There were doubtlessly other factors. The club and key focus on two well-known heroes of antiquity. The nail belongs to Lycurgus, a borderline-mythical litigator from Sparta. Never heard of him? You wouldn’t be the only one.
And then there’s the subject of fortune itself, which pervades the whole of Fors Clavigera. Ruskin prefaced the writing with this quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures...
Fortune is something I am uncomfortable with. Firstly, what exactly is it? Sometimes it feels like a strange kind of cosmic luck, a crutch for the superstitious. Why do baseball fans turn their caps inside-out when their team is trailing? For fortune. At other times it seems closer to something resembling fate, and in that sense binding and authoritarian. Why do good things happen to bad people? Fortune again.
And yet, “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” is arguably the most crucial of the fors, the one which motivated Ruskin to write them at the particular time he did, believing they could inspire social change in that moment. He attempted to write as the spirit of the moment directed him, and what became a series of monthly letters ended up spanning 13 years.
The ability to understand or forsee the particular moment is a mysterious one; the gift of seers and prophets. Just such an act was perhaps taking place even as I stopped my writing on Fors in 2020. On June 3rd, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Killer Mike and El-P released RTJ4 two days earlier than scheduled, with the note;
“Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit so here's something raw to listen to while you deal with it all. We hope it brings you some joy. Stay safe and hopeful out there and thank you for giving 2 friends the chance to be heard and do what they love.”
Walking in the Snow, the sixth track on RTJ4 contains the lines;
And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free
And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me
And 'til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"
For some, these lines were prescient enough to imbue Michael Render with prophetic powers – how had he written a song about George Floyd’s death before it had happened?
For those more familiar with the work of Run The Jewels or the story of racism and police brutality in America, it was depressingly apparent that the lyrics were most likely a reference to the death of Eric Garner in 2014, a man who bore some resemblance to Killer Mike who died at the hands of multiple police officers who pinned him to a sidewalk whilst Garner repeated the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times.
This confusion or overlap between foresight and a familiarity with the plight of a people is remarkably similar to the ways in which the Biblical prophets seem to be understood.
From my own experience in charismatic Protestant traditions, prophecy is almost singularly understood as the ability to give others ‘words of knowledge’ (often about physical ailments that frequently involve a person’s legs being different lengths) or predictions of the future.
Whilst the biblical prophets such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel or Daniel do often come with words (normally of warning) for the future, they also take up a significant amount of paper making known the cause of the oppressed and the unheard that no one else seems bothered about. Killer Mike prompts the thought that perhaps in their own context, there were points at which these vocations overlapped and served each other.
The summer of 2020 also preceded my return to Tolkien and the deep-dive into Eucatastrophe. Tolkien’s understanding and sublime portrayal of the dance between free will and providence, most evident in Gollum’s sudden slip at the very moment Frodo’s will had failed, is far less oppressive than my initial reaction to the word fortune had been.
Tolkien’s own reflection on the creative process involved in producing The Lord of the Rings; a participation in ‘a dream some other mind is weaving’ is the very opposite of this – creative, collaborative, something that anticipates our involvement.
It is very similar to how I’ve come to understand the tradition of liturgy; once a series of dry, rote prayers for those whose hearts weren’t really in it, the last year has revived in me an appreciation for many aspects of the old, well-trod traditions – the way they too anticipate my involvement and can when entered into properly be a gateway to something far larger and full of wonder than the self.
Even an enthusiastic involvement in ritual participation is nothing but a resounding cymbal unless it redirects us from introspection, towards the sight that Ezekiel and Killer Mike possess - that will call out injustice and seek to embody something better in community. That’s a large part of the call of clava, too.
There. I got Ruskin, RTJ and a major prophet into a single essay. I’m finished here.