The introductory notes published to accompany the exhibition on Vagrancy in 1973.

Includes an essay by Robert Lenkiewicz together with the remarks of
various vagrants and sitters for the project in response to the
questions:

1. How do you define the term "vagrant"?
2. Do you consider yourself a vagrant?
3. If yes, why do you consider yourself a vagrant?
3a. If no, why don't you consider yourself a vagrant?
4. Do you think vagrancy is a problem in the present local environment?
5. If yes, why do you think vagrancy is a problem?
5a. If no, why don't you think vagrancy is a problem?

Melancholy, the "Dance of Death" and Fool Symbolism in relation to Vagrancy

Robert O. Lenkiewicz

Don Quixote: Sancho, tell me, hast thou carefully preserved Mambrino's helmet?

Sancho Panza: Body of me, Sir Knight of the Woeful figure, I can no
longer bear to hear you run on at this rate! Why, this were enough to
make any man believe that all your bragging and bouncing of your
knight-errantry, your winning of kingdoms, and bestowing of islands,
and Heaven knows what, upon your squire, are mere flim-flam stories,
and nothing but shams and lies; for who can hear a man call a barber's
basin a helmet, nay, and stand to it, and vouch it for four days
together, and not think him that says it to be stark mad, or without
brains? I have the basin safe enough here in my pouch, and I'll get it
mended for my own use, if ever I have the luck to get home to my wife
and children.

Don Quixote: I swear thou art the shallowest, silliest, and most
stupid fellow of a squire that ever I heard or read of in my life! How
is it possible for thee to be so dull of apprehension, as not to have
learnt in all this time that thou hast been in my service, that all the
actions and adventures of us knight-errants seem to be mere chimeras,
follies, and impertinencies? Not that they are so indeed, but appear
so; either through the officious care or the malice and envy of those
enchanters that always haunt and persecute us unseen, and by their
fascinations change the appearance of our actions into what they
please, according to their love or hate. This is the very reason why
that which I plainly perceive to be Membrino's helmet seems to thee to
be only a barber's basin, and perhaps another man may take it to be
something else. And in this I can never too much admire the prudence of
the sage who espouses my interests, in making that inestimable helmet
seem a basin; for did it appear in its proper shape, its tempting value
would raise me as many enemies as there are men in the universe, all
eager to snatch from me so desirable a prize; but so long as it shall
seem to be nothing else but a barber's basin, men will not value it.

The History of Don Quixote, by Cervantes. Book One, Chapter XXIV.

Whatever the word "vagrancy" may mean in contemporary terms it has
always been identified with the experience of isolation. We can all
remember a time when the sense of being alone was uppermost in one's
mind, for whatever reason.

The sense of isolation has always gone hand in hand with terms like
"irony" or "the human condition". The word most frequently associated
with this state is "melancholy". It is interesting that melancholy has
for centuries been part of western culture. It was originally related
to medieval medicine, which argued that an increase of black bile
created depression. This bile - on of the four humours governing the
human temperament - had to remain balanced with three other elements;
if it defected or operated in excess it allegedly created the imbalance
known as "melancholie".

Each of the four humours were associated with a planet. Saturn,
because of its slow apparent movement and great distance, became
associated with melancholy. The mythological origins of Saturn the god
reflect a disturbing list of traits: castration, imprisonment beneath
the earth, time, old age and death. The Saturnine mood is familiar to
many through the engraving by Albrecht Durer; the brooding figure of
Melancholia.

A fascinating manuscript in the British Museum (Sloane, 160: fol. 39) records that:

"Some of these malancholike persons... troubled with this disease
imagine manye straunge, incredible and impossible things. Some that
they are monarches and princes, and that all other men are their
subjects: Some that they are brute beasts: Some that they be urinals or
earthen pots, greatly fearinge to be broken: Some that everye one that
meateth them will convey them to the gallows; and yet in the end hang
themselves. One thought that Atlas whom the poets faine to hold up
heaven with his shoulders, would be wearie, and let the skie fall upon
him: ...One (person) that had killed his father, was notablye detected;
by imagininge that a swallowe upbraided him therewith: So as he himself
thereby revealed the murder. But the most notablest example hereof is
one that was in great perplexity imagininge that his nose was as big as
a house..."

Du Laurens, writing at the end of the 16th century, has this to say about the melancholy man:

The melancholike man properly so called... is ordinarily out of
heart, alwaies fearfull and trembling, in such sort that he is afraid
of everything, yea and maketh himselfe a terrour unto himselfe as the
beast which looketh himselfe in a glasse; he woulde runne away and
cannot goe, he goeth oftentimes sighing... with an unseparable sadness,
which oftentimes turneth into dispayre; he is alwaies disquieted both
in bodie and spirit, he is subject to watchfulness, which doth consume
him on the one side; for if he think to make truce with his passions by
taking some rest, behold so soone as hee would shut his eyelides, hee
is assayled with a thousand vaine visions, and hideous buggards, with
fantasticall inventions, and dreadfull dreames... he cannot live with
companie. To conclude, he is become a savadge creature haunting the
shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the Sunne, and one
whom nothing can please, but onely discontent, which forgeth unto
itselfe a thousand false and vaine imaginations...

The above description is clearly psychological and does not relate
to the more cultured variant of the malcontent that developed at this
time. Melancholy was to become an art; a touch of irony, a dash of
unrequited love, the merest flavour of heavy-lidded eyes, folded arms
and floppy wide brimmed hats, these and more were the ingredients for
melancholy pie.

It became equated with the absurd, the tragi-comic and the fool.
Nothing could be taken seriously and yet the "secret" may be under
one's nose. Jaques, in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" says:

"It is ten o'clock:
Thus may we see, ...how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot
And thereby hangs a tale."

Melancholy can also be allegorical; through symbol it may be
possible to bypass a host of preconceptions about terms like "sad" and
"happy".

Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy" has Hieronimo declaim on melancholy with
several "Images" that strike deeper than a more literal approach:

There is a path upon your left-hand side,

That leadeth from a quilty conscience

Unto a forest of distrust and fear,

A darksome place and dangerous to pass:

There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts,

Whose baleful humours if you but behold,

It will conduct you to despair and death:

We have, it seems, the twin factors that seem to relate the
"melancholy state" to the "human situation". The image of the Fool and
the image of Death.

It is at this point that we leave the Elizabethan melancholy
tradition with all its gentle innuendo, its preoccupation with the love
theme, and metaphysical thought, for a period that is earlier and
somehow less refined, but riddled with a stark and sinister duality,
Death and the Fool.

Early medieval culture in Europe inherited a wide variety of symbols
from antiquity. No symbol was more common than the image of death.

Though not everywhere, the symbol of the skeleton is the most common
image of death that was employed. It is said that Egyptian festivals
were preceded with presentations of small skeleton figures to all the
guests in order to remind the party that - in media vita - death may be
ever-present.

A second century Roman mosaic depicts a skeleton pointing to flames
at his feet with the motto "Know Thyselfe". The flames indicate the
cremation process characteristic of Greek funerals.

Christian iconography was not to become familiar with this symbol
until roughly the 14th century; but when it was introduced to this
theme it welcomed it with enthusiasm. The skeleton became a symbol for
the vanity of the world as well as for death.

In the 1850's considerable research was done on the origins of the
Dance of Death; theories abound and differ greatly. Most agree,
however, that the rabid epidemics of bubonic plague and the inability
to deal with it probably influenced, if not created, the concept of the
"danse macabre" first published in Marchand in 1486.

All versions of the Dance of Death, both French and German, depict a
skeleton leading one or several partners. Frequently, he carries a
musical instrument or a pick and shovel, the tools of gravediggers. In
the "Heidelberger Totentanz", the German edition, the title page
records: "Come ye sires and servers, rush here from all estates, young
and old, pretty or ugly, all must come to this house of dance."

The most famous cycle of woodcuts on this theme were produced
between the years 1522 and 1526 by Holbein. Here, Death presents
itself in a number of guises: he appears to kill, to serve or to help,
to fight the living as an opponent, and sometimes he leads the person,
as would a close friend. Holbein's cycle were cut under the impact of
the Reformation; his skeletons dance less but fight and punish more.

It is reported that in Paris people spent their Sunday afternoons
watching a play performing the dance of death. The figure of Death
might have remained on the stage throughout the performance whilst
partners entered, discussed and left the scene.

One acceptable conclusion as to the real origins of the Dance of
Death is put by Eisler in his article on the "Danse Macabre". His
research indicated that the term 'macabre' originally meant
gravedigger. Thus "Danse Macabre" would mean the dance of the
gravediggers; an idea supported by the fact that the skeleton images
often carried the shovel and spade. There are reports of guilds of
gravediggers performing dances in annual pantomimes and even as late as
the early nineteenth century there are tales of Hasidic Rabbis dancing
behind the coffins of the deceased. The "wake" in this country has
similar parallels. Indeed, the early variant of the dancing skeleton
does imply that he is having fun, rather than criticising the human
predicament.

Constant and close contact with death, particularly in the 14th and
15th centuries, quite probably made part of the duties of the
gravedigger more entertaining. The custom of the gravediggers dance
may have cheered the mourners and distracted them from the idea that
death was monstrous or satanic.

The relationship between Death and the Fool might in these terms
become clear. The Fool survives where the wiser person might die; the
survival of the Fool does not make sense, it is as if part of the Fool
operates in another dimension. An aspect of this immortality is
preserved in the circus clown who jumps to his feet having been hit
over the head with an enormous sledge hammer. To quote from Paul
Vercor's novel "Sylva":

It is because the human species is the only one which knows that
death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter
as a saving grace...; during the moment when laughter shakes us we are
immortal."

Death makes a fool of life's joys or purposes, or at any rate
appears to. In order to tolerate him he is dressed in the costume of
his ambition. Durer, Holbein and Beham have all recorded him in
jester's apparel. The symbol of the Fool relates to Death in so far as
both survive inevitably, they have something innately in common. In
one sense death is merely change, a rearrangement; similarly, the Fool,
unable to stabilise his situation or mood, reflects the vacillatory
undertone of chaos and order, life and death. Unlike the more
self-conscious person, the Fool remains unperturbed by his own actions
or those of others.

Like the "little get up man", that child's toy, weighted at the
bottom and often painted as a clown which cannot fail to return to an
erect position no matter how many times it is knocked over, the Fool
survives the difficulties of life. One senses his affinity with chaos,
his passive, innocent, even benign violation of the rules and laws that
are the stock in trade of survival. Our affinity with him is precisely
this detachment from the event, his ability to remain unaffected by the
very things we hate or admire, work for, or fail to work for. In
fending off chaos we hope to assuage the sinister overtones of such
concepts as "freedom", we hope to avoid the nothingness of the human
dilemma. The Fool reminds us of the ancient and essential possibility
that life is not what we think it is and that there may be another
order of things operating under our noses.

It is possible that attempting to resolve the "problem" of vagrancy
as we recognise it today is to fail to see that it may be the modern
counterpart of earlier symbols. Chaos may be an essential ingredient
in society and the organiser and law maker may, by his very interests
and ambitions, be creating the "problem" in all its complexity. Like
trying to remove an air bubble from a closed container, we merely
relocate it for the time being. Today's vagrant is much the same as
yesterdays and not in any romantic sense: he is a product of the social
pattern and perhaps an inevitable and necessary one.

In 1568, a Fool society elected itself in Poland under the name of
the "Babinian Republic". Its structure was a duplicate of the Polish
constitution and it filled its offices by employing fools. Those
activities perpetrated by non-members that were considered sufficiently
foolish were admired and the person responsible for it was forced to
join the society. He was supplied with a license, a seal and a
position which suited his folly. The society became so large that
hardly any person of consequence in the church or government was not a
member of it. Eventually the king of Poland, Sigismund August II,
asked the Babinian Republic if they had a king. He was informed that
as long as he lived the society would not dream of electing another.

A "Fool society" does not have to be self-consciously elected, it may happen by accident.

The Poor Law legislation of 1388 forbade the relief of able-bodied
beggars without any attempt to differentiate between types. It took
over five hundred years for repressive and punitive techniques to be
replaced by rehabilitative ones. It would be a mistake to think that
attitudes towards the vagrant have changed as much as the laws.

Sympathetic and more positive approaches are the product of only the
last few decades and by and large they are represented by only a small
section of the social services. To put the law or service into effect
does not carry with it the commitment or the responsibility of the
person paid to do it. A service may be enlightened while the person
responsible for putting the service into practice remains retarded in
his private attitude.

NOTE

These notes and observations are designed to draw attention to an aspect of local community life.

Plymouth, like all other cities in this country, has a number of
people who are classed as vagrant from one point of view or another.
Experience and familiarity with these people quickly reveal that their
circumstances are at times very difficult for them to come to terms
with. Facilities for the rehabilitation and/or accommodation of these
people are limited. This much is known.

The following pages may help to indicate some of the problems
involved, from the point of view of local welfare and other voluntary
agencies. There are also many contributions from people who for one
reason or another consider themselves vagrant. These contributions
were collected with the full co-operation of the individuals quoted.

The notes conclude with a more philosophic collection of anecdotes
collected from those individuals who were inclined to contribute. This
much is not so well known.