'Lucky Jim' by Kingsley Amis (pub. 1954)

 

Lucky Jim - we don’t envy him.  What the first thing to remember about Jim Dixon is that he is a Beta male and  he knows it.  During the war he served in a non-heroic role, somewhere well clear of the enemy lines. All the others in his digs saw action or commanded.  Even one of his students Michie had; I don’t know whether to call Jim’s war a good or a bad one.  It’s an English usage that I can’t get quite straight.  If you were decorated was that a good war.  It may be reticence or irony or understatement.  Dixon seems to have been producing triplicate for the duration.  Another mark of his less than silver back maleness is the way that an emotional vampire woman, Margaret, fastens on to him for the life giving supply of emotional plasma.  Those ladies know their clients.

Funk is his ongoing condition which he treats with that common over the counter medication: beer.  His place in the History dept. of a provincial university is in jeopardy unless he gets a paper  out that his head of dept. can show to the board.   The end of the final term of his first year of probation is upon him and the paper on mediaeval shipbuilding is still with a publisher whose reply to a query, when?, is written on a sheet  torn from a pad and written in green ink.  A: as soon as I can get round to it, I’m busy.  Uh, uh, not auspicious.  Be that as it may his head Mr.Welch seems kind and in the best tradition of academic serfdom has Dixon doing research for him.  Looking up he calls it.  Still he wants Jim out at his house in the country for an arty evening of madrigals and tiny glasses of sherry.  That doesn’t end well.  After slipping out slyly to the pub and having several pints slightly Brahms and Lizst as the Londoner said the last cigarette in bed slips from his nerveless fingers.  That might have been academic sutee but was just a hole in the blanket and the sheet.  Megatomy with a palsied hand held razor blade leave things worse but in his case a fair maiden comes to the rescue.

Who she?  Callahan by name but the important thing is that she is the girl friend of Bertrand a soi-disant artist and all round poseur.  In the best traditions of the campus novel he is perhaps having an affair with the wife of another member of the History dept.  The girlfriend who is beautiful catches Dixon’s eye as it would probably do for all males with active blood circulation.  Alas Jim thinks that she is out of his class.  More thumos deficency.  She seems a good sport and helps Jim tidy up his incendiary drunkeness.

Another reason that Dixon is nervous is that Margaret from the English dept. is there at the madrigals also.  The Welches have been putting her up after the suicide attempt which even Jim thinks has odd features to it.  Why during the attempt  play the wireless so loudly inviting a call from the flat downstairs.

So there you have it - the main dramatis personae of this novel.  Their interactions with the hapless protagonist pulling faces through one contremps after another is the fun.  The high point of this low comedy is Jim’s lecture on Merrie England with him quite merry himself.  With a hey and a hoy and a hey nonny no - around the maypole of disaster.

There is much satire about academic life and artistic pretensions.  We remember that Amis was an academic himself and fond of a tipple and that his emotional and marital life was not the shortest distance between two points.  We are invited to fill in the B and C between Amis and Dixon.

It’s a good comic novel which give the unlikely experience of improving on re-reading.  Always a good sign. Cheers.

Confusion not Confounded in Advaita Vedanta

 There is an excellent reason why Vedanta has chosen the apparently paradoxical way of talking about perception using the phenomenon of confusion.  Confusion in Vedanta is taking something to be what it is not. The rope is taken to be a snake, the stump at dusk is taken to be a human form etc.  It is important here to distinguish between this mis-take and the related phenomena of delusion and illusion.  

The point is that there can only be confusion when there is a state of affairs that is the case.  We are thus tied into a reality.  The mental modification (vritti) is not the true reality but that true reality can be found.  

This way of looking at things runs counter to the Western conundrum known as the argument from illusion.  If, it is said, we are mistaken in this instance, may we not be globally in error. This view has its origin in Cartesian doubt.  What we are in contact with is the mental experience.  That there is an external world corresponding to this is due to the mercy of a God who is not a deceiver.  Vedanta is different in that there is an ontological connection between the vritti (mental modification) and the upadhi (limiting adjunct).  They share the same substratum.  They meet on the plane of being.

Too Much

 What is there to do?

You are here now.

This is not going to go away.

You may get the fascination of consciousness for itself which is perhaps what samadhi is.

But this is not everything.

This is not dissolution.

We only want everything.

Is that too much to ask?

'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas

 ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ was serialised over two years and for the modern reader beset by vastly more media and their attendant distractions one might imagine that a similar time might be required to get through its over 1200 pages.  As Dell Comix used to say “don’t take less”.  Really don’t, steer clear of the rocks of an abridged version.  It’s a lee shore as Edmund Dantes might have said in a nautical metaphor.  Anybody that starts to read the Penguin Classic, flex your knees when lifting, version will affirm that the voyage through this ‘baggy monster’ will be done much more quickly.  I may have spent two weeks or so at it.  

It speeds along with a fair narrative wind behind it.  The Penguin edition has footnotes which elucidated the political background and the various mythological references that Dumas throws to elevate the tone.  It’s a rattling good story and as I read it I thought apart from the treasure it is quite credible.  In regimes which were insecure the threat of summary incarceration keep a fractious populace in line.  Looking further into the background of the writing of the novel I discovered that the basic outline of the plot was lifted from the ‘memoirs’ of a policeman.  You might say being ‘stitched up’ was what got Dantes in durance vile and also what got him out of it to wreak: what?  Revenge or retribution?  Is not all judicial punishment a rebalancing of the scale and if that involves the loss of everything that the criminals hold dear then we accept it.  Call it what you will, the rent in the universe has been mended.  Dantes should have died but he did not, now they must pay.  The intricacy of their repayment of their debt is is beautiful.  We are given hints but the unfolding is like an engine of condign retribution, running smooth as a sowing machine stitching the traitors into a shroud.  All that was hidden will be brought into the light of day.  Long brooding on the mechanics of justice and how it is to be wrought has honed the blade that must fall.  Not literally of course, the miscreants destroy themselves by going steadily into paths of wickedness.  The irony is that two of them are ennobled, one a baron the other a count and another with the scoundrel’s ribbon of the legion of honour.  

All of them have forgotten that young sailor picked up at his betrothal party and whisked into oblivion.  The dungeon pallour of the Count of Monte Cristo, a nice running metaphor, has changed his appearance and unlimited money from the treasure is better than plastic surgery as a means of disguise.  Who could imagine that the two men were one and the same.  

The reading did not pall in the least and the high tone as it moves through multiple locations never descends into bathos. Perhaps once when Cristo dons a sailors kit when repelling a burglar is there a hint of buffo to the opera.  That I think is the keynote that should guide the reader.  It is grand opera.  Scale up.  Interludes like the Roman carnival with Franz and Albert are ways of lulling you into a lyric mode.  This is life, sweet isn’t it?  Now imagine being the victim of envy and cowardice and suddenly rapt into horror.  

Still can you control everything?  Might not your retribution bring collateral damage in its train?  Cristo wonders but we are quite complacent.  Stay not your hand, smite them we urge. 

Dammed good read.  It skips along. Forget the movies, this is the proper article warranted genuine Dumas.  I must read more of him.

Upamana Pramana (Comparison) and Genus and Species.

 Does the pramana of upamana translated as ‘comparison’ start somewhat in midstream?  We are immediately given the concept of genus and species, the cow in this case so in essence we already have the power to discover genus and species natively.  Taking the single example of the ‘gavaya’ ( bos gaurus) we can be immediately aware that it must be a member of a species and with that awareness comes the knowledge of differentiation which makes a species.  Sharing the same genus as the cow (bos Taurus) is a likely presumption.  

There is an element of the problem of universals lurking beneath the surface of Upamana:

This (upamana) is not possible through perception, for then the cow’s form is not in contact with the eyes.

We only sense particulars and actually to begin with genus and species is logically downstream from the universal ‘cow’.  The problem of universals is not salient in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra.  Sankara deals with it in his section of Brahma Sutra Bhasya called ‘Vedic Words’.  I find some similarity (that word) between his treatment and the ideas of William of Ockham.

More anon on that.

Addendum to "A Tree in the Yard' 17/7/26

 It is important to distinguish between the object which can be grasped by the senses I.e. the tree in the yard and the metaphysical reality which makes that perception possible.  That reality is not itself perceptible but it can be realized.  That realization does not refer to a special mental condition or continuing experience.  Sankara in BSBh rejects the notion that samadhi is equivalent to the highest realization.  He regards it as just another state of mind.

What meaning then can we give to the notion of realization?  It is of course an unshakable belief in the unity of Being, the I AM that Nisargadatta focussed on during the time of his sadhana.  It creates a transformation in the qualities of the person, those that can be experienced by others.  It must be said that a penchant for the collection of Rolls Royce cars and high end watches is a counter indication of realization.  Spontaneous compassion and immediate insight into the spiritual condition of others is an essential indication.  Being in the presence of a sage can raise one’s own awareness to the point that instruction seems to come from within. I’m not sure that faith in him is even necessary.  It's a matter of spiritual harmonics.

A Vedantin views the Tree in the Yard

 The tree in the yard, that staple of solidity, reality and undeniable fact is sometimes referred to as unreal by the Vedantin.  What can he mean?  

Essentially the rope/snake analogy is being flaunted and asked to do a great deal of work.  We need to pull back a little further to get better focus and ask what the paradigmatic form of error is for the Vedantin.  It is confusion or taking something to be that which it is not.  That is perfectly fine for the everyday physical world.  In poor light we take the stump to be a man, the piece of shell to be silver etc., etc.

That sort of talk does not translate/transfer to the metaphysical however.  The tree is real but we may ask wherein does its perceptuality arise ?  How does that out there physical reality come to be in my consciousness as it actually is.  The short cut answer without going into the technicalities of upadhi and vritti is that there is a unity of the substratum of consciousness, a unity of Being.  What is real on the physical side, a tree that is separate and real for the perceiver is unified on the metaphysical side.  Taking the physical to be the only reality is a mis-take.  This is the world of duality.  Keeping both sides going is the world of non-duality.  

Thus we get the extravagant closing down sale of the world: everything must go.  This is an unreal bargain.