Friday 15 March 2024

Dmitri Fydorvitch Karamazov packs pistols

 Dmitri Fydorvitch is on his way to Mokroye and Grushenka and the Pani that has come back to claim her, he that ruined her and left her a prey to a rich merchant, Samsonov. His life is going to change and the pistols won’t save him. Plug the Pole and then himself in a grand guignol of atrocity and take the rap for parricide, Daddy weltering in his blood and brother Ivan Fydorvitch in colloquy with a junior devil. Give me the pistols at once he says to the man he pawned them to. His destiny is there in Mokroye and is the significance of the Elder’s bow before him. 


It is just as De Quincey wrote in essay on ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’  tension is heightened by business which delays the denouement of the horrible event that is to come. We give the shopping list, load the troika, show fistfulls of money, describe the grasping nature of the landlord, the foolery of Maximov and Kalegnov. There is an atmosphere of unconstrained hysteria and folly. How are we to go on? Send for Jews with fiddles and cymbals. Dmitri dissolves in tears and then laughs woodenly. Round his head the terrors begin to gather.  


Dostoyevsky is at full strength automatic writing here, his genius has taken control and everything must be said.  The things that ought not to be said, that are left for us to find, the parallels between the early life of Zosima the Elder and Dmitri are flickering shadows.  As in life personalities blend together and at once are separate and alone with personal guilt that denies mitigation.  Its not that we should have known but that we in fact did know.  A great novelist creates that symbiosis, the sense that we are dramatis personae, flowing together in a single mind.


Wednesday 6 March 2024

Leftovers show

 As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you.  ‘Is there an app for that’?  As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17. 

The Leftovers

Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.


II had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare  possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.


Tuesday 5 March 2024

Hope is cheaper than despair.

 

My tweets of the moment are grim and dark even melodramatically so. But that’s the nature of the tweet. I write:

Compared to Repeal (of the 8th Amendment) all other social ‘improvements’ are tinsel and glitter. Ireland is on the skids heading towards a sea of evil.

At least we haven’t been presented with the argument that ‘durable relationships’ would strengthen marriage, so far.

By the branches of Rhetoric: No Logos (reasons), Ethos (testimonials from celebrities), lashings of Pathos (emotional manipulation). Such is the referendum debate from the Yes/Yes party.

At this point I can hardly add much to those sentiments. Repeal did the most serious, indeed deadly, damage to Childhood, Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Family. These proposed amendments are merely tidying around the edges, cleaning up the debris and facilitating the erosion of the nation state and in time its destruction. At this point they look likely to be defeated. I hardly dare hope that this could be a return to moral sanity in the way that some small event could recall a different world. I remember the cop that got one of the pair of serial killers that went around Ireland years ago to confess by asking him if he remembered the day of his First Holy Communion. Everything is captured in Memory as Bergson wrote and can be a key.

Socio-Political analysis would deny this and point out that a deeply unpopular government is having its claret tapped. That too and the Covidology Codology that continues to rankle even among those who were taken in by it, perhaps especially those. We’ve gone all antithetical as it were or contrary. Bile to be purged, boils to be lanced and the Green Party to be put away like the toys we are bored with and won’t bother to buy batteries for.

Let’s hope. It’s cheaper than despair and you can always return it.

Saturday 24 February 2024

Mont Saint Michel explained

 I’m reading Augusto Del Noce’s ‘The Problem of Atheism’ at the moment. One of his essays distinguishes between natural atheism and irreligion. The one is the old timey involvement with the god question as though it were a serious issue that needed to be resolved  and required careful consideration; the other is the ‘what’, ‘yawn’, ‘is that still going, is it a thing’.  The latter eye roll is the triumph of empiricism.  

O.K. you know all this so why am I bringing it up? We got on Sky recently. My excuse for this is that the ash trees have grown so tall and so ivied that signal from the satellite is impaired most of the year. So Sky. Tonight we were flicking through the program list and spotted a documentary on Mont Saint Michel. That could be interesting. It was as an example of the dismal worship of science. Nothing much was mentioned of the religious origins of the world heritage site merely that there was a legend of the founder Bishop  being touched on the head (or in) by St.Michael in a dream causing a hole to appear in his skull. Sure enough in a reliquary a skull was found with just such a hole. Then we had an expert in this curious condition explain it to us as a result of a cyst. This was accompanied by 3D graphics. Then there was the age of the bricks which are examined for magnetic orientation pinpointing the time of laying within ten years. More explaining coated in the white alb of science, graphics winding through the compass of reality.  

There was no mention of the fact that Mont Saint Michel was a Benedictine foundation given to them by Edward the Confessor or that after a couple of centuries of absence they returned in 1968 or that they were replaced by the Monastic Fraterneties of Jerusalem in 2000. Maybe they could have used a few graphics from a Knights Templar movie for that. Nothing but the design of the sluice gates that keep the island from being silted up and losing its unique isolation from the mainland. An engineering marvel, awesome hydraulics, cams opening and closing.

 Its possible to know everything and understand nothing.

Maybe I’ll fire up the chain saw. 











Thursday 22 February 2024

Nisargadatta on Idealism and Realism

 

Nisargadatta is not promulgating an ontology/epistemology.  He uses the existing philosophy of the enquirer as a means to attainment of a path that might lead to enlightenment.  The point is finding water by drilling deep not by a multitude of small holes.  Sifting through various approaches, realism or idealism, internal or external reality is beside the point for him.  Sincere seeking using the dialectical advaitic method of adhiropa/apavada or statement followed by retraction.  Maharaj challenges the Questioner’s implicit realism:

“M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way.  Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.  Have a good look at yourself and all those misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve.  Just as all our little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.”

The important thing is getting detached from the panoply of awareness to focus on the central fact which cannot be sublated, the I AM you are in the moment.  What are you at with your theories, you can only be distracted by them.  By being in the presence of a master one has other business than that.

On the face of it Maharaj seems to be offering a pure subjective idealism as a ‘final’ theory.  Such would be the western way of doing philosophy.  In advaita/nondualism the theory ends in the unsayable, the apophatic.  Move towards the ‘trikala abheda’ or that which is un-contradicted in the three moments of time;  past, present, and future.

Last word from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Don’t mentalise and verbalise.  Just see and be”

Friday 16 February 2024

Was Mortimer Adler happy you know?

 

Somebody out on the internet wrote that they were going to read and review the intellectual autobiography of Mortimer Adler called ‘Philosopher at Large’ (pub 1977).  What I knew of him was not very much, the ‘How to Read a Book’ which I haven’t got round to yet and the Great Books put out by Encyclopedia Britannica of which I have a few bought second hand which show no sign of having ever had daylight penetrate their inward parts.  I have exposed them to UV radiation but the format of double columns marching endlessly is not a genial read.

So far I have read a couple of chapters and my general impression is that of someone on the spectrum, high functioning Aspergers.  The writing is flat, affectless, no descriptions of scenes, people, family only in general terms, friends as foils and interlocutors and always Adler studying all the time.  In a big library reading room with books ranged round from A to Z he thinks it is a good idea to work his way around following the alphabet.  Taxonomy, Logic guide his construction of the world.  He seemed to have no idea about how his assailing his professors with questions, interjections, following up lectures with written  objections and and responses to the answers given might be excessive.  Another indication of the autistic type is extreme physical awkwardness and lack of interest in such activity.  Proficiency in swimming was a requirement for a degree which was denied to him because he refused to go to swimming classes.  He would write long philosophical letters to girls that he met.  Indeed his record keeping has a touch of graphomania.  Whoever has his posthumous papers requires extensive shelving.

His talk on Aristotle’s account of happiness ( available on you tube) is good  and now that he is dead after a long and strenuous life we may ask - was he happy? I don’t know.  Acclaim is not sufficient. Was there any joy? Now read on: maybe, I haven’t got to C yet.

Saturday 10 February 2024

'A Dark Adapted Eye' by Barbara Vine

 

Craft: when the practice becomes absorbed into the writer’s natural intelligence and the active imagination takes over. Ruth Rendall assuming the mask of Barbara Vine writes herself into the story as Faith the narrator of ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’.  The title refers to the  perceptual adaptation to low light by the eye.  Of course it has the metaphorical import of the ‘falling of the scales’ also.  Faith has come to the home of her aunts Vera and Eden who live in the rural England in a quiet village.  Does a half sister become a half aunt?  Helen the daughter by a first marriage of a paternal grandfather lives in a large country home nearby.  Faith is avoiding the blitz and she is about eleven when the story opens.  A swirl of information and dramatis personae come at you through the opening pages mirroring the narrator’s confusion and as the story progresses everyone takes their places.  You are immediately told about the central event which isolates and maims this family history.  Vera  murdered her sister Eden and has been hanged for the crime.  Its as if all the participants had their own observation platform of this landscape bringing horror, denial , revenge, reticence, snobbery, and the make and mend of frugal wartime.

Faith’s voice changes as she grows through the years of contact with her aunts, her cousin Francis, his capers and later on Vera’s other child Jamie about whom there is a mystery.  Who was the father if it was not Gerald the army officer who is serving abroad?  All will not be revealed or rather some genteel obscurity of questions will remain at the end.  The subtlety of diction reflecting progress towards being an English Literature student at Cambridge is what only instinctual craft can manage.  Landscapes become a little more florid, personal reflection more stylised, and the persona of the non-judgemental liberal becomes clearer.  But the horror, the horror as the man said will not go away as knowing the precise hour and manner of a death fixes the picture of the family.  Faith’s father is Vera’s twin.  He’s a respectable bank manager in London and he hides all evidence of connection. He rips out a photo of Vera from its frame and in doing so cuts himself leaving a smudge of blood on it.  Barbara Vine must have hesitated over that piece of metaphor but an execution makes Shakespeares of us all.

This is a why dun it story and the skein of tangled motive is like the jumper which is unraveled to make baby clothes for Jamie and must be washed and  ironed to take out the kinks before knitting.  I’d read it again.  It’s a minor classic, a gothic analogue of ‘Middlemarch’.  To say more would be, so to speak, drop stitches.