Some mysteries of Madeira

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I
A mountain, in the middle of the sea

After three days of terrifying storm [at sea], during which, on several occasions, the navigators had thought themselves lost, there came upon them suddenly an unexpected calm, and a dense, dark, ashen fog, through which they could hear approaching a great thunderous roar from afar. A strong current in the sea bore them swiftly towards it.

The sailors found this more frightening than the storm: to sink is common enough sailor's fate, but to pitch over the precipice at the end of the world seemed both terrible and unknown. Tough, wiry, dry-eyed men stared intensely, white-knuckled, forwards, awaiting their fate.

Then, in the late afternoon, relief came: the fog lifted revealing a be-cliffed, steeply-hilled, thickly-wooded isle, full of game and birds, balmy of climate, rich in soil, and -- untouched by the foot of man. The roar they had heard was not, it turned out, the ocean pitching into the netherworld but -- the ocean surf crashing against her rocks!

(Tratado que comproz o nobre e notavel capitão Antonio Galvão dos diversos & disvaridos Caminhos, per onde nos tempos passados a pimenta & especcaria veio da India as nossas partes, & assim... Lisbon, 1563)

Such was the Portuguese discovery of Madeira in 1419.

Or not exactly - the discovery: it is the first of the many strange mysteries of the island that, it turns out, it had not been unknown prior to the Portuguese discovery; rather it seems to have been someone's well guarded secret, though we are not sure whose: a fourteenth century Italian navigational map has since come to light showing clearly the island's location and fairly precise drawing of its coastline. Who made it and who owned and used it and for what purpose, we do not know; but someone did.

Nor do we know why they kept it a secret, but they did.

The Aldobrandini twelve

Ippolito Aldobrandini, in time Pope Clement VIII, commissioned twelve tazze, or elaborate table-top ados, which are known by his name. They were executed between 1573 and 1577, mostly likely by a northern (cherman?) artist working to an Italian design. They represent the twelve roman emperors featured in the histories of Suetonius (the statuette), and the major events of the reign of each (on the plate). The last time all twelve were together was 1861; the set was subsequently scattered, and, what is worse, some individual pieces were disassembled and reassembled again -- some wrongly.

(I would like to know why they were scattered, but have been unable to find the story so far; surely, they would have been more valuable as a set? Something odd must have transpired, but what? Inheritance, perhaps? As for the disassembly -- the explanation is simple: the owner had a mechanically-minded twelve year old son).

This one, in the possession of the Minneapolis Arts Institute (who?!), shows the figure of Augustus and the events from the reign of -- Caligula. See this page for a zoom-in view: the details are really impressive and the most amazing thing about it is its color: it's gilt silver, but somehow barely gilt: the color is the palest-yellow-tinged, extremely subtle and very beautiful. The chemist in me wants to know how this effect was achieved.

I have found two of these in Portugal: a complete one at Medeiros Almeida - of Emperor Tiberius, beautifully displayed allowing one a close-up stare; and an incomplete one (only the plate) at Arte Antigua, also well displayed if not well lit. There is another one at Victoria and Albert, but the VA website won't tell you which emperor they have. (Maybe it's an embarrassing emperor?)

(Nor will the VA let you zoom in on their tazza. Let the provincials struggle for cheap popularity, not us).

Another tazza was sold at an auction in July 2000 for 1.6 million bucks. At these sort of prices, and with public museums owning some, the twelve are not likely to be put together ever again.

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Looking at the Arte Antiga tazza today, I discovered it was much richer gold than the Medeiros piece. It was also dented: perhaps that's your explanation: it had been dropped, damaged, and had to be regilt. But it was regilt by someone who did not know the original recipe and so came out yellow as an egg-yoke.

The workmaship, of course, remains extraordinary.

Urad Dhal vs. Jesus 1:0

There is some disagreement as to whether

a) Jesus went to India during his hidden years (i.e. before launching his public career in Palestine); and went in order to learn all that mind-boggling stuff with which he subsequently beguiled the unlettered back home (a.k.a. "Wisdom of the East"), as this film would have it ("this is clearly a possibility we cannot exclude"); or

b) whether he went there at the end of his Palestinian career, to escape crucifixion, as his Holiness Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian would have it ("The evidence from books of history shows that the coming of Jesus to the Punjab and neighboring territories was inevitable");

but

that he did go seems to be clearly established by this recipe:

URAD DHAL

Ingredients:

1 cup Urad (black) daal
1 Onion sliced
1 Tomato diced
1 tsp Ginger grated
1-2 Green chilies chopped
Coriander leaves finely chopped
1 tsp Cumin seeds (jeera)
2 bay leaves
2 cloves
1/2 tsp. turmeric powder
Salt to taste
A pinch of Garam masala
Red chili powder to taste
2 tbsp oil
1 tsp lemon juice


Preparation:

Clean and wash the dhal properly. Soak it in water for 10-15 minutes.
Boil it in 5 cups of water. Boil till it becomes soft. It should not become pasty. Remove the water and keep aside.
Heat oil in a kadhai (deep skillet) and add cloves, bayleaves and cumin seeds, allow to splutter.
Now add ginger, onion and green chili and stir-fry till golden brown.
Add tomato and fry till it softens. Add all dry masalas (turmeric powder, chili powder, salt) and fry for a moment.
Now add dhal and lemon juice, mix very gently.
Sprinkle garam masala and garnish with coriander.
Serve hot.

Urad dhal is the oldest dhal known to man; excavations at Mohenjo Daro have shown that Indians were eating it, spiced with jeera, turmeric and amchur, some five thousand years ago (while our ancestors, people, ate raw meat on a stick in caves).

Then Jesus arrived and began his teaching and the Punjabis were faced with a difficult problem: do we go and listen to that odd-looking, wheatey fellow over there, or do we continue to squat here and eat urad dhal (using our right hand, of course)?

Then, not surprisingly, they punted for urad dhal.

This explains why there is no trace of Jesus and his teaching in India. Urad dhal wins. It always does.

*

(Further research reveals that Jesus did not, in fact, go to India, but to Poland. 'Twas the mushroom season that did it, I am sure).

In which he is mean and sarcastic towards people and places he loves

The Museu do Oriente has a rich, well organized, well-labeled collection; it's also at the end of the world across three wrong sets of tracks and therefore real hell to get to; and in a building which makes me sick (it's a converted factory, all reinforced concrete, sloping ramps and delivery size elevators; and all shapes are relentlessly, unforgivingly straight and perpendicular).

It also has a gift shop which is not just ridiculously priced -- they buy for 3 euros and sell for 36 -- and full of utter and total junk -- not a single item of any value at all -- but is also totally wrong: the Asian outfits are not Asian, Burmese "laquerware" is plastic, the cabinet with tea-pots, helpfully inscribed "China" -- and "中国", for added authenticity, no doubt -- has not a single Chinese item in it and the tea implements in it are worse than useless. The museum does a good job popularizing some aspects of Asia; but its gift shop then completely undoes it all. I am entertained -- I can't help laughing out loud at some of the shop items -- but also shocked. Is the museum really allowed to do this? Is this not a violation of some kind of principle? A perversion of its educational mandate?

While waiting for my show I watched a documentary on Goa -- it featured interviews with people I know and pans of the insides of their homes; Mario looked younger and healthier than I remember him; perhaps the video predated my stay, Goa seemed somehow cleaner than I remember it.

The show was Bharatnatyam by Saju George, the Dancing Jesuit (oh, yes); not the greatest BN I have seen, Saju also tired towards the end of the first half and began to lose balance; still, for a priest -- I mean, an amateur -- he was really remarkably good, even excellent. For a moment I had a spell of aesthetic delight.

I left early, unwilling to remain behind to join the announced discussion regarding matters of dance and priesthood. I like the dance alright, it's the priesthood I can't stand.

*

Coming back by way of a fancy restaurant where overpriced vegetarian food is served in Indian thalis (a thali in India is a way to serve an economic dish) I noted that, it being Friday, it was time for their weekly Oriental Dance. The lights were on and the curtains drawn; I looked in. It wasn't Bharatnatyam, though, as the thali has always suggested to me, but, somewhat disconcertingly, North African belly dance. Except that it wasn't that either: it was a pretty lame ad lib by someone who has clearly not even taken lessons. That someone was pretty and was clearly having fun; she caught my knowing glance through the window; and gave me a pixish smirk: she was enjoying herself -- the fraud perhaps more than anything else ("I can't believe they are paying me to do this"). She was clearly English -- a tourist perhaps or a student -- it's such an English joke; and such a English smirk.

In which he descends (briefly) into hell

(and makes his own illustration)

Every great classic must obligatorily contain a chapter in which the hero travels out to the limit of the known world and peers beyond. (If it doesn't, it fails; ask Camoes and Mickiewicz why they are not taught in the Dead White Men courses in America).

The epic chapter of my life took place this morning.

I went to a certain suburb to look for shoes in a certain large shopping mall. This expedition necessitated a departure from the quaint city center, with its seven hills, its aqueducts, its triumphant arches, its mosaicked side-walks, its cute wooden trams and the levitating clouds of blooming jacaranda everywhere, its tiny retail shops and minuscule family owned eateries, its mainly pedestrian traffic -- and into the wholesale mass-market world of modernity.

The impression this created was so overwhelming that upon returning I immediately set out on a massive substance abuse program, carefully blending uppers and downers for that so very much needed knock-out blow.

Over there there had been broad freeways down which endless chains of motor vehicles tore with a roar; and square honey-comb towers -- factories for living -- in which people somehow managed to live cheek-by-jowl without going on a wild shooting spree too oft; gigantic shopping malls, convoluted architecturally, full of absolutely worthless, shockingly ugly stuff; and proferring in their feederies (deemed "restaurants") what looked like mold-injected, polymer-based artificially colored sugar pulp. Everything was fast and noisy and there was not a single pretty thing upon which to rest one's soul.

A huge tower full of apartments with head-bashing low ceilings (but central vacuum-cleaning, I am sure) was being marketed at a site overlooking a major snarling freeway traffic exchange. "Lux living" said the copy, but it should have said "Luxury living easy to get away from" (that is -- if you buy this place, you needn't really be here).

A hard thought struck me: goodness gracious, people live like that.

My god, I thought to myself, these suburbs have grown in the last fifty years; but how did they grow? Where must one come from to find this kind of life sufficiently bearable to choose it over wherever it is one comes from?

*

Later, a glance at the real-estate magazine revealed a puzzling fact: the housing there, in the middle of all that, is hardly less expensive than it is here; 20-30% discount on average over this -- which is, I grant you, a theme-park life, but a cute theme park life all the same, agreeable in the extreme, easy on the senses, and pretty well laid back.

Which means that the quality/price curve is here extremely shallow -- as it is in the rest of the world: as one travels down the curve, one gives up a tremendous amount of quality to gain a little in price advantage -- an apartment which costs 10% less to rent is a lot worse than its 10% more expensive brother.

But try to go up from the middle and the opposite seems true: to generate a 10% improvement in quality from here -- the place where I am -- one must be prepared to double the price one pays. The price-to-quality curve seems therefore to look like this:



Where the axis cross is the "middle" of the market (me, and almost certainly -- you). If we go down from here (look for a cheaper apartment, for instance), any saving will come at a huge cost to quality; but going up from here we pay through our nose for even a small improvement.

I am not sure why the curve should look like this, though suspect it has something to do with income distribution.

*

How steeply prices rise as one tries to go up from the middle was confirmed for me in the afternoon when I visited an oriental carpet dealer -- in my own quaint and laid-back neighborhood of course (my much abused soul had needed to look at pretty things to recover from the morning's rude shock). The friendly Iranian man took me through the back, up some regal stairs and into a cavernous apartment hung and laid with delicious carpets (it was like entering the Ali-Baba cave). And there they were, beautiful, restful and silent: mamluks, tekkes, herazes, sardes, qoms reposing in total and absolute silence, not rushing anywhere, not making a sound. There I sat on a snow-white silk qom, all 40,000 euros of it, and slowly my soul calmed down.

Speaking of Mamluks

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Speaking of Mamluks, here is one (click to enlarge):

Edmund de Unger explained why Mamluks were his favorite oriental carpet pattern: "however long you stare at them, he said, you always see something new, you are never bored". But neither does the eye tire, I'd like to add: the patterns are complex, but regular and calm, and the color scheme is subtle.

This is a modern Mamluk, a copy of a sixteenth century original. It was woven by Woven Legends.

A few words about carpets

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1. Edmund de Unger, the owner of this miniature [which is a leaf of Shah Thamasp’s Shah Nama, read about the book here, read the book here, see pages from various manuscript editions here], was born into a Hungarian aristocratic family. His father was an Oriental carpet collector and young Edmund's first drawings as a child were not dogs, houses and human stick figures but – carpet patterns.

2. His father’s collection died a dramatic death: during the 1945 fighting for Budapest, Russians buried their dead wrapped in them. One couldn’t very well object: they were, after all, war heroes. And, surely, a hand-woven carpet, rich, thick, and laboriously made, makes a fitting shroud for a hero.

3. After the communist take-over, young Unger fled to the UK where for a time he served as a gentleman’s gentleman (literally) while studying for a barrister’s degree. He then joined British imperial foreign service and it is there that he caught the luster-ware bug. It all went from there. Though it was probably inevitable: a collector is born a collector, Unger says, what he collects is a matter of accident – stamps, bottle caps, Old Masters, carpets.

(Though, this not the case with me: my collections are not collections at all. They are just assemblies of beautiful object of every category and description, since they do not follow any scheme at all -- no category, no period, no genre. Clearly, I am not a collector in the same sense as Unger. Nor in another: I do not care if my possessions are authentic; only whether they are beautiful).

(Still, I do understand something of de Unger’s pleasure: he recalls fondly falling asleep deliciously in his friend's house while counting his friend’s Qing pieces. It has happened to me).

4. Asked his favorite oriental carpet design he says without hesitation "Mamluk", because, no matter how many times one stares at one, he says, one always discovers something new. I understand this, too: I, too, am slave to complexity. (Says who complexity is not a source of pleasure?)

(Just wait. There is a really nice Mamluk coming up).

5. I found the interview in the most recent issue of Hali ("carpets, textiles and Islamic arts" -- where has this beauty been all my life?). There I also found other treasures; like the advertisement, by Azer Ilme, a carpet weaving and marketing company of Azerbaijan (see some of their offerings here), that they have managed to reproduce a Shehi Safi carpet (last examples of this beauty-wonder were made in the 16th century, back when Azeris still spoke an Iranian dialect); and an article on the paracas carpets of Peru.

6. These last are as weird a story as you'll ever hear. They date to sometime between the 1st Century BC and 4th century AD - roughly the time of Imperial Rome. They were used to wrap the dead who were then buried in elaborate cave necropolises in the Paracas peninsula, Peru. One Julio Tello discovered these necropolises in the early 1900´s when he noticed very strange -- and beautiful -- carpets for sale in the markets of Lima and followed the grave robbers to their source. The colors of the surviving carpets have been beautifully preserved in the dry darkness of the graves; we know nothing about the civilization that made them, or why they made them, or what the designs mean, but they look as if they had been dyed and woven yesterday.

And they do look weird: just look.


7. And thus it is seen that the Russians, wrapping their war dead in Persian carpets, were simply re-discovering what the people of Paracas had known long before them: that a carpet makes a fitting shroud for the dead. I should make a note of it: I too want to be buried in a richly woven carpet.

(All this for a mere afternoon at the library. Can you imagine? And they say reading does not have a future).

*

8. On a later day at the library I discover that burying the dead wrapped in carpets was an ancient Scythian custom. The oldest extant Old World carpet -- dating to 4th century BC -- comes from a Siberian Scythian burial in Pazyryk, a high cold plateau in the back of beyond, where the borders of China, Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan meet. (This was discovered only lately, but confirmed a story from Herodotus that the Scythians buried their dead at a special site several weeks' ride east into the steppe; well, guess what, the old man did not lie: they really did). (Read all about it, and especially the Ice Maiden, a tattooed woman buried with weapons, horses, and a chariot, here).

Now, this touches me deeply: I am supposedly of Scythian descent.