Is Theodor Fontane the German Hardy?

Again, I don't know enough to say. I did just read Unterm Birnbaum (Under the Pear Tree) and there were things about it that reminded me of Hardy - the strong sense of place, the use of local dialect, the pastoral setting combined with some very dark themes. The prose is deceptively simple, also, I think, like Hardy's. There's also the fact that Hardy and Fontane both seem to be in that rarefied set of writers who've achieved greatness both as poets and novelists. And that both touched on topics that were seen as 'inappropriate' by the society of the time.

Fontane seems most well-known in the German-speaking world for his ballad 'John Maynard' about a steamship captain on Lake Erie whose ship caught fire but who stayed with it and steered it to shore. Bizarrely to my mind, the repeated, 'Und noch ---- Minuten bis Buffalo!' ('And ----- minutes more to Buffalo!) has apparently been etched into the memory of generations of German school children. It is an exciting poem. The rest of Fontane's ballads read as very alien nowadays, even (or maybe especially) the 'English-Scottish' ones.

Fontane's lyric poetry, though, is straightforward, lucid, and, I would say, moving. (In the first two of these qualities his lyric poems are different to Hardy's.) I just wanted to post a couple here. The beauty is all in the simplicity - a simplicity which is, again, often a slightly deceptive one.

Der erste Schnee.

Die Sonne schien, doch Winters Näh’
     Verrieth ein Flockenpaar;
Es gleicht das erste Flöckchen Schnee
     Dem ersten weißen Haar.

5

Noch wird – wie wohl von lieber Hand

     Der erste Schnee dem Haupt –
So auch der erste Schnee dem Land
     Vom Sonnenstrahl geraubt.

[6]

Doch habet Acht! mit einem Mal

10

     Ist Haupt und Erde weiß,

Und Freundeshand und Sonnenstrahl
     Sich nicht zu helfen weiß.

I don't have any great grasp of German poetry, but the simplicity, the 'naive' joy in nature, and the bittersweetness of the ending - the sense that certain kinds of longing are inevitable - reminds me of nothing so much of Wilhelm Müller's Winterreise, as famously set to music by Schubert. All these notes - simplicity, an intimacy with nature, and, finally, of the inevitability of life's joys passing - all that is even stronger here:

In der Krankheit.

(Brief an E.)

     Mein ganzes Zimmer riecht nach Wald,
Das machen die kiehnenen Tische,
Glaub mir, ich muß genesen bald
In dieser Harzesfrische.

5

     Du bist noch kaum bei uns daheim

An unsres Kindes Bettchen,
Und sieh, schon sitzt ein muntrer Reim
Auf meinem Fensterbrettchen.

     Er sitzt allda und schaut mich an

10

Wie auf dem Felde die Lerchen

Und singt: „Du hast ganz wohlgethan,
Dich still hier einzupferchen.

[21]

     „Steh nur früh auf und schweif umher

Und lache wie der Morgen,

15

So wird dies grüne Waldesmeer

Schon weiter für Dich sorgen.

     „Und schied’st Du doch zu dieser Frist,
So tu es ohne Trauern,
Das Leben, weil so schön es ist,

20

Kann es nicht ewig dauern.“

Why is chess stressful (but the Eucharist is not)?

Despite its image as a sleepy past-time, chess can be stressful. Players' heart-rates rise and fall dramatically during games. Top grandmasters can expend thousands of calories during tournaments, shedding alarming amounts of weight as a result. Players have even died of heart failure in the middle of competitive matches, crushed by the pressure they were putting on their system.

What makes this sedentary pursuit so stressful? Two things. One is the presence uncertainty and of threats - to your position, to your King, and ultimately to your pride - something which is bound to activate our hard-wired 'fight or flight' response and everything it brings in its train (like an increased heart-rate). The other is the need to make decisions.

Decision-making is, of course, the stuff of life. And it's exhausting - in a way that has now been tracked, measured, and given a label: 'decision fatigue.' The more decisions you make, the more tired the 'executive' parts of your brain get, and the worse you get at decision-making. It's why even top top chess players can make embarrassing blunders near the end of grueling matches. It's also why busy executives have taken steps to reduce the number of decisions they make in a day. President Obama had a chef decide his food for him. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes.

If we find uncertainty and threats - and the related need to decide how to react to them - unpleasant, it should be no surprise that we also find environments in which we don't have to deal with these things more amenable. This is what a lot of rituals and religious practices do: they set up a programme of repetitive movements or phrases, repeated over time, which are almost completely predictable. That predictability removes any uncertainty. It removes any threats. And it removes the need for us to make, or take, any decisions.

The problem is, we actually like making decisions. More precisely, though we don't always enjoy the actual experience of having to make our minds up, especially when there's a lot at stake, we like being able to make decisions for ourselves, especially when there's a lot at stake. That's basically what autonomy or freedom is, something people often want to defend, even to the point of extreme hardship or death.

This, then, is what makes chess stressful and the Eucharist not. One presents us with threats (even if of a purely intellectual kind) and forces to make a series of difficult decisions quickly. The other temporarily suspends our decision-making, banishes all threats, does away with uncertainty. The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that this is also why we enjoy music. Listening to a sequence of notes, in fact, involves even less activity on our part. It is, in a sense, pure ritual.

But it also involves a suspension of our agency. And agency or autonomy, as we've seen, is also something we want. It's crucial, then, to find a balance between activities that allow us to rest by putting our agency in cold-storage, and those that force us to do things in the world - stressful as that is. And it might be crucial not just for individuals, but also for societies.

That's not just because both things are good, but because in this as in other contexts, rest, besides being pleasant in itself, improves and freshens action, and action, in the final analysis, is what life is made of. Occasionally surrendering our freedom - if only in specific, tightly-constrained ways - might allow us to defend and exercise it all the more energetically.

Wealth and health

One of the tropes of the current crisis has been that to re-open the economy is to sacrifice lives on the altar of profits. It's also been widely pointed out that this is a false dichotomy. In fact, wealth and health tend go together. Economic downturns lead to deaths as predictably as viruses. In this post I just want to re-state this view one more time, since I think it's a crucial one to grasp if we want to react sensibly to this (or any other crisis).

As the above graph suggests, there's a positive association between longevity and GDP. GDP and child mortality seem to be inversely related. Deaths from the five most lethal infectious diseases have declined as the global economy has grown.

Correlations like this aren't a slam-dunk case that wealth causes health. Studies that have looked at the association in detail have found it to be a slightly complicated one. But even if the exact causal mechanisms at various stages of growth can be difficult to disentangle, the basic picture seems clear: wealth and health tend to go hand in hand. That's the case not only if you look at individual countries through time, but also if you look the set of countries at a particular point in time and compare the well-being of people in richer and poorer parts of the world (even controlling for other factors).

Moreover, unlike in the case of spurious associations (scores for M. Night Shyamalan's films going down on Rotten Tomatoes in line with newspaper sales, for example), it's not hard to think of reasons why these two variables might be linked, and why the wealth of a country might help its people be healthier. Richer countries can give more funding to health services. They can invest in better-quality housing, safer infrastructure, and a more comprehensive social safety net. Its citizens are wealthier, and they can spend more money on their well-being.

So far we've been looking at the positive side of the story, with better wealth being associated with health. But there's also a dark side to the association, with poverty being associated with disease and shorter life-spans.  You can see this effect with economic downturns even in the rich world: opioid deaths rose by 85% in parts of the US where car factories had closed down (and here too it's easy to think of how this might have happened, with unemployment leading to despair and addiction). A 1% rise in the unemployment rate makes working-age men 6% more likely to die of any cause.

And that's in the rich world. Economic growth is even more vital to the developing world, since increases in wealth just make the citizens of rich countries even healthier, whereas people in poor countries live much closer to death and disaster. They're highly dependant on trade and exchange with the rich world. It's no surprise that UNICEF is now predicting a 45% rise in child mortality because of lockdown-related disruptions.

The relationship between economic downturns and health does have its complications. Some studies suggest fewer people die in the actual course of recessions than normal (although more people die of particular causes, like suicide), but there are lasting health costs over the longer term. So even if the coronavirus lockdowns are followed by a V-shaped recovery, with locked-up demand immediately bursting out again, then we might expect our health (on average) to be slightly worse than it otherwise would have been over the next few decades.

There probably are a few people out there who would put profit for themselves ahead of other people's lives. But most of the people raising warnings about the lockdowns are probably just trying to draw attention to the harm we can do to ourselves if do too much damage to the economy. Whether Covid-19 is dangerous enough to justify the public-health costs associated with the economic downturns that are now starting to bite - that's a different question, and one that's best left for another day (and maybe even another website). But it's not a simple question.

'Your money or your life?' isn't a question that, in ordinary circumstances, anyone would want to be asked. But it's actually a much easier question to answer than the one many countries are faced with now.

Parkour for the course

A few years ago, an old friend from my rugby-playing days started telling me about his new workout ideas. Henry kept on playing rugby union long after I stopped, and had gotten to semi-professional level in England. Whatever sport he was doing he always worked out a lot in the gym, and had started doing so back when it wasn't yet seen as an automatic thing for rugby players to be doing. Now Henry had left the gym behind for a looser routine of kallisthenics in the park on the way home from work. He'd started making fitness videos based around some of the new moves he'd been practicing. And he talked about how his wife, a yoga and pilates instructor, had helped him think more about 'mindful movement.'

Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of hippy horseshit to you, let me me just up the ante before I explain why I think there might be something to it. Another person I remember using some of the same language was a yoga instructor on one of the unreasonably pricey and slightly cultish places on Valencia in San Francisco. He talked about how he used to do a lot of cycling, and how that had taken a toll on his body, so he gave it up for yoga. I thought at the time that it made very little sense: there was so much good evidence for the benefits of aerobic and resistance exercise (both of which are offered by cycling), and, actually, relatively little for the benefits of yoga.

With a crick in the my neck from doing more cycling than usual because of the lock-down, I've started to reconsider. That's partly because of the former massage therapist Paul Ingraham's admirably skeptical and empirically-focussed blog Pain Science, which is slowly bringing me round to a slightly new way of thinking about muscular health and sickness. (Ingraham sees a lot of chronic muscular pain syndromes of the sort I've long had in my neck and shoulders as caused by 'sick muscles' - muscles in dysfunction either because of over-use or under-use).

It's not entirely clear what's going on when people get the kind of muscle knots that are associated with long-lasting muscular aches and pains. What does seem relatively clear (as far as I can tell) is that overuse of particular muscles correlates with more of these 'knots.' At the same time, as Ingraham points out, under-use of the muscles can have equally unpleasant effects. One point he makes is about static-ness, at work or at home - that is, keeping the same position for hours on end. He's skeptical about workplace ergonomics programmes which, for him, encourage people to try to find the 'perfect' posture, where what causes discomfort and pain isn't really what static position you're in, but the fact that you're in any static position for big chunks of each day. The solution is to engage in a regular series of 'mobilizations,' moving and stretching your limbs and joints through at least forty or so repetitions.

The point Ingraham makes about immobile postures made me wonder about mobile ones as well. Is spending a couple hours in the same position on a bike any better? Sure, you're moving, and you will get all the benefits of the exercise involved in spinning your legs (which are considerable). At the same time, the rest of your body is basically immobile. Running is a bit better, but your body is still going through a reasonably restricted range of movements. Using the weight machines in the gym will get you moving through a variety of shapes, but only a set number. Even yoga classes can focus on only a few classics poses, powerful though these classic poses can be. Squash is probably the most dynamic thing I do, but that, too, ultimately involves a set palette of movements, and it's quite one-sided (something I very much feel down one side of my body after a long match).

Ingraham's 'mobilizations' are apparently just his version of a new line of 'mobility drills' that physios are getting into at the moment. One of the key things about them, though, is their looseness and freedom. He suggests that they're 'exploratory.' And that's where the mindfulness comes in - not, in this case at least, as hippy horseshit, but as a kind of fine-grained empiricism. The idea is just to be aware of where the muscular pain and discomfort is and to move and stretch there, in whatever way you feel like moving and stretching. (Assuming, of course, that it's the chronic, tiring-feeling kind of muscular pain we're talking about, not something like a tear.) No need to do things that have a name or a history - you can do whatever the hell you want, as long as it involves moving and stretching, and you'll be doing a mobilization.

All of this explains why I've become a late convert to parkour. The lockdown has meant the gym and the pool -  two of my weekly standbys - are no longer a noption, and neither are yoga classes. (For some reason it's always harder for me to have a good yoga session at home - I need a third-party enforcer to take up a series of awkward postures and take five sounding breaths in them.) That's led me to wander around town doing pull-ups in scaffolding, climbing trees, jumping off concrete ramps, throwing large rocks a short distance into the harbour, jumping up and down onto plinths, swinging on lamp-posts, doing one-arm push-ups on bollards, doing two-arm pushups on bits of grass (34 is my current record), doing leg lifts on bits of grass (34 is my current record), going up and down any ladders that cross my path (3 or 4 is my current record), and occasionally even engaging in 'jumping-jacks'  (7).

You can see a picture of me engaging in hyper-legit urban-jungle street-running above. I'm too old and wise to go in for any of the actually risky parkour that the cool kids do (why bother?), but I can see why they like running around and swinging onto things and jumping off them. They're going through their exploratory mobility drills in just the right spirit, of creative freedom and fine-grained empiricism.

Speaking of empiricism, my theory of why unstructured exercise might be better for keeping aches and pains at bay may of course turn out be complete bollocks. I don't know of any studies that compare more unstructured forms of exercise with more regimented types. If you do, feel free to put them in the comments. Paul Ingraham often talks how most doctors and research scientists are too busy thinking about the really harmful stuff (major diseases) to have much time to spend on aches and pains. But chronic pain can be a major downer, and it's surprising from the economic standpoint if no other how little research seems to have been done even on such widely-used concepts as muscle-knots. After all, people spend a lot of money on massage and various sorts of complimentary therapy, even if even the less wacky-sounding ideas they depend on (smoothing out muscle tissue, say) don't have all that much research behind them. So surely it's time for us to start running some tests on the free-runners.

The Rediscovery of Johnny Baloney

Another thing it turns out I'm ignorant about (although I might have suspected it) is the short-lived but spectacular flowering of cast-bronze sculpture in southern Germany around 1600. This took place mainly in Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach princes, and Augsburg, home of the HNW Fuggers - no coincidence, since casting large-scale sculptures is bronze is enormously expensive. The 'Neptune ...taming a sea-horse...which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' that the speaker of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' draws his guest's attention towards is supposed to speak loudly about his spending-power. It's also a quiet reminder of a river of artistic influence on which bronze deities of all sorts flowed between northern Italians states and southern German ones as the 16th century drew to a close. 

At the head of this river was a Dutchman, usually known by the less than compellingly Dutch name Giambologna (French Jean de Boulogne). A portrait of him by Hendrick Goltzius (more convincing Dutch name) is above, partly so that he'll stand at the head of a river of images in this post. And partly as a thanks for leading, directly or indirectly, to the flood of monumental bronzes that visitors to Munich can now wade into. 

There's at least one weighty tome on this topic by others who know vastly more about it than I do. So instead of trying to write anything much about it, here's a quick intro in images.

Let's start with two works by Giambologna himself, both on classical themes: the Rape of the Sabines (1574-82) and Hercules and Nessus (1599), both now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

Literal tonnes of smaller bronze versions of these are around (including in a room in the Bayerisches Staatsmuseum  in which my personal rediscovery of Johnny Baloney was made). Some are better than others; here are two chosen at random:

One bronze in Munich that is by Giambologna himself is the towering crucifix in Michaelskirche, a gift to the Wittelsbachs by their fellow jet-setters the Medici. There was a connection there, with Albrecht V of Bavaria's sister-in-law marrying Francesco de Medici in 1565. And, of course, their wedding forged a link in the bronze-casting chain, with Hubert Gerhard, a student of Giambologna,  going on to work for both the Fuggers in Augsburg and the Wittelsbachs in Munich. Here are two examples of his efforts, the archangel Michael defeating Lucifer on the facade of the Michaelskirche, and Perseus holding up the head of Medusa (this one in the Wittelsbachs' Residenz palace in Munich):

Soon the Wittelsbachs decided to breed their own sculptors by sending talented sons of Bayern to Florence. Two of the most successful of the new crop were Hanses Reichle and Krumper. Here's another Michael by the one Hans, above the entrance to the Zeughaus in Augsburg; and the tomb monument of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV (a Wittelsbach) by the other Hans, in the Munich Frauenkirche:

I've saved probably the most recognizable of Giambologna's works for last, the Flying Mercury from around 1580. This one has been extensively copied and played off, and has turned up all over Europe - including, of course, in the Wittlesbach's home in Munich. What better image of the swiftness and borderlessness of artistic influence could there be?