Netflix Royalty

RIP Prince Philip and Adam Zagajewski, Joan Didion on obsessive note-taking, and the Feast of St. John the Baptist gives us the excuse we crave to start that bonfire.

Hello.

This is my occasional review of what’s on my mind and my desk. Catch up on what this newsletter is all about. Or subscribe here if you like.

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We could be royals. Like most Americans, my exposure to the British royal family comes largely through “entertainment” in the broad sense: movies, television, newspapers, other various organs of the 24/7 global media spectacular. Though there are still lots of monarchies kicking around, Buckingham Palace has a special valence, whether you love it, hate it, or loudly proclaim how much you don’t care about it. One might be forgiven for thinking that, apart from a narrow range of practical constitutional duties, entertainment is the true and central purpose of royalty, and fair enough. After all, as the political scientists tell us, all large-scale communities are a sort of shared hallucination mediated through the communications technologies of the day. 

Claire Foy on set as a young Elizabeth II. Photo: Des Willie/Netflix

All that to say that when Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and consort to the Queen, passed away aged 99, I felt unnaturally and probably fallaciously familiar with him. That’s thanks to having just finished up Season 4 of Netflix’s The Crown, which follows the life of Queen Elizabeth II from the death of her father in 1952, when she was just 25.

It’s a fine soap: Good acting, all the production values we’ve come to expect from prestige TV, lots of drama, and lots of visual fodder for fashion types. Even better, it feels “serious” and “historical” so you can pass off the time spent as Learning About The Past. How much of it is accurate is a matter of debate, though Prince Harry reportedly enjoys it despite a rather unflinching portrayal of his late mother, Princess Diana. 

I found that how much you learn from the show depends a lot on your background knowledge or your eagerness to research as you go along. It touches on many key points of British and world history in the 20th century, but often obliquely, assuming pre-existing knowledge (why are the miners striking? What’s the deal with Edward Heath? What’s a “Balmoral”? Etc). To be clear, this is to its credit. It avoids being overly didactic and gives a bit of the sense of being cloistered, as royals are—only dimly aware of the ruckus of the outside world, muffled as it is by thick walls and communicated via games of telephone passed through multiple layers of servants.

More interesting though is the meta-question of why, in the first place, is there such fascination for the royals—they are rich, yes, and at times glamorous, but also extremely petty and generally pretty dull. (It would be hard for me to sympathize with Margaret Thatcher’s darwinian worldview less than I do, but the episode where she is forced to sit through an interminable holiday weekend filled with judgmental disdain, being berated for breaking rules no one told her existed, did manage to make me feel sorry for her.) 

Of course we’ll always like gawking at rich people, but here I think there’s an extra layer, in all the ways their lives are limited rather than expanded by their wealth and power. Rich, but caged. Eccentric, but only in a narrow range of predetermined paths. Under constant scrutiny—by the media, but more importantly by the totalitarian internal surveillance of the family itself. 

The primary emotional driver of the show—and the larger Show that plays out in the newspapers—is the conflict between personal fulfilment and cold, demanding Duty. There is the big one, of course—the abdication of Edward VIII in favor of his divorced lover, which irrevocably alters British history. But there are also myriad others. The love pairings of Margaret and later Charles, which are broken up for reasons of realpolitik. Queen Elizabeth’s dashed hopes of an idyllic life as a horse breeder. Prince Philip’s dashed hopes for heroism and adventure. (In the Show we now have Megxit, but the show hasn’t gotten there yet.)

What this gets at, in a heightened way, is the tension that all of us feel: that our lives are predetermined in various ways, blocked by various forces—and yet here we are, simultaneously, called on to make meaningful choices, to somehow make ourselves. (The common lingo of “finding ourselves” seems to miss the mark—there are many potential selves, and some should remain emphatically unfound.) There is something beyond mere voyeurism in watching others navigate such strict roles while nonetheless finding ways to maneuver inventively within them. And, indeed, the most successful at this trick—the Queen and Prince Philip—find their footing precisely by having those constraints to push on. Their personalities mature into a synthesis that couldn’t have come into being without the limitations and disappointments, cruel as they are.

We all feel at times that life has somehow betrayed us, or misplaced us, or mismatched us—in love, or work, or geography, or upbringing, or biology—no matter how fortunate our situations appear from the outside. The work of life is to transcend bitterness or even the sometimes-necessary defiance and transfigure our limitations in creative and affirming ways. 

This appears to be the choice that Prince Philip made, which is why, for his many flaws, his life is deserving of at least some of the fascination it receives. Born in Greece to a scorned and exiled family, Philip described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction” and “nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Yet as the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins argues, he came to play his role to perfection—by recognizing that it is indeed a role, that all the world’s a Show, and that while he may not be able to invent a whole new character, he can at least improvise some new lines.

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The hoarders of words. Apropos the art of the newsletter, I’ve long noted the disconnect between those who feel the compulsion to keep a commonplace book, which has been with me all my life, and those who find the whole enterprise bizarre. Re-reading Joan Didion on keeping a notebook:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself… Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

She argues that accumulating details is only ostensibly about trying to describe the world; it is more accurately understood as seeking to retain access to our own shifting subjective experiences. “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” she concludes, “whether we find them attractive company or not.”

Gone to Lvov. Ilya Kaminsky on Adam Zagajewski, another of the great postwar Polish poets, who died in March. “‘I do not believe in happiness,’ Adam was fond of repeating, ‘but I believe in joy.’ Despite everything, this insistence on wonder. Despite everything, in the age of mass murder, a lucid moment.”

More reflections from Clarissa Aykroyd.

Afrosurf. Decolonizing the most beautiful sport¹. “I used to have wave dreams... it’s like a first-love thing. It’s like light-blue walls, and you’re flying. That’s when you get hooked, when you just need to keep going back because you’re constantly dreaming about waves.”

Hans Küng. Perhaps we have passed the era of celebrity theologians (and perhaps that is for the best), but the 20th Century was chock full of them to an extent that seems alien now. Before “televangelist” became a bad word, millions tuned in nightly to the Reverend Fulton Sheen, while Reinhold Neibuhr shaped a generation’s views on matters of war and peace. (Not to mention MLK Jr, Karl Barth, Billy Graham...society was still God-bothered, as the New Atheists might say.) Küng was one of the giants of this era, the high-water mark where modern media allowed for mass audiences but before the decline of religion in public intellectual life went into free fall. An early friend of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and the youngest official theologian at Vatican II, Küng became a sort of spokesman and lightning rod for liberalizing forces. I won’t be taking any theological cues from him, but an interesting life that touched on nearly all the currents and controversies of the modern Church. Requiescat in pace.

Sea to table. Kevin West profiles the growing community of Maine farmers, fishers, foragers, and chefs working on building a better food culture rooted in both ancestral foodways and modern sustainable and regenerative approaches. “If you're a counterculture or a reform movement, you go to the edges...We come to the margins to experiment with new ideas.” 

Perhaps we need a neologism, à la cyberpunk, to describe those who synthesize hippy-style back-to-the-land philosophies with the latest agricultural technologies and techniques. I follow and admire a lot of these types, and few seem to fit the Luddite stereotype—much to the contrary.²

Books.

I’ve been working my way through Irving Stone’s classic (and maybe largely apocryphal) novelized biography of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. Fun stories of our hero Mike getting into fistfights in church and sneaking into morgues to examine dead bodies. 

Nearly finished with Simone Weil’s The Need For Roots. A slightly more niche book than I was expecting, this was written in 1943 as a proposal on how to reform French society once the war ended. (Weil died, aged 34, shortly after finishing it.) Lots of history of the development and centralization of the French state, but also more general reflections on the nature of the common good and the ways in which industrial capitalism undermines it. 

Music.

I just stumbled across the 1998 album Lux Vivens: a collaboration between David Lynch and Jocelyn Montgomery to produce the music of 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen.

Poetry.

When I listened to the Third Concerto then,
I still didn’t know that experts considered it
too conservative (I hadn’t realized
that art contains not only art, but also hatreds, fanatical
debates, curses worthy of religious wars),

I heard the promise of things to come,
omens of complex happiness, love, sketches
of landscapes I would later recognize,
a glimpse of purgatory, heaven, wanderings, and finally
maybe even something like forgiveness.

As I listen now to Martha Argerich play
the Third Concerto, I marvel at her mastery,
her passion, her inspiration, while the boy
I once was labors to understand
what came to pass, and what’s gone. What lives.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Rachmaninoff”

(Here is Argerich playing this concerto.)

What I’ve been working on.

For the past year or so I’ve been slowly and haltingly doing more visual art. Feels good to get back in touch with that, which dominated my school years and then just...stopped. Many such cases.

j_elliot_art

A post shared by @j_elliot_art

I hope to do more. An artist website is in the works—for now, you can follow me on Instagram for extremely occasional updates.

The liturgical life.

In the Western Church, we have just come out of Eastertide, the fifty days of glorious feasting from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. It is now back to Ordinary Time, which lasts until Advent in December. 

Upcoming in June are a number of high-ranking feasts, including the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The feast of St. John, the Forerunner of Christ, is celebrated on June 24, symbolically placing it six months before the celebration of Christ’s birth.

This feast used to be a much bigger deal, like most of them. Together they once interspersed the year with almost constant festivity. Falling on or near the summer solstice, St. John’s Day³ was particularly merry in Europe:

From Scandinavia to Spain, and from Ireland to Russia, Saint John's Day festivities are closely associated with the ancient nature lore of the great summer festival of pre-Christian times. Fires are lighted on mountains and hilltops on the eve of his feast. These "Saint John's fires" burn brightly and quietly along the fiords of Norway, on the peaks of the Alps, on the slopes of the Pyrenees, and on the mountains of Spain (where they are called Hogsueras). They were an ancient symbol of the warmth and light of the sun which the forefathers greeted at the beginning of summer. In many places, great celebrations are held with dances, games, and outdoor meals.

Fishermen from Brittany keep this custom even while far out at sea in the Arctic Ocean. They hoist a barrel filled with castoff clothing to the tip of the mainsail yard and set the contents on fire. All ships of the fishing fleet light up at the same time, about eight o'clock in the evening… Another custom is that of lighting many small fires in the valleys and plains. People gather around, jump through the flames, and sing traditional songs in praise of the Saint or of summer.

...In Spain these smaller fires (fogatas) are lighted in the streets of towns and cities, everybody contributing some old furniture or other wood, while children jump over the flames. In Brest, France, the bonfires are replaced by lighted torches which people throw in the air. In other districts of France they cover wagon wheels with straw, then set them on fire with a blessed candle and roll them down the hill slopes...

Sensing a theme? Go forth, therefore, and light some stuff on fire (responsibly).

As ever,

J

1. I always hesitate to call surfing a “sport” at all; I don’t begrudge anyone their ability to make a living from it (that would be sour grapes) but I have really zero interest in the whole world of competitions and their inane scoring schemes. I’ve tried to watch! “Competing” in surfing seems a bit like turning sex or loyalty to one’s friends into a points competition: you can technically do it, I suppose, but it’s quite besides the point. On the other hand, it is a physical activity that requires high levels of skill and in which a large part of the pleasure lies in the challenge of incremental improvement. Which is…sport-adjacent, at least.

2. Excuse the figure of speech: the Luddites did nothing wrong.

3. And/or St. John’s Eve, the night of the 23rd. In North America, fiery celebrations apparently persist in enclaves like Puerto Rico, New Orleans, and Québec.