improve more. Perhaps “resolution” is a good word to convey my experience here. My understanding of French culture and French people is a bit fuzzy due to the language barrier. I can get the gist of things, but often lose subtleties. Sometimes this is frustrating, and exhausting. An interesting experience nonetheless, the experience of being lost. Right now, I am sitting at this lovely café, surrounding by the French, and their language. Par mal?!

It just started to rain. The patisserie across the road lights up its windows. The rain, the bread, and the joyful conversation flowing in the air. C’est la vie française.  

As I said, I have done so many cultural activities that to give a superficial survey of all is meaningless. Perhaps they will be permeated in my future entries. But at the moment, let me tell you my excursion early today at the musée archéologique. The museum is on the other side of the river, not very far away from where I live. It is a small museum, but I like the design quite a lot. In a sense, it epitomizes the city, with a long history and vibrant modern life. (The rain is hardening, and the view of mountains is lost in mist.) The museum was built on an archeological site that can be traced back to the time of antiquity. It was a burial site for the city since the 4^th century, and later when the region was Christianized churches were built upon it. Archeologists found at least 1500 tombs here, from the 4^th century to the 18^th century, and with the technology of “bioarchéologie,” it becomes a valuable place to study the evolution of the society and human health in the region. The heart of the museum is a huge pit where human remains are displayed. A machine projects the lights of five colors onto the pit, demonstrating the architecture of five renovation/rebuilding of the site in the past two millenniums. A nice combination of old archeological finds and new technologies. And there is music as well in the background, a sort of solemn religious tones that make visitors to contemplate death and eternity.

And there is the story of Saint Laurent, to which the current church is dedicated. Living in the 3^rd century, he was one of the martyrs who defended Christianity. The Roman emperor tortured him by putting him on a grill and let the fire burn him slowly until he died. Later he became a saint, and Christians in Middle Ages prayed to him to cure their burns and skin illnesses. A very interesting connection to my subject.

Well, at the moment let me stop here. I will not overwhelm myself by writing too much at a time, since that only intimidates a future writing. Perhaps “peu en peu” is better. Just like this beautiful fountain in front of me: let the water flow more slowing and continuously.

The rain just stopped. The air feels fresh and cool. It is about the time that people here begin their night life, and there are so many things in summer for them to do, and for myself as well!

À Grenoble

The first few days in Grenoble is overwhelmingly thrilling. The city, located at the foot of the Alps, has many cultural heritages and natural beauties. I live in a lovely apartment in the centre-ville, with a kind host grandma, Madam Biron. From the porch of the apartment, I can see the mountains at the distance with snow on the top. That is a lovely scene. 

I may say that the geography of Grenoble is somewhat similar to Kyoto, both surrounded by mountains. The difference is that the mountains in Kyoto are imbued with temples and cultural sites. For Grenoble, though not completely absent, the mountains are primarily a natural resort for skiing and hiking. I will surely "profiter de ça."

I have been discovering more in the city: Do you know Stendhal was born here in 1783? And he absolutely abhorred this city! Do you know Rousseau stayed here for a short period of time as well? Do you know Napoléon passed here in 1815 before he went to Paris to retake the power from the Royalists? And there are a few beautiful monasteries on the mountainside. One of them, la grande Chartreuse, is where the documentary "Into the Great Silence" was made. A place to which I have no access, though mesmerizing to contemplate the life inside. 

Each of these deserves a separate entry. And that will be done. But the city itself, especially the old section where I stay, is fascinating as well. I have already experienced the cultural difference between America and Europe. Everything here is delicately small: alleys, cafés, restaurants, bookstores, bakeries, etc. I have taken a few times of walk around the area. It was absolutely lovely. There are also many "places" in the area, where I can often find churches, monuments, or other historical sites. The summer time is the best in Grenoble. People here love to hang out outside, chatting with friends, enjoying the sunshine, having a good meal. A different kind of life. 

Well, c'est tout pour aujourd'hui. Tomorrow the class starts, and perhaps it is the start of my transition from the initial cultural excitement to a more gradual cultural adaptation. On verra. 

Norman Rockwell

Before I knew who Norman Rockwell is, I encountered his works three times. In Japanese, perhaps I can say that this is 縁があります. We have a special tie. First time was in K's lecture, where he showed one of Rockwell's paintings.

The girl in front of the mirror has two images: one is her reflection in the mirror, and the other is the actress on the magazine. The painting struck me because I feel it portrays something universal. All of us have these two images: who we are and who we strive to be.

Early this year, when I was at AAS, a professor showed me and a new friend we met a mural preserved in a Song tomb. The mural is about the daily life of a family, which apparently manufactured medicine for living. "This is like Rockwell's paintings on American lives," they commented. I was at a loss. Who is Rockwell? They then explained to me by showing another painting of him. 

This is a rather amusing image of a boy, before receiving the penicillin injection, examines the certificate of the doctor. I encountered this image again in JG's lecture on American history of medicine, from which I learned more about the social context of the image. Despite Rockwell's playful depiction, doctors' authority was rarely challenged in the mid-20th century America, when this painting was produced.   

So who is Norman Rockwell? He is one of the most eminent illustrators/artists in the 20th century America. What made him famous is the over-300 cover illustrations that he produced  for the Saturday Evening Post magazine from 1910s to 1960s. The popularity of the magazine made millions of Americans familiar with his works. In a sense, Rockwell's works are quintessential American, because they captured the spirit of everyday American lives in the 20th century. 

Rockwell spent the last 25 years of his life in Stockbridge, a small town in the western Massachusetts. Hence a museum was built there after he died in the 70s. Out of curiosity, I went there last weekend. Unlike most of the museums I visited before, this one is located in a rural area. On my way there, I was driving through dense forests in a mountainous region. And almost all of a sudden, the museum dashed into my eyes, sitting on a big grassland with mountains in the back. It was beautiful. 

The museum is not very big. On one level, it hangs up all reprints of the 323 paintings that Rockwell made for the Post. Going through them is like a quick survey of American history in the 20th century. Many people may not say Rockwell is a true artist, and Rockwell himself admitted this. Most of his works are for commercial use; he worked for deadlines and had to follow the guidelines of those magazines he worked for. For example, his illustrations for the Past are generally uplifting and bright, even during the dark period of the Great Depression. This is because the Post, a conservative magazine, set the style. Similarly, Rockwell's portrayal of American lives after the WWII is positive, with soldiers coming back home and establishing happy families. The reality may not be that simple. The malfunction of the American middle class in the 50s is widespread, though only gradually recognized later. If you want to get a real sense of what this is about, go to see the movies such as "The Hours" and "Revolutionary Road."          

But I don't intend to devalue Rockwell's works. If he is not a great artist, he is a great story-teller. The commercial concern made him efficiently produce paintings that can tell stories in a few seconds in order to catch the eyes of his audience. And he did it quite successfully without sacrificing the meticulous details of his artwork. In fact, traditional training made him pay great attention to details. As a result, his works are both arresting and accurate. No small an achievement. Just look back to the painting "Girl at the mirror." Isn't there something beautiful in this painting, something sadly beautiful?  

  

A new time

When I checked the date of my last post, it is Sept. 5, 2011. In French, I would say "j'ai la honte," that is, I am pathetic! Nine months have passed. Lots of things took place during the time: I submitted my prospectus; my prospectus got passed; I taught two courses; I went to visit my brother in SF; I received a fellowship for my research abroad. And many more. On the other hand, nothing seemed to happen at all. Right now, I am sitting on the window seat in my living room, looking over the quiet street outside and musing upon whatever in my head, or nothing. That was exactly the situation one year ago, when I started this blog. I love summer time in Cambridge.    

Time is an interesting thing. Everyone agrees that it is irreversible. It flows in one direction, like a river. But time is never an abstract concept. It associates with things in this world and our experiences. Hence, the contour of its flow becomes more complicated. Sometimes, it repeats itself, either through a natural pattern (seasonality, for example) or by personal experiences. We can also think about memory, which makes our past part of our present. Surely we can contemplate a historical time, that is, a time flowing from the past to the present. Many historians contemplate this issue. One of my former advisors even claimed that the conception of time is the key factor to distinguish a modernist from a post-modernist perspective.

What does this mean? Let's put these technical jargons aside, and just think about a popular narrative of time - a progressive time. This makes sense at the first glimpse: with the development of science and technology, we are living in a better world than those who live in the Middle Ages. Barely can we find a person who prefers to live in the past, no matter how nostalgia he/she is, where epidemics abounded and the living condition was miserable. This progressive narrative, though, is not without problems. These days it has become a tacit knowledge among historians that a progressive time does not do justice to history, because it usually engages the use of applying modern standards to the evaluation of the past. This inevitably ends up with a glorious celebration of the present at the expense of dismissing the past as backward, unsophisticated or even alien. The end result: a complete disconnect between the past and the present. Historians wouldn't be very happy about that.

Let's listen to what Walter Benjamin, the eminent social critique in the early 20th century, comments on the topic. Here are his words on a painting by Paul Klee :

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." 

What historians try to do is to remove the violence of progress in order to "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." 

Why do I say so much gibberish about time and history? I don't know. I would like to say more things about Benjamin's fascinating writings. But at the moment, it might serve to alleviate my guilt of not writing for my blog for such a long time. Time is not a linear, seamless thing. Neither is my blog writing. Enough about excuse. Now I want to initiate a new time for my blog, to keep writing in the following year, when I will travel extensively. Let's see where my angle flies.