It’s no secret that Nicholas Hawksmoor is and has been on my Top Ten list of architects—for decades; probably since I was an undergraduate. His six churches for the 1710 Commission for Building Fifty New Churches may be the finest examples of Protestant British Baroque and worthy counterparts to Messrs Bernini and Borromini in the Catholic south. All six of the London churches were on the list for my first visit to London in 1971, and I have returned to many of them again and again—especially Christ Church, Spitalfields and St Mary Woolnoth.

Through the vigor of those buildings, Hawksmoor has entered contemporary British literature in works by novelist Peter Ackroyd and poet Iain Sinclair. Thirty years ago Ackroyd published a novel titled Hawksmoor about the occult activities of fictional 18th century architect named Dyer and the investigations of 20th century Scotland Yard detective Hawksmoor. Dyer commits crimes at each of the six construction sites (connected with the real Hawksmoor), while detective Hawksmoor investigates contemporary crimes at those same locations. In an alternating-chapter format popularized by Erik Larson (Devil in the White City, et al.), Ackroyd shifts between the English of the early 17th century and that of our own time. A sample of his dialogue invokes a heightened sense of time and place:

And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it. First, you must measure out or cast the Area in as exact a Manner as can be, and then you must draw the Plot and make the Scale. I have imparted to you the Principles of Terrour and Magnificence, for these you must represent in the due placing of Parts and Ornaments as well as in the Proportion of the several Orders: you see, Walter, how I take my Pen? Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, 1985

For a scholarly architectural treatment of those six buildings, look for a copy of Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches by Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The qualities of six Protestant churches from the years 1712-1731 have engaged historians, poets, and writers since my undergraduate years, when Kerry Downes may have initiated the juggernaut in 1970. Extricating the work of Hawksmoor from his close contemporaries and  associates Sir Christopher Wren (for whom Mr H was Clerk of the Works) and Sir John Vanbrugh (with whom H worked on Blenheim) has been the task of these past forty-five years, and that reassessment may not yet be complete. My love for these works—whether or not they were designed by Hawksmoor—confirms something about my own architectural inclinations: I am at heart a Mannerist.

man·ner·ism

“Agincourt’s stories have many sources.” I like the sound of that, the way the successive “z” and “s” sounds slither and loop across the page. My words are set in motion by circumstance; some of them from direct experience; others indirectly, chance remarks from friends, social media, news. It’s remarkable (so, I’ll remark on it) that our words often have more power than we intend; that something said in jest, words lobbed into conversation to simply occupy the void, can become the keystone to dissembled thoughts in another mind; unintended consequence. The casual becomes causal.

When James O’Rourke died in the spring of 2011, I was asked to say a few words at his memorial service. With no idea what to say, I put off preparing something until the night before. Desperate for a framework that might add some objectivity, I settled on Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” based on a fragment from archaic Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (“a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”). That binary view seemed the best way to discuss someone who defies easy explanation.

“I have known James O’Rourke for forty years. We were friends during part of that time.” That opening gambit drew a wave of knowing laughter from Jim’s friends and acquaintances in the Concordia Centrum. We’ve all be there one time or another: Those in agreement with James could do no wrong; those out of step with his agenda, on the other hand, were banished to the seventh level of invisibility. Redemption was possible, but an admission of wrongdoing was never his to make. In Berlin’s understanding of Archilochus’ two diametric types, Jim was a classic hedgehog. Without that hedgehog-ness, I should add, this community would be significantly less blessed with art.

Wikipedia’s entry for the hedgehog-fox phrase says this about Isaiah Berlin’s spin: “Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea,… and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea.” If asked to define James T. O’Rourke succinctly, “…single defining idea..” would be my nomination; art in general and the gallery-museum in particular were the driving force of his life. Herein lies the reason for the occasional lapse in our friendship: as endearing as the hedgehog may be, I am a fox.

My ten or twelve minutes elicited a little more laughter and one incident of actual applause. Having, I thought, made my case for James’s hedgehog-ness — and acknowledging my unworthiness to be linked, even remotely, with Isaiah Berlin — I concluded with my own diametric duality: “Ultimately, I’m a dog person, while James preferred the company of cats.”

Given my circumstances of the last few weeks, culminating in the passing of our cat Bob this morning, I must re-evaluate that last statement.

There have been two cats in my life, just two; both have been strays living in our backyard, and both of them moved in to what I had assumed was a “dog” household. I’m pleased to report that Miss Kit and Mr Bob have shaken my imagined canine commitment.

“The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

“The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

“Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. ‘Have some sense of proportion!’ she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

“And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

If you have to ask, explanation won’t help. It’s that simple.

I’m not trying to dodge the question of why we value the four-legged members of our family so highly. We just do, and no one who thinks otherwise can be made to understand the lengths we will go to afford them aid and comfort. Our commitment these last few days to Bob, our cat—even though he has a long way to go in the healing process—reminds me that Agincourt lacks a veterinarian. I’ve tried to entice a Fargo-Moorhead architect (who shall not be named) to tackle the design of a contemporary animal hospital and have thusfar been unsuccessful. Recent experience with at least three DVMs in Fargo, however, tells me to further the story of veterinary medicine in Fennimore county.

Our cat Bob has been very sick for the last five weeks with Feline Triad Disease. Several visits to the vet and a weekend in the emergency animal hospital have only strengthened my resolve to weave veterinary threads into Agincourt’s fabric and build on the stories of Finlay Dun and “The night of the albino calf” and of Martha Tennant’s role in founding the community’s first animal welfare society.

At the “Gold Rush” flea market held at the Olmstead County fairgrounds each year, our friend Karen and I happened on the same item almost simultaneously: it was a worn book by W. P. Pycraft titled The Animal Why Book, illustrated by Edwin Noble (actually, John Edwin Noble) in an Arts & Crafts-like style reminiscent of Sir William Nicholson. We have several Nicholson prints on the dining room plate rail, but Noble’s work—similar yet not derivative—was unfamiliar. Karen and I tossed a coin to see who the lucky buyer would be. I won.

The internet yielded considerable information on Noble (less on Pycraft) and a growing list of books he had both illustrated and written. Along with the Animal Why Book, there were two others in a series with similar treatments of animal-related topics: Helpers Without Hands about humankind’s dependence on domesticated stock, and Pads, Paws & Claws on wilder species around the world. I found pretty good copies of these two and several other marginally less attractive volumes illustrated by Noble, a few of which were written by him as well.

Beyond his beautiful images of species ordinary and familiar, rare and exotic, Messrs Noble and Pycraft may have given us a name for Agincourt’s current veterinary practice: Pads, Paws & Claws. Hooves probably belong in there as well — this is a rural community, after all — but the Pycraft-Noble book is too beautiful to pass by without mining it for ideas.

Self-awareness has never been my strong suit. So half way through my forty-fifth year of teaching, a critical look at my skill set seems long overdue. It’s a damn good thing I have a job—and one with a modicum of security*—because, frankly, I couldn’t get one today (especially in teaching) if my very existence were at risk.

The clock hands move exceedingly slow, but moved they have, in several respects. First, architecture itself is no longer what it was when my academic career began—both what architecture is and the way that it’s done. This is no bad thing. Then there’s the “academy,” the ivory tower that has been my sheltered employment, with these sorts of change afoot:

• subtle pressures from Bismarck that would effectively transform the university into a trade school;
• a proposal from DC which would license new architects simultaneous with their graduation.

Not to mention the arrival of a generation whose values and motivations I plainly do not comprehend. You’ll appreciate this story from Memory Lane:

Until his death in 1965, Burr Shafer contributed a weekly cartoon to The Saturday Review, a literary magazine that may have been a geeky affectation during my high school years. Burr’s was a one-frame cartoon titled “Through History with J. Wesley Smith.” Of the three Shafer images that have stayed with me for more than fifty years, this was my favorite: One brontosaurus turns to another in a sub-tropical setting and wonders aloud: “I don’t know about you but this cold snap has got me worried.” Which begs the question, am I too a dinosaur in a new Ice Age? [There are no quotes because the story is mine.]

The thought occurs to me more often than good mental health should comfortably bear that I’m that dinosaur and there’s a decided chill in the air. Without straying into unnecessary and very personal detail (and an uncomfortable naming of names), eight years of therapy with Dr Bob have helped.

With the fall semester almost behind me (grades are due in about seventy-two hours), the biggest change afoot is my switch from Third Year in our curriculum to Second Year, a level I haven’t taught in about thirty-five years. And makes this self-assessment all the more important: What could I possibly have to offer a group of Sophomores roughly the age of my grandchildren, if I had any?

Among those items thrown on the scrap heap of history is the rolodex™, now so antique that I doubt it would register at all with those nineteen-year-olds I’m about to meet. Yet that is, indeed, what I am: a rolodex of so many mental images of building I’ve seen in magazines, on student draughting tables (though no one draughts anymore either; spellcheck doesn’t even like the word), through personal encounter in my travels, and now on the internet.

I teach by example. Now and then, that example is myself; putting pencil or felt tip to yellow tracing paper. But more often it devolves to a trip down memory lane and the suggestion that a student’s current mental block might be loosened by looking at Sidney Robinson College, Cambridge, or an obscure Prairie Style house in Billings or a candy factory at Noisiel-sur-Marne, east of Paris or David Chipperfield’s latest as yet unbuilt design. What seventy years have taught me is the value of a keen eye — if I only had a pair — and a good memory. I know how to see; I believe what I see; I record that I’ve seen. In philosophical terms I am a Naïve Realist and have to resist the temptation to apologize.

* “Tenure just means they have to find a longer flight of steps to push you down.” — C.D. Elliott

Do you recognize names like Jim Jones and David Koresh? You might even remember Marshall Applewhite. They’re just three of the myriad charismatic leaders who persuaded ordinary people to follow them into death. I’m an ordinary person, too. So why am I still here?

“Cult behavior” fascinates me. What is it that Scientology offers its believers that attracted Tom Cruise and repulsed me? During the stridency of current political rhetoric, I wonder if we’re watching the resurgence of a particularly ugly cult experience from the mid-1950s — when I was eight to twelve years of age — and watched America begin to unravel on our first TV set.

Is it odd that the two programs I recall from that never-to-be-repeated experience of a “first” television are Milton Berle and the televised hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a congressional committee created to uncover disloyalty and subversive in the United States. Founded in 1938 as a special committee, it became permanent in 1945 and made the Cold War even more frigid as the committee’s interests shifted from Fascism to the perceived Communist threat from “agents” in key government positions and commercial activities that might influence public opinion, such as newspaper publishing and Hollywood’s film industry. Though HUAC gets the lion’s share of vilification, it was its Senate counterpart, the Government Operations Committee under the leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), that we might see reflected in the pronouncements of Donald Trump. The eerie parallel ought to be sufficient cause for reflection.The question for me concerns the likely appearance of a cultish following of Mr Trump.

[Refreshing my failing memory and gaining new information today, I am surprised to learn about McCarthy’s strong connection with the Kennedy family (fellow Roman Catholics), which soured when Robert Kennedy became counsel for the committee, and his increasing differences with Republican Dwight Eisenhower (in office from 1953 to 1961 and the first president who was a topic of conversation in our very Republican household). I should add, also parenthetically, my wonderment at the political divide that grew between me and my father, whose last presidential ballot was cast for George Wallace while my own sympathies have drifted ever toward Marx. Roy and I, by the way, never spoke of politics.]

What is a Cult?

1. a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies.

2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.

3. the object of such devotion.

4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.

5. Sociology: a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.

7. the members of such a religion or sect.

8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.

The American Psychological Association proffers a definition, though I haven’t looked at its update in the new DSM.

Many cults and their charismatic leaders have come and gone during my seventy years: several have been religious (Jonestown; Heaven’s Gate; Branch Davidians; Scientology), while others are more secular (AmWay and Mary Kay) and operate much like Ponzi schemes. In this light, Trump has created no cult. Rather his canny insight to popular culture — which should come as no surprise because of his many financial interests in hostelry, gaming, and attendant “signature” branding — has touched the residual core of latter-day McCarthy-ites from the ’50s: older White heterosexual men watching their power wane as people of color push them into minority status, and as women, gays, and other minority groups achieve significant social gain. Older “norms” once thought immutable are threatened by social change and demand to be defined by law: What does it mean to be married, for example, or to be Caucasian or Christian, and which flavors of Christianity are true? They have seen the advancing tide of heterodoxy and, like Canute the Great, stand ankle-deep, ordering the waves to recede.

Journalist Chris Mooney (whose bona fides will be suspect to anyone on the right) has written The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality, which I highly recommend. Mooney admits at the outset that it might just have legitimately been titles The Democratic Brain because the point remains the same: we are bifurcating into two species, 1) hunter-gatherers who daily face the world, embrace change, engage the unfamiliar, and strategize solutions, and 2) those who maintain the home fires and the status quo, fear change, dismiss science, and reject critical thinking. There is objective science to back his contentions.

As someone who has fought for change in my small way, it isn’t the enemy without that concerns me; it is the stranger behind me in the check-out line, the person sitting next to me on the bus, and the voter who just vacated the booth that I’m about to enter to cast my lonely ballot.  Focus on the Family’s James Dobson suggests that homosexuals should be rounded up and put in concentration camps in the American “Outback” (actually in Wyoming), and Reverend Kevin Swanson has gone a significant step farther, suggesting his own brand of Sharia Law advocating enforcement of biblical injunction “… that homosexuals should be put to death.” Republican presidential candidates Cruz, Huckabee, and Jindahl were in attendance at Swanson’s last soirée, casually dismissing the notion of distancing themselves from his rhetoric.

So called spiritual leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr, Franklin Graham (son of Billy), and the Robertsons (father Pat and son Gordon) whip their followers to a fine frenzy, then stand back unapologetic when the bullets fly or the baseball bat connects with its target. Apparently its OK to shout fire in some theaters.

I haven’t exhausted the topic of cult behaviour but may not have the strength to follow through as I gird my loins for the onslaught.

“History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.”

― Idries Shah, Reflections

“History isn’t what happened, but a story of what happened.”

— Some guy

Twice a week I stand in a classroom and summarize some of what happened during particular chunks of space-time. Today, for example, we considered late Mediæval developments in the nether reaches of the Gothic—in Bohemia, Spain, and Portugal. Seventy-five minutes hardly does justice to any of these topics. And just before I walk into that classroom, Idries Shah’s observation haunts me: I’m the filter he was writing about.

Browsing—what I consider a species of academic grazing—continues to be my favored academic activity. Our friend Cecil Elliott likened me to a former colleague at N. C. State who he described this way: “He grazes much but produces no wool.” But whereas another friend, Jonathan Taylor Rutter, posits my behavior as more goat- than sheep-like — a perspective I have welcomed and taken to heart — there comes a time when I must spin that wool into thread and weave some fucking yardage. Product; I need product. I gotta birthday coming up, and occurs to me several times a day that I’m not going to live forever.

Surely the joys of grazing include serendipitous discoveries like this duo of buildings from Paris: the Cirque Medrano, which once stood at 63 Boulevard Rochechouart, and La Ruche, an artists’ colony still holding the line against redevelopment in the 15th arrondissement. I visited La Ruche (“the beehive”) in 2013 because Gabriel Spat once maintained a studio there in the early 20th century. Each of these eccentric buildings inspires me (i.e., make me smile) and reinforces a prospect that Agincourt once had a similar building on the unfashionable stretch of South Broad Street.

Nineteenth century entertainment more often took place outside the home — at church socials and county fairs; at baseball games and other athletic events; on Saturday afternoons in The Commons and evenings at the Auditorium; even in the disreputable pool halls of “Music Man” fame. Perhaps because Fargo once had a roller rink, I hoped Agincourt might enjoy a similar facility. In fact, there has been one on the 100 block of South Broad since the earliest days of the project. But I had doubts about its whimsical form, which is a reason why discoveries like Cirque Medrano and La Ruche are so reassuring.

La Ruche, by the way, was a recycled structure from the 1900 World’s Fair, dismantled, reconstructed and repurposed for artist’s studios.

Oh, and not incidentally, Cecil Elliott took a dim view of aphorisms like Louis Sullivan’s famous observation “Form Follows Function.” Elliott’s retort, invariably, was “funk follows formtion,” which has always struck me as an equally reasonable point of view.