ombhurbhuva

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

2012-01-26T00:03:00.002Z

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West published in 1918 is an extraordinary work of fiction for a 25 year old. It was her second published book, the previous one being a monograph on Henry James. The novel has a brisk narrative flow and a setting that is restricted to the confines of the large Baldry residence where Kitty Baldry and her husband's cousin Jenny await his return from the war. The perfectly observed setting is disturbed by a caller, a creature of the lower orders who arrives with the most extraordinary news. Chris it seems has been shell shocked and is at present in a hospital in Boulogne. It emerges that he has fallen into a state of partial amnesia in which the last 15 years of his life have been expunged and he has only the memories that he had when he was 21. The woman who has brought the message is the one that he was in love with at that time. ‘For it is she’ we are tempted to add but in fact such states were well known at that time. He has forgotten that he is a married man and has no recollection of his wife and remembers Jenny who is the narrator only from 15 years before.

Through an unfortunate twist of fate the early love of his life has never received the letters that Chris wrote to her at the old address which is a pub run by her father on Monkey Island on the Thames near Windsor. Margaret Grey is now married herself to a valetudinarian. They are both depicted with formidable condescension which alters as the story goes on to envy of the innate nobility of Margaret and the fact that she is loved with the abandon of first love by Chris Baldry. Now she presents the picture of a middle aged woman somewhat eroded by life. Jenny thus describes her:

The bones of her cheap stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty; as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.

The precise notation of the gradation of the social order; which West keenly felt as one reared in genteel poverty, is depicted beautifully. There are tiny indications of this. Jenny notices that some plume elements in Margaret's hat have gone astray and have been mended with adhesive. She deprecates with a refined contempt this device. A woman of that class would have no knowledge of the ways of Seccotine but a young West fearful that her gallant feathers were bedraggled might. The fiction within a fiction, the abolishing of history, the recovery of a lost love and the claims of real life are treated with mature clarity. As a writer she has that indefinable gift of narrative flow and the creation of character. It is a very short novel, 187 pages long, a novella really. Her mature work the Aubrey trilogy which begins with The Fountain Overflows published in 1957 surpasses that very high standard. If second hand prices are anything to go by it seems that she has fallen into neglect. I got my hardback copy of 'Fountain’ in an original dust jacket for €1.

Colour me Celtic: black or white = gorm no geal

2012-01-20T23:50:00.000Z

duine gorm = black person in Irish
duine geal = white person.
That is in relation to persons, in relation to chromatic colour ‘gorm’ means blue and ‘geal’ means bright/light

Which is perhaps slightly interesting. People have speculated that the perception of colours evolved slowly and that the Homeric trope ‘wine-dark sea’ is an indication of this, but why shouldn’t there be a special word for a certain type of deep sea on a cloudy day that departs from the usual chromatic suggestion of wine red which of course it’s not any more than the ancient Celts thought that Negroes were the same colour as the sea.

David Benatar's Baby

2012-01-18T23:43:00.000Z

This morning I heard a philosopher wittering on about the Benatar thesis as though it were a profound challenge to our intuitions. When Wikipedia comes back look it up:childfree

Why have teachers of philosophy taken up this obvious piece of specious sophistry? I suppose it is a device to engage the interest of their charges.

David Benatar’s baby is like Schrodinger’s cat both dead and alive. For the purposes of pain he/she is alive and for the purposes of pleasure not alive. For various complex reasons D.B. urges that it would be the moral thing if the baby never was, never came into existence and never was allowed to be born if through some oversight it was conceived. Now my point is this and it’s a very simple one - how can something which doesn’t exist, which is a generalised abstract non-entity be weighed on any moral balance against any other entity, fish, flesh or good red herring.

His general thesis is one which he extrapolates from the particular thesis of the known suffering of a child that would likely be born with a serious genetic defect. The idea is that one would not consider it correct to conceive and give birth to a child that would suffer throughout a short life. To go from that case which warrants serious consideration to a general reluctance to conceive is just too big a step. You have gone from a specific definite case in which the potential harm are clear to a hypothetical unestablished abstract generalised harm. This supposed harm can simply be countered by saying what very many people would say with complete sincerity - on balance I am happy to be alive and I am glad that I was born. Here’s the great speech from Blade Runner. Even a replicant is glad to have lived.

Roy: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys (pt.2)

2012-01-17T13:11:00.000Z

Previously

Somewhere on the Tipperary side of the Shannon the brother docked the boat and brought me to this nice pub which was made from the covered in ground floor of a ruined Georgian mansion. What sort of planning permission was required for that I wonder? Anyway such is the wreck of ancient glory that is Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys; some habitable rooms, elsewhere noble desolation. But no hyper cold Bud just tea and bread and butter. Lots of it.

There are serious structural problems. First of all length: over 636 pages in 2 Volumes. Second of all, the exclusive focus on the inner workings of the said 'Wolf', his said personal mythology, his diet, his appreciation of the Dorset countryside and so forth and his obsession with the face on the Waterloo Steps.

It was an English face; and it was also a Chinese face, a Russian face, an Indian face. It had the variableness of that Protean wine of the priestess Bacbuc. It was just the face of a man, of a mortal man against whom Providence had grown as malignant as a mad dog. And the woe upon the face was of such a character that Wolf knew at once that no conceivable social adjustments or ameliorative revolutions could ever atone for it - could ever make up for the simple irremediable fact it had been as it had been!

This face is mentioned 30 times throughout the two volumes. If somehow finger by finger volume 1 could have been pried from his hands and published on its own all would have been well because that covers the ascension of Wolf and his winning of the delightful Gerda who is a bird whistler that can fool a blackbird into response. The second volume has the descent of Wolf. He loses his mythology, Gerda loses her whistle and this reader lost his interest.

Wittgenstein was right you know - an inner state stands in need of outer criteria. Loss must be established not through telling us but by the anguish of a mood that is a reflection of what was common previously. It is the fading into the light of common day that breaks the heart. An event that would have brought joy now only reminds us of our loss. The description of the event must limn the loss without underlining and highlighting. It may be that practice in the short story develops this capacity. Powys did not do short willingly. Porius his last and most obscure novel ended up as 624 pages after losing 500 pages to the editor.

The first volume has many fine things in it such as playing hide and go seek with Gerda on Babylon Hill where he first experiences her particular gift without knowing it to be her:

He listened fascinated. That particular intonation of the blackbird's note, more full of the spirits of air and of water than any sound upon earth, has always possessed a mysterious attraction for him. It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber paved pools surrounded by hart's tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.

I feel that somehow all will come right for Wolf and Gerda. It ends on a high note. Tea.

The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates

2012-01-14T09:56:00.001Z

Henri Bergson told us that we forget nothing which seems fanciful when we may spend a morning looking for our keys. What he meant and here I am open to correction because there are opaque elements in his thought, was that we 'virtually' remember everything which is another way of saying we remember nothing if we construe memory on the model which is presented to us by the standard neuro-science of our day. Memory other that motor memory or stuff that is learnt by heart is not 'in' the brain. Where does that leave the ancient practice of memory loci as elucidated by Frances Yates in her magisterial Art of Memory?

I still can't find my keys though. I did not leave them in my usual place. They are good and lost. If I had left them in their usual locus, a place which I have by heart, then that motor connection between place and keys would allow them to merge together. So it is with information that I wish to remember. The use of a well known and gotten by heart room, to use a simple example of the Classical technique that Yates writes about, has placed on all its elements the varied items of information that may have no direct associative connection with each other. Then to recover the information I merely walk through the room picking up each item as I go. Does this not prove the associationist thesis that Bergson impugns? What he would reply to this is that what is happening is that motor memory has so to speak absorbed the item to be recalled and therefore the usual efforts to focus and condense what is virtual is obviated. Is this not the point of advertisements that by repetition make an indissoluble connection?

Now that everyone with a smart phone is a googleamus we need to ask whether the ancient skill of forgetting should be revived wherever we left it. Bacon in his 'Advancement of Learning avers:

There has been laboured and put into practice a method, which is not a lawful method, but a method of imposture, which is to deliver knowledge in such a manner, as men may speedily come to make a show of learning which have it not. Such was the travail of Raymundus Lullus in making that art which bears his name......

(quoted in The Art of Memory)

Haven't we all met them and do they not infest our centres of higher learning? I mean those rote learners by whatever means. Poetry should be learnt by heart and lectures should be orations to be most effective but what is the point of memorising the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhyasa by Shankaracarya and applying over that a standard interpretation? That means you are locked into a certain unfolding. There is very little chance of a reconfiguring of the elements within it which lead to a genuine understanding.

Bergson's Cone of Memory

2012-01-09T18:05:00.000Z

Bergson’s cone is fine as a representation of his thoughts on memory and by implication duration as long as we remember that his view of memory radically diverges from the accepted neuro-scientific picture of both his contemporaries and ours. Memory is stored in the brain. Lesion injury demonstrates this beyond a doubt. That is the modern position. H.B. says ‘no, it’s not and here’s why’. Now I’m not, for now, going to recapitulate the argument which supports his rebuttal but simply go on to sketch the questions which naturally occur to the reader the chief one being: if memory is not located in the brain, where is it?

Looking at the famous diagram again we find that under this new dispensation memory is entering into the plane of history where the human being dwells. This creature is connected to its own personalised cone of memory because that duration or the densification of its history is its own.

My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually dwelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing - rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow.

(from Chap.I. Creative Evolution Sony Reader pg.8)

As a speculative aside we might consider boundless ‘memory’ or consciousness as the Tailhardian noosphere impinging on the less complex elements of nature thereby creating ‘memory’. In mythic terms we are in the devic realm Mnemosyne, that of the shining ones. Don’t snort in that dismissive fashion, for Plato this was still a way of doing philosophy!

Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances...... That is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live over a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed.

(pg. 9/10 S.R.)

When Thomas Reid said that memory was unaccountable part of what he meant was that memory could not be broken down into simpler fundamental intellectual powers in an analytical fashion. He could not account for the fact that we have memory only of the past and that we are generally barred from ‘memory’ of the future. Bergson’s account departs from the realm of common sense to that of the a posteriori transcendental. In effect he is saying : ‘We can’t be doing what we think we are doing according to neuro-science. We wouldn’t have the knowledge that we have. Here then is a better account which covers the facts.’

Yet at the same time we still want to think of memory quantitatively. After all we fill books with memories so we are inclined to think of them as being located. How do we retrieve them if not from somewhere? In another of his rather fine metaphors Bergson gives an indication of an alternative procedure. Instead of going down to the storehouse of memory with your docket:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past—a work of adjustment, something like the focussing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it re mains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for a memory.

There is still the element of unaccountability in this description, that something that evades the empiric itch, that demand for evidence. We just know its a memory and not a faint perception or sensation or some will o’ the wisp that Locke and Hume chased across a quaking bog.

For Bergson memory is embedded in perception. How often have you been working on something in the house and discovered that a tool you need is in the shed. You go out there but by the time you get there other thoughts have driven the purpose of your mission from your head. Blankly you stare at the bench and tool box. No clue there. You must retrieve your steps, mentally or physically to the job until the memory of what it was you wanted can enter you. The associationist thesis is apparently supported by this procedure but Bergson insists that memory is part of our personality:

We have supposed that our entire personality, with the totality of our recollections, is present, undivided within our actual perception. Then, if this perception evokes in turn different memories, it is not by a mechanical adunction of more and more numerous elements which, while it remains itself unmoved, it attracts around it, but rather by an expansion of the entire consciousness which, spreading out over a larger area, discovers the fuller detail of its wealth. So a nebulous mass, seen through more and more powerful telescopes, resolves itself into an ever greater number of stars.

So Proust’s madeleine was not a portal that brought everything with it automatically. The life of a person has no internal logic so memories are made by one’s own personality.
- But, Proust, you know that never happened.
- Yes, certainly, but it’s really me.

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

2012-01-07T10:44:00.001Z

Yates throws a despairing shrug at Tolstoy when he opens The Easter Parade with

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parent’s divorce.

The old priest’s advice to the young curate about sermons was:
- Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you have just told them.
In the end like one scrying the lees in the glass of life, the surviving sister says:

’Yes, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost 50 years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.’

Telling us:
The mother is ‘Pookie’. Yes, the girls Sarah and Emily are encouraged to call her that. Yates avoids the words peripatetic and peregrination in relation to the movement of Pookie about the various towns where she works in a modest capacity,certainly not as a Realtor which was plan A. The words alluded to and in general all linguistic flourishes are avoided in a controlled prose. Here’s the funeral of the father who departs early in the book:

There wasn’t much of a ceremony at the chapel. An electric organ played, a tired-looking man read a few nondenominational prayers, the casket was removed, and it was over.

Pookie is slapdash and approximate and her decline into alcoholism is mapped with precision by Yates who knew that region well. Emily the youngest daughter at Barnard College has come home for the weekend and they both are going to visit Sarah and Tony and their 3 children where they live on Long Island in a clapboard bungalow on the grounds of Tony’s fathers residence. In a nice touch we get a certain amount of real estate information.

Yates creates islands of omission. Though the word ‘snob’ is never used, Pookie is one, and her nerves dealing with Wilson in the big house lead her to babble and get drunk. Emily stays on the sherry which in that family amounts to a temperance drink.

By the time she was ready to leave at last Geoffrey Wilson had to help her to the door. It was getting dark. Emily took her arm - it felt soft and weak - and they made their way past trees and overgrown shrubbery towards the long road to the railroad station.

Actually the whole family have a problem with alcohol, even the father, though that information comes from mother and you know how alcoholics worry about other peoples drinking. Over the years the damage accumulates and the grip on things slackens. Clever Emily drifts from relationship to relationship with neurotic men. She has no luck or perhaps it is that the recapitulation of the primal family drama leads her towards older divorced men that trail issues.

I read it through at one sitting. It’s a short book, 225 pages in the Vintage Classics paperback. Now reading it again I find the low key tone just right for everyday tragedy. Excellent.

Revolutionary Road: The Movie

2012-01-03T09:13:00.000Z

Should this have been done? Probably not. It wasn't genreiste enough if you'll pardon the barbaric coinage. Certain indifferent novels can be made into films that piggyback on the signs and signals that are well established. We know how to read them and their blandness is an appropriate lack of a barrier to the interpretive glossary. A good novel is its own world with its own climate and the translation to another medium leaches out the texture. They replaced the Freudian psychology of the book with visual signals. The Campbells house is furnished in shades of brown, not even good Grand Rapids whilst the Wheelers are into pale Dano-Scando. It's probably marks the difference between a comfortable sofa and a statement about your taste.

It may well come to pass and perhaps it already has, that Freudian Depth Psychology will be studied as a branch of literature or a vade mecum for 20th.Century studies. It's a verbalising technique; consider the key practice of free association. We lie down, we become embalmed in archetypal stillness which is essentially Cartesian and therefore at odds with the dissolution into imagery of film. The motivation in the book is soluble in this medium.

Thomas Reid, the unaccountable and the pramana.

2012-01-02T13:00:00.001Z

The expression of unaccountability in relation to the intellectual powers of man as distinguished by Thomas Reid has a certain creative ambiguity about it. Like the famous fudging of the Anglo-Irish Agreement it allows for everyone to take whatever they want out of it and to nudge it in the direction of their predilections by 'clorification'. 'Unaccountability' might for the proponents of mysterianism be only the implicit admission that we cannot by virtue of our conceptual schema grasp what that schema is in itself. 'It outruns the mind' as it says in an Upanishad. Take it up with 'the Author of our being'; 'not my desk' in civil service jargon.

In conjunction with that you can take unaccountability as an expression of the concept of the pramana. A pramana is a valid means of knowledge which cannot be reduced to any other. Naturally different schools vary on what is fundamental and irreducible. The Advaitins recognise six pramanas. Memory is not one. Inference (anumana) cannot be reduced to perception (prataksha) or sabda (reliable witness) etc. There comes a point where the most cunning of philosophic alchemists cannot further fractionalize in the alembic of his mind the crude propositions of the laity.

Memory and belief can hold hands but are they conceptually welded.

When I believe that I washed my hands and face this morning there appears to be no necessity in the truth of this proposition. It might be, or it might not. A man may distinctly conceive it without believing it at all. How then do I come to believe it? I remember it distinctly. This is all I can say. This remembrance is an act of my mind. Is it possible that this act should be, if the act had not have happened? I confess I do not see any necessary connection between the one and the other. If any man can shew such a necessary connection, then I think that belief which we have of what we remember will be fairly accounted for, but if this cannot be done, that belief is unaccountable, and we can say no more but that it is the result of our constitution.

from EIP Essay III. i. pg.321 Sony ereader/search- distinctly. This -((the full stop is followed by a single space))

What does this have to say to the contemporary article of philosophic faith, the Justified True Belief as the touchstone of knowledge? Memory is not a valid means of knowledge on its own but it may share with the concept of the pramana a degree of irreducibility. The notion of belief that accompanies clear memory is definitive and not explanatory. Ultimately there is just memory as an element of our constitution.

For some light relief: I bet Flannery O'Connor loved this poem by Thomas Hood:

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,--
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.

Thomas Reid on Memory

2011-12-30T20:13:00.001Z

The common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid has been promoted as the ideal prophylactic against the bizarre theories that infest philosophy according to at least one professional philosopher whose rather hectoring manner decides me against mentioning his name. One notes that haunting by restless spirits begins with the ouija board. This individual also derides believers in God and the proponents of mysterianism. What Reid says about memory, a strangely neglected topic in epistemology brings into question his recruiting as an opponent of all error and fantastical theory.

First, I think it appears that memory is an original faculty given us by the Author of our being, of which we can give no account, but that we are so made.

The knowledge which I have of things past by my memory seems to me as unaccountable as an immediate knowledge would be of things to come; and I can give no reason why I should have the one and not the other, but that such is the will of my Maker. I find in my mind a distinct conception and a firm belief of a series of past events: but how this is produced I know not. I call it memory, but that is only giving a name to it; it is not an account of its cause. I believe most firmly what I distinctly remember; but I can give no reason for this belief. It is the inspiration of the almighty that gives me this understanding.

(from Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1785 edn. available on Google Books - ereaders search for Essay III. Then to Chap.II. or pg.320 on Sony ereader)I will have to append a note on efficient search on ereaders that is universally valid.

As Bergson has pointed out in an essay which I wrote about recently
mind energy
the idea of the connection between brain and memory has been well noted for a long time and is not the trump card magicked from the sleeve of modern science. Thomas Reid finds the outline of the theory in a a commentary by Alcinous on the doctrines of Plato.

When the form or type of things is imprinted on the mind by the organs of the senses, and so imprinted "as not to be deleted by time, but preserved firm and lasting, its "preservation is called memory".

Upon this principle Aristotle imputes the shortness of memory in children to this cause, that their brain is too moist and soft to retain impressions made upon it: And the defect of memory CHAP. vii. in old men he imputes, on the contrary, to the hardness and rigidity of the brain, which hinders its receiving any durable impression.

Reid also admits the lesion evidence but rejects the idea that this demonstrates anything about the nature of consciousness because there is no resemblance between nueronal events and the experience. I take this to mean that simply stating that one is the other or causes the other is to use the words 'cause' and 'identity' in ways which we have no experience of, that do not relate to our ordinary uses of these words. He writes:

It is probable that in perception some impression is made upon the brain as well as upon the organ and nerves, because all the nerves terminate in the brain, and because disorders and hurts of the brain are found to affect our powers of perception when the external organ and nerve are found; but we are totally ignorant of the nature this impression upon the brain: It can have not resemblance to the object perceived, nor does it in any degree account for that sensation and perception which are consequent upon it.

Excuse these long citations but it is probably necessary to emphasise the fact that the knowledge which modern neuroscience demonstrates through brain imaging does not evade the 'hard question' which was clear to the savants of the late 18th. century however approximate their physical findings were. Reid's close examination of the absurdities involved in the 'impression' theories of Locke and Hume bring to mind similar analyses in Matter and Memory by Bergson. I found Epistemological Problems of Memory
the Stanford entry on the Epistemological Problems of Memory to be very helpful on this.

Finally to demonstrate how far common sense can take you from the high road of scientism: (from E.I.P. pg.322)

Our Maker has provided other means for giving us the knowledge of these things; means which perfectly answer their end, and produce the effect intended by them. But in what manner they do this, is, I fear, beyond our skill to explain. We know our own thoughts, and the operations of our minds, by a power which we call consciousness: But this is only giving a name to this part of our frame. It does not explain its fabric, nor how it produces in us an irresistible conviction of its informations. We perceive material objects and their sensible qualities by our senses; but how they give us this information, and how they produce our belief in it, we know not. We know many past events by memory; but how it gives this information, I believe, is inexplicable.

A Priest in the Family by Colm Toibin

2011-12-25T21:28:00.000Z

Part of my Xmas haul was The Granta Book of The Irish Short Story edited and with an introduction by Anne Enright. She acknowledges the help of various people including Colm Toibin whom she clearly has a high regard for as she brackets him with Banville, O'Brien and McGahern.

Banville, O'Brien, McGahern and Toibin – those writers become more distinctive as people, even as their sentences become more distinctively their own......As much as possible I have tried to choose those stories in which a writer is most himself.

I have disparaged Toibin here before but I am always willing to be proved wrong and as Enright is a well known writer herself, a winner of the Booker prize a few years ago, her selection might be supposed to represent him at his best. So let's have a look at it.

A Priest in the Family begins inauspiciously with a weather report.

She watched the sky darken, threatening rain.

This flouts Elmore Leonards first rule of writing:

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

This is all the more so as in Ireland it is always either raining or threatening to rain. When James Joyce told us in The Dead that “snow was general all over Ireland”, that was a form of precipitation which is unusual enough to mark. The old woman who is reacting to the weather is curiously seasonally affected. She doesn't mind cold and wet weather as long as the light level is low. Maybe there is some symbolic blazing being cut here in the story because further on we are told:

'As long as it's the winter I can manage,' Molly said. 'I sleep late in the mornings and I'm kept busy. It's the summer I dread. I'm not like those people who suffer from that disorder when there's no light. I dread the long summer days when I wake with the dawn and think the blackest thoughts. Oh, the blackest thoughts! But I'll be all right until then.'

Her (Molly's) son is a priest and the man to whom she is speaking is a priest also and a friend of his. Despite a little bit of gumption building business i.e. Pulling up his socks, he cannot come to the point of the visit he is paying her.

Instead, he reached down and pulled up one of his grey socks, then waited for a moment before he inspected the other and pulled that up too.

His news which she apparently is the last to know about is that the priest son is going to trial on a charge of sexual abuse which occurred some years before when he was a teacher. This would have been in a secondary school probably though this is not made clear in the story.

After the priest has left Toibin tells us

When he had gone she got the RTE Guide and opened it for the evening's television listings; she began to set the video to record Glenroe.

Given that the last Glenroe episode was in 2001 and this woman is nearly 80, the usage of 'listings' is odd. It is narration I know and not her voice but 'listings' for 'programmes' has a leaden ring. If you're in her world be there. Ask yourself: what would Joyce have done?

Much is made of the fact that Molly is keeping up with things, playing bridge, learning the intricacies of email, visiting people and generally being the active elder, sharp as a tack as they say. What is she missing? It comes out eventually when the priest returns on the following night. It is delivered in the dullest possible way and the reaction to it is not credible. Her son the priest was abusing teenage boys under his care. This would likely be in a boarding school. All she can think of is : “Does the whole town know?” No fainting, no breaking-down, no recourse to tea or prayer or anger only a determination to hold her head up through it all. Pardon my unbelief, but this is not a credible reaction. The daughters, 2 of them, show more or less similar blankness. They are a low-light, crepuscular family but this is ridiculous.

Is this curious lack of affect a reflection of the author's attitude one wonders. He received a great deal of criticism due to his offering a character witness to the court in the case of aggravated sexual assault on a 15 year old boy by the writer Desmond Hogan
Hogan
Being a good writer, which actually Hogan is not,is not a defence in a case of this kind. We had another similar scandal in the case of Cathal Sharkey who was seducing young Nepali boys and who was likewise defended by other fellow members of Aosdana. When priests abuse it is universally condemned by the intelligentsia but they shuffle and temporise when someone they know does the same thing. Perhaps a parity of reasoning is operational in the story. If Mammy threw a wobbly then that would mean it was serious.

It's too poorly written to possibly subvert anyone's moral sense.

Bleak Midwinter

2011-12-23T09:17:00.002Z

"God bless us everyone" said Tiny Tim, the last of all"

A Christmas Carol has been read into me so much that I was scarcely conscious that I had never read it. It is part of the hope of Xmas that Usura(Canto XLV)Usura will somehow be converted and a humanised market of jolly potlatch prevail. That story can be related to the Children's Christmas Party episode of The Sopranos a marvel of bleak, bleak, black comedy. It is nearer I think to the Gospel account of post-natal flight, blue-collar toil under an alien regime and eventual betrayal and crucifixion. Judas, that rat! How do Christians take anything good out of it?

Happy Xmas.

Reputation

2011-12-21T22:13:00.000Z

I'm having a look at The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose to see what the editor Frank Muir has to say about Tristam Shandy by Laurence Sterne. My own view based on readings in different moods and times is that it is a lugubrious piece of drollery. Does stretching a joke count as a longer joke? A partial confirmation of the correctness of my reaction came from a German Professor of my acquaintance who told me that the book was hugely influential and regarded as the pinnacle of wit in Germany in its day.

Frank Muir tells me that I'm in good company. Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett did not think much of it. Oliver Goldsmith thought Sterne a bawdy blockhead and Johnson was offended by the occasional indecency but the book was taken up by the fashionable and thereby the judgement of true wits was obviated. And so, I aver, it remains, a mystery of reputation.

Once you allow Professors in they swarm over the gunwales like boarding marines. I met Mickey, whom I know from a boy, down town about his shopping. He runs a post-grad writing course in the local university. By the bye, I said, how does Colm Toibin have the reputation he does? We both shook our heads like the Swedes in the Muppet Show, bewildered by the effrontery of fame. 'He has a great agent' said Mickey. 'That must be it' says I. His sentences are laid down like chains of sausage, dull thoughts follow dull images without ever a sense that his creation may break away and manifest a life of its own like the mind created elementals of sorcery. That golem never breaks out of the cellar.

The story gets away on Flannery O'Connor regularly. In The River the boy tells the woman who is going to mind him for the day that his name is Bevel.

His name was Harry Ashfield and he had never thought before at any time of changing it, "Bevel", he said.
Mrs.Connin raised herself from the wall. "Why ain't that a coincident.!", she said. "I told you that's the name of this preacher!".

How did O'Connor think of that? I've a feeling that it wasn't her, it was young Ashfield the confabulist that thought of it, she didn't know until he said it. That's what having genius is.

Young Tommy Joe, aged 5, of my acquaintance, future Professor of the Strange but Untrue phoned up his grandfather Martin:
- I can't see you today.
- Why's that Tommy?
- I'm going to the doctor.
- What's wrong with you.
- I don't know, the doctor 'll tell me.

There was nothing wrong with him and naturally he was not going to the doctor but the circumstance of phoning required 'news'

Mulliner

2011-12-19T13:51:00.001Z

Mulliner's BUCK-U-UPPO is to be found in the collection Meet Mr.Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse. I got it for 5€ brand new at my local 2nd. hand bookstore. The Mulliner Collections are not in the Wodehouse selection at the Gutenberg Project though I suppose diligent searching might turn them up elsewhere.

Mr. Mulliner the chronicler of the vast Mulliner clan to whom the oddest things happen, is introduced in the following manner:

He was a short, stout, comfortable man of middle age, and the thing that struck me first about him was the extraordinarily childlike candour of his eyes. They were large and round and honest. I would have bought oil stock from him without a tremor.

It is never stated but that oil stock might be infused with essence of serpent. Mr. Mulliner's brother Wilfred is a chemist of note who has produced some renowned patent preparations one of which comes to the rescue of a timid curate nephew Augustine. His normal tendency towards windiness and funk is eliminated by a spoonful of this elixir. I fear that a summary will not do justice to the ineffable nature of the plot which has emerged momentarily from the sphere of the apophatic It is a lift from De Profundis to Excelsior.

We later find that Augustine through a clerical error has been sent the B preparation of BUCK-U-UPPO which is designed to eliminate funk in elephants who decline to face the tiger in the hunt. A mere spoonful added to their morning mash turns the perturbed pachyderm into a fearless tusker. This over-egging of the curate, mea culpa, does not stop him from ordering after this fashion:

Send immediately three case of the 'B'. 'Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Deuteronomy xxviii.5

Buck-U-Uppo

2011-12-16T11:36:00.000Z

You are sheep without a shepherd. To parse that differently, what are you with a shepherd? You are not a sheep you are egregious ie. above the flock, you stand out, you count or are countable or accountable and have taken responsibility for your own destiny. People have been jumping on poor Mr. Marks like the bland following the bland for forgetting the overwhelming power of social conditioning. Mr. CoatesAtlantic chides him for lack of proper humility and bids us ask why we wouldn't have done anything back in the days of slavery. Yes indeed because rightly seen life is a 12 step program. We are powerless to change without intercession. Ta-Nehisi Coates has the spirit of his father to be for him the spiritual analogue of Mulliner's 'buck-u-uppo', Carter who manumitted his slaves had Swedenbourg's teachings and the Quakers were guided by the Holy Spirit. The latter is non-confessional by the way. End of homily.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

2011-12-13T06:59:00.000Z

So what do you do when you wake up at 3:30 from a dream of poor quality, drowning came into it, do you set yourself to twitch as your life passes before you, a series of tableaux of failure, ignominy and desolation? No, you get up, make a cup of tea, take 3 sweeties from the Roses tin, no more, and read Everything that Rises must Converge.

In checking the source of the title I discovered that it is from a book by Tailhard De Chardin, The Future of Man. I wrongly guessed Plotinus who has something of the same sort of pneumatics in his Enneads. In Good Country People O'Connor quotes from Being and Time by Heidegger. She is fond of lay scripture and finds therein ironic themes and inverted doxology.

I note that the Googleamus throws up various glosses on the text called notes. Such explication de texte I never read and on reflection navigating over the reefs of political correctness must be so hazardous for the high school teacher that they would love to leave it out or leave it to the Spark or Monkey interpretations.

There is some shape shifting in this story and exchange of sons. One is reminded of the ancient practice regulated by Brehon law of Tanistry and fosterage. Here of course it is the feeblest of the ancient blood, the liberal son, that inherits. However he is not without an image of Tara's Halls animating his reveries.

Being O'Connor her endings tend to be definite and final, the middle seems to have less of the aggregation of detail of the inveterate fabulist that she was. It was a late story and her illness may have been affecting that energy. As Micheal O Muircearthaigh said about the Clare hurler who went on a severe diet.

You know the ways it is, when you lose a lot of weight, some of your strinth goes with it.

Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor

2011-12-12T22:58:00.000Z

As a rest and a relief from John Cowper Powys I am reading in Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories. With her you will never know how consciousness is to be distributed but it may switch from soul to soul like a vile oppressing spirit that produces the grim atrabiliousness that breaks out as laughter. Good Country People has that constellation of which O'Connor is particularly fond, Mother, intellectual child with solipsistic tendencies and a stranger that is passing strange. Just when you think Hulga is about to discover her misplaced Joy she loses something other than she had perhaps hoped for. Mother is generally a put upon creature of determined good will. The vast country cunning of Mrs. Freeman who must match each affront to flesh is pitted against Mrs. Hopewell her employer. Her various stands in the kitchen; against the gas heater in the winter, in the doorway in the summer, at the refrigerator: are perfectly noted. This brooding and capping ubiquity - 'I always said it did myself':

All this was very trying on Mrs.Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience.

The bible salesman, a collector of curiosities, a wandering nihilist who passes for good country people entices Hulga who herself affects a belief in Nothing. Her Phd. in Philosophy is not a match for his powers of abstraction.

Thought Experiments

2011-12-08T16:05:00.001Z

Back in the day when I was a boy philosopher the only thought experiment you might encounter was Locke's soul swap of the cobbler and the prince as a way of promoting the idea that what made you uniquely you were your memories, attitudes, abilities etc and not this all too solid flesh.

In eastern lore Shankara is supposed to have been debating a woman on the kama sutra but being a celibate was at a disadvantage so he arranged a soul swap with a multiwived nabob using his yogic powers. The wives noticing the increased interest of their jaded spouse suspected that this was the result of sorcery or yogic mischief. 'Look' they said, 'for a sadhu in trance and despatch him leaving him trapped in the body of the rampant rajah'. Shankara got back and reanimated his usual form in time to triumph in debate over the saucy housewife.

The moral of these stories is that fables do not function as 'intuition pumps' but merely serve to reflect underlying dogmas. Worse than that, they conceal this dogma by adding the spurious persuasiveness of the factitious. There is something in a story which disables the critical faculties and allows us to accept time travel, buttons which pause time, the salvific properties of obese folk and the like.

Instead of thought experiments let's try thinking.

Parmenides and Satkaryavada

2011-12-07T10:28:00.001Z

In A History of Philosophy Vol.1, Greece and Rome, Part 1 by Frederick Copleston S.J. the theory of Parmenides is described succinctly and with admirable clarity:

His first great assertion is that "It is". "It", i.e. Reality, Being, of whatever nature it may be, is, exists, and cannot not be. It is, and it is impossible for it not to be. Being can be spoken of, and it can be the object of my thought. But that which I can think of and can speak of can be, "for it is the same thing that can be thought and can be". But if "It" can be then it is. Why? Because if it could be and yet were not, then it would be nothing. Now, nothing cannot be the object of speech or thought, for to speak about nothing is not to speak, and to think faout nothing is the same as not thinking at all. Besides if it merely could be, then, paradoxically, it couldnever come to be, for it would then have to come out of nothing, and out of nothing comes nothing and not something. Being, then, Reality, "It" was not first possible, i.e. nothing, and then existent: it was always existent - more accurately, "It is".

In the Sankhya-karikas of Isvarakrishna we have this expression of the doctrine of Satkaryavada also known as the doctrine of the non-difference of cause and effect:

The effect already exists in the cause for the following reasons: what is nonexistent cannot he produced; for producing a thing, a specific material cause is resorted to; everything is not produced by everything; a specific material cause capable of producing a specific product alone produces that effect; there is such a thing as a particular cause for a particular effect.

As in the injunction frequently encountered on Irish building sites Think of the next man, this doctrine leaves much to be done in the way of ingenious exegesis by subsequent sages. We can however discern through the fog something of the form of a like insight to that of Parmenides. What is, is, and what is not has no traction on reality in order to come to be. It can't get started.
As mentioned in a previous note on this topic
advaitic causalitythis idea of causality comes from the narrow focus of what in the Aristotelian system would be termed material causality. In a curious way the materialist monism of Parmenides throws a light on the Satkaryavada doctrine which bundles together material and efficient causality and treats them as one. Because potential is wrapped up in the nature of the material which is then what is to be formed out of that material must somehow be in existence. Otherwise it could not come to be because it would be nothing and as we are told nothing cannot gain traction.

Satkaryavada is a confused likeness of the doctrine of the impossibility of change espoused by Parmenides in that it accepts change but only as mithya i.e. real as an appearance.

By knowing a single lump of clay, everything that is made of clay would become known. A modification begins with speech, it is a (mere) name. The clay alone is true i.e. real.

Commentary on Chandogya Upanishad VI.i.4

In the commentary of Shankara on the Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya the impossibility of something coming out of nothing is unequivocally stated.

Existence does not come out of non-existence. If something can come out of nothing, then it becomes useless to refer to special kinds of causes, since non-existence as such is indistinguishable everywhere.

B.S.B. II.ii.26

This general principle is used externsively both in the discussion about material causality and the possibility of change and also as a method of refutation of the Buddhist doctrines of Annata and Annica. In this note I am concerned with material causality. An important citation on this topic is B.S.B. II.i.18 in which he states his views on potency:

Again, when some potency is assumed in the cause, to determine the effect, that potency cannot influence the effect by being different (from the cause and effect) or non-existent (like the effect), since (on either supposition) non-existence and difference will pertain to the potency as much as to the effect. Therefore the potency must be the very essence of the cause, and the effect must be involved in the very core of the potency.

Grasping these ideas is like lifting mercury with a fork because we are so primed with the Aristotelian concept of Cause & Effect. I'm not even sure that they conflict with Aristotle's views because they are more onto-theological than ontological. Brahman in the Vedic schema is the material cause of the universe. Brahman as pure act is the cause and the effect of all manifestation. Just as all the potential for items made of clay is in the clay, all the potential for what is, is in Brahman. There is a unity of act and potency in Brahman and because Brahman is the reality of anything whatever this non-difference of cause and effect is reflected in matter of all kinds.

It is not the case that Shankara ignores the idea of efficent causality claiming that everything just happens. He accepts the role of actors but still subordinates their causal importance to the material cause or the nature of things. That is the supervenient reality.

Moreover, if it be admitted that something can come out of nothing, then on the same ground even the indifferent people who are inactive should attain their desired results, for non-existence is clearly evident even there, and so a husbandman who does not engage in cultivation should get his crop, a potter who makes no effort for preparing the clay should get his vessels ready, and a weaver who does not make any effort for weaving the yarn should get a cloth just as much as one that weaves. And nobody need in any way strive for heaven or liberation. But such a position is neither reasonable nor is accepted by anybody. Therefore the assertion of something coming out of nothing is unjustifiable.

These topics of substance, identity and change refracted through a vedic medium are puzzling and pondering on them gives one a sense of how Plato confronted by Parmenides tried to save the appearances.

The Bergson Thing

2011-12-03T15:08:00.000Z

So this Bergson thing, isn't it all a bit esoteric, the province of Levinas and Deleuze, those masters of obfuscation? That would be an error because with Bergson you always know what it is that you don't understand or rather it hovers there on the tip of your mind. You feel yourself in a physical state of unease as the consciousness attempts to enter you by neural pathways that have yet to be set up, pathways that would make you ready for a perception or a reaction.

If this experience is as commonplace as Bergson maintains and shown by him to be manifest in the searching for the right word, or putting a name to the face then such strategies as we deploy in these cases ought to be universal. Hatha Yoga has many techniques one of which is pranayama or breath control. It was noticed early by yogis that states of ecstatic consciousness and oceanic feeling were accompanied by a suspension of breathing. Could a replication of such breathing lead to a facilitation of a like consciousness? Yes so it seems and even for a beginner some pranayama leads to a quieting of the neural traffic that facilitates meditation.

The materialist will claim that this merely proves his point. What point? That we evoke in the brain we know not what, in an area we know not where, an incommunicable awareness that has no adaptive advantage. When an explanation is more complex and contains more imponderable elements than the explanandum you can be sure that you are a lost puppy. It's worse than dormitive, it's, it's, I know not what. Oh, yeah, it's continental or even orientalist. It's Buddhist monks with electrodes. What do these deep meditation experiments show? In the words of the title of M.R. James's story Whistle and I'll Come to You.

Mind Energy by Henri Bergson

2011-12-01T10:09:00.001Z

When Bergson talks to a general audience the categories of realism and idealism which are so fraught by fundamental disagreements are set aside and he brings to bear his acute forensic intelligence on the experimental suggestions which seem to establish a materialist view. The other thing is that his later writing on the subject which was covered in a philosophical context in Matter and Mind shows an awareness of its difficulty. Fifteen years had passed by the time he came to give the Huxley Lecture to the University of Birmingham from the publication of that very difficult work. No doubt the multitude of questions and rebuttals that he had faced in the meantime enabled him to enhance the clarity of his exposition. Life and Consciousness is the title of his lecture and it is collected in the book entitled Mind Energy (pub. 1920) A copy of it is available at Internet Archive in various formats: mind energy

There is also out there on youtube an individual reading The Soul and the Body from that same collection reading
He stops to clarify from time to time. There is an energy that communicates itself.

Bergson says in that first lecture something that gave Wittgenstein an odd feeling:

It is literally impossible for you to prove, either by experience or by reasoning, that I, who am speaking to you at this moment, am a conscious being. I may be an ingeniously constructed natural auto maton, going, coming, discoursing; the very words I am speaking to affirm that I am conscious may be being pronounced unconsciously. Yet you will agree that though it is not impossible that I am an unconscious automaton, it is very improbable.

In each of the lectures he focuses on some aspect of behaviour, conscious or unconscious, and turn a light on its underside.

The amoeba, for instance, when in presence of a substance which can be made food, pushes out towards it filaments able to seize and enfold foreign bodies. These pseudopodia are real organs and therefore mechanisms; but they are only temporary organs created for the particular purpose, and it seems they still show the rudiments of choice.

Here we come to the panpsychism which has been castigated as vitalism or a dormitive explanation. In Creative Evolution Élan vital was translated as vital impetus. 'Whatever' as the man said to the turnip, the difficulty is that when something is 'pan' contriving an explanation which does not include the explanandum is tricky. Can the concept of 'telos' be avoided here? In the ordinary understanding of teleology by its critics it is taken to mean an end or objective that is aimed towards, something to be achieved in the future. In the Aristotelian account of causality the 'end' is something that is operative now. The end of poetry is pleasure or the end of rhetoric is persuasion. The 'what is it for' is the telos. And that is a present experience.

We have good ground, then, for believing that the evolving force bore within it originally, but confused together or rather the one implied in the other, instinct and intelligence.

Things have happened just as though an immense current of consciousness interpenetrated with potentialities of every kind had traversed matter to draw it towards organisation and make it, notwithstanding that it is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom.

The second lecture in the book is entitled The Soul and the Body delivered in Paris in 1912. It covers in a general way the topics first dealt with in Matter and Memory. For those who wish to engage with the startling idea that memory is not wholly stored in brain tissue this is a good place to start. Over several pages he recapitulates the lesion evidence:

Let us go further: science can
localize in definite convolutions of the brain definite
functions of the mind, such as the faculty of perform-
ing voluntary movements, of which you spoke just now.
Lesions of particular points in the Rolandic area, be-
tween the frontal and the parietal lobes, involve the
loss of movements of the arm, of the leg, of the face,
of the tongue, according to the exact spot affected.
Even memory, which you consider an essential function
of the mind, has been partly localized. At the foot of
the third left frontal convolution are seated the mem-
ories of the movements of the articulation of speech ;
in one region between the first and second left temporal
convolutions is preserved the memory of the sound of

THE SOUL AND THE BODY 41

words ; at the posterior part of the second left parietal
convolution are deposited the visual images of words,
and of letters, etc. Let us go further still. You said
that in space, as in time, the soul overflows the body
to which it is joined. Let us consider space. It is
true that sight and hearing go beyond the limits of the
body. But why? Because vibrations from afar have
impressed eye and ear and been transmitted to the
brain; there, in the brain, the stimulation has become
auditory or visual sensation; perception is therefore
within the body and not spread abroad. Let us con-
sider time. You claim that the mind embraces the
past, whilst the body is confined within a present which
recommences without ceasing. But we recall the past
only because our body preserves the still present traces
of it. The impressions made by objects on the brain
abide there like the images on a sensitive plate, or the
records on gramophone disks. Just as the disk repeats
the melody when the apparatus is set working, so the
brain revives the memory when the requisite shock is
produced* at the point where the impression is re-
tained. So then, no more in time than in space does
the soul overflow the body. But is there really a soul
distinct from the body? We have just seen that
changes, or, to be more exact, displacements and new
groupings of molecules and atoms are continually go-
ing on in the brain. Some of these express themselves
in what we call sensations, others in memories ; without

42 MIND-ENERGY

any doubt brain-changes correspond to all Intellectual,
sensible and voluntary facts. To them consciousness
is superadded, a kind of phosphorescence ; it is like the
luminous trail of the match we strike on the wall in the
dark. This phosphorescence, being, as it were, a self-
illumination, begets strange internal optical illusions ; so
consciousness imagines itself to be modifying, directing
and producing the movements when in fact it is itself
the result of them. The belief in free will consists in
this. The truth is that could we look through the
skull and observe the inner working of the brain with
instruments magnifying some billion times more than
our most powerful microscopes, if we then should wit-
ness the dance of the molecules, atoms and electrons
of which the cerebral cortex is composed, and if in
addition we possessed the rule for transposing the
cerebral into the mental, — a dictionary, so to speak,
which would enable us to translate each figure of the
dance into the language of thought and feeling, — we
should know, quite as well as the supposed * soul,' what
it was thinking, feeling and wishing, what it would be
believing itself doing freely, though it would only be
acting mechanically. We should know it, indeed, much
better than it could know itself, for tbis so-called con-
scious * soul ' lights up only a small part of the intra-
cerebral dance ; — the soul is only the assemblage of
will-o-the-wisps which hover above certain privileged
groups of atoms ; — whereas we should be observing all

THE SOUL AND THE BODY 43

the groups of all the atoms, the whole intra-cerebral
dance. Your * conscious soul ' is at most an effect
which perceives effects : we should be seeing the effects
and the causes."

How he proceeds from this acceptance of the facts of lesion injury and aphasia to his account of Memory and duration is ingenious. An invidious observation perhaps but would Bergson be employable by any Anglo-American philosophy department today? In any case this collection of lectures has the broad brush nature that is a very useful and accessible introduction to the thought of a man who is unfairly relegated to the ranks of the higher hand wavers.

Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys

2011-11-29T09:47:00.003Z

I was going to go on to read some Joyce Cary bringing in more of the Anglo-Irish literature side of things but having started Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys (1929) Internet Archive have lots of his work:
Wolf Solent
I'll continue with it. I feel the need to nourish my soul at that fount of oddness and really for precipitate alteration of focus that is yet somehow right he has no equal. Don't look for a pattern, that's what a tornado does. Yes, of course, but if you go out far enough out and squint according to a theory you will see it. Rely on it, Powys will be there before you in earnest colloquy with the myrmidons of his kingdom - Selena Gault and Darnley Otter. But no one is left unnoticed.

He gave up his ticket to an elderly station master whose air, at once fussily inquisitive and mildly deferential suggested the manner of a cathedral verger.

The technique of creative absence which Wolf practises he calls 'sinking into his soul'.

This 'sinking into his soul' - this sensation which he called 'mythology' - consisted of a certain summoning up to the surface of his mind, of a subconscious magnetic power which from those very early Weymouth days, as he watched the glitter of sun and moon upon the waters from that bow window, had seemed to answer such a summons.

This secret practice was always accompanied by an arrogant mental idea - the idea, namely, that he was taking part in some occult cosmic struggle -- some struggle between what he liked to think of as 'good' and what he like to think of as 'evil' in those remote depths.

I'm going down the universe, I may be gone for some time.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor

2011-11-28T17:35:00.001Z

Palladian was Taylor's second novel (1946) and it is a playful homage to some of the themes which have concerned the great English women writers. The heroine is Cassandra Dashwood aged 20. She is to be a governess to Marion Vanbrugh's child Sophy. He,Marion by the way is pronounced Merrion, is the owner of a mouldering demesne and a residence with a Palladian applied front. Marion is still grieving over the death of his wife at the birth of Sophy who is now about 11. He reads Greek verse in the original and has a fin-de-siècle aestheticism which marks him as vaguely effeminate. His household is composed of Tom his cousin, drunkard, artist specialising in surreal anatomical sketches, failed medical student, handsome and dissolute. Also there is Tom's sister Margaret, a medical doctor, residing for the duration of her pregnancy and Tom's mother who is the housekeeper and an ancient Nanny. Clearly the big house regiment has fallen in strength but it still has representative members from all ranks.

The amusing thing about this book is that the ancient women retainers and staff are used as a hag's chorus gibbering by the range in the kitchen sustained by stewed tea and grievance, sinking betimes into the unity of weird sisterhood and then bethinking themselves to grovel or assert distinctions. The sister Margaret is a monster of tactless confrontation and sublime greed. Being pregnant she has to eat for four and her sorties against a gooseberry pie and a latticed jam tart in the larder together with her inept covering of tracks in the matter of assaults on bread and dripping are depicted with transgressive fascination. Being a lady she massacres the bread.

How far can you take homage before it turns into pastiche? Any writer but Elizabeth Taylor would have gone into that area and succumbed to it. She is able to manage it by an ironic subversion. Marion is no brute Rochester, Tom is no Heathcliffe howling on the moor but the lover of Mrs.Veal the Landlady of the Blacksmith's Arms. She is first met on the train in the compartment with Cassandra:

She had a way of settling her blue fox across her breast and smiling down with pleasure and approval - it might equally have been pleasure at the fur or the bosom, since both were magnificent. A dusky, pleasant perfume came from her as she stirred, and the little charms hanging from her bracelet jingled softly.

The other Elizabeth Taylor. Quite!

Cassandra, a bookish girl whose recently deceased father was a schoolmaster with a personal library of 2000 volumes, is well prepared to adhere to the template and fall in love with her employer particularly when he turns out to be a scholarly man. He is haunted by the death in childbirth of his wife Violet who he claims read Homer in the original at the age of 8. Will their love be crossed? Now there's an expression that Taylor would never permit herself.

She (Cassandra) had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that - the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it, but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. 'Quite separate', she thought. 'Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken, that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then would not be tolerable.'

This is a short novel of 191 pages with plenty of white. It's quite good. The Virago edition I borrowed from the library has an Introduction by Paul Bailey that is littered with spoilers. Taylor has written better novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in my opinion, but her good is very very good and she's never horrid.

House Arrest in Paris

2011-11-26T19:22:00.002Z

Having finished The House in Paris and not wishing to spoil your reading of it; if you haven't already read it, I will reserve my remarks to generalities. In the crime novel of the puzzle sort everything is explained in the library at the end by the Poirot like figure who shows you that everything you needed to discover the killer was given to you in the plot. There is no knowledge that is his alone. Realistic fiction is different, like life itself motivation 'unknown' to the reader/observer can sometimes lead to strange and uncanny twists. People do the unexpected and swerve without signalling. The great writers can depict that without leading us by the nose, others place finger-posts so that we don't get too much of a shock. That sort of writing need not concern us here. How did Bowen manage in that test of writers justification? Very well I think, but it is a fact that you have to sink into the characters and below the surface fabric of the novel to feel the greater archetypal tides. Mme Fisher as malign anima is how 'unknown' earns its quotes. She is one of those spiders in Baudelaire's 'Spleen'

And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin
Their meshes in the caverns of the brain,

But she herself is webbed down by illness and can only marshal her minion, Miss Fisher, by rapping on the ceiling, like a communication from beyond that does not lack authority.
Mrs. Michaelis, Karen's mother is also of the sort who manages by creating default avenues of permission, that channels the lives around her into patterns that she considers appropriate. She eliminates from consideration that of which she does not approve:

On Sunday night, when - '
Mrs. Michaelis put a hand to her face. 'You know I never ask you to tell me everything, Karen.'
'On Sunday night when I came in, I really did see Ray's letter. I left it where it was because I felt bad, because I am not going to marry him.'
'I think you will want to, Karen.' said her mother

Karen's aunt Violet, her mother's sister has kept from Karen's parents the fact that she is very ill and is to undergo an operation that she may well die from. They live in Ireland and when at the start of the Past section Karen visits them her uncle Colonel Bill blurts it out but his wife says nothing. The complex pattern of secrets is another way of webbing down.

Mme. Fisher tells Leopold much more than he needs to know as a form of post-mortem oppression. But now I'm telling and here I am re-reading it already.

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

2011-11-24T22:47:00.001Z

The Anglo in Anglo-Irish is very different from the Anglo in Anglo-Indian. The latter is a racial mixture, the former is a marked racial aloofness that when mingled with the native Irish loses caste as definitively as a Brahmin who has touched a plough. The Vikings and the Normans went bush early and became more Irish than the Irish themselves the only trace being their towns and castles and of course that strange uvular r that lingers round some areas. Brendan Behan, puer Borstalus for his Republican sins, referred to the Anglo Irish as a protestant on a horse. Yeats tried to identify with 'hard riding country gentlemen' whereas his stock was of the clerical protestant, professional adjuncts to the land owing class. Perhaps it is that wariness and otherness, that aloof noting of the correct distance that brings out the writer in a group that discovers when they go to their putative mother-country that they really are not English at all. They need to be in Ireland to feel that they are after all English.

I've been reading Joyce Cary and Elizabeth Bowen recently and though it may seem that their connection with Ireland is exiguous, their writing has a specific gravity, a weighting that is Irish and a glancing off the surface that is unmistakable. I'm reading The House in Paris from 1935 at the moment. It is achieved in the sense that it creates precisely those harmonics between Past and Present which form the structure of the book. The Present is represented by the young of the Past and the interplay between the 11 year old girl and the 9 year old boy has some of the fatality of replication.

She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks.

(Karen from The Past section)

It is a subtle book requiring a vigilant meditativeness to enjoy.

Spots of Time

2011-11-22T12:10:00.001Z

There's a steroscopic aspect to realisation. What gives depth and fullness to experience is an an ability to immerse ourselves in it in a non-dual way. The object of experience is set against the subject of experience but at the same time what makes experiencing possible is the underlying ontological unity. The object can come to be in the subject. Clearly this non-dual realisation is a rare event in the lives of most of us but as Wordsworth has said in his 'spots of time' passage they are vital.

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress'd
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repair'd,
A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced
That penetrates, enables us to mount
When high, more high, and lift us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life in which
We have deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will.
Such moments worthy of all gratitude,
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood: in our childhood even
Perhaps are most conspicuous.

(Bk.XI. ln.258 foll.)

There is no claim in this passage that such epiphanies are the domain of elite adepts. We all can visit and experience recreation and renewal yet there are what the Buddhists call 'upaya' or skillful means. Alienation and banishment from the garden is always a possibility. I shall have to look at the later poems in the era after the great decade to find if there is a clue to Wordsworth's decline in them.

Prelude to Reality

2011-11-20T11:07:00.002Z

The challenge of realism is to show that we experience reality even if this experience has limitations. There is always the possibility of error and there is always more to know. Contrasted with this is idealism which is never naive perhaps because it is all naive. Idealism turns our conviction that we are experiencing reality into an experience of experience and the perception of perception and reduces 'common' sense into a complete mystery which arose we know not why from we know not where. Obviously there is an 'internal' side to experience, neuronal traffic and the like, and there is an 'external' side, the conceptual, the common. Wittgenstein ought to have put paid to the excessive weight that idealism puts on the internal beam of the scales with his beetle in the box but like a powerful virus it is a cunning adversary that mutates. However I don't think that it is the business of philosophy to deal with every manifestation of ontological error however solidly empirical it seems. Don't panic, it's perfectly safe to remain in your armchairs.

There is that perennial conundrum – if you can pose the question, can you not by that very fact resolve the question? Yes I would reply if you accept realisation as a comprehension. The aporia of how there can be a non-numerical identity between the experience and the reality is resolved by the fact of poetry.

Nor should this, perchance,
Pass unrecorded, that I still lov'd
That exercise and produce of a toil
Than analytic industry to me
More pleasing, and whose character I deem
Is more poetic as resembling more
Creative agency. I mean to speak
Of that interminable building rear'd
By observation of affinities
In objects where no brotherhood exists
To common minds.
.....
......
To unorganic natures I transferr'd
My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth
Coming in revelation, I convers'd
With things that really are, I, at this time
Saw blessings spread round me like a sea.

(The Prelude Book II. 396 foll.)

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

2011-11-15T10:35:00.001Z

I am reading The Prelude by Wordsworth regularly and consecutively. The bathos that attends excessive solemnity like an awkward acolyte is there but for me it humanises the lofty and impassioned passages that are normally anthologised. "Keep her going Liamie, don't stall the digger", I cry from the pit.

Nor will it seem to thee, my Friend! so prompt
In sympathy, that I have lengthen'd out,
With fond and feeble tongue, a tedious tale.

(Bk.1.645..)

Not so Dear William inveterate companion of my earlier years,
A form glimpsed in the tumbling cataract of Glencar,
hanging in the mist, its own moment,
given, complete and no presage of future states.

Wordsworth often asks, was I being led on, was this part of an unfolding initiation? In the monist philosophy which he informally espoused everything already is whatever it's going to be. 'Become who you are' said Kierkegaard somewhere. The end or final cause, the telos of Aristotle is not an objective to be attained but what is the case now. Everything is to the point.

Meet the Bensons

2011-11-13T07:19:00.000Z

I mentioned recently the work of Robert Hugh Benson. The Bensons were an extraordinarily gifted family. Of the four surviving members of the family of six the 3 boys were writers and the daughter Maggie an amateur Egyptologist of note. It was a complex family and I would say that if 7 shrinks with 7 couches worked for 15 years I do not think at the end of it they would get it all quite clear. The Dodgson/Carroll nod will be clear from the link below. Robert's brother Arthur writing in one of his essays of which there are 70 volumes has this to say about his family and particularly about his father the late Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson:

Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell what my point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English lines. My father, in a busy life, held a series of what may be called high official positions. He was an idealist, who owing to a vigorous power of practical organisation and a mastery of detail was essentially a man of affairs.

Read this
and you will be aware of the level of heroic denial the foregoing entailed.

As well as writing novels, ghost stories and essays Arthur prepared for publication the letters of Queen Victoria and 'arranged' the papers of his brother Robert ka Hugh, and his sister Maggie. The other brother Edward ka Fred was also a prolific writer of novels and ghost stories and a personal friend of Queen Victoria. I pass over with a sniff the opportunity for cheap ribaldry here. Actually this brother may have been the best writer of the three. His Mapp and Lucia novels are quite readable and amusing. I'm reading Queen Lucia (Gutenberg Project) which seems to be the start of the series. They were made into a miniseries by Channel 4 back in the 80's which I haven't seen. The eponymous Lucia is the apotheosis of 'twee'.

In the garden behind the house there was no attempt to construct a Shakespearean plot for as she so rightly observed Shakespeare who loved flowers so well would wish her to enjoy every conceivable horticultural treasure. But furniture played a prominent part in the place and there were statues and sundials and stone-seats scattered about with almost too profuse a hand. Mottoes were also in great evidence, and while a sundial reminded you that "Tempus Fugit" an enticing resting place somewhat bewilderingly bade you to "Bide a Wee". But then again the rustic seat in the pleached alley of laburnums had carved on the back, "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold" so that meditating on Keats you could bide a wee with an clear conscience.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2011-11-10T17:15:00.003Z

First, let's be clear, Stoker was not moving about the lay figures of Marxist/Feminist/Freudian criticism when he wrote Dracula, he was working straight out of 'the foul rag and bone-shop of the heart'. The mind of a civil servant is a strange and hideous place, a lair of filth, corruption and latterly, brown envelopes. I never, ever read the introductions to novels in the fancy academic editions lest the wearisome lucubrations of the scholastic infect me with its turbid literalness: but having read Dracula for the nth. time I invited Maud, Daughter of Richard, Ellmann into the clean well-lighted place that is my mind. Alas! I think a first reading at least should be a naive one - in which our reader encounters this novel for the first time. Besides the critic may be careless of spoilers.

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will". He made no motion of stepping to meet me but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The moment however that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said
"Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely and leave something of the happiness you bring."

Ah yes, was ever a more prophetic invitation made. Note the quiet old-world dignity of the formula and the implication that all motions of the soul are fundamentally free. Can there be such a thing as a willing victim? When you join the ranks of the Undead you do so by invitation. He invites you to a mockery of eternity, you accept. As Dr. Van Helsing makes clear later in the case of Lucy she must first have let the Count in.

The conventions that create the illusion of verisimilitude are freely used in this novel. The Bradshaw Railway timetable both English and Continental is plied freely, we can be certain that the indefatigable Van Helsing can do those journeys to fetch his kit in the time that is allotted to him. In a sort of a way the normal narration of a novel is subverted and real history with its profusion and methodology of documentation is aped. Even the phonograph, the latest killer app of the day is pressed into use. Nobody knows what anybody else is thinking unless they are told and we do not know unless that is recorded by one or other of the participants. There is an inevitable muting of character development using this sort of narration but the point of Dracula is the play of forces.

It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which 'modernity' cannot kill.

However it is Mina Harker nee Murray using all modern methods who collates the evidence in 'a mass of typewriting' that allows each to know of the adventures of the other. Only Van Helsing of Amsterdam, Dr. Sewards old professor, appears in the annals of the rest having none of his own if I rightly remember.

It is surprising how many people think that Dracula is an ill written farrago or pulp and just don't bother with it taking the movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the fons et origo. That is a mistake. There is much excellent stuff in it. Here is the passage where Jonathan Harker discovers that his host dispenses with stairs:

What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not see the face but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had some many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.......

There is some humour also, perhaps unconscious, but I think not. In Dr. Seward's Diary we are told of the first meeting with Mina Murray of the mad zoophagite Renfield who is in clairvoyant contact with the Count :

She came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once command the respect of any lunatic for easiness is one of the qualities mad people most respect.

Extract from Ombhurbhuva's journal:

I have finished Dracula today, and now I see that it is the Day of the Dead. Of course I observed the usual precautions and only read it during the hours of daylight. I am comforted by the wild rose in the hedge and an abundant supply of garlic in the kitchen. As ever I was relieved that Kukri and Bowie knife accomplished their grim task giving peace at last to the Count who in his day, we must not forget, was a great patriot.

A Mirror of Shalott by Robert Hugh Benson

2011-11-09T23:32:00.001Z

This is the season of the pooka, a good time for stories of the supernatural. In a paperback anthology I found a slight tale by Robert Hugh Benson benson excerpted from a book called A Mirror of Shalott. This is available on Internet Archive. IA The suite of stories are told by a group of Catholic clerics meeting in a house in Rome I'm not sure that everyone would consider them real chillers, there are no fat boys like the one in Pickwick that will make your blood run cold, with a recitation of the blood drinkers burial in character but in an understated way that sharpens your sense of both the supernatural and the infranatural, they have a power.

Benson was a priest himself so the material plane was merely a diaphane that could be backlit on occasion. My sense is that these tales are more or less the true stories that he had heard from his colleagues in the ministry. It is the near irruptions into the everyday of other worlds where you can't be quite sure whether it was imagination or not that are the most effective. One story of a dream told by Father Stein :

He was slow of speech and thought and movement, and had that distressing grasp of the obvious that is characteristic of the German mind.

However the story that he tells of an archetypal dream is worthy of the best of Carl Jung.

Another story involves the concept of mystical substitution which a man proposes to the priest who is recounting it, a practical man not well up on the idea.

Well, I didn't understand him at first, but we talked a little, and at last I found that the idea of mystical substitution had seized on his mind. He was persuaded that he must make an offering of himself to God and as to be allowed to bear the temptation instead of his brother. Of course, we know that that is one of the claims of the Contemplative but to tell the truth, I had never come across it before in my own experience.

Not a good idea as it turned out. This man had previously gone for the priesthood and we are told:

The man's health simply could not stand it. But he led a most mortified and interior life with his wife in his London house, with a servant of two to look after them and was present daily at mass at the church that I served then.

Diverting and edifying. Quite!

The Sin of Father Amaro by Eca De Queiroz

2011-11-07T23:15:00.001Z

The Amateur Reader (Tom) at Wuthering ExpectationsARin his exploration of Portuguese literature mentioned Eca De Queiroz favourably and I spotted his famous novel The Sin of Father Amaro in a tottering pile on the floor of the second-hand book shop (€5). In the later translation I note that it is called The Crime of Father Amaro which seems an odd variant as sin and crime are readily distinguished from each other.

The Sin of Father Amaro is a swingeing attack on the clergy of Portugal in the 19th.C. both individual members and institution. They are what their Lord and Master Jesus Christ would have called whited sepulchers using the Church as a cover for their sordid plotting, lusts and avarice. The ‘beatas’, that band of addled women oppressed by scruples and in thrall to the priests that batten on them in a spiritual vampirism meet at the house of a lady who is the the mistress of the Canon. This individual is also the mentor of a young priest who has been appointed to the local cathedral. De Queiroz’s description of the old ladies and the leech priests are like illustrations from Lombroso’s people to avoid supplement.

Dona Josepha, the canon’s sister, was also there. She was nick-named the Peeled Chestnut. She was a little withered creature, crookedly formed, with shrivelled, cider-coloured skin and a hissing voice; she lived in a state of perpetual irritation, her small eyes always alight, her nervous system eternally contracted, her whole attitude full of spleen. She was dreaded by all. The malignant Doctor Godhino called her the Central Station of the intrigues of Leiria.

In the woman’s house in which Fr. Amaro is staying is the 22 year old daughter; beautiful, fresh, virginal and prone to sentimental religiosity. Clearly in liturgical terms, a ‘suitable victim’.

Amaro is at first given charitable indulgence by the author; he has been, after all, press ganged into the clergy by a sponsor in the nobility who reared him and his sister. He is a fine vigourous handsome fellow whose health has markedly improved since his curacy in the mountains. The chief element of his cure was wrought by a facilitating shepherdess.

The leniency of the author becomes strained as he delineates beautifully the insidious seduction by the paroche of Amelia. From this point in our history we know how cult leaders can prey on the impressionable and devout. It is true that there are clergy who use the office to cloak their abuse but the author seems a misanthrope who finds no good in anyone, lay or clerical. This is perhaps a weakness in a purported realist. All the characters without exception are hypocrites, fools and knaves, the priests in particular combining all those traits in an odious melange. The progress towards tragedy is inevitable and the ebb and flow of the tide of guilt and ecstasy is closely observed.

First published in 1875, my translation by Nan Flanagan is from 1962. In 2002 Dedalus Books presented a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. They have issued more of her translations of Eca De Queiroz which I shall be looking out for.

Broad and Low

2011-11-02T11:52:00.003Z

Anton Rubenstein's lush opera on the same subject was also banned by censors who deemed it sacrilegious and stupid.

I read this in a Wikipedia article on Lermontov whose A Hero of Our Time I am starting to read in the translation by Wisdom & Murray(from Gutenberg Project). It made me laugh, out loud even, in an unironic fashion. But why? Do we need not access to the stupid as a matter of free speech. It ought not to be kept from us. I demand the right to be baffled.
Speaking of free speech one recalls that it was our President-elect Michael D. Higgins that abolished Section 31 which kept Sinn Fein off the airwaves in Ireland. How karmically appropriate that it was Martin McGuinness in a television debate that delivered the election to Michael D. when he sunk the front runner ,by all polls, Sean Gallagher. As with all Sinn Fein truth it was larded with lies but precisely timed to be too late in the campaign to counter.
Michael D. will be fine. I met him a couple of times at funerals. We had a chat and a laugh. I was recalling to him the previous funeral. Because Pat's woman was away in Europe at the time his sisters took charge of the laying out of his body and had entwined his hands in sturdy rosary beads. Pat affected to believe in fairies and paid out good money for an advanced course in TM; spiritually eclectic would be a fair description of his religious views. Many and wandering paths. Probably not Marian. I said to Michael D that Irish funerals had a tendency to fall into low comedy. We laughed and then we talked of his efforts to secure the release of Kenneth Bigley who was a hostage in Iraq. In the end Bigley was beheaded but I think that contacts and middlemen from Gaza that Michael D would have known were used to try to reach Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the leader of the group.

Somehow Pat's teeth were lost and his jaws had a Schopenhaurian chapfallen visage that gave him a peevish look as of one who had just noticed a dog pissing on his shoe. I liked Pat, God rest him, and I think that he would have enjoyed the broad and low element.

The Bridge in the Jungle by B Traven

2011-10-27T14:33:00.001+01:00

We love mysteries and even when the mystery is solved we are inclined to doubt the solution. The mystery of B Traven is such an open and we leave it open case.
B Traven - a mystery solved
is a fascinating documentary from 1978. It's the great old style B.B.C. Documentary with Robert Robinson in what looks suspiciously like a bush jacket or a safari shirt, some sort of intrepid tailoring anyway. He speaks slowly and projects a lot in foreign speak to a number of people who knew B Traven in his various avatars.

Other B Traven musing is to be had in a witty story by Rudolfo A. Anaya B Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca available complete at story

One of the people he meets is of course John Huston who filmed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Reading the book I find that famous piece of dialogue practically unchanged but put in the mouth of Curtin rather than Dobbs:

'All right,' Curtain shouted back, 'If you are the police where are your badges? Let's see them.
'Badges, to god dammed hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don't need badges, I don't have to show you any stinking badges, you god-dammed cabron and ching' tu madre.

I imagine that the reason that I don't see B Traven in any of the barrows that I frequent is that they have been read to bits. I found his novel The Bridge in the Jungle from 1928,(English publication in 1938,) in a Penguin 1975 reprint. B Traven covers are good. Here's a selection of them from
just seeds

I haven't quite finished The Treasure yet but I would say as a novel The Bridge is the better of the two. The construction is tighter, less yarny without side-trips here and there which the former is subject to. A hard bitten prospector who goes after what the jungle will provide, gems, gold,crocodile hides, medicinal plants, meets up with another gringo who is pump master in a village. There is to be a fiesta and while they wait for the music to begin one of the kids that have been hanging about the bridge goes missing. The fear is that he , though a good swimmer has fallen into the water and getting into difficulties may have drowned. So they drag and probe a little to satisfy the natural search methods that must first be utilised before the humility before the supernatural can come into play. An old Indian who knows the way of these things takes command and looks for a thick candle. Such candles are hard to find but someone offers what the old 'brujo' hardly hoped for.

'A consecrated one' the old Indian gasped. 'A consecrated one, a real consecrated one! Woman be thanked, that's exactly the very one I am looking for. Now we can't fail. Bring it! Quick! Hurry! Please let me have that candle, senora!'

He fixes the candle,a thick one, like the sort the about to be confirmed carry in procession, to the precise centre of a board and sets it off in the river the idea being that the calling to the light of the spirit of the dead child trapped in the river will bring the candle to hover over the spot. Here is where Koves/Traven brings to bear the ethnological lore that he gained from his expeditions to the jungles of Southern Mexico. But his respect is not that one might have for a reliable native informant, it is their dignity before the rigours of life that has him abandon observation and become immersed in the mystery.

He brings too that element of low comedy that ameliorates the funeral, Taintgonnarainnomo as suitable music for the ragged process to the grave. Which, really, it is.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

2011-10-23T12:03:00.001+01:00

Going by the author information in the front of the book there is some congruence between the life of the author Richard Yates and the protagonist of Revolutionary Road. They are of a similar age, war experience, job experience. Whether the picture window was part of the vista I don’t know but in the large corporation , Remington Rand, where he worked, there would be plenty of suburbia to go around.

The focus of the book is on the Wheeler family, Frank & April parents, Jennifer and Michael the children up in Connecticut. That perennial American stranger, the absent father, is in both the Wheelers lives. The novel opens with an amateur drama production of Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest. Being a Googleamus I find that it is a sort of key or ‘clef’ if you will. (from the play)

Gabby (undeterred): We could go to France, and you’d show me everything, all the cathedrals and the art—and explain everything. And you wouldn’t have to marry me, Alan. We’d just live in sin and have one hell of a time.

Squier: That’s a startling proposal, Gabrielle. I hadn’t expected to receive anything like it in this desert….

Gabby: Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?

Also foundmarin

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, April.

Both the Wheelers are in the Holdenesque argot of the era (1955) phonies, actors in search of a character or something. The little grace notes of observation honed by empirical acquaintance are delicate. Frank Wheeler drinks dry sherry on a Sunday. It is I suppose almost Calvinist after the hard liquor of the week and slightly brittle and sophisticated. Not that they are narcissistic, Narcissus had an image that he loved, they are looking for one that someone else can love.

I won’t say anything about the plot. Period note: She decamps to the couch. Let’s not be too snotty about Suburbia, how do you think you got to College, punk. This is a very fine novel by someone I had never heard of. It is one I will reread.

Causality in Advaita

2011-10-21T13:23:00.002+01:00

What happens when you have a restricted diet of examples? Ontological malnutrition no less. Such is the ‘clay and vessels’ of Shankaracarya which has become the standard paradigm of causation in Advaita. The problem is simply stated. Material causality is taken as the paradigm case of causality. Clay is the material cause of a clay vessel of which the pot, dish, plate etc is the effect. Gold is the material cause of rings, bangles, necklaces etc. They are its effects. That particular line of thinking is further developed into reflections on Brahman and what is real but for a start let me focus on the causality issue.

The westerner has an advantage here of having Magister Aristotle as a pedagogue telling him that causality has four aspects to it, material, efficient, formal and final. He reminds us that potency is not act. A lump of clay left there will not transform itself into a vessel just because it can so be transformed. An efficient cause is required for that. The formal cause of the particular vessel will be the standard type that is required for whatever function is desired. Form follows function as is said. The actual material as such does not effect anything in a causal sense but it must of course be a suitable material. It is therefore not correct to speak of Material Cause and its Effect as though the latter flowed from the former. The material cause is not an actuating principle on its own.

Both material and formal elements are intrinsic to the effect as existing ie. this particular plate, that particular pot. Neither element on its own is an adequate explanation for the particular existent. The extrinsic causes of the the particular existent or effect are the efficient and final causes.

In the Thomist manual by Coffey Ontlogy the Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding is put succintly:
Ontology

In what does the positive causal influence of a material cause consist? How does it contribute positively to the actualization of the composite reality of which it is the material cause? It recieves and unites with the form which is educed from its potentiality by the action of efficient causes, and thus contributes to the generation of the concrete, composite, individual reality.

With that background limned in the consideration of the text from the Chandogya Upanishad VI.i.4 will be in a separate post:

By knowing a single lump of clay, everything that is made of clay would become known. A modification begins with speech, it is a (mere) name. The clay alone is true i.e. real.

Karma and Evolution

2011-10-18T22:15:00.002+01:00

Shankaracarya (788-820 A.D) of course had no idea of Darwinian evolution. Extracting the implication of the doctrine of karma he declares that the transmigratory state has no beginning. Rebirth is on the basis of karma so there will always have to be prior births for the whole machinery to operate, it can’t just suddenly start up. In reply to an objection :

From Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.i.35

It is only after creation that results of work, depending on the diversification into bodies etc., could be possible by depending on the result of work........

Reply:

That is no defect, since the transmigratory state has no beginning, This defect would have arisen if transmigration had a beginning. But if that state had no beginning, there is nothing contradictory for the fruits of work and the variety in creation to ac t as cause and effect of each other on the analogy of the seed and the sprout.

In that view of the cosmos man and all the species were always there. It’s interesting that some Hindus find themselves aligned with Christian fundamentalists in the denial of evolution. Others seem not to have a coherent position on the matter. Probably they are waiting for some authoritative pronouncement.

De Quincey, Coleridge and Yeats meet the Keswick carrier.

2011-10-15T23:16:00.004+01:00

De Quincey and Wordsworth had gone out to meet the carrier from Keswick (Lake District) bearing newspapers with the latest reports of the war in Spain. It was a clear night and Wordsworth stretched himself upon the ground and had an experience which he related to De Quincey:

"I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if under any circumstances, the
attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of
steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly
relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection
of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known
under other circumstances.Just now my ear was placed upon the stretch, in order to catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon the lake of Wythburn from the Keswick road; at the very instant when I raised my head from the ground, in final abandonement of hope for this night, at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy brightness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have arrested me under any other circumstances".

Here you have the perfect example of the natural movement from the one-pointed state (ekgratha) to the expanded state of consciousness. This is a standard practice in meditation and it occurs spontaneously and is the more effective the greater the disjunction.

The embowered Coleridge, (from) This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison

A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has soothed me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy,

Yeats's movement is from a rapt examination to a release into a state of expansion that burns off the fogs of yea and nay. He writes:

At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy.... Perhaps I am sitting in some crowed restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them; everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs, I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended.

(from Mythologies)

Vacillilation, IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blesséd and could bless.

More on A.E. Coppard from V.S. Pritchett and Frank O'Connor.

2011-10-14T08:08:00.001+01:00

Frank O’Connor and V.S. Pritchett speak highly of Coppard and they are both of them masters of the short story. There’s peer review. Pritchett talks about him in an interview from 1985. I came across it looking for Irish influence in the work of Coppard. Irish characters crop up and theres a Celtic aspect. He was part of a group called the New Elizabethans in Oxford along with W.B.Yeats The universal element in folk stories which Lady Gregory and Yeats were discovering and recording seemed to grasp that chthonic power which eluded the over elaborate productions of the modern mind. James Stephens comes to mind as one tuned to the same station.

B.F.: I'd like to ask a little more about the first short stories you read. You said that in Dublin you read D.H. Lawrence and Joyce's Dubliners.

V.S.P.: Yes... yes, I read them, and I also read an English writer who is now rather forgotten but who was an extremely gifted writer of stories, in a very small compass, a man called A.E. Coppard. I admired his stories enormously. And in fact I used to know him, when I was living in the country. He was a nearby neighbour. And he was a very strange man; he was a warehouse‑man's clerk or something like that who had decided to be a writer, so he had gone out and lived in a shed in the woods in Buckinghamshire, entirely on his own, with no sanitation and his drinking water from a well, in a shallow well in the earth. And he was a natural perfectly spontaneous man, not muddle‑headed he was absolutely clear‑headed. I don't think he had any views about life in general, any kind of intellect, but he had a marvellous appreciation of the instant; he could describe a squirrel very well, he could describe a game‑keeper, he could describe a couple of old farmers arguing about whether, beef is better than veal to eat, or what pork is like, and things like that. He had a great decorative sense of comedy. He was unfortunately, when I look back upon it, a rather folkish writer; he came at a period when the peasantry were dead really and they only existed in pockets in England, in little places, and their traditional customs by that time had almost gone. It was when suburbia spread out and the countryside died. That curious old England went out. Another writer who was very good, in the same way, in his early stories, who came later, was H.E. Bates. He wrote very well, very good English, had a good style, but was also brief.

from Journal of the Short Story
journal of the short story

I can see where the folkish which has a disparaging tone could come from. There is a narrative quickness, a blending of worlds, a suspension of ordinary judgment of the probable and the possible, beggars, pilgrims and beautiful shy girls. Pritchett is a master of penny plain truth, Coppard will do you a nice tuppence coloured and thrupence de luxe. Can’t do better than that guv’. What you often get is a fragment like the flow of a stream around a rock where there is an order wrought by the nature of all the elements in the event but this order is never repeated.

Frank O’Connor in The Paris Review 1957 has this to say (

Yesterday I was finishing off a piece about my friend A. E. Coppard, the greatest of all the English storytellers, who died about a fortnight ago. I was describing the way Coppard must have written these stories, going around with a notebook, recording what the lighting looked like, what that house looked like, and all the time using metaphor to suggest it to himself, “The road looked like a mad serpent going up the hill,” or something of the kind, and, “She said so-and-so, and the man in the pub said something else.” After he had written them all out, he must have got the outline of his story, and he’d start working in all the details

paris review

A.E. Coppard

2011-10-13T00:05:00.002+01:00

Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half done - like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before you’re anything but a fool.

(from Simple Simon by A.E. Coppard)

This is from a short story collection, Black Dog by A.E. Coppard (1878 -1957) first published in 1923 then issued in the pucca ‘Travellers’ Library’format put out by Jonathan Cape in 1926, reprinted in 1926, 28, 29, 51, 57. My copy looks like it came out of a box in the back of a warehouse. Nice 7“ x 5“ cloth that can slip into the pocket of your coat, print beautifully struck. No.2 in the series. I also have Adam and Eve and Pinch Me in the same format, also republished several times. Penguin brought out a selection in 1972, Dusky Ruth and Other Stories from his various collections. It has a short introductions by Doris Lessing who is a big fan. By the bye is Doris Lessing the worst writer in English ever to have won the Nobel Prize?

The Penguin selection mostly stays clear of the mystical, magical, fabulous stories which are a distinct element in his work. In these times we don’t Adam and Eve it. In that title story Adam and Eve and Pinch Me a man travels in his astral body through his house and thinks that he does it in his corporeal form. There’s a wonderful flowing exalted sense conveyed by the writing and at the same time the stress of the man who tries to communicate with the others who are in a different plane but whether that plane is this sublunar one is not quite clear.

There was Bond (the gardener) tinkering about with some plants a dozen yards in front of him. Suddenly his three children came round from the other side of the house, the youngest boy leading them, carrying in his hand a small sword which was made, not of steel, but of some more brightly shining material; indeed it seemed at one moment to be of gold, and then again of flame, transmuting everything in its neighbourhood into the likeness of flame, the hair of the little girl Eve, a part of Adam’s tunic; and the fingers of the boy Gabriel as he held the sword were like pale tongues of fire.

These volumes are what I call ‘barrowed’ treasure. Never having heard of him I could only find them there. Due a revival.

PS: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is available to download from Internet Archive A&E and Pinch Me with some extra stories compared to British Edition.

Praxis and Doctrine

2011-10-10T11:58:00.006+01:00

It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to pull it all into a phrase I say 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life.

Yeats wrote this in a letter some days before he died. There is a truth in it that surpasses the theological wittering about Praxis and Doctrine. The meanings that are mined out of the ground of Religion or Yoga, words which have union as their root, are finally abstractions. Even the eternal truths of mathematics are abstractionst according to Bergson who held that lived duration, is real. Duration is merely gestured towards by a recognition of the paradoxes generated by conventional truth. We can always disagree about the meanings that we take out of stated doctrine but the embodied reality comes out of a fundamental union. This is implicit even in the theological acceptance of the basis of doctrine.

However, in the event that the Church might not yet have enunciated a decision, consequent to the conclusions of some universal council, the principles of ecumenicity, antiquity and agreement are to be invoked. In other words, the reliable standard for orthodoxy must be what has been believed in the Church everywhere, always and by all.

(from Cardinal John Henry Newman and the development of doctrine by Fr. Peter Waters)
http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1998/aug1998p10_553.html

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys

2011-10-09T19:36:00.004+01:00

At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London, and divine-diabolic source of the First Cause of all life.

Is this the oddest and yet quite truthful start to a novel that has ever been written? Scholiasts of recurring heresies will note the Gnostic element but that is but a facet of the ingredients in the cauldron kept bubbling with clippings from The Thorn. To say that it is complex and a worthy proposal in its anfractuosities as a special subject on Mastermind would be to claim that a clock that builds new cogs as required and is lubricated by the best butter is nevertheless a sure chronometer. Nay sir, this novel includes history and concludes it.

There are 1120 pages in all, don't take less, and it would not be giving too much away to say that The End is not a conventional marker but a part of the novel. This requires strategy. Mine is baptism by immersion. Simply allow each paragraph to draw you on to the next and soon you will be attuned to its, and here I doff my cap step back and with a deep bow and flourish say, its cosmic vibrations.

Mohanty on Advaita

2011-10-08T23:51:00.003+01:00

I had always taken the aporia of awareness i.e. how the world is somehow in our consciousness as it is, in its reality, as my fundamental orientation. I then moved from that towards an attempt to come to grips with the consciousness itself. One redaction of the problem is that the mental state is transparent, in a sense we see 'through' the mental experience directly to the object. That has an attraction. It is simple but its simplicity evades the multitude of appearances that we are supposed to see through. The unity and singularity of the object must be assumed and therefore we have to expand our account to explain that unity. We know that the object has an identity. How?

Advaita moves in the direction of that expansion but it first begins with an exploration of consciousness as such. The intentionality of consciousness is what strikes one first. If we are not thinking about something it won't be in our minds. If we are not paying attention then we will not take in what is occurring in our physical presence. What we are aware of is a selection. We know what is in our minds. In all modes of consciousness this is known to us immediately without the intermediation of an ego. J.N. Mohanty puts it well in his paper on Consciousness and Knowledge in Indian Philosophy in the journal Philosophy East and West, Vol.29, No.1(jan.'79).

....how can two such things be together, that is, how can pure self-revealing consciousness, whose essence is exhausted by this self-revealing character be also the intentional empirical consciousness, which is of an object and belongs to a subject? Intrinsically, consciousness is objectless and subjectless; owing to avidya, it appears to be of an object and as belonging to a subject. Again avidya is the source of intentionality.

This approach solves the question of whether it is a native or primitive faith that there is an identity of some sort between what is in our minds and the actual object that existed before we turned the light of consciousness on it. Both subject and object arise from the split in primal consciousness. They implicate each other.

Suspicion

2011-10-08T08:47:00.001+01:00

Have you noticed that slightly irritating academic locution ‘I suspect’ cropping up a bit or is it just me? Those illative antennae are waving again. Is this a manifestation of timid academic soul, a hedging of bets against positions which are edgy and windswept where a strong gust might pitch you into an abyss of scepticism or radical doubt? Unless you inhabit a position how are you going to feel the force of it? Being a charitable person I reject as unfounded this suspicion as condescension or as a pat on the head, a letting down gently into the pit of the unfounded, the dubious, the inchoate or as a wrinkle on the brow of bland certainty.

Take it down town and book it.

ME CHEETA, the autobiography (as told to James Lever)

2011-10-07T10:25:00.002+01:00

James Lever admits that in the middle of the writing of a previous novel that was too beautiful to let go off as though the adhesions would tear too much of his soul away and leave him raw and unable to efface the world; he read Infinite Jest and remained impaled on his couch abandoned to the despair of perfection. But then an editor gave him a deadline and an idea - write the biography of an animal star as though by that animal. Thereby Me Cheeta was born. At first Lever was kept from the limelight, you know what stars are, till it finally leaked out that it was an ‘as told to’ James Lever.

It’s a classic and I’m going to go out on a limb here (don’t bounce up and down) and say that it moves into the region of greatness. No, no, I mean it,Cheeta’s a wonderful person and a beautiful human ape. There’s the standard spoof of the genre which is itself classical Yiddish self-deprecation allied with sprinkles of bombast and comfort pleat ego. Cheeta sees the goings on of the stars and is a favoured guest at their parties with many a salacious aside but there is a genuine pathos in his worship of alpha male Johnny Weismuller. He sees but he doesn’t get the meaning of what his heroes do, a bit like us, and he misses the obnoxiousness of Niven and Flynn and their pranks. His original capture he understands as a rescue from the jungle which is a dangerous place for animals.

You liked Black Beauty you’ll love this. It will touch your heart.

Gissing and The Nether World

2011-10-05T16:04:00.001+01:00

George Orwell might have written the biography of George Gissing. He was asked to do so by a publisher in 1946 but he was on his way to the island of Jura and so had to decline the offer. Instead he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four which is a decent swap. Orwell was born in 1903 the same year that Gissing died and they both lived to the age of 46 each succumbing finally to lung disease. I am relying here on the biography George Gissing: A Life by Paul Delany. Therein the point is made that whereas Orwell took to tramping to research his books on poverty, Gissing merely walked the streets and visited the workshops of Clerkenwell to do research for his novel The Nether World but it could also be maintained that Gissing had no need of sentimental immersion as he had just buried his first wife Nell two weeks before starting that novel. He had first met and fallen in love with her when he was a brilliant young student and she a young prostitute. Though he, through the multiple scholarships which he had won, was well off, for a student, still that was not enough to keep her off the streets and he began to steal from his fellows at Owens College (later Manchester University). The month in goal that he received for his crime was the beginning of his real research into the nether world. Expelled from college in disgrace he went to America that place of dubious sanctuary but when he came back after a year took up with Nell again. His plan was to turn her into a ladylike companion but she kept up with her trade and her drinking throughout their marriage. Delany suggests that she infected him with syphilis, the disease that finally killed her and may have exacerbated the weakness of his lungs.

There are many of us who have been scorched by the fire of a fatal relationship but have come out the other side with a here be dragons map engramatically engraved on our brains . Gissing continued to explore that territory. What he needed was a nice intelligent work-girl that he could mould to a suitable companion. His second wife went mad and fought with the servants.

By being expelled from Owens College he had lost his chance to rise in the world. He later wrote in a letter:

The life of a Fellow at Oxford or Cambridge is, I should think, almost ideal. He has his man-servant, his meals either in private or at the public table, an atmosphere of culture and peace.

The way that the clever student can con his lessons well and deliver them back in the same diction as the professor, that sincere flattery that brings academic honour, could be the very mimesis that hobbles his style. It’s not there all the time, that constraint that makes him seem like a foreigner that was attempting the speech of a class always beyond him and that he could never be sure he was getting right. There is a concept of what is ‘writerly’ that stifles the life of his prose sometimes but I do not deny that this may be a function of his hurry. He began the novel on 19th.of March and finished it on the 18th. of July. In our more leisurely days that would probably be the time allotted for a first very rough draft .

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

2011-10-02T22:56:00.000+01:00

I was watching this arts show, last year or the year before, The View, which ought to be called The Dim View because nobody ever likes anything much. Then a terrible and unprecedented thing happened; one after the other they agreed that Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It was just very good. This is to be read. And they were right. There's that clear and distinct prose that allows the occasional unstressed effect to drop you through the story levels like a fast lift. In Travis. B. Chet Moran who through a touch of polio and horse wrangling accidents has a limp.

His father drove him to Great Falls, where the doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee. From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.

His gait is almost a mirror of his mind. He has got into the way of taking on winter ranch minding jobs in Montana which he likes but he senses that he is getting too solitary.

He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.

For a while he takes an office job in Billings but he realizes that his hip is not up to all that sitting around so again he takes a winter feeding job.

He made it through Christmas, with packages and letters from his mother, but in January he got afraid of himself again. The fear was not particular. It began as a buzzing feeling around his spine, a restlessness without a specific aim.

He's about 21, too young to be talking to his horse so he goes into town and cruises around for some pinochle action or something. There are lights on at the school and people going in so he joins them. He signs up for a class on school law. Beth Travis a young lawyer is giving the class. He talks to her after the class and thus a sort of relationship begins which is complicated by the fact that she has to drive back to the town where she has her day job, a nine and one half hour trip.

He wondered how he might court a girl who was older, and a lawyer, a girl who lived clear across the state and couldn't think about anything but that distance. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, but it wasn't the restlessness he had felt before.

Maloy has the ability to get into the mind of the young man. She's a friendly anima. Travis. B. goes on to its denouement with that accumulation of detail that builds a believable world.

Only a couple of the stories in the collection of 11 drop below a very high standard. If you like the short story form especially the American short story where they do what Ernie said they should, leave something out that only the author knows is left out, this is a treat.

Lytton Strachey

2011-09-30T13:59:00.004+01:00

It takes Basil Willey in Nineteenth Studies to put us right about Lytton Strachey’s scalpel job on Thomas Arnold in his Eminent Victorians. He does not deny that it is exquisitely done with the contrast of high minded quandry and banal fact that leads to bathos. Arnold’s earnest wresting with evil is followed by:

His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robe of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of imposing vigour; and his head, set decisively upon the collar, stock and bands of ecclesiastical tradition, clearly belonged to a person of eminence.

Strachey’s chum Virginia Woolf once described James Joyce as underbred. We must therefore accept that she might have considered Lytton overbred or in any case some sort of genetic cul-de-sac that it would be unsafe to breed from should he have been so inclined. The character of St. John Hirst in The Voyage Out is said to be modelled on him. “There’s Hirst...........And he’s as ugly as sin”

Strachey’s way with Thomas Carlyle in a shorter piece collected in Portraits in Literature is similarly deflationary, prophetic fire reduced to a fart in a biscuit tin.

He had higher views: surely he would be remembered as a prophet. And no doubt he had many of the qualifications for that profession - a loud voice, a bold face and a bad temper. But unfortunately there was one essential characteristic that he lacked - he was not dishonoured in his own country. Instead of being put into a pit and covered with opprobrium, he made a comfortable income , was supplied by Mrs. Carlyle with everything that he wanted, and was the favourite guest at Lady Ashburton’s fashionable parties. Prophecies, in such circumstances, however voluminous and disagreeable they may be, are apt to have something wrong with them. And in any case, who remembers prophets? Isaiah and Jeremiah, no doubt have gained a certain reputation; but then Isaiah and Jeremiah have had the extraordinary good fortune to be translated into English by a committee of English Bishops.

The loss to English literature of Jane Welsh is blamed on the Sage of Chelsea. No, Lytton, no, this must be the easiest sum ever presented to the felicific calculus. The misery of two people was obviated by them marrying each other.
Finally one must judge Strachey to be an unreliable critic though a wonderful stylist with an accurate but not deadly sting. His major works are available on the Gutenberg Project.

Marianne Dashwood

2011-09-29T06:50:00.000+01:00

They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Cole from The Sixth Sense.

Finding value at the heart of reality. It is a truth that we create our own worlds, up to a point. In noticing what we notice when not under threat there is implicit a scale of valuing. The altering of these constructions is a favourite theme of Jane Austen's. The heroine at the end of the novel has a new world, a more 'real' world. It is more real in that it is more complete, the blank or missed bit is now present. In 'Sense and Sensibility' the modern reader must regret to a degree the punishment of Marianne, it seems too comprehensive and she appears to me at least to be too reduced, too broken to be put together without permanent disability. That is all too often life, sigh!

In the Year of Jubilee

2011-09-26T23:28:00.000+01:00

In The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy chronicled the upper middle classes for the lower middle brow reader. The opening of the novel is set in 1886 which is one year before the jubilee of Queen Victoria. In the Year of Jubilee George Gissing writes about the lower middle classes. His audience is perhaps upper middle brow. There is no chance whatever that his work will be turned into a superior soap to beguile the winter schedule with a Christmas episode.

The close attention to class and the minute division in those classes that are opaque to the outsider is a theme of Gissing’s. In general his people are ill fed, ill housed and ministered to by mutinous servants. When introduced in the novel they are sketched in like types from a Lombroso catalogue.

A younger girl of much slighter build with a frisky gait, a jaunty pose of the head, pretty, but thin-featured and shallow-eyed; a long neck, no chin to speak of , a low forehead with the hair of washed-out flaxen fluffed all over it.

Due to the new universal education they, the 3 French sisters, are able to read but to what end.

But on tables and chairs lay scattered a multitude of papers, illustrated weeklies, journals of society, cheap miscellaneous penny novelettes and the like.

The 3 are living in De Crespigny Park, more genteel than their previous residence on the Camberwell Road. The husband of the eldest Ada is Arthur Peachey who is a leading light in a manufactory dedicated to disinfectant. Their deceased builder father left them some money.

Beatrice and Fanny had learnt to support themselves, Beatrice in the postal service, and Fanny, sweet blossom! by mingling her fragrance with that of a florist’s shop in Brixton; but on their fathers death both forsook their employment and came to live with Mrs. Peachey.

The other family in the novel are the Lords, Stephen the father, Nancy and Horace the children. Fanny French has designs on Horace whom she reckon will come in for half of the plunder when the old boy dies. He is a dealer in pianos, a lucrative trade when every parlour that fancied itself had to have one.

One thing about Gissing; if you want to know how people lived when the Empire straddled the globe and the Old Queen reigned he’s your man. Interiors, food, hairstyles, dress both male and female he covers everything with special attention to the shoddy and the tawdry. He’s much the better writer than Galsworthy in the rendering of texture. His depiction of the squalid and evil conditions of Victorian England distorting the lives of the masses is excellent. His women are fell creatures, his men mostly hapless. All his works are on Gutenberg. Recommended: New Grub Street, The Odd Women. I am at present reading The Nether World about life in the tenements. Not many jokes.

The Forsyte Saga

2011-09-23T13:17:00.000+01:00

I’ve just finished reading The Man of Property by John Galsworthy being the first volume of The Forsyte Saga. Absolutely first rate as one of his characters might think but not say, after all it doesn’t do to be too enthusiastic. The Forsytes give nothing away; they amass, they collect and finally surrender only to take a profit. When the novel opens it is 1886 just before the Jubilee Year of 1887 and the family meet up for the engagement party of June Forsyte at the house of her Grandfather Jolyon. His brothers and sisters with all their children are there. The family saddle of mutton is also there, for they love succulent, simple and ample food, floury potatoes and the gourmand brother Swithin drinks champagne by the pint. Collectively they live in those areas like Park Lane and Kensington where property values are on the rise and their family conversations are like moves in real monopoly.

Soames Forsyte son of James the brother of old Jolyon is married to the beautiful Irene. They are not happy and there is talk of separate bedrooms. She has brought nothing to the marriage but her beauty which is in itself an indication of a lack of judgment on his part. Her father was a professor, not much money in that, and after the death of her mother he remarried a much younger woman. The step-mother was anxious to have Irene off her hands and enhance her own chances. Pertinacious Soames wore her down after several refusals. They have been married for 3 years and she is now about 25. He is 32 or so and his name is in the style and title of a firm of solicitors.

It’s an interesting thing how the intentions of the author often fail to coincide with the depiction of his character. Irene suffers from what we can today easily recognise as Dickens disease. Under that sanctified plaster we wonder whether there is functional plumbing. A little thought suffices to reassure ourselves when we recollect that the refined love of the best of everything has been traded for conjugal rights with a man that physically repelled her even in her days of chaste courtship.

But I will say no more; these short reports are merely an incitement to read. Find it on Gutenberg Project (Complete Saga)http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4397

Room by Emma Donohue

2011-09-18T18:01:00.000+01:00

Emma Donnohue's Room is not a book that I normally would have read being allergic to Booker hype but I was staying in a house that had a copy so I took it up. I hardly left it down until it was read. It is told from the perspective of Jack a just 5 year old and the setting is that of a garden shed in which he and his mother are the captives of a man that is referred to as Old Nick. Jack has been born into captivity and to him the TV which they have is no more than images from the dream time with no connection to any free reality. Ma knows that from now on this reality must be adjusted and the real nature of their predicament made clear so she begins to raise that magical diaphane on the misty neverland of Dora the Explorer.

It seems to me that Donohue has brought us into a world that does not bear thinking about, one of profound horror and anxiety as we jog along in the banality of evil hoping that they may somehow escape and that their captor will in turn get a room of his own in the big house. Good read.

Weighting for the Barbarians

2011-09-16T14:12:00.000+01:00

So I finished Waiting for the Barbarians and I've been thinking about it. The first thing that occurred to me was that in an age of muskets and bows, empire and Barbarian horde, in a time of danger, no god is invoked. When I looked to check it struck me that god is all through it in the form of god's own tense, the nunc-stans of the continuous present. That this hadn't been apparent to me before because I normally can't abide the intrusiveness of it, that buttonholing, is an indication of the skill of the writing. So if God is in the grammar, where's the devil? In the diction, Mo.

The magistrate narrator is a weighing scales. The sentences are perfectly weighted to the dynamic of the action, he is balanced between the meddling Empire and the nomadic Barbarians. His attachment to a Barbarian girl who has been partially blinded and lamed by the emissaries from the centre causes the pointer to tilt in the direction of folly. He mounts an expedition to return the girl to her people.

Henry James's Big Ask

2011-09-05T13:12:00.000+01:00

I am now it seems at the stage in the bog of The Golden Bowl where I think I previously lost my wellingtons some 30 years or more ago. Does ones taste change so little or is it that the vast indetermination and fog grows so thick that the continent that is Henry James is cut off. There are so many ‘big asks’. The chief one is that an American who is a billionaire by 47 simmered in the ruthless stews of the Gilded Age would buy a prince in a poke. This Adam is a figure of great wealth sanitized by benevolence, a Carnegie or Mellon or Beattie. James was insulated from ‘getting and spending’ by grandfather’s money. This patriarch was Scots Irish, an Ulster Presbyterian from Cavan.. The Cavanman is reputed to eat his dinner from an open drawer in readiness for unexpected callers. Whether that elder endowed anything or not we can be grateful that he established a line that produced the other James boys.

The other novel I’m reading might be said to be an antidote - Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It is crisp, precise, direct although so far there is no indication whether the Barbarians or the Colonists are generic or specific to a time and place. Muskets are mentioned and torture is routine. It is realism but not of the coarse sort. Distance makes types and that’s fine because when you move closer they become individuals though so far they have remained unnamed.

Transmission of Wisdom

2011-08-09T12:32:00.000+01:00

Poetry is a medium that is suited to the transmission of wisdom which is the aim of philosophy. Compression and densification of meaning is its primary mode. The full range of reference of the word is used and the metrical form makes it memorable so that dwelling in the the poem is made easy. This dwelling is necessary for the meaning in all its complexity to emerge. Moreover the alien rule of metre forces the mind away from the economy of effort which is cliché and the new way of saying something is the mother of new thinking.

cf. Four Quartets by T.S.Eliot

Blessing

2011-08-06T11:52:00.000+01:00

What goes around comes around. What does that mean? Is it a reference to moral mechanism, the seeking of balance in the account, the perfect lack of entropy in the karmic?

This happened in India on the ashram of X. Jerry got a letter from his mother which he read and then threw in the wastepaper basket that was on the veranda where he was sleeping. These baskets were cleared away regularly by the sweepers. On the following day Jerry bought some oranges from a fruit seller in the market which were carefully wrapped up individually. It is only when he gets back and unwraps the fruit that he notices the wrapping is with the pages of his mother's letter. Nothing is wasted.

As I wrote in my last post I laughed to think that I'd missed the opportunity to give a blessing on our walk in the hills. Last week we were walking in the same area on a bog and forestry road. The very top of the hill for miles is a raised bog. In Ireland bogs are found on the heights not in the hollows. Walking up we met a tall man of the age of second reason, of review. He looked at me closely . M. told me later that he said in a soft voice 'God bless you all'. This is not commonplace in Ireland any more though I will grant that there are recusants.

God bless you all.

A Funny Thing happened on the Way to the Bog.

2011-07-08T01:05:00.001+01:00

Just past the last house on the bog road we parked the car and got out for a walk. My wife and daughter marched on ahead of me in seven league mode and I dawdled behind soon losing sight of them on the twisty road. The boreen was only wide enough for a single car and an alert pedestrian. Who's rushing? The steep banks are thick with heather, ferns, woodbine, hazel and dusky ringlets abound like flying shadows. Hanging on a tall fern what do I see only a rosary beads of an unusual construction, made with brown nylon cord with knots around the Our Fathers and the Hail Marys loose together. Somebody must have dropped this as they were out walking I thought. It looks a few beads short. To check I held it up and was counting the beads when I suddenly became aware of the shadow of a car behind me. (I am a little deaf) Turning around still holding the beads up, I saw the couple in the car smiling in a good humoured way as though they had caught me in a Franciscan moment.

Later we had a good laugh about this. I said:
- I missed my opportunity to give them a blessing, wearing a black top I looked like a priest at home on holidays from the missions in Africa or the Far East, a bit mad.

Upamana

2011-07-01T01:15:00.000+01:00

To begin with I think it is worth while quoting the entire treatment of the valid means of knowledge (pramana) knows as upamana as given in the locus classicus of Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra who seems to have flourished in the 17th. Century. It will be noted just how short a treatment is given of what I hope to show is an extremely important pramana.

Now comparison is being described. The instrument of the valid knowledge of similarity is comparison. For instance a man who has seen a cow's form in cities and has gone to a forest, where his eyes have come in contact with a gayal (gavaya - bos gaurus) has the cognition, "This thing is like a cow". Then he has the conviction, "My cow is like this." Here by a process of agreement and difference, the knowledge of the likeness of a cow which exists in a gayal is the instrument, and the knowledge of that likeness of a gayal which exists in a cow is the result.

this is not possible through perception, for then the cow's form is not in contact with the eyes. Nor is it possible through inference, for that likeness of a cow which exists in a gayal cannot be the sign (reason) for inferring the likeness of a gayal in a cow. Nor can it be urged that this is possible through the following inference:

My cow is like this gayal.
Because it corresponds to its likeness existing in a gayal.
That which corresponds to its likeness existing in a thing is like the latter.

As Caitra, who corresponds to his likeness existing in Maitra, is like him.

For even without this sort of inference, the cognition, "My cow is like this," is a matter of common experience, and has also the apperception, "I am comparing the two,". Hence comparison is a distinct means of knowledge.

The first thing that must be remarked is the insistence that upamana is a distinct means of knowledge which is to say that it cannot be reduced to anything more basic or primitive. It thus takes its place along with the others such as Perception and Inference. There are 6 in all accepted within the philosophical system known as Advaitic Vedanta. It would take us too far out of our way to go into any detail about the rest of them though later I may offer a note on anupalabadhi or non-apprehension of existence.

Let me first make the point that perhaps 'comparison' may not be quite the apposite word in relation to this means of knowledge. I will be staying with the canonical example of the gayal for the moment. When the cow is seen in the gayal where is there what we would strictly in English call a comparison? When one speaks of comparison one generally requires that there be two things, a eye-witness description and a known individual. The one is compared to the other and a match is declared or a partial match or a mismatch. This seeing of the cow in the gayal seems to me to more like the successful deployment of the concept 'cow'. Our having the concept 'cow' allows us to 'see' the cow in the gayal. There is no comparison as such, having the concept is what enables us to do this, to have this recognition so to speak. For this basic reason I would stay with the term upamana to avoid what I think is an erroneous identification with the notion of comparison.

In Mental Acts Peter Geach speaks of concepts as capacities exercised in acts of judgement. Does exercising the concept just involve 'seeing' the cow in the gayal? Is the notion of comparison a misunderstanding that the translation of upamana underlines? We can construe what we have done as comparison only after the fact. That is what we must be doing we say to ourselves presenting an analysis that makes sense to us. It makes sense to us because of the inherent hankering after empiricist explanations. Evidence is required even if we have to make it up to have a likely story.

Why do we find it hard to accept that there things that we can do, that there are powers we just have and concept acquisition and concept utilisation are those sort of powers or they are perhaps a single power of double aspect. Having the concept 'white' means among other things seeing it in milk and chalk. No comparisons needed.

I am I have to admit ignorant of later speculation about pramanas and specifically this one amongst that school known as the New Logicians (Navya Nyaya) in its later phase. The perennial focus on the gavaya (bos gaurus) by commentators in general leads me to think that the general understanding of what was at issue was not clear. The canonical example is often a lifebuoy to cling to in a sea of incomprehension. My own speculations may be a matter of my own fancy and no better.

Note to a Rationalist

2011-06-12T11:00:00.000+01:00

There are things that are not true and you shouldn't believe them. One of these things would be the FSM. It's not any sort of explanation for the phenomena that you could rationally infer to, it makes no sense, it does not connect in any way to the sorts of explanations that make up your rational apparatus. To assimilate the FSM to a deity is merely rationalist bluster, sanctified by usage. Are there other things that you, Benjamin, shouldn't believe but are perhaps true? I would say yes, namely the things that do not cohere with the corpus rationalis that you have, from a boy, created. These might be tales related in The Varieties of Religious Experience that do not enter into what makes sense to you. They are not live options, they are dead options or they perhaps reside in that dim Sheol of the indeterminate couldn't care less. Obviously on your best day you recognise that you are not the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not that they are not.

Waiting for Godot

2011-06-02T05:39:00.001+01:00

I have always felt that Dawkins was on the ‘probable’ bus because it was heading towards the terminus of science and the safe haven of the empirical. By affecting to hold this position he could insist that the likelihood of evidence emerging for the existence of God was vanishingly small. Agnosis still falls within the precinct of gnosis, the conceptual dyad still stands if the question remains open.

Grayling impugns this stance by saying that such ‘evidence’ could never come to pass, nothing would ever serve to prove the existence of God. In effect evidence that could never become manifest is not evidence at all. The agnostic then is a confused atheist that wants a firm talking to. It's the old 'tooth fairy' argument.

This position of Grayling’s is a 'buck up man, stop being windy' retort to a Dawkins stance. It is to be contrasted to the apophatic mystical. God in whom we live, move and have our being is not an object of empirical observation, we will not stumble on it while looking for the tv remote.

The agnostic stance may be a valid position emotionally but faulty from a purely intellectual point of view. People like to keep their options open. This is why paint shops sell testers. However thinking it through, looking for definitive evidence is to have failed to appreciate what the entity in question is. Something that can be settled empirically even though there is a remote possibility of that eventuality ever coming to pass is not adequate to any serious concept of God. That we do not know is true but that we cannot know is also true. We cannot know because the intellectual equipment is not adequate to that purported object. If God is not an object he/she/it cannot be known. Therefore without some sort of realisation of God however limited that might be, the atheistic position is to this believer the intellectually respectable one. Is Grayling that sort of atheist? He has taken a stance about supernatural agencies and their incredibility on the basis that there is no evidence that could not reasonably be forthcoming. Colour me atheist.

Who then is an atheist in the heroic sense that I have been urging? A contender might be the philosopher Simon Critchley whose influences are continental and therefore large positions are second nature to him. Interviewed on http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2002-12/simoncritchley.htm re his book on humour he has this to say:

Are you suggesting that in a secular age, humour is the new God?

SC: This is an important question and it strikes me that there are about twenty things to say. First, there is no God. I begin from the assumption that modernity is defined by the impossibility of any metaphysical belief in a deity. That's where I begin from and that is axiomatic for me. It means that if I had a religious experience I would stop doing philosophy: philosophy for me is essentially atheistic.

Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period. So the difficulty of modern life, of modernity in the full sense is this: the way in which we make sense of ourselves, those things we value and attribute meaning to, is still within a religious framework. Yet we cannot believe that religious framework. So from my perspective, modernity as a fully secular worldview has never really been achieved. We still inhabit the traces, the memory of, that religious perspective. And that's an ambiguous thing.

Critchley being English has an acute sense of the folly of portentousness so I suppose it is a mark of his commitment that he ventures so far into an irony free zone. I respect that. His position on deity is a metaphysical transcendental one. Empirical confirmation or disconformation is senseless.There is no 'waiting for Godot'.

facing death, facing life

2011-05-22T16:14:00.001+01:00

His father had always been a stranger, an irritable stranger with exceptional powers of intervention and comment, and an air of being disappointed about his offspring. It was shocking to lose him, it was like an unexpected hole in the universe, and the writing of “Death” upon the sky, but it did not tear Mr. Polly’s heartstrings at first so much as rouse him to a pitch of vivid attention.

(The History of Mr. Polly by H.G.Wells)

That amusing and warm hearted novel has a lot of wisdom in it. We face death by facing life otherwise it’s just a distracting mystery encompassed by either table turning or nihilism. As an old English labourer explained to me as I hacked ineffectually with my pick axe at the obdurate ground of Hertfordshire - ‘Pat, you’ve got to put a face on the work’. I won’t reduce that piece of instruction to its complete architectonic significance but the practical import of it is that you must first create a decent hole with a face that you can prise away into the void that you have created.

In which Somerset Maugham meets Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

2011-04-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

Somerset Maugham read a great deal of philosophy including Eastern Philosophy as is evident from the title of his book The Razor's Edge pub.1944 which is from the Katha Upanishad.

Arise, awake, and learn by approaching the excellent ones. The wise ones describe that path to be as impassible as a razor's edge, which when sharpened, is difficult to tread on.

(Ka.Up. I.iii.14)

The master in that book is called Sri Ganesha and no doubt may have had elements of the famous Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvanamalai in South India whom he visited in 1938. Ramana's teaching was the ancient one of atma vichara or self inquiry and it consisted of continuously asking 'who am I', analysing the answer that you come up with and thus by progressive discrimination arrive at the permanent basis of self awareness.

I am not sure how well the details of the visit are known generally but I found an account of it in a book put out by the Ashram called Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

15th.October, 1938:

Somerset Maugham, a well-known English author, was on a visit to Sri Bhagavan. He also went to see Maj. Chadwick in his room and there he suddenly became unconscious. Maj.Chadwick requested Sri Bhagavan to see him. Sri Bhagavan went into the room, took a seat and gazed on Mr.Maugham. He regained his senses and saluted Sri Bhagavan. They remained silent and sat facing each other for nearly an hour. The author attempted to ask questions but did not speak. Maj.Chadwick encouraged him to ask. Sri Bhagavan said, "All finished. Heart talk is all talk. All talk must end in silence only." They smiled and Sri Bhagavan left the room.

Spinoza's Stone

2011-04-16T22:33:00.002+01:00

Spinoza trivia: The title of a bestselling novel taken from Ethicspublished in 1915, with no less than 3 film versions.Trevor Howard and Bette Davis were co-stars in 34, as were Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak in a '63 version. None of those 'treatments' came close to the book Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. The title of the Fourth Part of 'Ethics' is Of Human Bondage or of the Strength of the Affects. It is an excellent novel.
Maugham was a man of wide culture and perhaps it is a fancy of my own that he didn't just take the title in a quasi-ironic way and leave it at that. I imagine it amused him to use what is quite abstruse rationalism as a pattern . For instance we find at 4P.III.:

4P.3: The force by which man perseveres in existence is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes.

Philip Carey the protagonist, born with a club foot, is orphaned at the age of 9 losing both his father and mother in the same year. At this point he is taken to live with his uncle on his father's side and his aunt, a childless couple in their 50's. The uncle is a C of E. vicar in a seaside town who is at odds with the chapel folk who cater to the lower orders. We are in the tail end of the Victorian era, genteel poverty, coarse poverty and as a special treat the top of the vicar's egg. It is all beautifully rendered with simple language reflecting the consciousness of the child.
Philip is saved by the power of his imagination that is liberated by the travel books which the uncle collects.

4P.IX: If we imagine the cause of an affect to be actually present with us, that affect will be stronger than if we imagined the cause not to be present

.
He occasionally lapses under the pressure of misery into the fantasy that his mother has not died and that it all is a dream that he will wake from. The visualisation that Spinoza recommends can be neurotic denial as well as enabling. His school chum breaks a pen of his and he lies saying that it was a gift from his dying mother. Tears flow even though he knows that he bought it for 1s.4d a fortnight before.
There are many such masterful touches throughout the book. As was written:

4PXIX : According to the laws of his own nature each person necessarily desires that which he considers to be good, and avoids that which he considers to be evil.

The discrimination that comes through experience is the gyroscope that corrects the trajectory of Spinoza's stone.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. (from letter to Schaller, no.62)

In one thing though Maugham departs from the rubric that Spinoza laid out. It is possible for the deep courses of the soul to be running their own way beyond the reach of the discursive intellect. Without working it out we can arrive at a point of profound importance quite without that engagement of the conscious mind that is the ideal for Spinoza. Without Geometry or even Algebra we are there. Thus it was that Philip Carey arrived at the realisation that his faith has evanesced once the props of culture that support the Church established by Law were no longer in place.

He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty that he had reached to his own cleverness.

We know more than we know would seem a willful paradox but is the plain truth. For Spinoza what is reasoned out is the established truth, the other stuff is just truthy or a post hoc abduction. Everything must be brought into the light of reason to truly exist. The name given for this strain of European thought, often associated with the Enlightenment, is alienation in both senses of subreption and estranging. The problem for the novelist is to convince us of those underground streams. Like the twitches of the dowser's rods he must indicate the living water that is under the narrative.

Bellwether Jones

2011-04-03T01:27:00.002+01:00

I take out my little hammer and I tap your knee cap and oops your leg goes up. What a surprise! Like the good preacher he is, first Bellwether Jones told us what he was going to do, then he did it, then he told us what he had just done. Bad things happened but that had nothing at all to do with him and to assert that they had is to deny agency to the perpetrators. For his next trick Jones is going to a gang infested Afro-American quarter of LA and hold up a big sign saying 'N--s are spawn of Satan and the sons of Ham' and experience at first hand the cause effect nexus. The right to free speech must be upheld at whatever cost and if Jones is a martyr to it, so be it.

Franz I gotta plan

2011-03-26T07:26:00.001Z

Kalfka Papers: Note to a Zionist.

You forgot to mention that Kafka's instructions were that his papers be destroyed. In that case it is clear that the title to them is defective. As you know under the Ottoman law that applied at the time when Kafka first formed his notion of Zion all defective title reverts to the state. The Israeli Gov. to be fair to them have been punctilious in this regard and therefore they have the duty of care.

The other thing is that the old lady with the disputed title was for selling them off by the pound weight.

Any old irony:

- Such fine paper, written on both sides even. You don't get work like this anymore.

- The blots and bad spelling yet. In '67 I could get you a good price now it's on my hands forever. What can I do, it's the world we live in.

Grail Cup

2011-02-06T01:36:00.003Z

Hebeprhrenics are often preoccupied with the basic questions of life and the vaster problems of philosophy or science, while they themselves become increasingly unable to cope with day-to-day living, affecting strange mannerisms and perplexed by odd experiences

.

from 'The Psychotic' by Andrew Crowcroft pg.44.

In the presence of a Perfect Master the atmosphere is charged with gnosis that can affect even the most obtuse. From time to time you are borne up and live as you know is possible for you by nature but that you now can only manage by grace. During those two months that I spent at the ashram the world was being made before my eyes. I looked on in wonder. Everything said its name.

The toilet for the ashram was the hill behind it. Women went to the left and men to the right. I often took my tin whistle with me to tootle random notes and trills. To go out on to the hill you passed a pathsala where the Brahmin boys were taught to chant the Vedas. In 20 years they would have them learnt by heart. I could hear them at it and now I imagine the pandit beating time on his knee. In the order of emanation of creation akash or space is the first to proceed from the Godhead, and it has for its sole, sensible, quality sound. The Vedas reflect that primal energy and thus channel it for the good of the world.

Just outside the compound there was a group of low benders that the road metal makers and their families lived in while they made the long mounds of chippings. They spend all day with an iron ring around boulders to capture the flying shards of metal that they make with small lump hammers.

On my way down from about 20 yards away I saw a woman come out of one of the benders and run up the hill and a man came out too and dashed after her. In a short distance he caught up to her and threw her down on the ground. This all happened very quickly. Horrified I watched as he picked up a rock and raised it above his head to smash down on her. From the plane of tranquillity I was on a rapid sequence of thoughts passed through my mind........If I call out in English he will not heed me, he will not understand and anyway it's just another busybody foreigner and it would anger him more and he would be less inclined to stop what I took to be immanent murder. No I will play on this whistle like Krishna and he will be pacified by the sound - it will enter his soul. That is what I did trilling like Muralidhara. The man showed no sign of having heard me but he threw the rock away and let her get up. She ran away crying and went back into the tent.

Still shaken I went into the ashram but by darshan time I had forgotten all about it. Baba came out as He usually does and was going round on the crowd. He looked straight at me and gave me a full beam smile. It was perhaps more for having forgotten what I did, than what I did.

God is a personal God in that He uses whatever is in you, there to hand, to teach you. He's working from your inside out. The reality of what we are is greater that the personal/impersonal dyad. It is as they say beyond the pair of opposites. God can only be experienced personally, what the realisation of God may be cannot be experienced. 'It comes and stays'. The mark of experience is that it comes and goes no matter how high it takes you.

Nature spoke to me infused with power in the Wordsworthian way. There in village India man moved upon the earth with the same motions as he had done for millennia. The carts were drawn by bullocks and the fields parted by wooden plows with steel shod socks. I stood aside to let pass a peasant driving a pair, one black one white, both had silver tips to their horns. With ample mild power they were day and night pulling the year.

I saw a field being irrigated using two bullocks to raise the water from a deep well in a large leather bucket. It was an ingenious device. A ramp slanted away from the well whose rim was higher that the barely tilted plane of the field. Down the ramp the driver went side-saddle on the back of one of them drawing the large bucket up and sending the water gushing down into a channel which led round the garden of 20 perches or so. The bucket being emptied the driver unhitched the rope and the bucket shot back down into the well again. Then he smartly turned his team around and up the ramp again he went and without a pause hitched up. The other ryots guided the water in a channel which was made round the perimeter of the garden and from this main artery they drew with their short broad mattocks subsidiary streams towards the rows and ridges of their crop. As the driver of the bullocks went down the ramp he gave a cry and a chant which was always the same.

Why did it affect me so much? There was a confluence of so many symbols embodied and melded in a cycle contained and bounded by the cry of the driver. Water, earth, chthonic power & fertility. I didn't think of any of this as watched the work. This was a continuous liturgy I attended in that fertile red soil where they can have three crops, water permitting. The Upanishads say that even the earth is in eternal dhyana. With mindfullness we dowse for living water and its freshets are always a surprise. The fly wheel of the robotic internal dialogue is stopped and for a moment or two we seem to see into the life of things.

I will now relate an incident which had no trace of irruption into consciousness about it, but seemed ordinary, albeit puzzling, at the time.

There were several women on the ashram at this time, mostly Americans. One of them was exceptionally beautiful, tall, blond, slim but when she walked she did so with a profound limp that was almost a genuflexion. The shock of this affront to her beauty was so great it was like a punch in the stomach. Her stern dignity was a reproach to pity. I shall call her Jennifer as that preserves the chime her true name had with one from Arthurian legend. Jennifer\Guinevere. I was attracted to her but there then was neither the time nor the place for secular love. A group of us had decided to go to the village after darshan to buy milk in the dairy. She would be among the party. How would I handle this? When I was coming across the compound she was standing there dressed in a sari. For a blink of an eye I saw her in a blue gown with a wimple, tall conical hat and a white scarf, her favour, flowing from its point. Very well I said, Jennifer/Guinevere when we go out today it will be as a quest. The sense I had was of the courtly love of the troubadours and their awareness of the diaphane of spiritual beauty that lay over the equivocal preying on weakness of lust. My talisman was effective.

We got to the dairy just at milking time. There were 4 or 5 cows in their stalls in the large hut open at the sides. It was very clean. A man and his wife were milking the cows and they filled our tin billy cans. We paid them. As though prepared for a festival, the place was spotless and so too were its owners. When we went to go they detained us to give us some milk to drink. Their daughter came out, a girl of about 15 dressed in a long jupe and shirt top. I was handed a chalice of milk. It had a foot to it and bosses like the Ardagh chalice only it was lower and broader. It was dull brass coloured and not that heavy. I had to drink from it carefully as the normal tip you would give to a cup would have sent it splashing all over my face. I took a drink of the warm sweet milk and I was going to offer some to the others who were over beside the stalls. The man said - They have theirs, this is for you.

They were drinking from a tumbler which was set with stones, bright flashy gems of varying hue, a czar's treasure of a thing. I remember feeling envious of their bejewelled cup and wanting to drink from it. When we were finished we gave the namaz salute to the family and we went back to the ashram. On the way in through the back gate Jennifer turned to me and said:

- All today I couldn't stop thinking of you as a knight of the round table.

This adventure was experienced in normal consciousness and part of me sought explanation in theories like family treasure, glass baubles or booty from war. It was a puzzle and it had a theatrical feel to it. The cup was going to be there and the mental gauze of quest was tacked on to a prevision of it to make a sort of Grail story. I didn't think to talk to any of the others about it at the time to find out if it was a shared perception. But why should I, it was palpably, potably real.

To what plane of existence does this experience belong? It was a teasing mystery until I read a book by Harold Bloom called 'Omens of Millennium'. He places it precisely using the categories which the scholar of the Iranian Sh'ite sufis Henry Corbin elucidates. In their world there is the interpenetration of the mundane by the Imaginal. In a sense there is a continuum and we can pass from one sphere to the other without noticing it.

"Our confrontation with the angel is neither empirical nor transcendental; instead it takes place in a middle world that Henry Corbin calls 'imaginal', which is neither imaginary nor what we generally call 'imaginative', in the Western aesthetic sense." Omens pg.156

This world has also affinities with the world of formation of Kabbalah. It is next door to the world of 'action', the normal empirical domain. Introducing a passage from the Talmudists Adam Steinsaltz's 'The Thirteen Petalled Rose' H.B. remarks: Steinsaltz charmingly emphasizes, as does Corbin in his account of the Sufi imaginal world, that our perception of angels can be quite as ordinary as if such messengers dwelt entirely in the world of action:

(

Steinsaltz) "Similarly, the angel who is sent to us from another world does not always have a significance or impact beyond the normal laws of physical nature. Indeed, it often happens that the angel precisely reveals itself in nature, in the ordinary common-sense world of causality, and only a prophetic insight or divination can show when, and to what extent, it is the work of higher forces. For man by his very nature is bound to the system of higher worlds, even though ordinarily this system is not revealed and known to him. As a result, this system of higher worlds seems to him to be natural, just as the whole of his two-sided existence, including both matter and spirit, seems self-evident to him. Man does not wonder at all about those passages he goes through all the time in the world of action, from the realm of material existence to the realm of spiritual existence. What is more, the rest of the other worlds that also penetrate our world may appear to us as part of something quite natural." pg. 168 Omens.

Be it understood that when the word 'angel' is used in the text I am not assimilating my condition to the translation of Elijah or Enoch, it is to the world of formation that I refer. In the system of the Kabbalah there are four worlds - emanation, creation, formation and action. The Sufis that Corbin treats of conflate the first two into a realm of Pure Intelligences. The Hindus have lokas - Brahma Loka, pitri loka, rishi loka, Deva Loka etc.. Kailasa is the abode of Shiva and deathless yogis meditate in caves in the hill of Arunachala which is hollow and the centre of the world. Did I read once of a sadhu who went to Brindivan and was woken in the morning by the sound of a flute? When he went to his window and looked out there was Krishna driving his cattle down to the Yamuna. Krishna Loka.

When you arrive in one of those lokas you will know it, the Kabbalah's imaginal world is one into which you may drift by grace and not know it. Even the subsequent pondering of mysterious aspects of your experience leave you uncertain whether you were there or not which is just as it should be. There will be less in it to tempt us to the vanity of supposed attainment.

Extension

2011-01-11T09:18:00.002Z

I beg you to consider in the bowels of your library that the ereader may be a mutation of the book that masks itself by taking on some of the properties of its bitty foe. I of course refer to the ereader that does not have any sort of connectivity other than that of the host womb. The magic hour is 1941 for legal download which means that Virginia Woolf is on, Jacob's Room, The Voyage Out, the hilarious miserabilism of Gissing The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, the marvellous Kierkegaard vs Regina in his Journals and the Michelmas Geese.
All this and more in a platen that I can shove in my coat pocket.

Add to that the capacity to 'underline' and to substitute for the sheaves of post-its that fatten the great texts eg. the table talk of S.T.C. and I think we have an 'extension' that is virtually prosthetic.

Regina vs S.K.

2010-12-30T11:04:00.001Z

Drawing on reasons to justify our actions will always have elements of the neurotic. This is true of us all and not just those who are trapped in Lutheran gloom. Looking at the case of Regina vs S.K. I find myself caught between his rationalizations and the larger truth that what he did was actually for the best. I would put it this way - S.K's soul knew better than S.K. what the right thing to do was. What I mean is that at some point there was a vow, an affirmation, a turning of his face to a vision that gave orientation to his life. It was a projection that defeated time , that was a guide almost like an angelic pure spirit. He had made his soul and it dragged the miserable corpse of reasons after it. Souls need to be tended by daily practice for common day to be light enough.

5 Xmas Profs.....and a paradox in a pear tree.

2010-12-29T21:30:00.001Z

A.E. Waite writing on the Tarot:

The Hermit, as he is termed in common parlance, stands next on the list; he is also the Capuchin, and in more philosophical language the Sage. He is said to be in search of that Truth which is located far off in the sequence, and of justice which has preceded him on the way. But this is a card of attainment, as we
shall see later, rather than a card of quest. It is said also that his lantern contains the Light of Occult Science and that his staff is a Magic Wand
These interpretations are comparable in every respect to the divinatory and fortune-telling meanings with which I shall have to deal in their turn. The diabolism of both is that they are true after their own manner, but that they miss all the high things to which the Greater Arcana should be allocated. It is as if a man who knows in his heart that all roads lead to the heights, and that God is at the great height of all, should choose the way of perdition or the way of folly
as the path of his own attainment.

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I have for my sins been watching Philosophy TV
http://www.philostv.com/
on the theme of Xmas. Of the 5 profs only one had any sense of the supernatural aspect and he reserved himself to the notion of the feast as a spur to reflection. No doubt he could have said more but there is the tacit rule that we must stay within the bounds of the naturalistic. A couple of the others chose to reflect on the Xmas lie which might mean Santa or Sanctissimus and I now understand why the common run of philosophers prefer science fiction. It is the only way they can immerse themselves in myth. Roy Sorensen, well it's the way he tells them, sorites as recursion. Ho, ho; ho, hum. Professor Brennan presented theodicy as the legend of Uncle Theo. It's essentially the present you get every year in a new wrapping. If we look at God and what he gets up to without the nuministic empowerment of the scriptures we are left with a cosmic tyrant. He told this story effectively and well and of course within the schema of naturalistic explanation he is entirely correct. It is true after its own fashion but it is also true that there is a larger truth that is self confirming which becomes more established the more we turn our faces to it. I read elsewhere that "We have the intelligence and the scientific and technological knowledge to avoid or escape many natural disasters." This childlike faith that under the tree of science will be found the counter-balance to the evil and mayhem that is facilitated by science is misplaced. In the crib that is to be found. (Without prejudice to Balarama, Balakrishna etc)

it's not you Regina, it's me, me, me.

2010-12-29T10:43:00.001Z

It's not you Regina it's me, me, me.

Reading the journals of Kierkegaard in relation to the cancellation of his engagement to Regina Olsen one oscillates between viewing him as a neurotic incapable of grasping ordinary happiness and as a sadist that is determined to drive the girl mad. There are also elements of comedic misconstruction.

Shortly before her engagement to Schlegel she discovered me in a Church. I did not avoid her look. She nodded to me twice. I shook my head. That meant "You must give me up". She nodded again and I nodded in as friendly a manner as possible. That meant "You have retained my love".

He has the grace to admit that he did not know at this time of the forthcoming engagement and even after it had taken place when he again met her in the street was still unaware.

Then, after she had become engaged to Schlegel (1843) she met me in the street and greeted me in as friendly and confiding a way as possible. I did not understand her, for I had not heard about the engagement. I only looked enquiringly at her and shook my head. She certainly thought I knew about the engagement and was asking for my approval.

Her nod is construed by Garff Soren Kierkegaard a Biography as being an attempt to seek approval for her marriage plans and she thereby must have been comforted by his apparent affirmation. If he had been fully apprised of the situation would he have blanked her approach or shook his head; 'non placet'.

His fatuous benevolence may be the result of a poorly attended psychodrama but the lasso of the double bind if you will pardon the bondage metaphor has a kink in it. Give me up and don't give me up because I still love you. She had a narrow escape. In later life when the Schlegel's were happily married he hovered about giving them permission. It's all there in Joakim Garff's book with a decipherment of inked out passages in the Journals. J.G.'s ironies take the form of sprightly exclamations. He is good on the letter within a letter to Schlegel at his office in 1849. It bounced.

Sony ereader

2010-11-25T23:04:00.001Z

So I went and got an ereader, Sony Touch prs600 on Ebay America brand new in a sealed pack for €169 inc postage. In Ireland it would have cost €290 plus I'd have to carry it home. This is the rip-off-republic here.

It has a great variety of formats and a touch screen with a stylus for notes. The only books I will probably read on it will be free downloads from Gutenberg. I first downloaded The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. The small print is small and in artificial light I put on a pair of magnifying glasses. I could go to medium print or small print in landscape mode but that requires too many page turns. The background is grey which is easy on the eyes but I prefer traditional black on white which ought to be offered .

Verdict on the book which I haven't finished yet. So far I find its plot a clone of The House of Mirth written more melodramatically. It doesn't have the constant irony that can blow like an enervating bise which that book has and the turns of consciousness when there is a sudden lurch that indicates the secret life of the creative unconscious has taken over. It takes an artist to make that departure from clockwork credible. It may have been a pot-boiler or a chateau makeover still she's always readable. She is of course a tres grand snob and has all the prejudices of her class and period. Myers of 'A Commonplace Blog' likes her which is strange as she is casually anti-semitic.

Later:
Having now finished it I can say that although her language is good her themes hardly change from novel to novel and certain patterns recur. A manipulative beautiful woman finds that the financial assistance she gets from an infatuated rich man leaves her compromised. This man is boorish but possesed of low cunning a type of the rich sportsman that recurs in Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Of course they are still with us but lack bards to sing their glory. However Wharton tries the irony of alternative fates for her heroines. Lily perishes, Undines flourishes.

P.S. You will read that it is disadvantaged for reference purposes because the page numbers are altered. This is not correct. In small size font, the original page numbers are given in tiny font at the right margin where they occur.

Papal Flags

2010-09-24T14:25:00.002+01:00

This is a private space where Ombhurbhuva rules O.K. Opposed to this is the communal space where competing viewpoints of what is acceptable strive for a hearing. All very simple, all very symmetrical, all very 'binary', whatever that is. Like most simplisms and articles of liberal piety it bears no close examination. Bellwether Jones in his private garden proposes a bonfire of his personally owned copy of the Koran and even the President has to recognise his right to do so while pleading with him to reconsider. Is this moral solipsism? May not the practices and principles of the Commonwealth of Ombhurbhuva be applicable here?

The idea of a private gathering virtual or actual is no longer sustainable. The walls have ears and loose lips sink ships as the WW2 poster had it. Pope Benedict XVI makes a tactless remark at a gathering of theologians in Ravensburg. Up till recently this meeting would have been as occult as that of Madam Blavatsky's mahatmas in Tibet. Now it is round the world in a trice and papal flags would have been burned if they could have got them. In the global village the common law of a community with regard to actions liable to lead to a breach of the peace needs to be extended.

Failing that the President could apply his powers of rendition and torture. Rapture could come early for Jones.

Danger

2010-09-17T00:12:00.000+01:00

Writing on Goethe, Carlyle has this to say:

…..his maxims will bear study; nay they require it, and improve by more and more. They come from the depths of his mind, and are not in their place until they have reached the depths of ours. The wisest man, we believe, may see in them a reflex of his own wisdom: but to him who is still learning, they become as seeds of knowledge; they take root in the mind, and ramify, as we meditate them, into a whole garden of thought.

This is both the danger and the greatness of philosophy; we are invited into the web of another’s thought and encouraged by argument and maybe outright sophistry to see the world through a foreign eye. Through a species of morphing we are enabled to become strange to ourselves for a time. There is an imaginative engagement that is similar to the reading of a novel or the fascinating misdirection of stage magic. We submit to the onerous rules of a game in which unexceptionable axioms can lead us anywhere. ‘Substance’ may lead us to monads or ‘nature naturing’ or ‘what is not said of anything’. Metaphysics in this world is not a description of how things patently are, but of how things must fundamentally be, for things to appear as they do. In that sense it is perfectly possible for philosophers to take positions that are counter-intuitive because they are detached from intuition and so must you be for a while to read them at the depth they require to be read.

same again

2010-08-17T16:07:00.002+01:00

A preliminary review staying with the aforementioned lecture leads me to believe that one is as likely or more likely to gain an understanding of what he means by factiality from the short version as the long. That more space often means more obfuscating cuttlefish ink is the rule with your continentals as well as the Frenchness of being French which is that love of paradox and the desire to shock and amaze on every page.

Well then, he said clearing the bench of the tools of the previous job, facts are contingent and this invariable quality of facts or their 'factiality' is that this contingency is necessary. I would presume by this that he means positive facts rather that contrafactuals etc. It is a fact that Ceasar crossed the Rubicon and it is also a fact that he was not wearing a top hat whilst doing so. It will be better for us if we stick to the first sort. Precisely in what way is the crossing once it has happened contingent because it seems to me that it is a necessary part of the subsequent history of Rome. What he is getting at I think is a metaphysical intuition of contingency that would be serviceable for the third way of Aquinas. He differs of course from the Scholastics in that the does not look for the foundation of contingency in the necessary or one super fact being the ground of plain facts. His view is that facts are by nature contingent and that this is a necessary aspect of them.

Sprigge would stop nodding at this point and his beard would point like a setters nose:
- Sir,I must live.
- I do not see the the necessity.(Rousseau Emile)
He would follow up by saying :
- I am prepared to accept for the sake of arguement the notion of universal contingency but the perception of necessity is surely part of the human world and it demands a point of view. Well that's what David Hume would say anyway.

In the latter part of his paper he swings back into the consideration of factiality and the Christian God. By sleight of hand he moves from necessity as a quality of the contingency of facts to the notion of a necessary being so that is a pointless excursion that does not break the grip of the subjective absolute. Along with this he makes the interesting metaphysical point that non-contradiction is a condition of contingency.

Finally he offers the modest summing up of an admission that the problem of the closed circle has not been solved:

Would it be possible to derive, to draw from the principle of factiality, the ability of the naturalsciences to know, by way of mathematical discourse, reality in itself, by which I mean our world, the factual world as it is actually produced by Hyperchaos, and which exists independently of our subjectivity? To answer this very difficult problem is a condition of a real resolution of the problem of ancestrality, and this constitutes the theoretical finality of my present work.

Timothy Sprigge gives a fair imitation of a Gallic shrug.

ancestral home

2010-08-15T00:10:00.001+01:00

Is it a mistake to look for evidence to settle this problem and to lay it along with the ghost in the machine and all the other spooks that gibber about the corridors of philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux thinks so:

Because although phenomenologists can say that consciousness is originally correlated and open to a world, what can they say about a pre-human and pre-animal reality- about ancestrality, this domain of non-correlation, because lacking any subject? How are the sciences able to speak so precisely about this domain, if this domain is no more than a retrospective illusion?

(3729-time_without_becoming.pdf available on Speculative Heresies blog/resources)

Mind you he does not propose this as an answer to the correlationist conundrum, he's just sayin'.

What would Timothy Sprigge say to this? He has no less than 19 entries in the index for 'fiction, pragmatic'. There is 'device, pragmatic' with ten entries and 'truth, pragmatic' with 9 entries. T.S. has got it covered. On page 23 introducing us to the idea he remarks:

Two somewhat different sorts of notional judgement may be distinguished. The first kind acts as a substitute for a real judgement, by appropriately relating us to the way things are if this real judgement is true, and by its potentiality for developing into this real judgement when we are enough in earnest. We may say of such a notional judgement that it is, to borrow a phrase from Husserl, intuitively fulfillable.

Well then Master Quentin you may be a starry Normalien but are you in earnest?

On one hand, it seems impossible to refute the argument of the correlational circle- to forget that when we think something, it is we who think something- but on the other hand, it seems impossible to have a correlationist understanding of the natural sciences.

You see the difficulty is; we have cognitions, we slice and dice according to our needs and unless we have a philosophy which can support adequation to the real then we fall back to the perception of our perceptions. Science will become a pragmatic fiction. Q.M. proposes the Principle of Factiality. I will get back to you on that.

Unknown Object

2010-08-01T01:17:00.000+01:00

In a metaphysical system where to be is to be known the unknown object has no cash value. Present it to Timothy Sprigge and you will receive a blank look for why should he pay the bearer for nothing at all. Where epistemology has parted company with ontology the unquestionably mental aspect of perception can cause the world to drop away as an otiose inference or be merely a postulate that draws on the offshore bank of the transcendental.

In his wonderfully entitled book The Vindication of Absolute Idealism pub. Edidburgh U.P 1983, Timothy Sprigge writes:

From our point of view and doubtless in effect from Bradley's, we interpret his contention most suitably as follows. We can form no conception of an intuitively and coherently fulfillable sort of an unexperienced reality; this being so, the proposition that there is such a reality is incapable of being a literal truth, for there simply no real judgement in the offing to be true.

pg.112

What of the Advaitins with their vritti or mental modification? The mental modification is presented to the saksin or witness. Now this sounds mighty like representationalism or scientific realism and I have seen it interpreted as such by a teacher of Advaita who has a background in science; as though Locke were speaking in Sanskrit. He sees it as a matter of psychology.The tree in the yard is evidently not in my head so what is in my head? There is neuronal traffic and that appears to him to be a sound candidate that can represent the interests of the real tree. A nice picture but it simply isn't what Advaita is saying. It draws down the mind/body conundrum of how this cortical activity can be identical with consciousness. This does not arise in Advaita as there is no mind/body division.

The exceptionally succinct Vedanta Paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra (ca.17th.C) frames the problem in a way which echoes the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Shankara (ca 8th.C.) Asks Dharmaraja: On what is the perceptuality of the object based? Unity is the answer, the substratum of the vritti and that of the object is one and the same pure consciousness. The object is a form of limitation or limiting adjunct, upadhi of pure consciousness. To simplify, what the object is in a gross way, the vritti is in a subtle way.

So where does the unknown object/ajnatasatta come into the picture and where does it fit in to the ontological picture which I have limned. In a curious way the answer has a resemblance to the view of Berkeley that God was minding the shop. All cognition is according to the Advaitins an unveiling of the ignorance which had covered the object of that cognition. The nescience that covered that object did not annihilate the being of that object. We by our cognition do not grant being to anything. The unity of being which underwrites perception continues whether the object is perceived or not. When we perceive that object simultaneously with its perception is the knowledge that it was previously unknown. Obviously this is non-empirical knowledge. One might say that the order of apprehension was (a) the object as previously unknown and, (b) the object now apprehended by a valid means of knowledge. So all the while that it was out of sight and out of mind the object was sheltering under the umbrella of being. For Berkeley this pure being, pure consciousness is identified with God and thereby the 'books in the cupboard' do not wink out when no one is thinking of them.

The object is joined into an ontological structure in the case of Advaita but in the purely epistemological schema of Immaterialism the object lacks a connection. God seems to be an ad hoc fix to placate common sense.

Salamis

2010-07-19T07:47:00.001+01:00

The Statues

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough;
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

No greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these
Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic, vague immensities,
And not the banks of oars that swam upon
The many-headed foam at Salamis.
Europe put off that foam, when Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.

One image crossed the many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulin to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

(W.B.Yeats/Late Poems)

Here in a way is the antithesis to Devlin's Ank'hor Vat, and the paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha of the Buddha's gaze. The ideal body of the Greek statuary is firm, shapely and athletic and departs from the ideal only enough to give individuality. Their speed is not vegetative. The harmony of the proportions is governed by the golden section which continues to dominate our aesthetic sense and appears in joinery and cabinet making. The rectangle of Thomas Moser's coffee table is 30"x48" or 30x1.6. The one I am building at the moment will be 29"x18". It is a rectangle in which the lesser side is to the greater as the greater is to the sum of the sides, roughly 10:16 as 16:26. A common size of sash window is 5'x3'.

Curiously though the Scandinavians seem to favour a stretched rectangle. The very sense of its being stretched shows how dominant the golden section is but then the Swedish body is more stretched than the Mediterranean.

Realism II

2010-06-22T09:33:00.000+01:00

Realism II

Hegel didn't get it. I mean it as a particular. No what we are directly acquainted with is a universal in the way that we never step into the same river twice, we only step into 'river'.

"I point it out as a 'Here', which is a Here of other Heres, or is in its own self a 'simple togetherness of many Heres'; i.e. it is a universal. I take it up then as it is in truth, and instead of knowing something immediate I take the truth of it, or perceiveit."
(( Phenomenology of Spirit A:I.110

Such abolition of the definite article in not the breakthrough that it might seem. I mean in a figurative sense for Plato would have had to shatter the Greek language to do so. Someone now will remind me that in Demotic Wazi 'pen', 'the pen', 'a pen' and 'penning' are the same word. That's as may be but it seems the case that for some philosophers the shadow is the substance and the form is the reality. Where we see a single stout figure dancing alone they see a Botero couple.

My daimon is clearing her throat.
- What is it now?
- What you see as a dual manifestation may be a duck/rabbit. The reality of the object may be comprehended dually but only lived as an actual entity.
- When you spring those Whitehead expressions on me I grow afraid, I want to hide behind the couch. Do you mean that there is a need with the absolute positing of existence for there to be the absence of knowledge or ignorance. Here I'm not talking about 'ajnana' but common or garden scientific ignorance like 'is there a Higgs boson or not, let's find out'.
- That will do for now.

ANK'HOR VAT

2010-06-21T22:04:00.000+01:00

ANK’HOR VAT

The antlered forests
Move down to the sea
Here the dung-filled jungle pauses
Buddha has covered the walls of the great temple
With the vegetative speed of his imagery

Let us wait, hand in hand

No Western god or saint
Ever smiled with the lissom fury of this god
Who holds in doubt
The wooden stare of Apollo
Our Christian crown of thorns;

There is no mystery in the luminous lines
Of that high, animal face
The smile, sad, humouring and equal
Blesses without obliging
Loves without condescension:
The god, clear as spring-water
Sees through everything, while everything
Flows through him

A fling of flowers here
Whose names I do not know
Downy, scarlet gullets
Green legs yielding and closing

While, at my mental distance from passion,
The prolific divinity of the temple
Is a quiet lettering on vellum

Let us lie down before him
His look will flow like oil over us.

Denis Devlin

Satkaryavada

2010-05-29T23:37:00.000+01:00

Satkaryavada

The effect already exists in the cause for the following reasons: what is nonexistent cannot he produced; for producing a thing, a specific material cause is resorted to; everything is not produced by everything; a specific material cause capable of producing a specific product alone produces that effect; there is such a thing as a particular cause for a particular effect.

The unevolved exists as the primordial cause because the diverse evolutes are all attended by limitations, because common features subsist through all of them (arguing inheritance from a common cause), because the evolved has come into being as the result of the potentiality of a cause, because the distinction of cause and effect apply to the entire world without exception.

As all aggregates imply one different from themselves whom they subserve, as that for whom they are intended should differ from their own nature, namely, being composed of three dispositions, etc., as objects imply an enjoyer, and as there is seen through evolution a striving for liberation, there exists the spirit.

( The Sankhya Karikas of Ishvarakrishna 309/310/311 Sources of Indian Tradition)

This is the very point which Sankara adduces against them - " so on the absence of any logical ground for acquiring the tendency to act, the insentient(Pradhana) is not to to be the cause of the universe". (Brahma Sutra Bhasya II.ii.2)

Although Shankara did not agree with the creation theory of the Sankhya, 14 centuries after them he still retained some of their metaphysical ideas. Satkarvavada would be the chief one but there is also the idea that the Self has no action and the intellect no consciousness.

“Hence, as a result of union with the spirit, the evolved though non—sentient, yet appears to be sentient; and on its part, the spirit too, though the dispositions of matter alone act, appears to act but is really indifferent. It is for the sake of enlightenment of the spirit and the eventual withdrawal from primordial matter (i.e. liberation of the spirit from matter) that the two come together, even as the lame and the blind come together for mutual benefit; creation proceeds from this union.”(pg.311 Sources op.cit)

Shankara would hold that consciousness is always there beginingless, and that creation is itself beginingless and therefore he would reject the idea of consciousness as being a latecomer which gives an aim to the evolute.

Satkaryavada he found useful as a tool against the Buddhist doctrine of Annica (momentariness). The vital bridge of being would be broken by it and anything could spring from anything.

“For the non—existent there is no coming into existence, for the existent there is no lapsing into non—existence. the division between them is observed by those who see the underlying nature of things”. (from B.G. II.16)

Here the theory of satkaryvada gets the Vedanta seal of approval so it must be taken to be a central theory and a prime point of disputation in the maze of metaphysical box, impenetrable and beautifully tended, of six entrances or darsanas which would be regarded as astika and others spurned as nastika, unorthodox.

Opposed to the satkaryvadins are the asatkaryvadins who do not believe that the effect pre—exists in the cause. This they say would lead back to an inert pradhana or prakriti. Our bodies would be our selves and everything would be its own cause.(svahhavavada) The material cause essentially is not the only condition for the production of an effect. If that were so the only way of ensuring that a given effect did not arise would be by ensuring that its material cause never arose. Anyone who has ever made yoghurt will know that the bacteria need cosseting.

The purusas are brought in by Ishvarakrishna as a deus ex machina to get him out of this difficulty and also to satisfy the many Vedantic injunctions about the Self. They and their avidya supply the necessary motive power for the progress of evolution. How do these Selves affect nature? (Karl PotterPresuppositions of India’s Philosophies pg.108)[i] sees in the answer of the sankhyas the beginning of an epistemological approach to a cosmic maintenance problem. These selves by confusing themselves with material reality cause the process of evolution. In that case it takes viveka to set aside that confusion and achieve moksha.

If the selves are immaterial how then do they get together with the material prakriti? The answer to this is that their confusion is beginingless. How do things get confused which have no basis for similarity? Shankara would answer that there is no general rule that only things which are similar are confused. The self is taken to he fair or black. It is also the case that in the adhyasa which takes place the intellect which is ‘next’ to the self comes to be regarded as the self.

Ajnana and avidya are the Advaitin’s way of expressing this cosmic ignorance. ‘Adhyasa’ lit.setting upon, is the mechanism. Vivartavada which is the illusory appearance of the one stuff under many guises all of which are unreal by comparison with the underlying substratum, has a monistic tone in contrast to the cosmic dualism of the beginingless purusha/prakriti dyad. Tad eva Brahman.

The Buddhists are of course devout asatkaryavadins. Annica is central to the primitive doctrine. Whether as some hold the universe is mental or yet material they are alike in holding it to be momentary. The metaphor they use for expressing the apparency of unity is the ‘circle of fire’ , the alatacakra. ‘There are no souls or selves only patterns of momentary occurrences.’ (Potter, pg.119: “If the effect pre-exists in the cause why doesn’t it come into existence as soon as the cause does?”

The Self does not change in either Advaita or Sankhya but in the latter there is a gulf between the world of spirit and that of matter. Shankara would have a more unified relationship between the world and the Self, so therefore the logical need to have non—discrimination occur in prakriti would be unnecessary. Prakriti has evolved into this world which includes the body, mind and senses. Purusha is a passive witness of all this. Mental activity which is material does not affect the witness (saksin) in any way.

The gamut is run from totally inert prakriti which is called pradhana by Shankara to nature as we know it with man and his mind set over against it. ((pg.150/I K.P.)) Why does the Sankhya system not succumb to the pressure to merge Purusha and Prakriti or to go with either one or the other, as there is no plausible account of how they came to be yoked together in the first instance.

What causes the evolution to commence? What removes the upadhis? What is it that operates directly on the core prakriti? If it’s purusha then there is contact between the two which is death to the aloof saksin. The upadhis are limiting negative factors such as time and place ie. proper time and place. The purusha does not do anything to remove these inhibiting factors; the proper time and place simply arrives. What is interesting is that Ishvarakrishna was an atheist and yet the goal of his system was liberation.

In the classification of Karl Potter Shankara is almost a leap philosopher in that he would go beyond the pairs of opposites or conceptual thought, in order to realize unity. He accepts satkaryvada without at the same time accepting pradhana. He takes from Sankhya the instrument of insight as a way to vault over the toils of prakriti.

Realism 1

2010-05-28T13:17:00.000+01:00

Realism was the firstest with the mostest. Everything springs from it and is a reaction to it. Because it is the intuitive position and philosophy earns its keep by countering folk metaphysics some thinkers like to characterise it as 'naive'. To me that is to substitute rhetoric for reasoned analysis. Were Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Shankaracarya naive realists?

What is the initial encounter that gives realism its primal force? Of anything we can say 'it is and it is something'. Being meets being one might say but when you turn on that tap aporiai begin to flow. Sheltering as they did in the pleroma the pre-socratic and vedic sages could utter:

Om. That (Brahman) is infinite and this (universe) in infinite. The infinite proceeds from the infinite. (Then) taking the infininitude of the infinite (universe), it remains as the infinite (Brahman) alone.

(from Brh.Up.V.i.1)

“Nor is it divided, since it is all alike;/ and it is not any more there, which would keep it from holding together,/ nor any worser, but it is all replete with What Is./ [25] Therefore it is all continuous: for What Is approaches What Is (B 7.1)

(Parmenides)

Early in both encounters with being there emerged the puzzle: how could being emerge from non-being, how could something which was not cause something which is. The satkaryavadathesis emerged as an early answer within the vedic tradition and was very influential. My note on this theory fragmentary though it is I will post separately.

At this point someone will say that there is no real connection between the pre-socratics and the vedic sages other than that they reside within the ambit of my mind. That for the anti-realist would be perfectly real enough within the meaning of the word. My view is that neither of these groups comes from Mars and that the ingenuity of their individual responses can be analogous. However I would reject outright assimilation. Nobody then knew that they were realists.

But since there is a furthest limit, it is perfected/ from every side, like the bulk of a well-rounded globe,/ from the middle equal every way: for that it be neither any greater/ [45] nor any smaller in this place or in that is necessary;/ for neither is there non-being, which would stop it reaching/ to its like, nor is What Is such that it might be more than What Is/ here and less there. Since it is all inviolate,/ for it is equal to itself from every side, it extends uniformly in limits.

If they weren't realists can they be said to be monists? A commonplace interpretation has been that they both ignore diversity and cling to the nostrum which declares 'all is one'. Not true but there is the difficulty of accounting for the 'many' where there is such a powerful intuition of the 'one'.

Bulletin

2010-05-17T00:38:00.000+01:00

Trapped wind gives you that sensation where you feel that your tripes are like those narrow balloons that are hard to start but then move quickly to bursting point. So I got up, 5:13 am, and took a large dose of Mother's specific, bread soda (bicarbonate of soda). Giant burp. When I went back to bed I slept until the p.m. I was not in the best of form and as I try to keep the history of my inward parts in pectore was not able to release a palace bulletin. If you want to know this sort of report is interdict. Nobody cares. Then I read yesterdays Guardian magazine where there was an article on profiling by Jon Ronson.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/15/criminal-profiling-jon-ronson
Step by step he draws you into a world which is near this one but where there are a greater percentage of people who wear white coats. It is a world in which being dead wrong is a paradigm case of rightness in that the false contains a truth and that there could only be a false where the true was possible. In an explosion of laughter the megrims were banished.

Later on I started reading Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing the first book of the Dance to the Music of Time series. A classic. The laughter cure goes on and should the binding wind get up in the night I will have something to read.

bijas

2010-05-11T15:13:00.000+01:00

Cher Maitre Cormac writes:

As Pantugrel is walking through a cold patch he is hit by a particularly bad hail storm. Frozen words falling from the sky. Rabelais explains these are words that weren't heard.

Listening to a sanskrit scholar on the radio the other day he mentioned that all mathematical theory was written in verse, and that the Indians were the leading mathematicians until th 14 or 15 century.
The extant sanscrit classical library is apparently enormous.
And phenomenology in all this? Is it a realism? The word is an integral part of the phenomenon, is it not? And it would seem to be non dual.

I have always loved being in a new place where I don't understand the language and have to imagine and surmise what people are saying. Its a condition which doesn't last very long, little by little we begin to distinguish sounds and eventually meaning. It is always a dissapointment to find that the meaning is not very dissimilar to ones own.(I've never been to Amazonia for example.But the Vodoo priests in Benin can tell by the sound of the sea if there are fish to catch.)Eventually the language becomes transparent and it is the meaning that becomes dominant.

The Zaroastrian priests had very small chapels, big enough for only one person, sometimes two.They would bring about the world by their liturgical description of it,each thing in its proper place and proportion.Then if the world was summoned up fittingly, the sacrifice could take place.They too came from the Aryan invasion and share a common root with the Vedas.

I think all liturgies are a conjuring up of a world,or a god.And the worlds exist and the gods come if the words are right.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I ask:

But could those psychopomps do 'explication de texte'?

Those adepts of what might be unfolded had ways of achieving stastis in the concrete actuality of the statements themselves. Eternality reflected in an unchanging text could be checked by rhymes and quantities. Not only that but from the mantras they extracted like the meat from a nut the bijas and if you dared follow them go back to the sounding void of the 'nirbija'.

All the more reason that the group of seeds (bijas) which, because they are independent of the constraints of convention, cause consciousness to vibrate thus constitute a valid means for the attainment of consciousness. Because of the nonexistence of meaning to be expressed, because they vibrate in consciousness in a way that is totally indifferent to the external reality, because they are self-illuminating, because they cause the extinction of the movement of the vital breath - for these reasons the group of seeds are completely full and self-sufficient.

(Abhivinagupta on Bijas/ from The Triadic Heart of Siva by Muller-Ortega pub. Suny '89)

2010-05-05T19:21:00.000+01:00

Reading Gregory Schopen on the stupas of Bodhgaya reminds me that I once did some excavation there myself.

Bodhgaya
Someone said to me the other day that when you are in pain, emotional pain, nothing that is said to you registers; the gnawing thing soaks up all your attention. Yes. There is too that point when your mind is gouged to the founds and images flare. The puddle of rainwater reflecting the temple and the patterned bits of mirror in the temple wall reflecting the sky. Bodhgaya.
In Benares I was downed by a mysterious one day virus. For that day I was unable to move. Then after a deep calm sleep I got up feeling light, almost bodiless. I decided that before the long trip south I would visit the place of the Bodhi tree under which Buddha was enlightened. It's a short distance from Gaya on the Benares-Calcutta line. Every tourist should travel 3rd class unreserved in India. Once. When everyone that wanted to get into the carriage was in, the last man came in through the window, we set off. The ash streaked holy men with their high piled dung matted hair paid no attention to the notice 'ticketless travel is a social evil'.
It was dark when I got off at Gaya and found a place to put down my mat in the ticket hall. Lying on my back, a rug around me, I was soon asleep.
On waking I was too weak to resist the massage artist who began to knead my leg. It felt good and being paid 5 rupees, a day's wage at 7 in the morning must have surprised him. I took the first cycle rickshaw and struck a price for the four mile trip to Bodhgaya. Out in the country we stopped for tea at a roadside chai stall - a few sheets of galvanised stretched from a tree with some banana leaves on top. The tea dust was brewed with watery milk and strained through a muslin. It was poured from mug to mug to cool it, a yard long stream that was delivered up with froth. The fresh grass was lush on the verges and the fields were flooded for the rice planting.
The hermitage where I was directed to go was 1Rp. per night with use of fan extra. Swami in charge taking me to the large communal room asked me:
- You are coming from Ireland, what is your mission in India?
- I am just a traveller.
- Atchar, please enjoy, put your mat anywhere.
I walked up the road. Scraps of cloth and banners of silk fluttered in the branches of an enormous bodhi tree. The same tree? At its base slabs were set into the ground at intervals tall enough to act as blinds for the individual meditators. One ascetic sat there relaxed, his body braced by its posture.
The stupa to commemorate the Buddha's enlightenment was close by. Outside it two Tibetan monks were doing their 1008 full prostrations. I left them undulating and walked inside to the inner chamber where deep inside the cool silence was a golden statue of the Buddha. Round his feet some mice scampered nibbling on sheaves of wheat.
A flight of stone steps led to the first tier of the stupa which was open to the sun. In an alcove a standing Buddha stretched forth his hand. There were Greek folds in the drapery that lightened and gave mobility to the figure.
I heard the drum before I saw them. It was a funeral procession bearing a body on a litter of saffron cloth bound round two poles which was followed by a drummer lashing with a switch his deep bellied drum and two cavorting sadhus festooned with bones celebrating this oblation to the Divine Mother Kali.
Down at the local chai house and Brahmins restaurant I had the traditional speciality, milk rice, which Buddha is said to have had before he went to meditate. Two Americans were sitting there dressed in orange robes. Their heads were shaven. They had little orange purses. One said:
- That sunset last night was the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen.
The other said:
- Every sunset is the most beautiful sunset.
That night I lay in muck sweat, the fan churning the thick air like a spoon in gruel.
In the morning coming from my shower I met a lean monk of the centre. The mosquitoes were swarming around my ankles - any pause gives them occasion.
- You are coming from which country sir, and what is your profession, what can you do?
- I'm Irish, and I'm afraid that I can do very little, I'm a teacher.
- That is a pity, what we need are doctors and nurses for our mission in the jungle. You are a thinker sir, have you found the peace of mind in India?
- No, I haven't.
This answer seemed to annoy him as if to say 'you can't have taken your medicine or you would be getting well, isn't it!
I suppose he was used to dealing with earnest seekers after wisdom. My mind wasn't at peace, it was quiet through exhaustion from the struggle all these months to explain to myself why she had left me. If mind is a way of seeing the world, construing it, making sense of it; I had no mind. Still everything was there as it arose and then it flowed away and I threw nothing after it. No part of my awareness adhered to it, to obscure its present life.
The face of the Tibetan Lama who took me into the shrine room rises like a bubble of air breaking the surface of a lotus pond. There was a painting of the Buddhas of the 4 Quarters with their attendant deities and their consorts around the seed Buddha at the centre. There were lunar thrones, horse thrones, peacock thrones, elephant thrones, lion thrones, fire enhaloed lotus thrones, a figure bearing a bowl, a skull filled with blood, coral, a book and a sword. To one dressed in yellow with staff and begging bowl he pointed and said:
- He here Shakya Muni Bodhgaya Buddha.
He then brought me to the great bell-like prayer wheel with 1008 words of power written all round it. Each turn you gave the wheel gained you their virtue. It was 7 tons weight yet it turned easily, a marvel of ballbearings and balance pinging like a typewriter at the end of each round.
On my way through the compound of the Tibetan monastery I saw the lone meditator of the day before. He was washing rice in a little pot, swirling the water round and pouring it out with the same easy absorption. It was the cheapest half polished red rice, begged that morning.
Had he the peace of mind, or even skilful irony in stirring times? I was wandering at the edge of the picture amid all the exoticism and the seeking. Perhaps I was beginning to accept the sweet teaching of failure having sat at the feet of unqualified resentment. She, she, she. The reality of any ease was tested by her memory. Empty.
Now my mind had stopped. It was the way of exhaustion: so far into the maze, being blocked, out again and back in by the same route.
I stayed in Bodhgaya for two more days. Once I ate some milk rice and sat under the tree but I didn't notice any difference.

Illative sense

2010-04-30T13:45:00.000+01:00

Jean Steinmann in his biography of Pascal considering the intuitive knowledge of the heart says of it :

It is direct and absolute. It places us in contact with things and beings, while reason only apprehends ideas and concepts.

This may be as I believe a faulty and perhaps dualist approach to perception and rationality. However one knows what he means.

The heart is the 'illative sense' of The Grammar of Assent according to Steinmann:

"It is a capacity (writes Newman) of entering with instinctive
correctness into principles, doctrines and facts, whether they
be true or false, and of discerning promptly what conclusion from them is necessary, suitable, and expedient „ . . .It is an intimate understanding of an assemblage of intellectual data .....
I have already ventured to say that our belief in the extended material world follows on an inference from our perception of particular objects through their phenomena, as these phenomena actually come before it us, or even... from our experiences of the sensible phenomena of self, It is by the illative sense that we come to this conclusion, which no logic can reach.

Illative means arising" out of, consequently in Newman's sense it is the power of immediately- grasping the consequences of a given set of data. It is this which prevents philosophers from going wrong. It is also the sense that they can get that there is something not quite correct in the judgements of another thinker.

Bergson turned intuition into a philosophical method:

"It is not necessary in order to reach intuition to move out of the sphere of the senses and consciousness, Kant's mistake was to think that it was.--. Let us go back to the origins of our power of perception and we shall find that we possess knowledge of a new kind without there being any need to appeal to new faculties,.....

The origin of our powers of perception, that's the famous hard question. Is it about qualia? Let's say that the fuzzy red of a ripe tomato presents itself but not the concept 'tomato'. That concept is not the stuff of any operation of the senses in the sense that though it may be out of the senses it is not equivalent to them. What is the source of the identity which the unschooled in philosophy recognise between the object out there and the mental modification? The advaitins hold that the identity is not numerical but a matter of substratum.

I leave the obvious 'what about' to see if you've been paying attention.

Book Trove

2010-04-26T00:10:00.000+01:00

Great value in Charlie Byrne's yesterday. €4 for Virgin Soil by Turgenev and 3 other books thrown in for free that are usually €1, The Great Victorians 2 Various Authors (a Pelican from 1938 in fine condition), In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified.

That's the other Elizabeth Taylor.

I've always been curious about shorthand, looking at all those squiggles, that wriggling meaning that has a system. My mother taught it as well as typing and business studies in a village vocational school. So did her father after whom I was christened. I hit the world of business a glancing blow once. This was in a large insurance firm in London where tea was brought in a pot and the senior lady said: Who'll be mother? Almost any gathering of English brings the possibility of situation comedy. They fall to types and the gentle comfort of roles.

Being a great Victorian wasn't easy, don't let anybody tell you otherwise. There was much to do and only steam to do it with. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 - 1917) was the father of English Anthropology, the Celtic British had to fend for themselves. G. Elliot Smith, FRS tells us:

The correct interpretation of the thoughts, feelings, and social behaviour of other human beings is a matter of the utmost moment to everyone.

I concur.

I love Russian novels. I match them cup for cup of tea. In the town of S. in the province of W. But what is a titular councillor? I have the strong feeling he's one of those types that when you hand over your application there better be a brown envelope in there.

His father, a member of the lower middle class, had, through all sorts of dishonest means, attained the rank of titular councillor. He had been fairly successful as an intermediary in legal matters, and managed estates and house property.

Tyler, Taylor, Turgenev all anthropologists.

Vedic Words

2010-04-24T10:07:00.000+01:00

There may be a truth in the mythic idea that the word itself is a real thing. I mean that it is more than just articulated air. We have this thought in the ancient theories of magic, the name and that which it names are connected non-adventitiously. We find this in Hebrew, Greek and Arabic and the theory of the Vedic word is treated most seriously by the Advaitic philosopher Shankara.

It's curious that this should be so when you consider that Sanskrit is a declined language like Latin, Turkish or Gaelic etc and the body of the word can change its shape quite radically in the various cases. So then it is not the shape of the word that is significant it is the meaning of the word, what it signifies, connotes, denotes, its extension, intension, take your pick. The word as articulated air has a nimbus about it. The word 'scian' has a sharpness about it, it has a piercing nature, 'couteau is blunt, (to me) In ancient taboos some words are forbidden, they call up that which they mention or refer to. Fairies (air spirits) are not called such but are known as 'the good people', the Furies are the Euminides (well wishers), certain activities which further the continuance of tie species are known as 'this thing'. Euphemism is commonplace and surely has its origins in the idea that to mention something is to call it up.

There is a difference between saying that there is a relationship between the word and the 'thing’ and the word as the 'thing’. What does Shankara have to say on this point? What in short are Vedic words?

"It is on the basis of the inborn, relationship between words and their meanings from the very beginning that the validity of the Vedas has been established by saying...."
The Vedantin holds that "because the universe, consisting of the gods and others, originates verily from the Vedic words."

The objection to this seems cogent at first sight. If something has an origin then it is non-eternal. So are we to take it that the gods are non-eternal? No, says Shankara, it is the relationship that is eternal and not the event of the word giving rise to the existence of the thing.

Is this an acceptable answer? Let us go on to consider the rest of his thoughts on the subject. He makes the obvious point that there cannot be a connection between each instance referred to by a word and the vedic word. It is the generic word that is eternal, a notion, very similar to that of the 'ideas' of Plato. There is besides no imputation of a birth from words in the samesense as birth from a material cause.

Is this theory subject to the same difficulties as that of Plato’s? Can generality precede instantiation? Can the meaning exist separately from the instantiation of the meaning? This puts us in mind of the Cheshire Cat and its smile. Can there be equivalence without things we discover to be equivalent. Can there be identity which precedes things which are identical or exactly similar? This seems to be a paradoxical doctrine. How, again, is it known that the universe originates from words? "From direct revelation and inference".

Essentially he means from the Vedas and Smriti. He offers Quotations. An intuitive rationale of Shankara's is. "Besides it is a matter of experience to us all that when one has to accomplish some desired thing, one remembers first the word denoting it and then accomplishes it." He uttered the syllable bhuh, He created the earth. Tai.Br. II.ii.4.2

How is this meant to happen?

Sphota is the answer of the grammarians. There is an impression created by the words which are themselves created by the letters which constitute them. Shankara is capable of activating his critical intelligence on this notion which had been in abeyance due to his acceptance of a literal understanding of the vedas. His judgment is that the unit of intelligibility, to coin a phrase, is the word. "And. this sphota has no beginning, since its identity is recognisable at every utterance (of the word)." This then is the intuitive core of the Vedic word. It corresponds to the problem of the origin of universals. How can you find them unless you have them already?

His final considered opinion is that the single concept ‘cow’ emerges on the basis of the letters as a whole and not any other thing (called sphota).

Page 111 V.P.(Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra a medieval scholar, pub.Advaita Ashrama) Of these, secular sentences are of the nature of restatements, since their meanings are primarily apprehended through other means of knowledge; but with regard to the Vedas, since the meaning of Vedic sentences are known at first hand, they are not of the nature of restatements."

Lichtenberg

2007-02-20T02:00:00.000Z

I've just come across the aphorisms of Georg Christophe Lichtenberg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg

I am fond of aphorisms, in their compressed way they shine a thin focussed beam that cuts into the inconscient. They have a high specific gravity; they are the gold of speech.

In the old city of Jerusalem you may see a man carrying 23 chairs on his back or a large fridge. In Paris as told in 'The Piano Shop on the Left Bank'(by T.E.Carhart) you can hire a man who will carry a grand piano up the stairs of a courtyard apartment. There are the steps, there is the harness, there is the grand piano, you must find that perfect point of balance then swing and move. For this service there is an acolyte who guides the nose of the piano and prevents the swing of it from unbalancing the porter.

All that prose. Poetry has a stronger back. I can understand how Shankara wrote most of his Upadesa Sahasri in verse because its constraints force one to get past the normal cliches that spring effortlessy.

"A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already."
(Lichtenberg from Notebook E 49: 1775 1776)

Wisdom

2007-01-10T23:28:00.001Z

Is there such a thing as wisdom. Could someone be so connatural with wisdom that everything they do and say has that virtue.

"But in all such matters that which appears to the good man is thought to be really so." (i.e. that which appears good to him) Aristotle,'Nichomachean Ethics' Bk.10.chap.V.

Wisdom and Truth can often be connatural with persons who know nothing of abstruse philosophy and ethical theory. The only explanation is that they are it. A Nisargadatta or a Ramakrishna is more impressive than a hyper educated Brahmin but of course 'it' can land anywhere.

From War and Peace:
"Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of filling his belly, but Fokanitch, is a righteous man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget God."
"How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?" Levin almost shouted.
"Why, to be sure, in truth, in God's way. Folks are different. Take you now, you wouldn't wrong a man ......"
"Yes, yes, good-bye!" said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away towards home. At the peasant's words that Fokanitch lived for his soul, in truth, in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been locked up, and all striving towards one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.

The Curse of Opium

2006-12-15T11:02:00.000Z

Have you noticed about drunkards; how they will worry; with a sublime sense of the pity of such folly, about the excesses of others. ‘I am but a man overcome by an excess of humanity but Tommy’s gone to hell’. From the vantage point of momentary righteousness the drunkard issues a mild sigh as though surveying the long gallery of pissartists and portersharks; the friendly, goodly company of the dunned and dammed. ‘If I am the way I am, my reasons are excellent; his are spurious’ is another theme. So it was with Coleridge and De Quincy on the subject of their addiction to opium. The complexities of the attack and counter attack on the high moral ground takes a tone of truly comedic sense of injury and injustice.

“A letter of his, which I hope he did not design to have published, but which, however; has been published, point the attention of his correspondent to a broad distinction separating my case as an opium-eater from his own: he, it seems, had fallen excusably (because unavoidably) into this habit of eating opium – as the one sole therapeutic resource available against his particular malady; but I, wretch that I am, being so notoriously charmed by fairies against pain, must have resorted to opium in the abominable character of an adventurous voluptuary, angling in all streams for variety of pleasures. Coleridge is wrong to the whole extent of what was possible; wrong in his fact, wrong in his doctrine; in his little fact, and his big doctrine. I did not do the thing which he charges upon me; and if I had done it, this would not convict me as a citizen of Sybaris or Daphne.”

(From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)

When the pain for which opium was the anodyne is revealed we are reminded of two carpenters comparing the nicks and notches that tools and machinery have wrought on their limbs.

“Coleridge’s bodily affliction was simple rheumatism. Mine, which intermittently raged for ten years, was rheumatism in the face combined with toothache. This I had inherited from my father; or inherited (I should rather say) from my own desperate ignorance…..”

That’s right blame father. I ask you is it fortuitous that ‘father’ and ‘fault’ are side by side in the Irish sign language for the Deaf? How very adjacent?

Louis and Henri

2006-12-05T22:18:00.002Z

Louis MacNeice
August
The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly
Has whisked away the foam of may and elder
And I realise how now, as every year before,
Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame
Tomb-like around each little world of a day;
We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow
The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,
Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace
You and me and the stone god in the garden
And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,
Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings
Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,
For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.” (pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Naming

2006-12-05T22:18:00.001Z

Rumi refers to the myth of the naming of the animals as the type of the primal co-creation in which the world is blessed and accepted and inner and outer truth are made one:

When Adam became the theater of Divine inspiration and love,
his rational soul revealed to him the knowledge of the Names.
His tongue, reading from the page of his heart,
recited the name of everything that is.
Through his inward vision his tongue divulged the qualities of each;

This is the basis of what is called 'abjid' (arabic) or 'gematria' in Greek in which names are given a numerical value. The Hebrew Kaballah has this science also Aleph (1), Beth (2), Gimel (3) and so on.

In the Zohar it is written

"Had the brightness of the glory of the Holy One, blessed be his name, not been shed over the whole of his creation how could he have been perceived even by the wise? He would have remained (totally) unapprehensible, and the words "The whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3)could never be spoken with truth. But the closer man comes to his pure and divine essence, the more he experiences the intrinsic unity in all the emanations of the Sefiroth; for this unity is none other than the essence of man, the supreme 'self'" ((from 'The Universal Meaning of the Kabballah by Leo Schaya pg.28))

Singing Razor

2006-12-05T22:18:00.000Z

Offered in the Axminster Tool catalogue of a few years ago were open razors from Thiers that are so thin that a moist finger rubbed across them causes them to sound like a wine glass. The sharpness of the tongue of Thomas Carlyle bids me call him the 'singing razor'. One would imagine that the flensing of the poltroon Diderot must be a warning to the enlightenment's darling Hume but no the man mellows most disagreeably. He's a homey don't you know.

The veneration of Samuel Johnson is a curiously British cult. T.C. finds a plinth of equal elevation for Hume, almost.

"Both realised the highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each died not unfitly, in his way; Hume as one with the factitious, half-false gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie; Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously expectant heart, taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality still higher. Johnson had the harder problem of it, from first to last; whether, with some hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically the better gifted, may remain undecided."

2006-12-05T07:25:00.000Z

In Charlie Byrne's the other day I got for a mere €4 an odd volume of Thomas Carlyle's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. What a wonderful character, one can imagine his wife Jane saying to him - "Tom you ought not to read that if it upsets you so much". Yes, fatwas would have gathered about his prophetic head like the rooks of even at Drumcliffe church. By the bye In 'Bell, Book and Candle' I got a selection of critical writings edited by Harold Bloom on Carlyle, Weymouth Sands by John Cowper Powys and The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking by Dorothy Emmet. That completes the voting of the metaphysical jury.

Speaking of Diderot and his approach to Marriage, T.C. writes
"True, O Denis! the rock crumbles away: all things are changing; man changes faster than most of them. That in the mean while, an Unchangeable lies under all this, and looks forth, solemn and benign, through the whole destiny and workings of man, is another truth; which no Mechanical Philosophe, in the dust of his logic-mill, can be expected to grind-out for himself. Man changes and will change: the question then arises, Is it wise in him to tumble forth, in headlong obedience to this love of change; is it so much as possible for him?"

There's no date of publication of this volume but the selection from the catalogue of Chapman and Hall's Publications shows the date December 1st. 1888. We are offered Untrodden Paths in Roumania by Mrs. Walker and Paddy at Home or Ireland and the Irish at the Present Time, as seen by a Frenchman (Baron E. de Mandat-Grancy) A surprising number of writers have military background, Majors, Colonels and Generals e.g. Tiger Shooting in the Doon and Ulmer, and Life in India.

Patrick Melvin who indited his name so boldly to the inside cover, had left uncut pages even in the essay on Diderot which he has marked with an x. What a pleasure it is to cut them as though one were releasing a noetic genie.