Remembering Erostratus
from Infamy to Immortality by Paul Newman
"The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome
Outlives the pious fool who raised it." (Colley Cibber)
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
Remembering Erostratus
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