Dragon's teeth near Aachen, Germany, part of the Siegfried Line.
Dragon's teeth (German: Drachenzähne) are square-pyramidal fortifications of reinforced concrete first used during the Second World War to impede the movement of tanks and mechanised infantry. The idea was to slow down and channel tanks into killing zones where they could easily be disposed of by anti-tank weapons.
These "dragons teeth" were "sowed" extensively, particularly along the Siegfried Line. The remains of these fortification eerily echo those boundaries and borders that have been sites of historic conflict and contention in Europe.
For the LODE project in 1992, and for Re:LODE in 2017, the impact of European actions, be they economic or political, and enabled through a violent militancy, military conquest and colonisation, was evident along the whole of the LODE Line and zone.
The LODE Line pathway runs east and west across northern Europe, leading the project to India, where traffic on the road is supposed to keep to the left, a consequence of British colonial rule. The LODE line crosses the Indonesian island of Java, where traffic on the road keeps to the left, a convention brought to Java and imposed by Dutch adventurers in establishing a colonial administration, before Napoleonic conquest of the Netherlands imposed the general rule in Europe - to drive on the right! Napoleon never reached Java, so the convention remained. The LODE Line runs across Australia, where colonisation by the British of an "empty land", resulted in the destruction of indigenous people and their cultures, and also the convention that Australians drive on the left. In Colombia, they drive on the right, a post-Napoleonic convention imported from the colonial power, Spain. In Eire the LODE Line crosses an island that was the first English colony, so the Irish drive on the left, both sides of a border, a border that will change the course of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Recognizing the European character of "globalisation" requires recognizing that it is actually existing capitalism that is shaping the modern past, present and future, NOT people!
This project begins in Europe, in England, and so understanding "our" "Eurocentrism and Culturalism", is essential if the project can truly enable audiences to see things as they really are. The project aims to be an example of a realist art for people across the world. NOW!
Bureaucracy, colonialism, bean counting, profit and loss, it always ends up with the privatisation of profit and the socialization of loss.
I will sing you a song of Los (loss), the eternal Prophet (profit) . . .
Africa? Asia?
In 1795 William Blake engraved this poem in his all-singing, all-dancing "interweaving" of the sister arts of painting and poetry.
Blake's Song of Los captures perfectly an understanding of the global impact of Empires upon populations across the world.
The author David V. Erdman whose subject is the life and work of English poet and painter William called his biography of the poet, Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times.
Here is the text from the ASIA page; which is about when the Kings of Asia hear the howl rise up from Europe.
THE KINGS of Asia heard
The howl rise up from Europe,
And each ran out from his Web,
From his ancient woven Den;
For the darkness of Asia was startled 5
At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc.
And the Kings of Asia stood
And crièd in bitterness of soul:—
‘Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath,
Nor the Priest for Pestilence from the fen, 10
To restrain, to dismay, to thin
The inhabitants of mountain and plain,
In the day of full-feeding prosperity
And the night of delicious songs?
Shall not the Counsellor throw his curb 15
Of Poverty on the laborious,
To fix the price of labour,
To invent allegoric riches?
And the privy admonishers of men
Call for Fires in the City, 20
For heaps of smoking ruins,
In the night of prosperity and wantonness,
To turn man from his path,
To restrain the child from the womb,
To cut off the bread from the city; 25
That the remnant may learn to obey,
That the pride of the heart may fail,
That the lust of the eyes may be quench’d,
That the delicate ear in its infancy
May be dull’d, and the nostrils clos’d up, 30
To teach Mortal Worms the path
That leads from the gates of the Grave?’
Blake, understands that "Empire" is not only about subjugation and exploitation of populations abroad, as it were, but also the populations at HOME, green and pleasant lands not withstanding.
The Classics! it is the Classics, & not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars.
Indeed, it seems that a study of history, if using the forensic methods of Michel Foucault, produces the understanding that, as far as Europe is concerned, it is WAR that is the default position, and that PEACE is, to a lesser and greater extent, a form of WAR.
Europa? Europe? War and Peace and a United States of Europe
After World War II, European integration was seen as an antidote to the extreme nationalism which had devastated the continent. In a speech delivered on 19 September 1946 at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, Winston Churchill went further and advocated the emergence of a United States of Europe.
The 1948 Hague Congress was a pivotal moment in European federal history, as it led to the creation of the European Movement International and of the College of Europe, where Europe's future leaders would live and study together.
It also led directly to the founding of the Council of Europe in 1949, the first great effort to bring the nations of Europe together, initially ten of them. However, the Council focused primarily on values - human rights and democracy - rather than on economic or trade issues, and was always envisaged as a forum where sovereign governments could choose to work together, with no supra-national authority. It raised great hopes of further European integration, and there were fevered debates in the two years that followed as to how this could be achieved.
But in 1952, disappointed at what they saw as the lack of progress within the Council of Europe, six nations decided to go further and created the European Coal and Steel Community, which was declared to be "a first step in the federation of Europe".
Alcide De Gasperi from Italy, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman from France, and Paul-Henri Spaak from Belgium understood that coal and steel were the two industries essential for waging war, and that by tying their national industries together, future war between their nations was made impossible. These men and others are officially credited as the founding fathers of the European Union.
This popular scene from Ray Harryhausen's film (1963) Jason and the Argonauts shows armed skeletons springing up from the earth.
At the 1992 Academy Awards, in honoring Ray Harryhausen with a lifetime-achievement award, actor Tom Hanks remarked:
"Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane. I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made".The mythological inspiration for this scene is the ploughing of furrows in the earth and the sowing of dragons teeth that spring up armed men, and is part of the foundation myth of the city of Thebes. The reason the founder of the city, Cadmus, a prince from Phoenecia, comes to Boeotia in search of his sister Europa.
Re:LODE and desperately seeking Europa
Quite apart from a geography where the shifting of boundaries, populism, and bureaucratic blindness to the needs of populations, Europe is increasingly becoming a problematic idea as well as a concrete reality. Given that it is where this artistic activity originates, it will become increasingly questioned in the re-launch of the LODE methodology.
In
Greek mythology, Cadmus was the founder and first king of Thebes. He
was a Phoenician prince, son of king Agenor and queen Telephassa of Tyre
and the brother of Phoenix, Cilix and Europa. He was sent away by his
royal parents to seek out his sister Europa and bring her back to Tyre
after she had been abducted from the shores of Phoenicia by Zeus.
In Greek mythology, Europa was the mother of King Minos of Crete, and after whom the continent Europe was named.
Europa's
earliest literary reference is in the Iliad, which is commonly dated to
the 8th century BC. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of
the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, discovered at Oxyrhynchus. The earliest
vase-painting securely identifiable as Europa dates from mid-7th
century BC. Greek Εὐρώπη Eurṓpē contains the elements εὐρύς (eurus),
"wide, broad" and ὤψ/ὠπ-/ὀπτ- (ōps/ōp-/opt-) "eye, face, countenance".
Broad has been an epithet of the Earth herself in the reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European religion. It is common in ancient Greek mythology
and geography to identify lands or rivers with female figures. Thus,
Europa is first used in a geographic context in the Homeric Hymn to
Delian Apollo, in reference to the western shore of the Aegean Sea. As a
name for a part of the known world, it is first used in the 6th century
BC by Anaximander and Hecataeus.
Unsuccessful
in his search for Europa, Cadmus came in the course of his wanderings
to Delphi, where he consulted the oracle. He was ordered to give up his
quest and follow a special cow, with a half moon on her flank, which
would meet him, and to build a town on the spot where she should lie
down exhausted.
The
cow was given to Cadmus by Pelagon, King of Phocis, and it guided him
to Boeotia, where he founded the city of Thebes. Intending to sacrifice
the cow to Athena, Cadmus sent some of his companions to the nearby
Ismenian spring for water. They were slain by the spring's guardian
water-dragon, which was in turn destroyed by Cadmus.
He
was then instructed by Athena to sow the dragon's teeth in the ground,
from which there sprang a race of fierce armed men, called the Spartoi
("sown"). By throwing a stone among them, Cadmus caused them to fall
upon one another until only five survived, who assisted him to build the
Cadmeia or citadel of Thebes, and became the founders of the noblest
families of that city.
In Chapter 7 of McLuhan's 1964 work Understanding Media, Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity he writes on page 83:
Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, in considering “the nature of growths of civilizations,” not only abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of real growth of society, but states: “More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a ‘time of troubles’ or a universal state—both of them stages of decline and disintegra- tion.” Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion.
The old Greek myth which taught that the alphabet produced militarism (“King Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men”) really goes much deeper than Toynbee’s story. In fact, “militarism” is just vague description, not analysis of causality at all. Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social energies that is both specialist and explosive, so that it is merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does, that it both creates large empires and causes social breakdown. But militarism is a form of industrialism or the concentration of large amounts of homoge- nized energies into a few kinds of production. The Roman soldier was a man with a spade. He was an expert workman and builder who processed and packaged the resources of many societies and sent them home. Before machinery, the only massive work forces available for processing material were soldiers or slaves. As the Greek myth of Cadmus points out, the phonetic alphabet was the greatest processer of men for homogenized military life that was known to antiquity. The age of Greek society that Herodotus acknowledges to have been “overwhelmed by more troubles than in the twenty preceding generations” was the time that to our literary retrospect appears as one of the greatest of human centuries. It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read. The succeeding age of Alexander saw Hellenism expand into Asia and pre- pare the course of the later Roman expansion. These, however were the very centuries in which Greek civilization obviously fell apart.
Toynbee points to the strange falsification of history by archeology, insofar as the survival of many material objects of the past does not indicate the quality of ordinary life and experience at any particular time. Continuous technical improvement in the means of warfare occurs over the entire period of Hellenic and Roman decline. Toynbee checks out his hypothesis by testing it with the developments in Greek agriculture. When the enterprise of Solon weaned the Greeks from mixed farming to a program of specialized products for export, there were happy consequences and a glorious manifestation of energy in Greek life. When the next phase of the same specialist stress involved much reliance on slave labor there was spectacular increase of production. But the armies of technologically specialized slaves working the land blighted the social existence of the independent yeomen and small farmers, and led to the strange world of the Roman towns and cities crowded with rootless parasites.
To a much greater degree than Roman slavery, the specialism of mechanized industry and market organization has faced Western man with the challenge of manufacture by mono-fracture, or the tackling of all things and operations one-bit- at-a-time.
This is the challenge that has permeated all aspects of our lives and enabled us to expand so triumphantly in all directions and in all spheres.
The question arises: Does this "us", that was so enabled, still include this writer, and you, the reader?
Liverpool, Hull, Rotterdam (Or Anywhere?)
Speaking about where we are, valuing where we are, enables us to become universal, helps us to find out about our orientation to the wider world, and to make a real difference if what we want to do is to make the world a better place.
This Re:LODE page identifies a significant problem with this process that is so Laugh Out Loud obvious, and, precisely because it is obvious, it requires analysis, consideration and the effort to reflect on methods and methodology.
Speaking about where we are, Liverpool or Rotterdam or anywhere (or Hull) and then locating this position in Europe leads to the obvious point that in every identified location, within and without the boundaries of Europe, perception is governed to a greater or lesser extent by "being in the bubble" of that specific location, that particular environment.
For the LODE project in 1992, and for Re:LODE in 2017, the impact of European actions, be they economic or political, and enabled through a violent militancy, military conquest and colonisation, was evident along the whole of the LODE Line and zone.
The LODE Line pathway runs east and west across northern Europe, leading the project to India, where traffic on the road is supposed to keep to the left, a consequence of British colonial rule. The LODE Line crosses the Indonesian island of Java, where traffic on the road keeps to the left, a convention brought to Java and imposed by Dutch adventurers in establishing a colonial administration, before Napoleonic conquest of the Netherlands imposed the general rule in Europe - to drive on the right! Napoleon never reached Java, so the convention remained. The LODE Line runs across Australia, where colonisation by the British of an "empty land", resulted in the destruction of indigenous people and their cultures, and also the convention that Australians drive on the left. In Colombia, they drive on the right, a post-Napoleonic convention imported from the colonial power, Spain. In Eire the LODE Line crosses an island that was the first English colony, so the Irish drive on the left, both sides of a border, a border that will change the course of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Recognizing the European character of "globalisation" requires recognizing that it is actually existing capitalism that is shaping the modern past, present and future, NOT people!
This project begins in Europe, in England, and so understanding "our" "Eurocentrism and Culturalism", is essential if the project can truly enable audiences to see things as they really are. The project aims to be an example of a realist art for people across the world. NOW! This is the backstory to questions connected to the LODE cargo. And, furthermore:
Because Re:LODE is an art work instigated in an English context, it is English, and not Welsh, not Irish, not German, not Polish and not Ukrainian!
But Re:LODE is European, and:
He continues:
So, Re:LODE asks:
How is Europe part of our locality?
Re:LODE is in search of Europa!
The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, referring, it seems to the western shore of the Aegean Sea:
Liverpool, Hull, Rotterdam (Or Anywhere?)
Speaking about where we are, valuing where we are, enables us to become universal, helps us to find out about our orientation to the wider world, and to make a real difference if what we want to do is to make the world a better place.
This Re:LODE page identifies a significant problem with this process that is so Laugh Out Loud obvious, and, precisely because it is obvious, it requires analysis, consideration and the effort to reflect on methods and methodology.
Speaking about where we are, Liverpool or Rotterdam or anywhere (or Hull) and then locating this position in Europe leads to the obvious point that in every identified location, within and without the boundaries of Europe, perception is governed to a greater or lesser extent by "being in the bubble" of that specific location, that particular environment.
For the LODE project in 1992, and for Re:LODE in 2017, the impact of European actions, be they economic or political, and enabled through a violent militancy, military conquest and colonisation, was evident along the whole of the LODE Line and zone.
The LODE Line pathway runs east and west across northern Europe, leading the project to India, where traffic on the road is supposed to keep to the left, a consequence of British colonial rule. The LODE Line crosses the Indonesian island of Java, where traffic on the road keeps to the left, a convention brought to Java and imposed by Dutch adventurers in establishing a colonial administration, before Napoleonic conquest of the Netherlands imposed the general rule in Europe - to drive on the right! Napoleon never reached Java, so the convention remained. The LODE Line runs across Australia, where colonisation by the British of an "empty land", resulted in the destruction of indigenous people and their cultures, and also the convention that Australians drive on the left. In Colombia, they drive on the right, a post-Napoleonic convention imported from the colonial power, Spain. In Eire the LODE Line crosses an island that was the first English colony, so the Irish drive on the left, both sides of a border, a border that will change the course of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Recognizing the European character of "globalisation" requires recognizing that it is actually existing capitalism that is shaping the modern past, present and future, NOT people!
This project begins in Europe, in England, and so understanding "our" "Eurocentrism and Culturalism", is essential if the project can truly enable audiences to see things as they really are. The project aims to be an example of a realist art for people across the world. NOW! This is the backstory to questions connected to the LODE cargo. And, furthermore:
Because Re:LODE is an art work instigated in an English context, it is English, and not Welsh, not Irish, not German, not Polish and not Ukrainian!
But Re:LODE is European, and:
"Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the traditional culture . . . "So, Samir Amin writes in his preface to the re-publication of his seminal work Eurocentrism (2009), originally published as L'eurocentisme: Critique d'une idéologie (1988).
He continues:
"Modernity is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e., societies), make their own history."Furthermore, he says:
"Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, reason is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition). The latter implies secularism, the separation of religion and the state, and on that basis, politics is formed."
Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of globalized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that capitalism puts human civilization itself in danger.
Capitalism has had its day.
The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history.
The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system.
Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the post-modernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures).He says, furthermore:
As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values.
This implies the economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.
So, Re:LODE asks:
The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, referring, it seems to the western shore of the Aegean Sea:
Then you went towards Telphusa: and there the pleasant place seemed fit for [245] making a temple and wooded grove. You came very near and spoke to her: “Telphusa, here I am minded to make a glorious temple, an oracle for men, and hither they will always bring perfect hecatombs, [250] both those who live in rich Peloponnesus and those of Europe and all the wave-washed isles, coming to seek oracles. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, giving answer in my rich temple.”
Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth [280] in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. [285] There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said: “In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, [290] both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.”
