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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 27, 2012
Serenity
Serenity, a word I used in this space last Sunday to the complete confusion of a couple of readers, is something I associate with chastity, in a sense both broad and deep. Or to be more specific, with stamp collecting."Calm, clear, untroubled," from the Latin, "serenus," which means just the same - this is what a dictionary can tell us about serenity. We anglophonic types seldom use the word, even of the weather. Our distant ancestors, more familiar with it, made it an honorific, so that for instance a prince might be His Serene Highness. Such a character was held to be above contention, and there he remained, by "being," not by "doing." In contrast, if one of our contemporary politicians were serene, he'd be on the verge of leaving office. Probably involuntarily. Our modern, nay post-modern, and very urban, nay conurbative world (I only invented that word because it's needed), seldom has even enough serenity to realize that it is not serene. We exist for action, especially pointless action; yet seldom pointless enough to achieve serenity. Which brings us back to stamp collecting, or if my reader prefers, watercolour painting, or currymaking, or butterfly hunting, or listening to a choir sing Palestrina - five things you can do without a cellphone. All might be dismissed as "hobbies." I selected stamp collecting, which I mentioned also in a column last year. But it wasn't adequate and this followup is required. Stamp collecting strikes me as the most absurd of the available options - especially today, when letters go unwritten, most current stamps are unspeakably vile, and the Post Office itself survives as a low-cost distributor of unfranked advertising flyers and other junk mail. Always start with the absurd. My paternal great-grandfather got into the habit of soaking "small Victorias" off all the envelopes that came to him (would that he had preserved the whole envelopes!) and then, my grandfather went him one better by organizing them. During his travels as a geological cartographer in Latin America, he found more stamps; then added the United States and by decisive increments, the whole British Empire. My father, in turn, wandered into the French Empire. Cut to the present. I inherited a lot of stamps, together with fond childhood memories of experiences and companionships predicated upon them. A great disordered mass found its way into boxes in the back of a closet, and then last year, out of the ridiculous notion that something must be done about them, I was hooked back, into a second childhood. The finest stamps are exquisite, miniature works of art, and my attitude toward them is that of an art collector, rather than of a respectable philatelist. He is typically excited to find rare and valuable stamps with errors. I flinch at mistakes, and instead look for what the engravers got right. To be a "world collector" is, in philately, to be Don Quixote, and beginning in my 1960s childhood, when truly ugly stamps were coming into that world, and the sheer volume of them became sufficient to overwhelm any collector, even of a single country, a principle of limitation began to occur. I recall my very first moment of revulsion, at too-numerous "topical" stamps, in glib sets, printed on glossy, unwatermarked paper, by cheap processes of photo-lithography that reduce every composition to a mechanical array of dots, or pixels. By now it is a fanatical hatred: of stamps that, under significant magnification, are just an artless smear, unworthy of human attention. Instead, my interest focused progressively on the engravers, and on the craftsmanship that runs to such specialized techniques as embossing and recess printing. Any country, any time, without prejudice, for the love of art crosses every border, ignores politics and rebels against all "system." The Pole, Czeslaw Slania; the Spanish brothers, Sánchez-Toda; a little galaxy of Frenchmen, such as Pierre Gandon and Jules Piel; the Austrians Kolman Moser, Adalbert Pilch, Rudolf Toth; our Canadian, Yves Baril - these are among my heroes of stamp engraving and design, a list that could be considerably extended. Slania alone (pronounce him something like "Chess-wav Swanya"), who died in 2005, having engraved more than a thousand stamps for more than 30 countries (to say nothing of the bank notes), and long the engraver to Sweden's royal court, is the only one approaching household name recognition. A man of superhuman talent, and matching skill, equally at home in any genre of engraving, or draughtsmanship of any other kind, on almost any subject - Slania was a man whose every burin scratch conveyed a rich and gentle humour, and reverence for life. The techniques involved in serious steel engraving - the skill, patience, and quality of attention that is required - will in themselves create a man of character. Or woman: for I immediately think of Barbara Kowalska, another Polish engraver, whose insight into human character appears in every stroke of her miniature portraits. Serenity is the precondition for the production of the sublime. Conversely, contemplation of the sublime is the path to serenity. For so many centuries this was known; and in our present century it must be rediscovered. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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