Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia and the Internet

But if Dürer did not try to peer so deeply into the inner life of nature, as Leonardo did, nor feel its appalling independence, he was deeply engaged by the mystery of the human psyche. His obsession with his own personality was part of a passionate interest in psychology in general; and this led him to produce one of the great prophetic documents of western man, the engraving he entitled Melancholia I. In the Middle Ages melancholia meant a simple combination of sloth, boredom and despondency that must have been common in an illiterate society. But Dürer’s application is far from simple. This figure is humanity at its most evolved, with wings to carry her upwards. She sits in the attitude of Rodin’s Penseur, and still holds in her hands compasses, symbols of measurement by which science will conquer the world. Around her are all the emblems of constructive action: a saw, a plane, pincers, scales, a hammer, a melting pot, and two elements in solid geometry, a polyhedron and sphere. Yet all these aids to construction are discarded and she sits there brooding on the futility of human effort. Her obsessive stare reflects some deep psychic disturbance. The German mind that produced Dürer and the Reformation also produced psychoanalysis. I began by mentioning the enemies of civilisation: well, here, in Dürer’s prophetic vision, is one more way in which it can be destroyed, from within.

This lithe linguistic reconstruction of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving first came to general attention via television in 1969. As a fourteen-year-old viewer I was fascinated by how the words, so precise and direct, could describe the work while at the same time explain its meaning. The words came from Kenneth Clark, a lean patrician Englishman who seemed ever to be in some sort of pain to tell us exactly what he thought of any artwork. This particular passage of Civilisation (ess, not zed) was also striking to me because Clark was effusive about the negative message of the Dürer, a change from most of the show where he chose to accentuate the positive. It is this “brooding on the futility of human effort” and its effective explanation that has stayed with me ever since. The concept that learning, the humanities and the sciences, could be a burden as well as a liberation, a source of unhappiness as well as happiness, had been put into my mind. Clark was sending his viewers a warning, of which there are many in that series.

It was about the same time that we all went, one morning, on a school excursion to the IBM Building in Fitzroy Street, very near St. Kilda Junction in Melbourne. We had been popping holes in flimsy computer cards for some weeks, our objective being to send some no doubt elementary message into the monster machine on the ground floor of the place we were now visiting. Dimpled chads hung from the cards of some of the lazier students. The computer must have been two storeys high maybe, inside the building, and this was its main impression. Maybe it was its only impression, as there is only so long that schoolboys can stare at the walls of a large box before going ape. Serious men walked about the place, pointing out where things went in, why lights went on, and using statistics the while to wow us into submission. The scientists among us were wowed, the rest were wearied. I suppose what we were doing was Fortran and I have no idea really how high the computer was, it just felt that way. It would have been about the main computer in Melbourne at the time. Maybe it was the only computer, in Melbourne.

Over forty years later, and a whole lot wiser, there are days when we each stare at our personal computer screen with all the brooding melancholia of Albrecht Dürer’s dark angel. Like other sophisticated technological advances, the internet is thought of as, by nature, a civilised and civilising force. Its existence often goes unquestioned, as its presence approaches ever more toward omnipresence. Even omniscience. When an operation like Google brags that it wants and will have all knowledge available online we respond, “only in America”, knowing ourselves that such an objective is never attainable. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, as someone who is not German once wrote. But what has already been assembled online is beyond any one human to absorb, in fact. It is impossible to find everything of personal interest over a lifetime out there. Depending on your day, the internet is a godsend, a singular super-signifier, a handy device, a regular update, a miasma, a mess of messages, or a monster. Because we cannot now live in communication with society without talking, sometimes quite frequently, to a computer, its hold on our lives is potent, if not quite omnipotent, yet. We stay on course, or stray off track, or play. We peer deeply, or not deeply, into the inner workings of billions of tiny electronic connections. If we treat the thing as a tool and a game, we can keep ourselves lively.

If we think too hard about our appalling dependence on the internet, then we might start to worry. Upload and download lead to overload. We wonder what all of this information is doing to our minds. Google Image is so inexhaustible, it’s exhausting just thinking about it. One effect that must happen to many people is the melancholia observed in the gaze and posture of Dürer’s figure. While it inspires passion and interest, the internet can also lead to a simple combination of sloth, boredom and despondency, as common in literate as in illiterate societies. Kenneth Clark’s version of Dürer’s engraving causes me think of the internet, its potential for good and bad, and the thousands of wonders it leaves lying about. To borrow Clark’s own words, the internet reminds me of humanity at its most evolved. Her wings are the added lift we get from gaining information while not leaving our seats. The compasses, symbols of measurement by which science has conquered the world, define the space between my computer and the one I am visiting on the other side of the planet. The internet is chockfull of the emblems of constructive action, yet how effectively do we use them? Or are they just scattered about unused? Our search strategies are a saw, a plane, pincers, scales, a hammer, and a melting pot, yet we may find ourselves on occasion sitting here at the screen, pondering the awesome scale of knowledge and brooding on the futility of human effort. The polyhedron and sphere are the inanimate beauties of our thought, like the boxes that house our computers, but it is the dog at the feet of its mistress, sad and sleepy because her mistress is immersed and unhappy, that is the real beauty within the frame. Is the internet one of the “the enemies of civilisation”? Clark’s Spenglerian language, loaded as it is with ominous signals, sounds heavy and misplaced. Melancholia I has a ladder going into the sky and an hourglass with plenty of time to go. It has a rainbow across a sea and scales to balance the information. These are all positive symbols we could apply to the internet, once we are in the mood to use them.

The Typewriter at the Carmelite Library

Quietly, with scarcely a string of words, the last typewriter manufactured in Britain left the production line at Brothers factory in North Wales in November 2012. Dutifully, duly, this instant relic was handed directly to a museum of technology.

Rumours persist online that someone, somewhere is still making typewriters, but increasing evidence from the same source suggests that if they are they do not have a big publicity profile. Searches for the machines in Melbourne kept coming up with the word eBay, a word that my spell checker only recognises when the second letter, not the first, is capitalised. Computers are now telling us how to behave, something we never expect of a typewriter.

The sense that something not too long ago happened to typewriters is felt when we notice that there are no new models in libraries and offices and homes. They are simply not being bought, and there is a reason for that. This week the Library sent a good-natured request to its own e-list:

The Typewriter at the Carmelite Library

Spine labels on books record the call number of the book, so the books are shelved in the correct order. The Carmelite Library prefers to use a typewriter for production of spine labels, and thereby hangs a tale. The Library typewriter is acting erratically. It is unreliable. The Library needs another typewriter for the typing of spine labels. Any typewriter that works. It doesn’t matter how old-fashioned, manual or electric, as long as it works. We are hoping someone on the list (or a local parishioner) may have a typewriter, in good working order,  that they can give to the Library on a permanent loan. Good working order also means its ribbons are still on the market.  Please talk to the librarian Philip Harvey at the Library, or by phone on 9682-8553

Responses were encouraging. One friend of the Library said he had a couple of manual typewriters, stored against the day when the whole computer universe suffered a collective meltdown. I advised him we wanted a typewriter because it’s faster and more practical than the computer for this particular job. Up until now, at least, that has been the case.  Others came to our aid with working typewriters, or mostly working except maybe for a few keys that need straightening, the caps lock is gone, or a roller needs constant adjustment. Minor mechanical problems go with the scene. Availability of ribbons hangs over us like a Damocles sword: we survive by a thread.

Perhaps typewriters are going the way of vinyl records. They have never gone away and remain in demand, even though the majority of people use another technology. For we must face the fact that we are in a transitional phase, where a major form of 20^th-century communication has been swept aside quicker than we can say qwerty. This divide becomes most apparent in age groups.

People over fifty grew up with typewriters, tapped to their heart’s content or rampaged furiously over the keyboard in search of their lost Hemingway self. An office without a typewriter was almost a meaningless concept. Many of these 50+ people were easy converts to the computer, where errors can be corrected on sight, storage can be facilitated in what a writer friend of mine calls her ‘virtual box’, and any of dozens of fonts can be selected from a dropdown menu. My favourite is Garamond, though lately I have developed a fondness for Cambria. With a typewriter it is one size fits all.  Other 50+ people watch with fear and trembling the passing of the typewriter. They have a possessiveness about typewriters that rises above sentimentality. The pure logic of the Save Icon is a whole new science, there to take away their fixed and secure feelings about return levers and shift keys. Their Remington is a fortress of good practice. Their Olivetti is not just the acme of style, it serves a useful purpose.

People under thirty display a very different attitude to typewriters. Typewriters are, for them, a fascinating object of creative delight. –30 people grew up with the computer screen and its hundred attendant devices. None of that overload of effects applies here. The typewriter delivers the words immediately, creates a fresh page of new script on call, gets the job done in real time. I have witnessed teens and pre-teens rush on sight to a typewriter in order to muck around with it and see what marvellous creations they can extract from its readymade capability. You can take them anywhere, more so the typewriters that don’t need to be plugged in. In fact, typewriters are cool.

All of this explains why businesses in some parts of the world now specialise in typewriters. They are stocking up the machines and their replacement parts, in anticipation of an ongoing demand. This is potentially lucrative, especially as parts become more rare. It is possible to imagine typewriter clubs, in the same way as we have clubs for vintage and veteran cars. Indeed, typewriters are already classifiable themselves as vintage or veteran.  The fact that the Carmelite Library can ask brazenly for a free typewriter is itself telling. The motive and action are validated by the reality that typewriters everywhere sit around gathering dust. Few people use their typewriter, which is why they are quite happy to send it somewhere where it serves a useful purpose. I myself would have offered one of the three typewriters we have at home, except that one of them has some faulty key responses, the second is liable to breakdown without hospital care, and the third is a classic memory typewriter used by one member of the household for storing day thoughts. It’s a blog without the web.

Responses to the Library request keep arriving by email. Next week we will have to decide which one of these offers comes with ribbons that are still being made. It is a sign of the times that big stationery stores don’t sell typewriters anymore, but do sell the ribbons that go with them. Next week, it will be time to make some phone calls.

Misplaced Signatures

In Italo Calvino’s book If on a  Winter’s Night a Traveller, the insertion of incorrect signatures by a publisher into its brand new book is one of the many comic mishaps that propel the plot of his highly literary novel. Wordy word games and writerly jokes are common features at play in Calvino’s writings. He assumes his readers know the rules of the book game, where the wrong set of pages causes a red face for the author, egg on face for the publisher, and a range of emoticons on the faces of readers.

This week on Atlantis (e-list of the American Theological Library Association) the same mishap is reported in the book Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics  by Graeme Goldsworthy ( IVP Academic, 2006). That it took eight years for someone to notice might say something about the popularity of this book, and we wonder that the author’s friends didn’t say something before, but still Angela G. Morris at the E.M.White Library of Louisville Seminary in Kentucky writes: “Pages 65–96 of our copy is … 65-96 from a book entitled  Myths and mysteries of the Old West  and includes text about George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull and The Mountain Meadows Massacre.  All very interesting, but not on the topic of the main text of the book.”

The beauty of e-lists is that clarification comes quickly. Other librarians soon wrote in about their copies. It seems the original hardback of 2006 is okay. Some libraries ordered the paperback of 2010, which is the one with the wrong pages. IVP apparently is hard at work sending replacement copies on request. One hopes that any e-book version has been scanned or copied from the original in the computer. If not, there is also the added problem of correct identification of page numbering.

Those stuck with the only copy of such a book, unable to find a replacement, are faced with a quandary. To remove the book from the collection is to stop access to the genuine contents found in the other pages. To keep it on the shelf unremarked is to further the confusion. If you do not decide that the book is simply a dud, it is useful common practice to write on the flyleaf and/or title page of the book full details of the exact discrepancy. At least then everyone knows and the Library is free of blame. The other thing to do is advise the publisher, if the book is recent.

There is another side to this story as well. While some of us rush to read Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics  by Graeme Goldsworthy, others rush to collect the same book because it contains pages 65–96 of Myths and mysteries of the Old West. As one e-lister wryly noted, it sounds like a future collectible. Well, maybe, maybe not. But it reminds me of the incredible flurry that surrounded the release in Australia of one of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Queues once formed along the streets, waiting for the bookshops to open selling first signed copies of new titles in the series. It was a reminder that this sort of readers’ clamour didn’t end with Charles Dickens. Unbeknownst to the sellers and buyers, page one of this particular installment of Harry Potter had a printer’s orphan. Because Australia is such an extraordinarily long way from England, even for jet aircraft, and because first release copies are released on the same day worldwide, and because Australia wakes up first to the morning sun, the publishers discovered too late that their initial print-run would have to be recalled and pulped. Only Australians got to snaffle the limited issue. Thus, by force of the market and the tyranny of distance, some very happy Melbourne buyers keep their rare Rowlings on the shelf, there to grow in value with time.