Steve Hely's Blog, page 15

Swiss History, Part Three

We jumped ahead a bit to cover the Bernese and Lucernese chronicles, from around 1500. Some real tough stuff in there, but also some fun:

When we last left what’s now Switzerland it was the Dark Ages. That term’s become unpopular but we just don’t know that much about what was up. There seems to be enough record and lineage to know there were some saints: Saint Bernard of Menthon, for example, he of the dogs with the barrels.

Where are our firsthand sources on Saint Bernard? What lingers seems to be mostly unsourced legend and possible propaganda? We have some 9th century stories about Saint Gall:

but we’re getting into lore here:

Images of Saint Gall typically represent him standing with a bear

who knows?

The saints, it is arguable, were trying to live outside of History, at least political history, which was possibly the smart move in the year 900. Perhaps always. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to see them, maybe they were political actors just like the counts of Annecy and the kings of Burgundy but with a holy varnish.

Between the Romans and what came next, the saints seem to have had the most lasting legacy: structures that still stand and names that are known.

The Rütli

In 1291, when the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf of Habsburg, died, the Helvetians decided their moment had come. On August 1, before a new emperor could be elected by a council of German princes, the elders of the three small states met on a tiny heath known as the Rütli on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne and negotiated an “eternal pact.” They declared their right to local self-government, promised one another assistance against any encroachment upon these rights and committed future generations to an alliance that was to “endure forever.” The pact was the beginning of the Everlasting League and the foundation of the Swiss Confederation. The forest meadow, the Rütli, accessible only by boat or by foot down a steep trail, is Switzerland’s most venerated patriotic shrine. Every school child is required to make at least one pilgrimage to it.

So says Herbert Kubly in the Time Life Switzerland. You’d think he’d include a picture of the Rutli, but he doesn’t. Maybe not his decision. That must’ve been frustrating in the days before you could find thousands of images of anything in one second.

(DrHäxer for Wikipedia).

A key word you come across in Swiss history is Eidgenossenschaft. Says Wiki:

Eidgenossenschaft  is a German word specific to the political history of Switzerland. It means “oath commonwealth” or “oath alliance” in reference to the “eternal pacts” formed between the Eight Cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy of the late medieval period, most notably in Swiss historiography being the Rütlischwur between the three founding cantons Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, traditionally dated to 1307. In modern usage, it is the German term used as equivalent with “Confederation” in the official name of Switzerland.

But how could a town/canton make a pledge? A person can make an oath, but can a canton? Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, in their Concise History of Switzerland, say:

Urban autonomy was common across medieval Europe, and many rural communities adopted corporate forms of organization in the High Middle Ages, but rural communities with imperial liberty emerged in only a few areas, notably in the central Alps. Valley communities in the mountains from the Valais to the Grisons organized as political corporations bearing seals and administering justice, and once they had gained sufficient legal privileges and autonomy, joined as equal members the networks of alliances among communes that characterized the entire region. Several factors enabled this development: location on the passes critical to imperial policy in Italy, the relative weakness of the major feudal dynasties and the high degree of cooperation demanded by pastoralism in the Alps, which encouraged strong collective institutions. Living in a diverse landscape of nobles, towns and cities also provided models and sometimes the impetus to organize on corporate lines. Historians have pointed to the emergence of alliances that included both urban and rural communes as a distinctive feature that enabled the Swiss leagues to thrive and survive after 1500, even as primarily urban alliances elsewhere foundered.

Here is Schwyz, from which Switzerland gets her name:

(Markus Bernet took that one.)

The truth or details about all this is still somewhat disputed, but a pact among the cantons is the key to Swiss history.

Together they fought off the Hapsburgs:

This was an intense time:

Source is this great site, Swiss History: Fact of Fake News, which goes into much detail about how much to trust our historians.

William Tell

You can’t talk about Swiss history without addressing William Tell, supposedly made to shoot an apple off his son’s head by a tyrannical Habsburg reeve (or vogt)? The earliest reference to him comes in The White Book of Sarnen, put together in 1474 by a country scribe named, conveniently, Schriber. (I learn all that here).

Both Church and Head in their Concise History of Switzerland and Steinberg in Why Switzerland? (great title) delicately broach the idea that William Tell very likely never existed, but he was so important as an idea to the Swiss that he’s significant. You can go as deep as you want on the historicity of Bill Tell. I found this interesting:

Rochholz (1877) connects the similarity of the Tell legend to the stories of Egil and Palnatoki with the legends of a migration from Sweden to Switzerland during the Middle Ages.

That’s Tell by Ferdinand Hodler:

Hodler’s life gives us a snapshot of everday Swiss history as it existed in the 19th century:

Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler’s family to thirteen.

The family’s finances were poor, and the nine-year-old Hodler was put to work assisting his stepfather in painting signs and other commercial projects. After the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1867, Hodler was sent to Thun to apprentice with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer. From Sommer, Hodler learned the craft of painting conventional Alpine landscapes, typically copied from prints, which he sold in shops and to tourists.

When we come back: Jean Cauvin and why there were no musical instruments in Geneva for two hundred years.

Bernese Chronicles (Swiss History Part Two)

Our attempts to learn the history of Switzerland led us to a swirling eddy that is the chronicles of the city/canton of Bern.

These depict in vivid detail the Swabian and Burgundian Wars.

Diebold Schilling the Elder was the uncle of Diebold Schilling the Younger.

Here is the work of the Younger:

Those are rampages through the Vaud.

The battle of Dorneck.

Entire chronicles can be found online, they’re shockingly long. Even a browse through them can be numbing. It’s like the work of Henry Darger or something, obsessive numbers of battle scenes and sieges and killings. Regrettably my German is insufficient for me to read them. I suspect I get the idea.

The events depicted kept the Burgundians and Habsburgs out of Switzerland and allowed the Old Swiss Confederacy to maintain its independence.

During this period the Swiss became so good at war that they became in demand mercenaries in Italy and elsewhere (the origin of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards). Their super-weapon was the halberd, which was capable of killing a mounted knight. Defeating a guy on horseback who was armed with metal sword from your feet was a vexing fighting problem of the time. The Inca did not solve it in time.

Much praise to Ursula Kampmann for her article on Swiss historiography.

The death of the Burgundian Charles The Bold at the battle of Nancy ended the Burgundian hopes for swallowing pieces of the Swiss Confederacy:

The corpse of Charles the Bold remained concealed until three days after the battle, when it was found lying on the river, with half of his head frozen.[308] It took a group consisting of Charles’ Roman valet, his Portuguese personal physician, his chaplain, Olivier de la Marche, and two of his bastard brothers to identify the corpse through a missing tooth, ingrown toenail, and long fingernails

One cheek had been chewed away by wolves and the other embedded in frozen slime.

so said Wikipedia at one time (source for this claim?). It was a halberd that got him.

from a footnote on Charles’ Wiki page:

he word Eidgenossen is literary translated as ‘oath companion’, and was a synonym for Swiss, referring to the members of the Old Swiss Confederacy.[286] Until the Siege on Morat, most of the confederacy had not declared war on Burgundy, because Charles had yet to invade a territory officially part of one of its members. But during the siege, Charles attacked a bridge which was a part of Bernese territory, thus obligating the confederacy to join Bern in their campaign against Burgundy.

Morat:

Charles’ death left Mary of Burgundy in charge. I’ve been meaning to put together something about all the depictions of her in art, but that’ll have to be another day.

And Switzerland independent.

The Swiss are not in the EU. Switzerland itself is a kind of mini EU, a union of 26 cantons, mini nations, that speak French, Italian, German, Romansh.

That’s enough for now.

I hope to visit Bern, it looks cool.

CucombreLibre from New York, NY, USA took that for Wikipedia.

Chronicles of the Cape Fear River

Speaking of chronicles, and Wilmington, you can’t visit Wilmington, North Carolina without hearing about this one.

Since we got a copy we’ve been meaning to write it up but it’s a bit daunting. It runs to about 700 pages.

One excerpt will suffice.

Sprunt had a nice house:

and was this cottage his as well?:

C.R.A.V.E.D

continuing a deranged hobby of reading corporate materials for fast food companies. See if you can guess what the acronym C.R.A.V.E.D stands for at $JACK, the corporate parent of Jack In The Box and Del Taco.

To buy time while you think, here is a story about Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, who had a strong, clear mission focus:

There is a great story shared by Chip and Dan Heath in the book “Made to Stick” about the late founder Herb Kelleher. Kelleher once posed a question to someone about their strategy,

“Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”

The person stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded:

“You say, `Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.’

(source)

How big is Switzerland compared to California?

looking it up for my own purposes, but I’ll cop to making a cheap ploy for traffic, as various map comparisons are one of the biggest drivers of stray Google searches to this site.

Beyers in Wilmington

Did these adventures really happen? Did we really meet up in Wilmington, North Carolina? The very day Duke was playing UNC? Did we really go explore the fringes of the Orton Plantation? Did we really go to Myrtle Beach? (what an unBeyers place, it could hardly be more unBeyersy, and yet he was sort of enthusiastic!) The conversation with the antiques guy in Southport, did that really happen? Did the woman really warn us not to swim in the Cape Fear River? (we won’t!) The night wanderings and laughings?

Some of these scenes feel like a dream, a bit of magical realism, and yet these weren’t even in the top twenty of our explorations. The other day Mat reminded me about the whale watch in Tofino. We went on a whale watch? I didn’t even remember. I remembered the hike to the crashed plane, and the raccoon of course, and Port Alberini.

I remember what we were talking about just before the photo above: I was saying that places that serve both beer and coffee kind of drag on me because the vibe and effect of each beverage is quite contrary to the other, so that a place that serves both will be caught in liminal territory, it’s inevitable that such a place will feel kinda like a WeWork or something rather than forming a strong identity. Beyers was more charitable. He’d had firsthand experiences with the realities of running a coffee shop. His attitude was always to approach with openness.

Jim Simons

Zierler:

And Jim, when you were a kid, how did you or your teachers or your parents first recognize the abilities that you had?

Simons:

Well, all parents think their kids are a genius, so (laughs) so, but I did get involved with math very early. I loved to keep multiplying by two and see… I finally got up to whatever it is, 1,024, I guess? And so I liked to do that. I remember I was in the car with my father when I was maybe four or five at the most, and he said he had to stop to get gas, and I said, “Why do you have to do that?” And he said, “Well, we could run out of gas if I don’t stop.” And I said to myself and then to him, “Well, you don’t have to run out of gas. You can use half of what you have, and then you can use half of that and then half of that, and you’ll never run out of gas.” (both laugh) Well, it didn’t occur to me that you’d never get anywhere either, but I just kept slicing up what was in the gas tank. And I remember also spending many a night lying in bed thinking, “How do you define the expression, “Pass it on.” That’s an expression, right? Pass it on. How do you define it? How do you explain to someone that he’s supposed to say to someone, the next guy down, et cetera, that wasn’t good enough. I really wanted to figure it out. And one night, I did figure it out, and then when I woke up, I forgot what it was. So (both laugh) but now I remember. But it’s, you know, a strange thing for a kid to do as, I was maybe eight, to think about such a question. So I always liked math.

Here’s my source for that. Jim Simons, smoker, figured out a way to turn the markets into a money machine, suffered severe tragedies, gave money to science. (Why are so many brilliants from Brookline? Irish Jewish interaction under the looming mountains of Boston?)

source.

Tempted

sent by our Rhode Island correspondent.

Randall Collins on Sex and Violence

We’ve discussed before the work of microsociologist Randall Collins.  Not sure why his work isn’t more popular. His insights about violence are both profound and practical.  Here’s a summary he gave of much of his own work.

Now that we have photos and videos of violent situations, we see that at the moment of action the expression on the faces of the most violent participants is fear.  Our folk belief is that anger is the emotion of violence, but anger appears mostly before any violence happens, and in controlled situations where individuals bluster at a distant enemy. I have called this confrontational tension/fear; it is the confrontation itself that generates the tension, more than fear of what will happen to oneself. Confrontational tension is debilitating; phenomenologically we know (mainly from police debriefings after shootings) that it produces perceptual distortions; physiologically it generates racing heart beat, an adrenaline rush which at high levels results in loss of bodily control.

Collins speaks of what sociologists have learned from CCTV footage of fights at bars:

This explains another, as yet little recognized pattern: when violence actually happens, it is usually incompetent. Most of the times people fire a gun at a  human target, they miss; their shots go wide, they hit the wrong person, sometimes a bystander, sometimes friendly fire on their own side. This is a product of the situation, the confrontation.  We know this because the accuracy of soldiers and police on firing ranges is much higher than when firing at a human target. We can pin this down further; inhibition in live firing declines with greater distance; artillery troops are more reliable than infantry with small arms, so are fighter and bomber crews and navy crews; it is not the statistical chances of being killed or injured by the enemy that makes close-range fighters incompetent. At the other end of the spectrum, very close face-to-face confrontation makes firing even more inaccurate; shootings at a distance of less than 2 meters are extremely inaccurate.

(Now, Collins does cite the work of S. L. A. Marshall, who is controversial.  Story for another day.).

Why do most potential fights defuse before they start?:

Most of the time both sides stay symmetrical. Both get angry and bluster in the same way. These confrontations abort, since they can’t get around the barrier of confrontational tension.

Practical advice:

Keep any confrontation emotionally symmetrical; make confrontational tension work for you by maintaining face contact; avoid micro-escalations; let the situation calm down out of boredom, which is what happens when an interaction becomes locked into repetition. In the violent sociology of emotions, boredom is your friend.

Go read the whole thing.  He also speaks on sex:

the strongest sexual attraction is not pleasure in one’s genitals per se, but getting the other person’s body to respond in mutually entraining erotic rhythms: getting turned on by getting the other person turned on. If you don’t believe me, try theorizing the attractions of performing oral sex. This is an historically increasing practice, and one of the things that drives the solidarity of homosexual movements. Gay movements are built around effervescent scenes, not around social media.

Beyers

Rower, photographer, architect of farm buildings, toy maker, llama soother, alpaca wrangler, kiva digger, wind-phone experimenter, gardener, shepherd, scholar, party animal, Lampoon member, “humble Harvard graduate” (as a Facebook commenter put it), Canadian, listener, musician, hippie, explorer, cyclist, hemp fabric evangelist, coffee shop proprietor, writer, cartoonist, sportsman, athlete, concoction maker, community activist, entrepreneur, naturalist, disc golfer, fermenter, osteologist (message me if you want to see the series of photos he took of a decomposing llama), maker of playlists, draftsman, burger chain logo designer, model, painter, diplomat, chef, potter, patissier, enthusiast. Friend.

Most important for him was husband and father.

We once had a conversation about the word kin, kindred. Kindling. The people you share your fire with.

Gone back to the spirit that brought him forth. Off on a new adventure.

He liked to check in on earth.fm