Arts, Christianity, Culture, Poetry

TS Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’

ASH WEDNESDAY

Intro: The prayers of Lent are a key guide to Eliot’s obscure sequence of poetry

Sometimes, people read TS Eliot’s sequence of six poems, Ash Wednesday, in the hope of better understanding this first day of Lent in the Western Christian Church. The poem is meditative and pivotal which marks his conversion to Anglicanism, and chronicles a journey from spiritual despair to tentative faith. 

Structured around the Lenten season, the poem moves through themes of repentance, purgation, and the desire for divine, transcendent love amidst the emptiness of modern life.

Knowledge of Ash Wednesday – and the rest of Lent – which falls on February 18 this year, is a prerequisite to understand Eliot’s poetry.

Ash Wednesday is obscure. It begins: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” This is a quotation from Guido Cavalcanti, who died in 1300, a friend of Dante’s. How the reader is meant to know that, I’m not sure.

The words had been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861, as: “Because I think not ever to return”, a reference to Cavalcanti’s exile from Tuscany. But Eliot knew that “to turn again” is an aspect of repentance, as the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 translated the Greek word metanoia, “change of mind”, found in the New Testament. The Ash Wednesday Epistle, from the prophet Joel, begins: “Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord, with all your heart.”

In St Mark’s Gospel, the first words of Jesus are: “Repent and believe the gospel,” and those are now one of the forms of words to accompany the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. But in Eliot’s day the Latin formula was: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, “Remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” In his poem, Eliot, with his Cavalcanti quotation, picks up both the return to dust and the turning again or repentance.

In Ash Wednesday, Eliot incorporates unsignalled quotations from church prayers. In a letter to Bishop George Bell of Chichester in 1930, Eliot addressed Ash Wednesday’s obscurity: “Most of the people who have written to say that they couldn’t understand it seemed to be uncertain at any point whether I was referring to the Old Testament or to the New; and the reviewers took refuge in the comprehensive word “liturgy”. It appears that almost none of the people who review books have ever read any of these things!”

In Part I of Ash Wednesday Eliot quotes the popular Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary.

In Part II he uses the question “Shall these bones live?” to make reference to the extraordinarily vivid passage in Ezekiel 37, where dry bones are reclothed in flesh and live.

In Part III, on the stairs, he ends with, “Lord, I am not worthy”, a prayer in the Mass before Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed,” an echo of the Centurion’s words in Matthew 8:8.

In Part IV, “And after this our exile” is taken from a medieval prayer, the Salve Regina, where Mary is asked to “Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

In Part V, “O my people, what I have I done unto thee” is taken from the Improperia or Reproaches in the Good Friday liturgy, based on the prophet Micah (5:3).

In Part VI, the last line, “And let my cry come unto Thee” is also in the Good Friday liturgy, from Psalm 102 (101 in the Vulgate) – in Latin: Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniat.

Before that, Eliot puts a line, “Suffer me not to be separated”, which is from the 14th-century prayer Anima Christi (taken up by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits). The context is: “Within Thy wounds hide me /Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.”

All these would have been very familiar to a practising Roman Catholic, less so to most Anglicans and utterly unfamiliar to the leading critics of the 1930s.

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Art, Arts, Exhibitions, France

Art: Seurat and the Sea

COURTAULD GALLERY

Intro: A first-of-its-kind Courtauld exhibition brings together the French artist’s haunting seaside paintings

– Join the dots: Georges Seurat’s La Maria at Honfleur (1886)

Never before has there been an exhibition of seascapes by Georges Seurat, which is odd, given that the short-lived French artist’s “marines” make up the bulk of his output. So, the Courtauld in London – which excels at jewel-like exhibitions based on enterprising scholarship – deserves praise for mounting one. Let’s be clear, though. Seurat’s chilly Channel views are magnificently weird. But if that puts you off attending and buying a ticket at the exhibition, you should at least give the show and gallery a chance.

Seurat is remembered above all as the painter of interminable dots. By the time of his death in 1891, at the age of 31, he had produced only a handful of major canvases, mostly speckled with tiny spots and flecks of pigment, applied according to a rigorous and quasi-scientific method. (A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884 (1884-86), in the Art Institute of Chicago, is undoubtedly the most famous.) As he result, he came across as an automaton. Compared with other modern artists, he’s uptight and hard to love.

Some will not be sure whether the Courtauld’s show of 26 works – including attractive oil sketches and preparatory drawings in Conté crayon, alongside 17 canvases – will convince sceptics that Seurat had a heart. His dotty views of ports and the open sea, produced on the northern coast of France over five summers between 1885 and 1890, contain anthropomorphic elements: masts, semaphores, bollards, buoys. But, with one or two matchstick-like exceptions, these seascapes are devoid of people.

The effect is rather uncanny, as if his subject were a model village. By representing glittering sunshine, fluttering pennants, and sailboats bobbing about on enticing, turquoise water, these pictures suggest summer holidays. But where are the holidaymakers? Seurat’s contemporaries sensed a “penetrating melancholy” in his seascapes, which, for all their luminosity, appear to anticipate the eerie landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.

Nonetheless, Seurat was clever and original. Earlier artists, tackling marine themes, depicted seething waves; Seurat’s seas are calm as a millpond. His canvases are expertly composed and executed. They seem to contain the seeds of geometric abstraction and Op Art, even Minimalism.

Conceived during his final summer, and set at dusk, The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening (1890) is a meticulous mini-symphony in shades of purple, rose, and pink. In it, are established curious and yearning dynamics between inanimate objects – including, in the foreground, a lamppost and two prominent anchors that seem to move in concert, like synchronised swimmers. Seurat rejected the idea that his works contained “poetry”, arguing: “I apply my method and that is it.” Yet, others will say that if this wistful and mysterious painting isn’t what poetry looks like, then what does? 

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Britain, Digital Economy, Financial Markets, Society, Technology, United States

A digital payments system is undermined by cryptos crash

DIGITAL CURRENCIES

Intro: Digital payments systems are taking hold in China and America, and the eurozone is chasing hard to set one up. The Bank of England’s lack of enthusiasm for a digital pound is a blessing in disguise

China already has one, and envious of the near monopoly American companies enjoy in European digital payments systems, the eurozone is chasing hard in setting one up.

Trump’s America has made it illegal for the Federal Reserve to pursue such a project, and instead has set its sights on privately sponsored stablecoins.

We’re talking here about so-called central bank digital currencies (CBDC) – in effect, digital versions of physical cash.

On this issue, the UK and the Bank of England stand pretty much nowhere. It might surprise you to learn that’s faintly reassuring. Digital money is not an issue to set the pulse racing, but what is amazing is how people are so exercised by it.

A Bank of England consultation on proposals for a digital pound provoked an unprecedented tidal wave of more than 50,000 responses, overwhelmingly negative in nature.

It wasn’t just issues over privacy posed by a digital currency that many respondents seemed to be upset about. Nor was it the complex and costly logistical problems in providing universal access to central bank money.

Still less was it the threat that a digital pound would pose to the future of fractional reserve banking.

Rather, it was the creeping encroachment on physical cash that people feared most.

Plain and simple, people still like the idea of notes and coins, even if they hardly ever use them.

No decision has yet formally been taken on whether to establish a digital pound, but the sense is that any appetite the Bank of England might once have had for such an enterprise has all but disappeared.

Nor does the Bank appear to be that eager on the supposed alternative of sterling-based stablecoins. Its proposed framework for regulating stablecoins has gone down in the industry like a lead balloon, and although the Bank has rowed back on some of the regime’s more costly features, is still widely thought of as too demanding to allow for the creation of a significant stablecoin presence.

George Osborne, a former UK chancellor, has claimed that Britain is in danger of being left behind in a payments revolution which is taking the rest of the world by storm.

But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Among a seemingly ever-widening portfolio of positions enjoyed by Osborne, he is an adviser to the US-based crypto exchange, Coinbase, which has a powerful vested interest in as lightly a regulated stablecoin environment as possible. Since Osborne went public with his concerns, Bitcoin and much of the crypto universe has crashed, and many so-called stablecoins – theoretically backed by the real-world, ultra safe, fiat currency assets – have faltered too.

At least half a dozen of them have “broken the buck”, or lost their dollar peg. Some have fallen to as low as a few cents in the dollar, resulting in losses running to hundreds of millions of dollars.

There’s plenty more damage still to come from that sell-off, so if the Bank of England has been asleep at the wheel in failing wholly to embrace the ecosystem of decentralised finance, we may have much to thank it for.

Instead, the Bank has focused its attention on its plain vanilla business of updating its systems for making direct, account-to-account payments between buyers and sellers.

It’s a kind of muddling through alternative to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) empire-building on the one hand, and Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of crypto on the other.

This should not be read as a derogatory view, but the Bank of England regards payments as a simple utility, not as either a way of maintaining the Central Bank’s grip on the “moneyverse”, which seems to be the ECB approach, or as a fintech opportunity for money-making, which is the current White House approach.

Critics complain that the Bank is further condemning the pound – and indeed the City – to the slow lane. Others would say that its safety-first approach is actually what you want out of a digital payments system.

Certainly, it needs to be faster, even instantaneous if possible, and to cost as little as possible. Above all, though, you want it to be robust, so that it acts as a wholly reliable means of exchange.

Four years ago, the House of Lords economic affairs committee concluded after a lengthy inquiry that a digital pound managed by the Bank of England was “a solution in search of a problem”.

Nothing has happened since then to change that verdict.

The vast majority of sterling transactions are already digital in nature, in any case, but they take place between commercial banks or on card networks, not via the central bank.

The benefits of a central bank digital currency are far from obvious, yet there are clear cut risks to financial stability, privacy, credit provision and security, to name just some of them.

Why then is the European Central Bank fixated on establishing a digital euro? In the main, it’s about monetary sovereignty and parallel fears of US dominance.

All the main card networks are American-owned, while existing systems for direct bank-to-bank settlement in retail transactions are clunky and inefficient in many euro-dominated countries.

And it’s about the threat posed by dollar-denominated stablecoins as an alternative means of payment.

The ECB and its political masters do not want this particular Trojan horse at the centre of the eurozone payments system.

Indeed, Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, has openly admitted that part of the purpose of the Genius Act, which sets out a regulatory framework for stablecoins, is to attract money into US treasuries, thereby underpinning dollar hegemony in international markets. Financing the US treasuries market is not what Frankfurt has in mind when thinking about the future of money.

Instead, the digital euro is proposed as part of Europe’s wider, statist approach to “strategic autonomy”, or making the continent less dependent on rival jurisdictions for core industrial, agricultural, and monetary functions.

The idea that money can in some way be reinvented is what really lies behind developments such as CBDCs and stablecoins.

So here’s the truth: it cannot. The Bank of England is no doubt guilty of many failings, but it does at least properly understand this basic maxim. Its overarching responsibility is to ensure that a pound is worth a pound, no more, no less.

Like cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are at root just another mechanism for rent extraction. And as long as there is scope for improving existing pubic infrastructure for digital payments, which is where the Bank of England is focusing its efforts, it is also hard to see the point of digital cash.

Paul Volcker, a one-time chairman of the Fed, had it about right when he said that the only socially useful innovation to come out of finance in the past several decades was the ATM.

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