Peacock-thoughts for a Pandemic Sunday

Peacock by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Charis in the World of Wonders
Ignatius Press, 26 March 2020

It's quiet in the village today. My amaryllis is silently, slowly opening. Though we're near the hospital, there is little traffic going by, and a good many Sunday villagers are or have been or will be snug in a comfy chair, watching the streaming services of their local church... or not, as they choose. 

At top, see a Clive Hicks-Jenkins peacock with its tail furled, one of the chapter division images for Charis in the World of Wonders. Peacocks have been a natural for symbolic bird since ancient times and for many cultures. Those eyes. The splendor of the shaking, unfurling fan. The rich, glitter of color. The piercing cry.

The early Christians adopted a belief of the ancient Greeks that the peacock was connected to immortality. Aristotle believed that the flesh of the peacock did not become corrupt after death. Perhaps ancient Greeks never let peacock leftovers last long enough to find out! But many years later, St. Augustine made experiment of the meat and agreed with Aristotle, finding that the flesh became only a little drier over time. Curiouser and curiouser!

Our modern image of a medieval royal table probably includes all sorts of weird, fantastic platters of food, including swans in plumage and peacocks with the great fan attached and spread. Desiring to have your own medieval feast, you might follow this advice:

A pecoke

Cut hym yn necke and skald hym 

cut of þe fete & hede 

cast hym on a spete 

bake hym well 

the sauce ys gynger.

That's a recipe from fifteenth-century England (Pepys MS 1047), by way of godecookery. The site also suggests that you not eat a peacock because it is tough and stringy. For myself, I would recommend that you not eat peacock because the peacock is beautiful and will give you a great deal more pleasure when rustling its tail of stars.

Nevertheless, godecookery offers a fourteenth-century sauce for your inedible peacock: poivre jaunet, from the 14th century Le Viandier de Taillevent. Grind up ginger, long pepper, saffron, an optional bit of cloves with verjuice, all toasted and then infused in vinegar or verjuice. Verjuice (Middle French "green juice") is a juice to pucker your mouth. Press some sour fruits like crabapples or grapes not yet ripe, and maybe even add some lemon or sorrel juice. 

Now you have it; take your scalded and spitted and stringy peacock and slather him in a sharp yellow pepper sauce. Tada! Here is the immortal flesh, preserved in acid and spice!

Paintings or mosaic work with peacocks appears as early as the third century A. D. in Roman catacombs. Part of this seems to be bound to the earlier idea that the flesh of the bird does not decay and holds some sort of immortality; that thought becomes a symbol wandering into regions of eternal life and resurrection. Part must be bound to the idea of leaving the earthly body and receiving a glorified body and soul, for the peacock in his fully revealed green and bronze and cobalt pomp and magnificence is an image of radiance and splendor. This sumptuousness finds its culmination in the peacock as symbol of Christ, who did not decay in the tomb and is transfigured and glorified.

 The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli, 1486
National Gallery.jpg (Public domain Wikipedia)
I see a kind of triangle between the source of God-radiance in the sky,
the figure of Mary at prayer, and the peacock with its tail pointing toward Mary.

Flannery O'Connor was child-famous at the age of five for her backwards-walking chicken, a buff-colored Cochin Bantam, and later for her writing and her love of peacocks, kept on the farm at Andalusia. And given O'Connor's Catholic faith and the great fan of symbolic meanings associated with the peacock, that's not surprising. Her "Living with a Peacock" is a marvelous thing, and you should go and read it right now. The dressing ("A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white piqué coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back.") and addressing of chickens, the aloof habits of peacocks, and much more are delightful. Her first peacock arrives with no tail but "carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it." Here, go! And if you need a nibble to entice, here is one:

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
“Amen! Amen!” an old Negro woman once cried when this happened and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inade­quacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent. A truck driver who was driving up with a load of hay and found a peacock turn­ing before him in the middle of our road shouted, “Get a load of that bas­tard!” and braked his truck to a shat­tering halt. I have never known a strut­ting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way. No peafowl of mine has ever been run over, though one year one of them lost a foot in the mowing machine.

And doesn't this sound like an O'Connor encounter with strange grace from her stories?

An old man and five or six white-haired, barefooted children were piling out the back of the automobile as the bird approached. Catching sight of him, the children stopped in their tracks and stared, plainly hacked to find this superior figure blocking their path. There was silence as the bird re­garded them, his head drawn back at its most majestic angle, his folded train glittering behind him in the sunlight.
“Whut is thet thang?” one of the small boys asked finally in a sullen voice.
The old man had got out of the car and was gazing at the peacock with an astounded look of recognition. “I ain’t seen one of them since my grand­daddy’s day,” he said, respectfully re­moving his hat. “Folks used to have ’em, but they don’t no more.”
“Whut is it?” the child asked again in the same tone he had used before.
“Churren,” the old man said, “that’s the king of the birds!”
The children received this informa­tion in silence. After a minute they climbed back into the car and con­tinued from there to stare at the pea­cock, their expressions annoyed, as if they disliked catching the old man in the truth. 

What stops so many is that galaxy of eyes in the shivering fan of feathers. O'Connor's people, black and white, instinctively grasp what a medieval man or woman felt about the peacock. Awe in the presence of the utterly strange and beautiful knocks at their doors. Symbolically for the medieval Christian, the spread feathers expresses the overwhelming, beatific vision of God. For them, the feathers made an analogue to God's glory.

Further, the eyes suggested the all-knowing nature of God, who sees and fathoms both the depths of all things and even what we may regard as things of the surface and small like the death of a sparrow or the number of hairs currently residing on your head. Interestingly, the peacock is also the vanquisher of serpents in medieval bestiaries, and also a bird immune to poisons. That means that the peacock stands in relation to the serpent as Christ stands in relation to the devious snake in Eden's garden.

I found this shot of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church (San Francisco)
on Pinterest, and can't seem to find the photographer...

The peacock still lingers in our world as a resplendent symbol of majesty, particularly in the Orthodox church. The rich double peacock image above shows the part of an Orthodox church called the Beautiful Gate, used by clergy, with its deacon doors or angel doors on each side. As is usual, Christ is on the right and the Theotokos on the left of the gate and doors.

I'll end with a poet who reached for the effulgence of the peacock and the preternatural nature of its cry. Here's a snip from a poem:

 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
 .
 The colors of their tails
 Were like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 In the twilight wind.
 They swept over the room,
 Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
 Down to the ground.
 I heard them cry—the peacocks.
 Was it a cry against the twilight
 Or against the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 Turning as the flames
 Turned in the fire,
 Turning as the tails of the peacocks
 Turned in the loud fire,
 Loud as the hemlocks
 Full of the cry of the peacocks?
 Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

In "Domination of Black," Wallace Stevens sweeps together darkness and autumn, deathly hemlocks, the gathering planets (so like the unfurling galaxy-tail of the peacock), and the idea of turning... all set against the memory of the preternatural cry of the peacocks. The otherworldliness of that stands opposed to dark and year's end, autumn and the hemlock, long associated (via funereal plantings and by the hemlock--not really the same hemlock as ours!--drink of Socrates) with death in the West. And this turning of autumn leaves in the wind, of flames in fire, of feathers in firelight is, not so surprisingly, a motion familiar to the peacock, who turns as he shivers his fantastical milky way of eyes.

And here's an image mixing peacock and leaves--
could not find peacocks in hemlocks!
Peacock in the Woods - 1907  (Public domain Wikipedia)
by Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921)

Christmas thoughts on painting and symbol...

Detail, Zanobi Strozzi, c.1433.

(Perhaps with some figure work by Fra Angelico?)

Predella to an altarpiece.

Tempera with gold on wood.

Wikipedia Creative Commons licence.

Image donated to CC by the Met.

* * *

                                           Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

                                           Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;

                                           Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,

                                           To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger

                                                 --from George Herbert, "Christmas" (I), 1633

I've long been friends with painters, and I love wandering among drawings and paintings. I have a particular affection for medieval paintings, and for the iconography of that era. One thing I especially find intriguing about medieval religious paintings is that the images possessed a function that was far more vital than that of paintings today. A painter in our time often wishes to have his or her painting in a static or traveling group show or a solo show. The painter desires to have images appear in an article or review, and longs to achieve the status of seeing his or her own paintings housed permanently in a museum. I dearly love to visit museums and would never dismiss them. But a medieval painter's labors joined a great variety of other crafted works to beautify and inspire in churches, cathedrals, synagogues, shrines, and castles. Art meant skill to make significant, beautiful creations. And many an artisan felt himself to be such a maker, part of a great body of people crafting and incarnating a house or way-station for God. Afterward, the made things were intimately connected to the highest spiritual feelings of many people, and they became an essential part of worship. Paintings, carvings, and sculpted pieces have frequently ended up in our museum collections, where they now have a more limited existence, drained of prior life and power, but yet... they once had that earlier glory. The symbolism in medieval paintings and icons likewise held meaning and a living power, where for most viewers today it remains merely a colorful mystery. 

So here's my Christmas greeting, rife with symbol and beauty: an adoration scene with ox and ass portraying the yoking of clean and unclean, centered on the infant Jesus. This iconography is extra-biblical, though reflected in St. Peter's highly symbolic dream of a sheet of clean and unclean foods let down from heaven. Such yokings reflect the baby's bringing of clean (Jewish) and unclean (Gentile) peoples together under the rule of Christ. Meanwhile the baby who binds the earthly and divine is radiant and haloed in gold, the metal at the top of the medieval hierarchy of metals. Perhaps he is so nearly naked and so radiant because painters of the era were inspired by a mystical vision from the prior century. St. Bridget of Sweden saw the baby lying naked on the ground, transfigured by light. 

St. Bridget may also be the source of the portrayal of Mary in prayer--and of her oddly blonde hair as well. Meanwhile, Joseph is less important, smaller, set back, crossing his arms in the attitude of one receiving a blessing. Mary wears a robe of heavenly, royal blue that discloses red, the color linked to Pentecost and the influx of the Holy Spirit. In Joseph, the colors are reversed. I imagine that for a Medieval viewer, the link from red to blood and martyrdom would have been clear as well--the fact that this strange, surprising child is born to die a martyr's death. Mary and Joseph are both serious-faced, befitting their role as guardians of the Messiah and the womb-tomb suggestions of the picture. I'm a little puzzled about the angels, as eleven is a peculiar choice, given medieval numerology. But there is another medieval piece that gives us eleven angels, the wonderful Wilton Diptych (and it has been argued that its heavenly court parallels Joseph's dream with sun, moon, and eleven stars, with Joseph himself honored as the twelfth.)

As in many medieval portrayals of the Nativity, the scene takes place before the shelter of a cave. The visual link between womb and tomb runs back to certain Neolithic passage tombs, and probably earlier. The womb is a place of transformation leading to new birth; the Christian vision of the tomb is also one of transformation and rebirth. The image of the cave (a mix of natural and altered stone) also reminds the viewer of the placing of the body of Christ in the cave (rock-hewn) tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. A cave being a piercing of the hard substance of the world by an ethereal body of air, the shape also suggests the divine that has come to pierce through the material world, and to be pierced in turn. The two support poles before the cave and the single bole of a tree may well have suggested the three "trees" on Golgotha to a medieval man or woman versed in the symbolism of the time. The tree is flourishing, again emblematic of new life. Far in the background, seven (a number of fullness and completion) towers on a hill and points the way toward heaven.

So there you go--a medieval Christmas card.

Have a joyous Christmas Eve and Day.

The Met site states that this tempera painting was originally attributed to the marvelous Fra Angelico but is now thought to be by his pupil, Zanobi Strozzi. Strozzi is known for his illuminations.

Book-and-birthday headshots...

Here are some possible book jacket headshots taken by my daughter on my Thanksgiving (every seven years!) birthday last Thursday. She likes the unsmiling one best... What would you pick (given the basic materials of over-the-hill moi, of course)? It's the naked-face (bit of lipstick) and undyed-hair of me. You can see my flying eyebrow in all three. Editor John Wilson once told me that half my face was like that of the nice lady in line behind him at the post office, and the other half belonged to a poet or a murderer. Writers are murderers of a sort. But the look--that's the work of The Wayward Eyebrow.


That was a big-number birthday! To celebrate, we had the full complement of five, plus the every-surprising and wonderfully dangerous-to-breakables Campbell Higle (who crocheted me a giant chicken! Chickens loom large!) A grand Michael-made feast with many festive bottles of champagne was had, followed by much stellar pie. I leaped with great abandon from my I.F.-and-keto w.o.e. (gotta love those acronyms) onto Thanksgiving carbs and sugars.

Then we went off to New York the next morning--my husband, me, and our youngest, who managed to pick up a g.i. bug and retch for much of the first night. Nooo! We felt ill but not quite as ill as he did. So we didn't accomplish quite as much as planned. Still, we tromped all over Manhattan to stare at extravagant Christmas windows; wandered St. Patrick's for the length of a service (the contrast between the cathedral and the theatrical show lights and brightly-colored shopping-ecstasy windows at Saks Fifth Avenue next door is quite something); shopped the Christmas Market at Bryant Park (we were staying near 8th and 37th, so that was convenient for persons not feeling so well); and ducked out of the rain to eat at Arva (Arva Madison Estiatorio on 60th--quite good.) And nobody tossed his cookies while out, which was a kind of victory, though I expect it happens fairly frequently in the city. (Confession: I once threw up in some tiny, extraordinarily well-groomed bushes next to a bunch of talkative missionaries on a street corner in Tokyo, but nobody even noticed.)

On Sunday, my fellas were set to see the Patriots (the youngest being a fan) beat the Jets (the unfortunate Jets!) Meanwhile I walked down to Central Park and then the Met to stare at the marvelous Armenia show--I tend to be drawn magnetically to the Medieval galleries there, so it was wonderful to see a very different Medieval world. Then I paid a bit of obeisance to the Dutch Masters show (Vermeer! Rembrandt!) and visited the angel tree in the Medieval rooms, along with some of my favorite pieces there, before walking around the park and heading back (lugging some very big books because I find it hard to leave the Met without art books.) Walked to the hotel, stopped to pick up a few Christmas presents along the way, and then gathered some more gifts and wonderful hot chili-chocolate at the Christmas Market.

Later, it was decided that a glittering night promenade across the Brooklyn Bridge enticed--that and pizza at Mr. Patsy Grimaldi's restaurant afterward. It was called Patsy's when I was there last, back in 2000 (or thereabouts) but now it is Julianna's. But Mr. Grimaldi himself showed us to our seats, and the pizzas were just as splendid as before. Our youngest was riding in an umbrella stroller the last time we crossed the bridge and hunted for Patsy's; now he is 21.

What a lovely birthday it was...

More on medieval prayer-nuts

Prayer Bead, 1500-1530, Mouth of Hell Mouth of Hell

Photo, The Globe and Mail: Ian LeFebvre

Not so long ago I wrote a group of poems for the Phoenicia Publishing anthology on the Annunciation, and then let publisher Elizabeth Adams pick what she liked best. One of the poems was about a medieval prayer-nut, and it appeared in John Wilson's Books and Culture.

Now there is some new research about prayer-nuts or prayer beads, and I think it wonderfully interesting. A fascinating article in the Globe and Mail tells us some things we've never known about these tiny, strange, packed-with-image orbs.

It turns out that a good deal of what's inside is invisible to the viewer, which is rather like the biblical idea of believing in what is unseen: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (KJV Hebrews 11:1). Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII at prayer are hidden behind a pillar. A rack of flayed humans is half-hidden behind the mouth of hell. The CT spies out detail that the owner of the bead never could have known.

How are these little miracles of the seen and unseen made? We now know much more than we did when I wrote my poem. The Art Gallery of Ontario has been peering around inside the beads. "The AGO’s micro-CT scans reveal for the first time that they were carved from a single piece of boxwood, but in parts, like stage sets, then held together, grain aligned, with tiny boxwood pins smaller than a single grass seed."

An experienced master craftsman, with the help of many CT scans, has now taken one of these apart, and so new secrets are known. "Craftsmen used tiny five-centimetre-long tools to drill and gouge and vein the exquisitely detailed religious scenes within the beads – some of which depict dozens of characters in full regalia and action, in a space about 2.5 centimetres wide and 1.5 cm deep." Take a look at the article; if you love the medieval world, you will find that the description of research on these small marvels is packed with interesting details.

The original post about my prayer-nut poem here.
  Includes links to beads at the Met.
The poem about the prayer-nut here.
  Books and Culture.
The new findings about prayer-nuts here.
  The Globe and Mail. With lots of images! (And, oddly, Trump and Comey.)

"The final result is an international exhibition, Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, that premieres Saturday in Toronto at the AGO, and then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum. Toronto’s boxwood has hit the big time, baby." --Ian Brown

"The elation of colour"

I like this little article including new research into the making of medieval manuscripts. Here's a clip:

The contents of a scriptorium’s cabinet have something of the ‘eye of bat, toe of frog’ about them. The parchment pages are goatskin, sheepskin, calfskin, split and pared down to tissue thinness, or they are ‘uterine vellum’ — the skin of aborted calves. Cuttlefish bones scraped the parchment smooth. Quills were cut from goose, swan or crow feathers. Hair from squirrels’ tails made the finest brushes. Gold leaf could be polished to brilliance with a ‘dog’s tooth’ — a shard of agate.

And another taste of the past:

The Roman taxonomer Pliny, a collector of both natural histories and far-fetched fables, writes of a red pigment called ‘dragon’s blood’ derived from the mingled bloods of a battling dragon and elephant. While most pigments could be had from the town apothecary, a scribe wanting to get his hands on dragon’s blood would have to wait for a defeated dragon to be crushed beneath a wounded elephant. Spoilsport art historians have since identified ‘dragon’s blood’ as the sap of the East Asian rattan palm tree. 

Read the rest! You'll find illuminated books to be even stranger and more beautiful than before.

Fowles in the frith

At seven, birds and squirrels flit and climb in the lilacs, and a lovely morning light lies in weightless panels on the green grass. To think that the air was juggling flurries so few days ago! And this little bit of 13th-century medieval marginalia runs in my head:

Fowles in the frith,
The fisses in the flood,
And I mon waxe wood
Much sorwe I walke with
For beste of bon and blood.

Wodewose being tamed by a lady,
15th-century tapestry, Basel
Wikipedia, public domain

Is it a courtly lyric in the voice of the lover in spring, thinking of his lady, to him the best of bone and blood, the best of all mortals? Is his unrequited love what sends him mad, to "waxe wood"?

Or has he suffered a great loss (death of the beloved lady, loss of a loved child, death of loved friends in battle?) Does he flee to the wild wood to be a wodewose, waxing mad in grief?

Or is he thinking of the Fall of Man and how all walk in sorrow because mortals are but beasts of bone and blood, mortal and sinful? (I'm remembering Chaucer's "Balade de Bon Conseyl," where a man is a kind of beast in a stall: "Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal!")

Or is the writer thinking of the Fall, sorrowing and thinking of Christ as the union of God and earthly man, the best of bone and blood? The fowls and the fish have no such need for reflection and are so without his sorrow.

Or, could it even be in the voice of Christ, so often portrayed as retreating in the wilderness? Could it be Christ, reflecting on Creation's fifth-day birds and fish and grieving for the human beast of bone and blood?

Is the poem somehow, mysteriously, all of these things at once, braided together, all those riches compacted? It's such a simple little abbab stanza, tied beautifully together by alliteration, jotted down in the midst of facts and numbers, with a bit of musical notation.

And somehow, also mysteriously, drifting in my mind.

***

***
A few notes

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini:

Merlin as war lord, mad in the Caledonian Forest.

Translation information and notes here

And [Merlin] mourns the [three brothers lost in battle], nor ceasing to pour out tears, he sprinkled his hair with dust and ripped off his clothes and lying flat on the ground he rolls now this way now that. Peredur comforts him, as do the nobles and dukes, but he desires neither solace nor to endure their supplicatory words. By now he had lamented for three days entire and had refused food, such great grief had consumed him. From that time on, after he had filled the air with so many and such great laments, he suffered a new madness and stealthily withdrew and fled to the woods, nor does he wish to be seen while fleeing, and he enters the forest and rejoices to skulk beneath the ash trees and marvels at the beasts grazing on the grass of the glade; now he follows them, now he passes by them at a run. He consumes the roots of plants, he consumes the plants, he consumes the fruit of the trees and the blackberries from the bramble bush; he becomes a man of the woods as though devoted to the woods. From then on during the whole summer he was discovered by no one and forgetful of himself and of his own kindred he hid himself in the woods, clothed in the manner of a wild beast. But when winter came and it had carried off the plants and all the fruits of the trees and he could not enjoy what he had, he poured forth such complaints as these in a pitiable voice: “O Christ God of heaven, what shall I do? In which part of the earth will I be able to remain since there is nothing here that I can eat?”

Vulgate Psalm 48: 21 

21  homo cum in honore esset non intellexit conparavit se iumentis et silebitur:
(Man when he was in honour did not understand: he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them.)

***

Only yesterday I thought that I might stop blogging--thought that perhaps it would be best. And now here I am again, all because of the little fowls in the frith, the happy fishes in the flood.

Dreaming back

Making Manuscripts from the Getty Museum.
Well worth watching...

I'm surprised by how many times the medieval world has crept into my books (perhaps most obviously in The Foliate Head, Val / Orson, and The Book of the Red King, but elsewhere as well) and into many of my blog posts. Perhaps I really am living in the wrong century, though I would not have lived long in the medieval world and am grateful to modern medicine's influence in matters of bad bacteria and childbirth.

My own possibly-quirky explanation of why green men invaded European churches here.

Druidic verse from Amargin, and a link to Yeats here.

"The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Prayer-nut" here (and in the print edition.) And no, you're not missing anything; it ends with "stumbles--"

And here's one where þa middangeard crept in. "Vermont Kingdom."

And a bit of The Book of the Red King here or here. Some of these will be a little altered when the book appears.

A favorite medieval-mad website: Jeff Sypeck, Quid plura? Here are his medieval-inflected posts.

And here is Jeff's Beallsville Calendar, now in progress, inspired by medieval calendar poems.

Christmas at Camelot from Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Clive's posts on Gawain and the Green Knight are here
Information on ordering the Gawain prints (more to come) at The Penfold Press

The medieval world is still with us. I just went to the door for mail and found a box of wine and New Selected Poems by Les Murray. Looking up an interview, I see him talking about influences: "Various Scottish and Irish medieval poets too, Dunbar and the poet of that mighty anonymous hymn from Ireland, "Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart," hymn 31 in John de Luca's Australian Parish Hymn Book" (Image Journal.) And here's this, a comment I might have made, from another interview: "the deadliest inertia is to conform to your times" (The Paris Review.)