Ghost of a flea: I pass the test! I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel

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August 28, 2007

I pass the test! I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel

BBC Radio is airing a four-part documentary series on archaeological reconstruction in the Balkans following the war; the second installment addresses the fortress city, Dubrovnik. It struck me not for yet more of the Beeb's tiresome, sophomoric posturing - failing to retroactively blame the war on President Bush the best they could manage was an "Americans are stupid" interjection* - but for its underlying assumption about the purpose of reconstruction and the meaning of history as it is embodied in architecture.**

Serbian gun boats in the Adriatic inflicted great damage on the medieval city of Dubrovnik in 1991/2. The Franciscan monastery with its library was hit many times. Known as the 'Pearl of the Adriatic', Dubrovnik was also under siege from the land. Dozens of buildings that we burnt out have been rebuilt. Three and a half million roof tiles have been replaced. Malcolm billings meets the architect in charge and talks to Dubrovnikans who risked their lives to repair roofs during the bombardment.

The BBC's archaeological broadcaster and writer, Malcolm Billings expends considerable effort to describe the "wave-like" effect of Dubrovnik's roof-line as the combination of slowly warping timber trusses and distinctive orange-red tiles weather into splendid Gormenghastian gentility. But no matter the presumably colossal expense of replacing these millions of tiles - I believe yet more millions are cited in the report than that noted above - and the fact he is talking to a local expert, Billings is unhappy the result. He believes the new tiles are slightly too red and the roof-lines slightly too straight. Will it take two-hundred years for them to weather into place? Maybe fifty, concedes the local authority and, pressed, perhaps a century.

It seems to me there is more going on here than a mere academic propensity to find something to moan about no matter the cost***; even worse than rolling into town and imposing on local hospitality only to make a cretinous dismissal of years of effort in restoration. No, it is that Billings seems to think there is an authentic Dubrovnik to be replaced, a Dubrovnik simultaneously untouched by war and yet somehow ringed by fortress walls subject to hundreds of years of wind and rain. He is English and should know better. Oxford colleges plants small forests to replace roof timbers centuries in advance; two-hundred years sounds like a perfectly reasonable time-frame for some tiles to settle in. Or are we meant to believe some gruesome Disney-esque mock-aging should have been carried out instead?

The logic underlying Billings frankly creepy yearning for an unchanging world strikes me to be the same as that underlying the emotive anti-logic behind claims to anthropogenic global warming.**** Many people seem to believe there is something called Nature which, but for human intervention, would remain pure and unsullied for all time. Yet it should be obvious to any mind that has moved beyond Bronze Age metaphor that we live in a world whose only constant is constant change*****. It is sad that things pass away - glaciers, forests, whole species - but without them nothing new would come into being. This is as true for the ephemeral works of humanity as it is for continents or stars or galactic superclusters. It must have been a nightmare to live in Dubrovnik under siege and an almost hallucinatory strangeness its medieval walls should once again shelter its people in a time of modern mortars, artillery and 24-hour cable news. It is rubbing salt into the wound to be lectured on the subject by a proponent of a vampiric ideology of stasis.

Dubrovnik photo by Arnáiz.

* It turns out Dubrovnik was not the first country to recognize the independence of the United States. Ha, ha, who could believe such a thing? Let us snort champagne and fart lobsters for we are the BBC!
** Missing from the report: An acknowledgment of the BBC's role in propping up Serbia's dictatorship and complicity in a three-sided genocidal free-for-all. Woe for the archeaological treasures of Egypt, certain to suffer the same retroactive concern for those of Afghanistan and Iraq; subject as they have been to the ministrations of the BBC's islamic puritan allies.
*** There are two many cruise ships calling on the town, the tourism industry is too successful and in any event the war cannot unhappen. Which makes sexual harassment Panda sad.
**** That is to say, those parts of it not motivated by a crass lust for grants, tenure or political gain.
***** To parse Frank Herbert.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 28, 2007 07:07 AM

Comments

I can understand the "unchanging world" mindset—it's just human nature, after all.

We're used to things functioning a certain way, and when time and progress tamper with our memories of a place it can occasionally be unwelcome. Whenever I visit my former hometown north of the city, I never fail to be amazed by how it's changed from farms and dirt roads to tightly-packed subdivisions. Part of me longs to see it as it was, but I'm also glad that it's metamorphosed and today's residents don't have to put up with the hassles of life at the outer perimeter of the urban core.

I run into this sort of thing on the micro-scale in my EU3 games all the time, particularly with all the HRE micro-states. The AI is constantly wanting to redraw the borders of Europe in novel and terrible ways. I am inclined to favour the borders we have today, but there's no firm historical reason why it must be so in every iteration of the game. Any one of a million events could have (and in the game, does) change the outcome. Sometimes I am inclined to fight it and make the game stick to my conception of the "natural" boundaries for a certain state. Other times I am content to let the AI run wild and craft something odd and wonderful I would not have conceived.

Ultimately I think we all know at heart that change is integral to human civilisation. It's the nitty-gritty specifics of timing, locale and purpose that we might disagree on.

Posted by: Chris Taylor at August 28, 2007 03:52 PM

I think this is a powerful argument. My reservations are twofold: First, I have enough of my anthropological indoctrination left to get a little twitchy at the notion nostalgia is something innate to us as humans. Things like an appreciation for the picturesque, notions of nationhood and associations of land or landscape with identity seem to me to be culturally and historically particular. I suppose a perusal of the Human Relations Area Files might reveal something identifiably universal going on with feelings toward "home" but I would be surprised... Second, and it would require a second listen on my part, but I am not certain this chap had ever been to Dubrovnik before the war. This being the case, he is articulating a nostalgia for something he had never experienced or he was only experiencing retroactively (a la Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus). In this he would not be alone. Many Canadians, for example, experience strong feelings of identification with the far north though most of us have never been there and have no intention of ever going there (though I would quite like to myself that is more of a Mythos issue than a Canadian issue and that being the case I would choose the Antarctic over the Arctic any day). It is an ersatz yearning for authenticity at some remove which I suspect is at play in much romantic nationalism or its trans-national, multi-culti alternative.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at August 29, 2007 10:40 AM

Ghost of a flea

August 28, 2007

I pass the test! I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel

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