The New Victorians

Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman keep the fires burning.

The theme of this blog is geographical travel, not necessarily history. But my meeting this week with Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman, a remarkable couple living in Port Townsend, WA, blurs that distinction in the most interesting way.
    The Chrismans might be called “lifestyle antiquarians”. Or “anthrochronologists”. Or “practical archaeologists”—I’ve struggled with phrases to describe them exactly. They are fascinated by the latter Victorian period, and have decided not only to study it, but to live like people of reasonable means in the years 1880-1900. And so, they reside in a 128 year-old house in Port Townsend, a town with much surviving Victorian architecture. They wear Victorian clothes, and read Victorian literature (high and low) by the light of Victorian oil lamps. They sleep on a feather bed, and keep and prepare their food with Victorian appliances, using recipes gleaned from period sources. And so on.
    They make concessions to practicality. There’s an old Isuzu truck parked in front of their house; Sarah pursues her writing career with a steel-nibbed fountain pen, but is still reachable by email. They have a PayPal account. “No one understands better than us that we can’t completely recreate the past,” says Gabriel. The vast infrastructure for that—the gas works and the ice deliverymen and the parts to repair their period machines—no longer exist.
    So why do they bother? There’s been a lot of chatter about them on the interwebs, reacting to their project with varying degrees of fascination, incredulity, and scorn (e.g., see here). The word “twee” comes up a lot, as in “those twee hipsters”. As much as most people bother to process it, the Chrismans’ lifestyle is dismissed as a particularly rabid form of nostalgia—a Masterpiece Theatre obsession run amok.
    The reality is far more interesting. Sarah is trained in cultural studies, Gabriel as a historian and archivist. As they conceive it, the Victorian period was not a superseded style obliterated by progress. It was literally what novelist L.P. Hartley called the past—“a different country” where things were done differently. It was a place where real people lived, with a real culture that was not at all “twee” to them. And so, like any good pair of cultural anthropologists, the Chrismans became “participant observers” in this different community, immersing themselves far beyond the reading of monographs and the attending of scholarly conferences.
    Is their immersion complete? Of course not (see above). What they mostly have left to participate in are the processes of material culture: what’s it like to light a period oil lamp? (Answer: it’s easy, but there’s a knack to it.) What’s it like to wear a corset all day and all night? (Answer: it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d assume.) What’s it like to visit the ladies’ room in a full-length Victorian outfit? (Answer: Victorian undergarments are more hygienic, and more friendly to female anatomy, than their modern equivalents.) What’s it like to keep time with a period watch? (Answer: difficult, because the electromagnetic fields we moderns live in tend to gum up the components.) The Chrismans have, through their experiential studies, recovered knowledge of the past that is simply invisible to conventional historians, because the written sources don’t bother to discuss such mundane, everyday things.
    Alas, contemporary attitudes have become a drag on their project. Due largely to the BBC and Hollywood, most people have a vaguely pleasant sense of Victorian aesthetics, but a hostile one to its politics. The very word “Victorian” is often used as a pejorative, synonymous with classism, racism, sexism, and sexual prudery. “The past is garbage” is an attitude that can be voiced in polite society, even though, as Sarah argues, “saying that would never be OK if it was about some foreign group.” Folks who abhor ethnic stereotypes think nothing of stereotyping millions of people who lived in the past— people who, as Gabriel notes, “can’t defend themselves now.”
    Complicating the picture is the fact that Victorian times are perceived as the heyday of worldwide colonialism, genocide of American Indians, and Jim Crow. Few formerly marginalized people (and their white allies) have much nostalgia for times they view as irredeemably repressive. To them, the Chrismans’ vigorous defense of their era sounds tone-deaf.
    But this isn’t exactly fair. First, because not all Victorians supported the old sins, and in some cases pioneered resistance to them. Second, because few deserve to have their lives defined by the worst excesses of their times. Imagine a person from 2016 waking up in 2116, and immediately saddled with blame for Bangladeshi sweatshop labor and the flooding of southern Florida—despite the fact that they personally strove to buy American and drove a hybrid car. Indeed, the very notion that Victorian times were inherently more evil than modernity is at least debatable, and perhaps laughable. They may have had children working bobbin machines in 1880, but they didn’t fill the oceans with plastic or drop barrel bombs on civilians.
    It’s unthinking and unfair, but progressivist arrogance takes its toll on the Chrismans. Sarah, who is mercurial and expressive, finds she must summon up the energy to step outside her door, even in hip, liberal Port Townsend. “It’s like running a gauntlet. I don’t know what I’ll find when I go out there.” Reactions to her hand-sewn wardrobe and corseted waist range from dewy admiration to white-hot anger—as if she is personally trying to undo a century of feminism. (She has written a book, Victorian Secrets, on what she learned wearing that half-desired, half-detested garment.) Gabriel, whose day job is in a bicycle shop, comes off as the prose to Sarah’s poetry—a mechanic and rationalist. He faces less hostility for looking different, perhaps because men’s fashions haven’t changed as much.
    To a historical novelist like me, several of whose books as set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a visit to the Chrismans is a tour of Candyland. Their restored wood-burning range, with its jet-black skin and nickel warming racks, is like a polished locomotive. Sarah’s high-wheel tricycle (alas, a reproduction) has a cleverly asymmetric design—the Millennium Falcon of bikes. When seen through the Chrismans’ eyes, Victorian times don’t seem twee or repressive as much as more immediate, a place one could actually visit and learn from. If the past is a foreign country, they are ready to be your guides. May their 19th century go on forever.

© 2016 Nicholas Nicastro

The Last Castle

The castle from the valley.

If there's anything most people think they know about Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, it's that it was the inspiration for the Magic Castle of Walt Disney. If they know anything else, it's that Neuschwanstein ("new swan stone") is the brainchild of King Ludwig II, the so-called "Mad King" who was completely disinterested in statecraft, but spent huge sums on realizing his romantic fantasies. This castle is his crowning achievement: a mammoth tribute to his friend and inspiration, Richard Wagner, embodying in stone the great Ur-legends that became the glorious past of a newly unified Germany. Or at least Wagner's versions of them.

That's all I knew when I arrived there yesterday, at what is still the #1 or 2 top tourist destination in the country (1.3 million visitors a year). I picked up some notion somewhere that Neuschwanstein was little more than a garden folly on a grand scale--great for viewing at a distance, but with not much to see within. Tastemakers deplore it as kitsch. The masses of unwashed surging in the town below, Hohenschwangau, did nothing to dispel these impressions.

But I was pleasantly surprised by Neuschwanstein. It goes without saying that it is spectacular from afar: situated on a high perch above the valley, its profile in white stone beckons in any season. On the day we visited, it was shrouded by tendrils of cloud, as if emerging from--or spinning--the mists of prehistory. 

Actually, though the interior was never finished, there's plenty to see inside. The interior is replete in the way we never see anymore, with every square inch painted, gilded, or carved. The style is 19th century Romantic, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. Photo-taking is verboten, but pictures are easy to find on the web, and worth looking at. It is certainly the only palace I know with a grotto--an actual cavern, with stalactites-- located directly off the master bedroom. 

How Ludwig II tops a staircase.

Of course it's kitsch. And yet, the Disneyfication of its profile has the paradoxical effect of making Ludwig's pastiche "original" seem more authentic than it would otherwise. Instead of the prehistory of Germany, Neuschwanstein has become the ur-source of a far larger empire: the Wonderful World of Disney. 

Despite its transgressions against conventional good taste, there's something else that's real about the place. It stems directly from Ludwig himself, who did not play at nostalgia or the faux antique, but actually lived for and in the world he created. For him, modernity was nothing much to celebrate, and the past was not an attitude to strike, but a kind of utopia. Knowing the human costs of that modernity, who's to say he was wrong? 

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

The Terrible Angel

It's a feeling I've had most often in a good bookstore, when faced with the sheer number of books I'll never have time to read. Or my first time in Italy, when the sudden superabundance of antiquity and beauty pitched me into a strange kind of despair. After my first exposure to Kyoto, I finally feel I have travelled to a truly different place -- though I've been an ocean from home for more than a week. Imagine spending a day smelling nothing but essential oils, and then imagine that happening to all your other senses too.

There have been many moments today when the beauty has simply wrung something out of me involuntarily, a little mortal "oh". My first glimpse of Kinkaku-ji, the so-called "Golden Pavilion", shining in the morning sun, seated in glory over its own reflection and retinue of fading irises. Or dappled sunbeams piercing a still pond at Ryoan-ji. Or an astonishing wooden screen at Nijo-jo's palace, carved from a single piece of wood, that somehow depicts peacocks from one side and peonies from the other. Or the particular "clacking" sound tall bamboo makes in the wind -- something I discovered right outside the door of my room at Myoshin-ji temple.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure," said Rainer Maria Rilke, "and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." I am not destroyed today, and I am temporarily relieved to be back in the world of plywood and linoleum and internal combustion. But there's still time for me to disappear tomorrow. 

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

Tokyo Drift

When my friends learn I'm in Japan, their first reaction is "great!"-- followed usually by "um, why?" I know what they mean by this, as in "why now?" or "are you there on business?" Unfortunately, I have no such excuse. One of my books, Empire of Ashes, was translated and published in Japan a decade ago. Whether it sold or anybody read it is a mystery to me. But that's not the reason I'm here.

Interest in Japan-for-its-own-sake is harder to justify today than it was a generation ago. Back then, it was the Land of the Rising Sun that was the focus of American anxiety, as Japanese "export champions" like Toyota, Sony and Fugitsu stood poised to bury their American competitors. In the 1980's and early '90's, it was widely expected that the Japanese economy would leapfrog the U.S. both in size and clout, with America reduced to nothing more than a colony for natural resources like coal, lumber, grain, and penurious blondes for Japan's pleasure sector. (See the 1993 Sean Connery movie Rising Sun for more on that. Or on second thought, maybe don't...) On TV, we watched Richard Chamberlain in Shogun. If America had a future, it looked increasingly Asian in character, as famously depicted in Blade Runner. Smart parents prepared their children to serve their new overlords by teaching them Japanese. 

Obviously, stuff didn't work out as expected. As Japan sputtered, and dominant American tech companies "disrupted" the world economy, nipponophobia receded -- to be replaced in due course by anxiety over the rise of China. Time will tell if the latter is any more of a mirage. (Spoiler alert: it probably isn't, but the West will change China far more than China will change us.) Our political debates rarely hinge now on what we can learn from Japan, and those prep classes have long since been replaced by sleep-away immersion camps in Mandarin. Being interested in Japan therefore has the feel of arriving at a party that broke up twenty years ago.

I can't quit the place so easily. Part of this must lie in my own experience as a person-of-a-certain-age, with Japan looming larger my rear view mirror than it does through the our collective windshield. Men of my generation will always be a bit like Blade Runner's Rick Deckard, rumpily out of place and looking askance at his Asian future as he wrestles with his bowl of udon.

But in another sense, Japan is even more relevant now than it was as the locus of chatter over superpower rivalry. The Japanese economy stumbled, expectations had to be reduced--and there lies the real lesson. For in a future where efficiency will be as valuable much as consumption, where making the most out of a smaller footprint will bear the greater rewards, Japan will be more relevant than ever. If I am to be watched over in my old age by a domestic robot, my future will arrive first in Japan. If my daughter or granddaughter loses all interest in marriage or childrearing, she will be more like her Japanese sisters already are. America's Great West Coast tsunami of 2037, caused by an earthquake combined with sea-level rise, already happened in Japan back in 2011. If my great-grandchildren own a condo on Mars, that off-world pied-à-terre will likely include elements of compact, highly-refined Japanese design, not Chinese or American glitz.

Traveling to Japan, therefore, is a little like time-traveling to an era I'll barely see, if at all. Though this isn't a business trip, I can imagine no more important business.

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

Snapshot: Cape of Good Hope, September, 2001

Not exactly the southernmost point of the continent of Africa--but close enough. 

After many days of observing African Wild Cats at the Pretoria Zoo, I took a short trip to Cape Town. This is truly great city in a spectacular setting. The day-trip down to the Cape shouldn't be missed, as visitors are sure to see knockout scenery, abundant wildlife, and lots of oddly beautiful Cape flora.

I've been plotting how to get back ever since.

The meeting place of two oceans...sort of.

The obligatory trophy shot. In the rocks behind me were lots of "rock rabbits", a peculiar rodent-like creature that is actually more closely related to elephants than rabbits. They're everywhere in this area.

Jackass penguins at Fish Hoek.

View from Table Mount toward the Cape.

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

An angel rolls up the Heavens.

Americans come from the most religious nation in the West, but they rarely see much church art at home. A tour in virtually any European country will usually include more ecclesiastical masterpieces than the typical American will ever be capable of appreciating. Meanwhile, native Western Europeans are (by and large) among the planet’s least religious people, yet they live amidst a stupendous patrimony of religious art. When Americans tour churches in a place like Italy, it's a case of the eagerly ignorant confronting the knowingly indifferent.

     After many trips around Europe, this American has the luxury to (usually) give the local cathedral or convent a pass. Life’s too short to take in another altar screen, another shoal of putti massing in a narthex. I make exception for truly old stuff, however—the paleo-Christian mosaics and paintings that form the bridge between the ancient world and the medieval West.  That interest brought me this week to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, on the island of Torcello near Venice.

     The largely 11^th century church is a survivor from a time when it wasn’t so clear which of the islands in the Venetian lagoon would come to dominate the region. The mosaics in the apse, including the figure of the Virgin Mary standing in solitary majesty in a field of gold, are probably the work of Byzantine masters. Depictions of the Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Last Judgment are placed on the forty foot-high west wall, presumably so worshippers would be reminded of their possible fates in eternity before trudging home.

     Though cartoony and ingenuous compared to Renaissance or Baroque treatments, the mosaics have an undeniable power—as if in the grip of their fervor, the artists had no time for fussing over draperies and musculatures and other aspects of outward appearance. The metallic backgrounds only increase the impact on the modern eye, which senses electricity coursing through those patinated swaths.

     But my attention was drawn this time to a particular panel in the Last Judgment. Here an angel, depicted entirely in shades of gold and white, is literally rolling up a scroll of stars. This apocalyptic image seems to be inspired by a passage in the Bible: Isaiah 34.4 (“And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.”) This was echoed later in Revelation 6.14 (“And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.”) In other words, so great is the power of the Lord, that at the time of His final dispensation even the things that seem most permanent in this world—the stars, the mountains—will be revealed to be as flimsy as stage props.

     Of course, to someone educated in a scientific age, the notion of the totality of the universe being “rolled up” by our moral failures is more than a little absurd. The stars, after all, have been here a lot longer than our tiny planet, much less humans and their religions. Taken uncharitably, we might accuse our ancestors not only of ignorance (which is excusable) but arrogance in their presumption that who-smite-whom and who-slept-with-whom’s-wife should be matters of galactic importance. Indeed, this was criticism that far predates modernity. The arrogance of Christianity and Judaism, in believing that any self-respecting deity would concern Itself with for creatures so recent, so cosmically insignificant as humans, was observed by Roman-era critics, such as Celsus and Porphyry.

     Yet however absurd it seems, this attitude is far from dead. It lives on in evangelical America. Millions nodded in agreement when, in 2009, U.S. Congressman John Shimkus (R-Illinois) denied climate change thusly:

 “I believe that is the infallible word of God, and that's the way it is going to be for his creation…the earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…”

     In other words, the laws of thermodynamics that underlie global climate change are like the stars in Isaiah 34.4—mere stage props to be rolled up and put away at the whim of the Great Director.

     And it was there again in the notorious evolution vs. creationism debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. When Nye cited empirical evidence that the earth couldn’t possibly be a mere 6000 years old (that is, evidence from geology and biology), Ham responded by making a distinction between “observational science”, the kind of stuff Nye was talking about, and “historical science”, or the way the universe may have worked in the past. According to Ham, while it may clearly be impossible for the Rocky Mountains to have formed in a few years according to observational science, that doesn’t necessarily mean the laws of physics weren’t different 6000 years ago. Nye’s got his science, and Ham’s got his book. I say tomayto, you say tomahto. Let’s call the whole thing off.

     Of course, Ham’s distinction is nonsense. Scientific laws are acknowledged as laws because they explain not only what we can directly observe, but what we can infer indirectly about the past. Laws that change over time aren’t really laws at all. Imagine how all science would grind to a halt if any empirical result applied only at the very moment they were found, and only at that moment. (There is a flavor of philosophical skepticism that suggests this very thing, but Ken Ham is no Humean skeptic.)

     But Ham’s Biblical literalism is really the Shimkus doctrine again: “observational science”, like the veil of stars, is mere appearance, subject to being “rolled out” after the Creation just as it might be “rolled up” at the End. The message is supposed to be Good News—how great is the power and the glory of God. But the meaning is “what a piece of work is Man”…and not always in a good way.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Hot Climate, Cool Reception

The view over Charleston harbor from the Edmonston-Alston House is uncertain.

Like most visitors, I was impressed on my first trip to Charleston, SC. Where many cities have historic districts, whole swaths of Charleston feel transported from its golden age of antebellum glory. Mansions, columned and porticoed, line-up sidewise along leafy streets, gleaming with fresh paint jobs in pastel, sky-blue, and buff. Since Hurricane Hugo in 1989, restoration has transformed the place. Locals like to say it hasn't looked this good since 1861---when the Civil War began at Fort Sumter, literally on Charleston's doorstep.

According to our guide with Palmetto Carriage Tours, one of the ongoing threats to Charleston's historic neighborhoods is flooding after heavy rains. As many as a dozen times a year, these venerable streets—lying as they do mere inches from sea level—are inundated by a foot or more of water with nowhere to drain. Global climate change will only make this problem worse, as increased warming of the atmosphere will both raise sea level and increase the frequency of violent storms. Considering how much Charleston's appeal (and tourist economy) depends on its historic neighborhoods, you'd think such risks would be matters of wide public concern.

You'd think so—but you'd be wrong. For South Carolina is one of the reddest of red states, where many folks take a dim view of climate change "alarmists". Case in point: the situation at Charleston's own (and quite fine) South Carolina Aquarium. As one of the city's prime educational and scientific institutions, the Aquarium will introduce you not only to a variety of aquatic species, but many birds, reptiles, amphibians, and even (on temporary exhibit) some raucous ringtail lemurs. Along with the fun, it does a good job teaching visitors about the problems of shrinking biodiversity, habitat loss, pollution, etc. But of climate change—arguably the single biggest environmental challenge facing the Carolina Low Country in the coming decades—you'll learn approximately zilch.

Perhaps solely out of perversity, I asked some of the docents about this. Their response was like that of a man crawling through the desert who hopes the oasis ahead isn't a mirage. Wary at first, they seemed to wait until it was clear that my interest wasn't a feint—and then granted that talk of global warming, alas, draws too many emotional complaints. "We don't want to upset people here," said one of them. To the obvious reply, that they'll be upset more by surging storm-water flooding their homes, the docent could only shrug. "We're happy to talk to them about it…" he said, making it clear that the onus is on the visitor to seek out the information the Aquarium should freely provide. That's clearly not the attitude it takes on certain other issues, like their ongoing sea turtle rescue program.

To be fair, all three docents I spoke to were perfectly aware that the reality of global climate change is no more a matter of serious debate than the existence of gravity. All of them welcomed my criticism, and looked forward to citing them to their supervisors. Yet that's where we are in large swaths of this country: many of our educational institutions, where the science, not the politics, should drive discourse, are simply afraid to acknowledge scientific fact.

It would be easy for an outsider like myself simply to tell the South Carolina Aquarium to be more like a vertebrate on the issue of climate change, and less like a jellyfish. Public reaction might be emotional, but the stakes in a place like Charleston are high. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has remarked, some things in life are "true whether you believe in them or not." And the truth is simple: unless something is done, sometime in the next generation much of that tender and expensive restoration in the city's historic core will go for naught, because it will be under water.

It's easy to say, but harder to do. Better to start right away.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Postscript: Here's a link to a report on the debate over climate change in Charleston.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-front-lines-of-climate-change-charlestons-struggle-16934