Remembering Erostratus
from
Infamy to Immortality by Paul
Newman
 |
The
Millennium Dome, or Prince Charles's 'hideous blancmange', is a sitting
duck and therefore it is only natural that someone like myself, who has
no objection to easy targets, should try to knock it off its concrete
perch. As Buckminster Fuller demonstrated, domes are artistically
impeccable, so any objection must focus on not on how it looks or what's
inside it but its provenance. If it had been thought suitable to
celebrate the millennium by raising a community centre at Greenwich to
extend the local range of amenities, one might have felt more confident
about its function. It would then be serving the citizenry in the way a
church did or a hospital. But the dome has no religious or local
significance. Cynics might say it is no more than a grandiloquent shed
advertising various goods and concepts. In time it will be abandoned and
dismantled and the land sold off - at an immense profit it is being
hinted.
As
citizens, we were told the dome was 'a great project', something truly
breathtaking and important, but such boasts were usually trumpeted by
those involved and receiving pay-offs from the scheme. It was all a bit
like those scenes in Close Encounters where the overawed ordinary
folk stand back emitting goggled-eyed, admiring gasps as they survey the
antics of technologically superior beings. The official message, in
brief, was this: you'd better agree this is wonderful because you're
going to be stuck with it in any case. With its twelve 100m steel
masts and overarching translucent umbrella, to look at the Dome does
appear enthralling, a gargantuan puffball with iridescent skin that
glows at night - but I have no notion as to its significance. Presumably
we are celebrating two thousand years since the birth of Christ, but any
numinous sensation seems quite out of place in this mixture of
exhibition centre, museum and theme park.
Neither
was entry to the dome particularly cheap - no concessions offered to the
unemployed or old age pensioners. Was anyone out there actually enraged
by the dome - enraged by being placed in a zone of exclusion, by not
feeling part of the celebrations or the dawning of a new age. For every
thousand or so on the inside, enjoying the warm drinks, fireworks and
fun, there is usually one of nihilistic bent consigned to the shivering
perimeter, shaking his fist at the sky and vowing to take revenge on all
those cosy partygoers. I wonder: did the security guards or policemen
arrest any suspicious malingerers stalking around armed with explosives
or firing devices? If they did, was a hurried D-notice slammed on
broadcasting their activities, lest such a news item alert the
terrorist-and-saboteur grapevine, encouraging others to take up the lead
until the dome be reduced to a ragged mist of cordite fumes floating
above the Thames?
Specifically
I was thinking of Erostratus who, in order that his name should never be
forgotten, burned down another magnificent building - one of the wonders
of the ancient world - nearly 2,400 years ago, at the ancient port of
Ephesus, in 356BC, allegedly on the day Alexander the Great was born. I
refer to the Temple of Artemis which took its place beside the Hanging
Gardens, the Pyramids and the Colossus of Rhodes as one of the most
alluring and stately structures on earth. "But when I saw the
sacred house of Artemis," wrote Antipater of Sidon, "that
towers to the clouds, the other Wonders were placed in the shade, for
the Sun himself had never looked upon its equal outside Olympus."
Sponsored
by the Lydian king Croesus, the temple was raised around 550BC to a
rectangular plan with a decorated façade and approached by a flight of
marble steps. The columns upholding the pediment were 20m high with
Ionic capitals; there were 127 of them, orthogonally aligned, supporting
an awe-inspiring enclosure containing bronze statues of Amazons, golden
pillars and statuettes, paintings and the votives of the thousands of
pilgrims, artisans and tourists who flocked to the place. Stuffed with
the masterworks of artists such as Pheidas, Polycleitus and Kresila, the
temple was a sumptuous treasure trove, a medley of follies,
superstitions and supreme artistic attainments. For this reason, some
might argue Erostratus did a good job in setting alight to such a
vainglorious pile. Perhaps it was his way of saying to the citizens of
Ephesus: "Look, I've done away with this pompous distraction, so
now you can look each other squarely in the eye and sort out your real
problems."
Of
course, this is vain supposition, for we have preserved for us no outer
details of Erostratus. All we retain is his gesture of resentment, his
snatching at immortality, his substitution of himself in place of the
deity. He stood for no protesting body or lobby for social reform.
Unlike that of Spartacus or Wat Tyler, Erostratus's anger had its roots
in material comfort. Ephesus was a rich seaport - in many ways a
prosperous, contented community. So not only was Erostratus defiling the
shrine but articulating his sense of apartness from the unquestioning
worshipper. He opted to attack the sacred rather than the secular, and
yet Artemis did not set her hounds upon him like Actaeon or seek any
redress - no wonder Plutarch speculated the goddess was too busy taking
care of the birth of Alexander to protect her own shrine. However, after
the razing of the temple, an interdict was issued forbidding on sentence
of death utterance of his name, and thus by pressure of omission,
Erostratus triumphed over the oblivion that engulfed more distinguished
achievers. For in denying a name, we engrave it more deeply upon the
memory: thus prohibition becomes an act of instatement. By designating
it as "the love that dare not speak its name", Oscar Wilde
rendered his predilection permanent and unforgettable. Absence, after
all, is merely the echo of a once-solid body.
Erostratus
appealed to Jean Paul Sartre who wrote a story about him. It concerns an
office worker, Paul Hilbert, a bitter, alienated recluse, who enjoys
humiliating prostitutes. Instead of having sex with them, he threatens
them with a pistol and makes them march around their rooms in the nude,
until they break down in tears and abuse him. Dreaming about violence
becomes his form of eroticism. During a conversation at his office, he
is told of Erostratus, the man whose name has endured "like a black
diamond" - a man made immortal by his felony. With the intention of
making a similar mark, Hilbert writes 102 letters to respected writers,
explaining his hatred of mankind, his lack of sympathy with their
essential humanism. Explaining his attitude of disgusted detachment, he
says that he intends to kill six people because that is the number of
bullets in his revolver. Weeks of seclusion follow, in which he has
strange visions, and then, after much deliberation and hesitation, he
goes out into the street with the intention of killing. But once he is
there among the crowd, his mood changes: "I repeated to myself,
'Why must I kill all these people who are dead already,' and I wanted to
laugh." A big man presses against him and asks for directions. In a
state of mingled disorientation and frenzy, Hilbert shoots him and
starts to run but is later traced to his flat on the seventh floor. The
story ends with him attempting suicide.
The
latter is rational enough, for Sartre's point is that Hilbert is merely
projecting self-hatred upon others. His true object of loathing is
himself. Nietzsche observed there might arise an Erostratus intent on
destroying a temple dedicated to himself as an act of narcissistic
perversity or outraged humility. Such dilemmas strike a contemporary
chord, for more than in any previous age, we regard it as important to
be seen as individuals rather than part of a collective. We like to see
our names in newspapers, minutes of meetings and letterheads. The
solipsistic 'I' is constantly cultivated and nurtured by psychologists
and counsellors. "What do you want?" is the
oft-repeated question. "How do you feel?" And yet,
ironically, simultaneous with this inflation of the ego, runs a parallel
denial that any such entity as 'self' exists. There are philosophers who
delight in styling personal identity as no more than a side-effect of
mental circuitry, an illusion of wholeness to which we grimly cling. In
reality, they tell us, we are no more than pre-set transmitters caught
in a crossfire of verbal signals.
Despite
such views, people continue to promote themselves as freestanding
personalities with the right to be acknowledged and gratified. Andy
Warhol pronounced everyone entitled to fifteen minutes of worldwide
fame, and in such a climate the contemporary artist in particular feels
duty-bound to brand his signature on the non-too-responsive hide of the
public. In order to do so, his symbiology may run to excrement,
intestines, underwear and the contents of dustbins. If he does not shout
loud enough, he will not be heard, for there are plenty of rival voices
prepared to drown his. It would not be an unoriginal notion for a modern
artist to stage a 'happening' in which he destroys the work of his
contemporaries, so that his name above all should survive the holocausts
of centuries. A variant upon this supreme act of egotism was enshrined
in the figure of Destructive Desmond who appears in the verse-play The
Dog Beneath the Skin by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. As
part of a cabaret act in a fashionable nightclub, Desmond would destroy
a well-known masterpiece. Picking up a Rembrandt, he would spit and
snarl something like this: "Ugh! - I hate you because you're ugly.
You're dark and brown like a chest of drawers! Grrr, I can't stand
looking at you, so I'm going to slash you to pieces!"
Like
Erostratus pitching himself against Artemis, Desmond was challenging the
elitism of art criticism. In an era of revolution and total war, his
denial of Rembrandt's worth was as valid as its promotion by a bourgeois
art connoisseur. It is interesting to contrast these violent gestures of
self-assertion with the modest markings of an earlier age. If we
consider a medieval cathedral, while the names of the original architect
and a mason or two may be recorded, the majority of the carvers and
craftsmen are forgotten. The progenitors of the varied motifs of angel,
wyvern, ape, hedgehog, minstrel, parrot, tiger and rosehead have been
absorbed in the mighty act of creation. Their idea was not to stand out
as beings apart, as towering all-important signatories, but to
interrelate by a common language of form and fable, their temporal
identities subsumed in the glory of the finished building. Only God
Himself, the architect of existence, loomed triumphant above the pile.
Such
anonymity runs against the modern current. Few of us today patiently
await our reward in heaven. We seek honour in the here and now. If it is
not bestowed, the elaborate and delicate organisation of modern society
empowers the anarchic citizen with an awesome potential to dispense
chaos and disorder. That the destructive force unleashed by an
Erostratus is often at odds with his petty stature had been recognised
for a long time. Publicity does not help either. Fisher Ames, a
Massachusetts Federalist who sat in the House of Representatives from
1789 to 1800, made some prescient remarks about newspapers inspiring
those vacant of purpose:
"Some
of the shocking articles in the papers raise simple, and very simple
wonder; some terror; and some horror and disgust. Now what instruction
is there in these endless wonders? Do they not shock tender minds and
addle shallow brains? They make a thousand old maids, and eight or ten
thousand booby boys, afraid to go to bed alone. Worse than this happens;
for some eccentric minds are turned to mischief by such accounts as they
receive of troops of incendiaries burning our cities; the spirit of
imitation is contagious; and boys are found unaccountably bent to do as
men do…"
Hence
it is never wise on the part of a government to exclude too many from an
enterprise or initiative. With its arrogant metropolitan setting and
overwhelming amassment of state-of-the-art advancements, the Millennium
Dome is bound to increase the insider's sense of communal solidarity
while heightening the outsider's sense of isolation and apartness. The
patronising assurance that it was put up "to please everyone"
is guaranteed to enhance the latter's resentment by offering him no
prospect of transcending his plight. While such baneful knight errants
continue to patrol the walkways and paving stones of the major cities,
organisers of lofty collective schemes had better take heed. For some of
those they exclude from their fairy palaces and techno-utopias may
decide to unexpectedly bare their teeth, and just as the ancients once
set aside a fallow field in order to appease the retributory deities of
storm and flood, it might be politic for the directors of the Millennium
Dome to erect in one of their twelve time zones a fireproof shrine to a
certain tiresome and unintegrated young man lest one night he creep in
and avenge the omission in a drastic, irreparable fashion.
Paul
Newman
(The
above first appeared in 3rd Stone, a magazine for the
New Antiquarian)